Postwar Stories: How Books Made Judaism American
Rachel Gordan
University of Florida
Date: Tuesday, September 10, 2024
Time: 12 - 1pm
Location: 24 Quincy Road, Conference Room
The period immediately following World War II was an era of dramatic transformation for Jews in America. At the start of the 1940s, President Roosevelt had to all but promise that if Americans entered the war, it would not be to save the Jews. By the end of the decade, antisemitism was in decline and Jews were moving toward general acceptance in American society. Drawing on several archives, magazine articles, and nearly-forgotten bestsellers, Postwar Stories examines how Jewish middlebrow literature helped to shape post-Holocaust American Jewish identity. For both Jews and non-Jews accustomed to antisemitic tropes and images, positive depictions of Jews had a normalizing effect. Maybe Jews were just like other Americans, after all. At the same time, anti-antisemitism novels and “Introduction to Judaism” literature helped to popularize the idea of Judaism as an American religion. In the process, these two genres contributed to a new form of Judaism--one that fit within the emerging myth of America as a Judeo-Christian nation, and yet displayed new confidence in revealing Judaism's divergences from Christianity.
Rachel Gordan is the Samuel Bud Shorstein Fellow in American Jewish Culture at the University of Florida where she teaches in the department of religion and the Center for Jewish Studies. During the 2024-2025 academic year, Professor Gordan holds a National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholars Fellowship at the Center for Jewish History in NYC. She received a PhD from Harvard and her BA from Yale. In addition to her academic publications, Gordan has been published in popular sites including Slate, LitHub, the New York Times website, and Tablet. Postwar Stories is her first book.