Belonging in Question: Jews in the American Civic and Legal Imagination | STROUM LECTURES IN JEWISH STUDIES 2022

Historian Lila Corwin Berman looks at questions of Jews' citizenship and belonging in the United States over the course of American history.

Although historians have long claimed that Jews in the United States faced few civic or legal impediments, Berman argues that this presumption has been more grounded in faith in liberalism than in fact. Instead, by examining a variety of legal cases, she shows how Jews were visible — and differentiated — within American law over the course of U.S. history. Returning to the “Jewish Question,” Berman concludes that it is impossible to understand American Jewish history without viewing it through the lens of a Jewish Question that positions Jews in relation to other groups that have been “in question” in the United States.