Between History and Memory: Rethinking the American Jewish Past

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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 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 will examine a number of those ideas about the American Jewish past which have dominated popular memory. It will juxtapose them against the actual historical data and then explore why such renditions of the past have held on so long and so tenaciously.