American Jews & White Supremacy: The Present Dilemmas of an Unstable History

“American Judaism: Past, Present, and Future”
A Three-Part Series

Part 2

Lila Corwin Berman, Temple University, “American Jews & White Supremacy: The Present Dilemmas of an Unstable History”

Over the last five years, Americans have reckoned anew with the history of this country’s racism and what that history requires from the present. In this talk, Professor Lila Corwin Berman asks how American Jews fit—or do not fit—in these often painful and polarizing conversations. She argues that older debates about whether Jews were “white,” should be supplanted by newer efforts to ask how whiteness organizes power and when and how Jews have been included in or excluded from that racialized system of American power.  

Lila Corwin Berman holds the Murray Friedman Chair of American Jewish History at Temple University, where she directs the Feinstein Center for American Jewish History. Her most recent book, The American Jewish Philanthropic Complex: The History of a Multibillion-Dollar Institution, has been awarded the 2021 Ellis W. Hawley Prize from the Organization of American Historians and the Saul Viener Book Prize from the American Jewish Historical Society. She is author of several other books and articles, and has written guest columns for the Washington Post, the Forward, the Chronicle of Philanthropy, and the Jewish Week. Berman is a graduate of Amherst College and received her Ph.D. from Yale University. 

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Part 3
The Future of American Judaism
Samuel Heilman, CUNY Graduate Center, Queens College
Sunday, May 22, 2022, 1:00pm