America? (2004)

T H E JE W I S H Q UA R T E R LY R E V I E W, Vol. 94, No. 4 (Fall 2004) v–viii E D I T O R ’S I N T R O D U C T I O N America? THIS ISSUE OF JQR marks a new chapter in the long life of our journal. When we assumed the editorial mantle in 2003, we envisaged a forum that would be faithful to JQR’s tradition of scholarly excellence, while at the same time open to important new themes, trends, and innovations in the various fields of Jewish studies. As we’ve sought to strike this balance , we have delighted in initiating, sometimes by stumbling upon, new features that periodically alter the profile of the journal. Thus, our first issue, volume 94, number 1, opened with ‘‘Recoveries’’—a series of brief reflections on a favored text, event, or moment written by a distinguished array of authors. The next issue (94.2) included a review forum in which three scholars, expert in different subject areas and writing from very different points of departure, meditated upon Daniel Goldhagen’s discussion of Catholic (and more broadly, Christian) attitudes and behavior toward Jews. The current issue features another new direction for JQR. In general, we do not plan to turn the journal over to regularly scheduled theme issues. But when a subject catches our fancy, we are prepared to explore it in depth, especially when novel perspectives can be brought to bear. We hope—and believe—that this standard has been met in the issue before you. JQR 94.4 is organized around the Jewish experience in America, coinciding with the ongoing 350th anniversary celebration of Jewish settlement in what would become the United States. The aim is less to celebrate than to investigate, probe, and question the American Jewish experience, as well as to take stock of the vitality and innovation in recent scholarship on that experience. To assist in these tasks, we have invited a number of colleagues to offer critical reflection. Rather than write fulllength research articles, they have been asked to take up the more supple and suggestive form of ‘‘Notes.’’ The result is a series of illuminating essays that reveal the richness, diverse legacies, and fault lines of the American Jewish experience. The work of questioning begins in Arthur Kiron’s opening essay. Kiron The Jewish Quarterly Review (Fall 2004) Copyright 䉷 2004 Center for Advanced Judaic Studies. All rights reserved. vi JQR 94:4 (2004) wonders what is actually being celebrated in the current commemorative year. He notes that the arrival of that fateful boatload of twenty-three Jews to New Amsterdam in 1654 was greeted with indignation, disgust, and attempted expulsion by Peter Stuyvesant—and thus may not be the most appropriate historical moment to celebrate. Kiron also wonders whether the source of celebration—and more broadly, of study—should be America in the geographically circumscribed sense of the United States. American Jewish history, he suggests, might well be reconstrued as a history of the Americas—set against the sweeping backdrop of transatlantic mobility, trade, and migration. This essay pushes to the foreground a recurrent theme in the deliberations of Americanists: the motif of exceptionalism, of a belief in a unique—and uniquely supervised—historical path for America. The Jewish variant of this theme posits that no community in history has been as affluent, successful, or well-integrated as the Jews of the United States. While this claim is indisputable in many respects, there is real value in examining more carefully some of its mythic underpinnings. Thus, David Hollinger takes on frontally the assertion of Jewish exceptionalism , urging that we neither ignore nor romanticize the overrepresentation of Jews in a number of notable vocations or fields. For Hollinger, the assertion of Jewish overrepresentation should be less a matter of ethnic pride than a spur to empirical research—followed by serious comparative analysis with other ethnic and religious groups in America. The Notes that follow undertake, each in its distinctive way, to complicate the triumphalist narrative of American Jewish history, which itself serves as a counterweight to more ‘‘lachrymose’’ conceptions of...