May has been American Jewish Heritage Month. We wanted to mark the month with a deeper exploration of American Jewish Heritage. Hasia Diner, Professor Emerita at the Departments of History and the Skirball Department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies at New York University, was kind enough to participate in an interview.
Berman Archive: During this Jewish American Heritage Month, we’d love your take on how the conception of “heritage” has changed.
Hasia Diner: I am not sure what “heritage” means or how it was used by those who designated this month. Let me offer a string of questions which baffle me when I see this phrase.
Must a heritage be something of which an individual is conscious and actively engages with? Can it be learned and can a group of people, in this case American Jews, be told that something which they were unaware of or which mattered little to them, constitutes their heritage? How can the single word “heritage” contain the multiplicity of ways in which people in the past and the present make sense of this category “Jewish American”? Who gets to be included in the category of inheritor? As promulgated by President George W. Bush in 2006, the idea of Jewish American heritage involves the celebration of the Jewish contribution to America. So, who determines what is a contribution? Contribution to whom? I want to add that by framing American Jewish history as the Jewish contribution to America, the call to celebrate implies that Jews alone made these contributions and that they undertook their activities by themselves. That is not what happened.
What prior episodes in American Jewish history resemble this one?
For American Jews, this moment may, and I emphasize may, look a bit like the 1930s, with right wing antisemitism rampant and a global crisis with profound Jewish implications roiling the world and the nation. Obviously it was different in as much as the Great Depression so profoundly impacted huge swathes of the population while today, despite the economic dislocations around us, the United States finds itself nowhere near the economic trauma of the 1930s. So too the divisions within American Jewry echo a bit of the 1930s, with many Jews identifying with the left, embracing and supporting socialism and Communism as solutions to the many crises of the day. Today, American Jewry is deeply divided over the issue of Palestine and the suffering of the Palestinian people at the hands of Israel, the declared Jewish state.
Archives cannot capture those who understood themselves as Jewish—however they defined that—and even lived most of their lives in largely informal Jewish circles, but belonged to no Jewish organization and as such were not captured by any of the records of formally constituted bodies.
What can’t an archive capture that is nonetheless essential to understanding American Jewish heritage?
An archive can never document real emotions and complexities. First, archives tend to valorize community insiders, the givers, the self-appointed leaders and have little to offer about groups that exist outside the mainstream, usually poorly funded and deemed disreputable by the custodians of the community. The dissenters from the community norm rarely make it into the archive.
Much of Jewish life in America took place on the proverbial “Jewish street,” the archive helps us little because it cannot store tastes, smells, and background noise of lived Jewish life. Much of that life took place in the commercial sector, with Jewish stores serving as the loci for everyday exchanges between Jews and between Jewish shopkeepers and non-Jewish customers. None of that falls into the mandate of archives. Archives cannot capture those who understood themselves as Jewish—however they defined that—and even lived most of their lives in largely informal Jewish circles, but belonged to no Jewish organization and as such were not captured by any of the records of formally constituted bodies. An archive contains what the custodians of community life want and not the shouting, fist pounding and angry gestures that flared at meetings. Additionally the intimate fabric of family and friendship groups fall outside of the archive, with family showing up only in moments of trauma and crisis.
What artifacts or documents from this historical moment do you hope find their way into future archives, for future historians?
This historical moment in which there is an upsurge of activity among Jews, younger ones in particular, who dissent from the formal community’s support for Israel. These groups, which are often in fact rejected from membership in Jewish Community Relations Councils and are demonized as anti-semitic or self-hating, are growing in number and I hope that an archive in the future will document the work of such groups as Jewish Voice for Peace, If Not Now, and others at the local and national levels. These groups are not only speaking out in horror at the genocide taking place in Gaza and the ethnic cleansing perpetrated by Israel in the Occupied Territory of the West Bank, but they are important and loud voices opposing today’s assaults on democracy by the Trump administration. Their history must be included.
What is your favorite holding in the Berman Archive or any archive?
As to my favorite holding in any archive, I want to share the thrill of opening a box and seeing documents in them that I believe no one else ever looked at . When the dust poured out (before digital archives) of the box and wafted in front of my eyes, I felt like an explorer, digging into a treasure that no one really knew about. Sometimes the box contained issues of utterly obscure publications, held together by a string so old and never untied, that I had to, with the help of an archivist, struggle to see what these documents contained. Digitized archives like the Berman are terribly important and of immense use, but nothing, for me, bests, that engagement with the archival box.
