Oct 27, 2011
Speaker: Dr. Hasia Diner, Paul and Sylvia Steinberg
Professor of American Jewish History at New York
University
Location: JCC of Greater Washington; Rockville, MD
From the idea that the eighteenth century constituted a "sephardi
era" in American Jewish history through the decades following World
War II in which American Jews shunned talking about and
memorializing the Holocaust, the history of the Jews of the United
States has been laced throughout with myths which do not stand up
to the test of historical evidence. This lecture examines a number
of those ideas about the American Jewish past which have dominated
popular memory. It juxtaposes them against the actual historical
data and explores why such renditions of the past have held on so
long and so tenaciously.
Also co-sponsored by Georgetown University Program for Jewish
Civilization and the Jewish Historical Society of Greater
Washington