American Jewish Historians and the Jewish Identity Paradigm in the Era of Intersectionalism

In her 2000 Oxford Handbook of Jewish Studies article on American Jewish history, historian Hasia Diner
notes a new trend in the field in which a growing number of works were focusing on Jews’ self-
understanding and self-presentation. Today, such works seem to have taken over the field, displacing
older social and intellectual historical narratives and approaches. The approach they take to the
American Jewish past is often based around the paradigm of “Jewish Identity” and how the former has
been shaped and changed by various Jewish-communal and external factors. The coalescing of various
disciplinary approaches to studying American Jews’ history and present around this paradigm, and the
increased interdisciplinary nature of such study, has yielded a field that might more aptly be referred to
as American Jewish Studies than American Jewish History.

This paper historicizes how this changes in the field took place. To do so it locates key works that
brought the Jewish identity paradigm into the study of American Jews and examines how this
paradigm’s popularization was shaped by developments in the related fields of modern Jewish history,
religious and ethnic studies and American history. It then offers a critique of this paradigm, considering those of other scholars as well who argue that the Jewish identity paradigm for American Jewish history has become a conceptual vise that restrains the field’s growth.

The final question this paper considers is why, despite their critiques of this paradigm over the past decade, American Jewish historians have been so reluctant to take cues from other fields within American history and the humanities more broadly towards new directions for the field, particularly those afforded by intersectionalism.