Imagining Early American Jews

Popular representations of history tend to meet the moral demands of the present. Before the social crises of the postwar era began to influence Jews' thinking and at a time when global antisemitism posed the most obvious threat to their continuity and survival, Jews in America were relatively untroubled by the nation's legacy of colonialism. Popular representations of early Jewish American history unabashedly highlighted Jewish conformity to the pioneer myth. The civil rights era and its a...