ArticlePDF Available

Editors’ Introduction

Authors:
Editors’ Introduction
Zev Eleff, Kimmy Caplan, Adam Ferziger
American Jewish History, Volume 101, Number 3, July 2017, pp. ix-xiv (Article)
Published by Johns Hopkins University Press
For additional information about this article
Access provided by Brandeis University Libraries (2 Aug 2017 19:03 GMT)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/665970
Editors’ Introduction
This issue of American Jewish History pays tribute to Jeffrey Gurock,
marking forty years since he began teaching at Yeshiva University, his
academic home throughout his distinguished career. As a prolific scholar
of the American Jewish experience, and a mentor to younger peers,
Gurock’s impact on the field is substantial, as we shall illustrate in this
brief introduction.1
Gurock grew up in the Bronx, New York, and attended Manhattan’s
Ramaz Upper School, a pioneering Modern Orthodox institution that
would make its way into the historian’s later scholarship. Afterward, he
majored in History at City College, and in 1971 began graduate stud-
ies at Columbia University. There, he was part of a group of students
who honed their scholarly skills during the late 1960s and 1970s in
the fields of Urban and Ethnic Studies and History. He would couple
with this a focus on topics related to Jewish History. Several of these
students—including Gershon Bacon, Gershon Hundert, Paula Hyman,
Jenna Weissman Joselit, Deborah Dash Moore, Marsha Rozenblit, and
Jack Wertheimer, and, of course, Gurock himself—emerged as leading
scholars of Jewish History: focusing primarily on the modern era.
Gurock wrote his doctoral dissertation on Harlem’s Jews in the
late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a study that appeared in
book form in 1979.2 Recently, he returned to this topic and published
a significantly revised and expanded version. A comparison of the two
reveals various clues to the expansion of his repertoire as a social and
urban historian, as well as familial and autobiographical reflections that
add to those that appear in his previous books.3 For instance, the new
edition describes recent developments in Harlem, including Gurock’s own
participation, together with his wife Pamela, in the 2012 dedication of
the new Torah scroll at the recently-established Harlem center of the
Chabad Hasidic movement.4
1. For a complete listing of Gurock’s fertile literary production through February
2010, see http://jeffreygurock.com/bio_Gurock.pdf. Only titles that relate directly to the
text are cited in the footnotes below.
2. Jeffrey S. Gurock, When Harlem was Jewish, 18701930 (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1979).
3. Gurock, The Jews of Harlem, 180181. In addition, see Jeffrey S. Gurock, Juda-
ism’s Encounter with American Sports (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University
Press, 2005), 18; and Orthodox Jews in America (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana
University Press, 2009), 121.
4. Jeffrey S. Gurock, The Jews of Harlem: The Rise, Decline, and Revival of a Jewish
Community (New York: New York University Press, 2016), 11.
xAMERICAN JEWISH HISTORY
Gurock’s many contributions to the study of American Jewish Or-
thodoxy made him a path-breaking scholar of this burgeoning field. In
fact, discussions of Orthodox communal life were already present in his
original work on Harlem. For example, he described the tensions between
the “ultra-Orthodox segment” and those who “argued that a Jewish
identity based on old-world values and institutions had little chance of
surviving the Americanization process.” It was in the early twentieth
century, according to Gurock, when “divisions within contemporary
Orthodoxy were to a great extent first crystalized.”5
Nonetheless, Orthodoxy was not the central theme of his first work.
Instead, that area of his research came into fuller focus in the early
1980s. In 1983, Gurock authored a bibliographical guide for students
and scholars of American Jewish history, and commented that “much
more still remains to be learned” about Orthodox Jews in the United
States.6 Gurock himself moved quickly to fill the gaps he had identified.
Within the same year he penned a lengthy article on Orthodox Juda-
ism that focuses primarily on immigrant rabbis and their organizations.
There he introduced a fundamental typology that distinguished between
“resisters” of Americanization and its “accommodators;” this framework
subsequently became a staple of relevant scholarship.7
Since then, Gurock has devoted much of his scholarship to the history
of Orthodox Judaism in the United States. This resulted in a series of
books and numerous articles that have uncovered an endless trove of often
unknown and, for the most part, undocumented chapters in the history
of American Orthodoxy. Gurock’s prime interest has been in tracing and
contextualizing the historical reality, although as his career advanced,
he dedicated increasingly more space to contemporary developments, as
well. His work is based upon massive, rich, and diverse documentation,
making use of memoirs, letters, official protocols, and legal documents,
and the Jewish and non-Jewish press. He interweaves and utilizes this
wide variety of sources with methodological sophistication, and creates
extremely thick descriptions of events, personalities, and processes. These
set forth the foundation for analyzing developments—both continuity
and change—within the various facets of Orthodox Judaism.
The educational-institutional history of American Orthodoxy, for
example, has been enriched considerably by Gurock’s groundbreaking
critical historical overview of Yeshiva University, as well as the edited
5. Gurock, When Harlem was Jewish, 112.
6. Jeffrey S. Gurock, American Jewish History: A Bibliographical Guide (New York:
Anti-Defamation league, 1983), 62.
7. Jeffrey S. Gurock, “Resisters and Accommodators: Varieties of Orthodox Rabbis in
America, 18861983,” American Jewish Archives 35 (November 1983): 10087.
xiZev Eleff, Kimmy Caplan, and Adam Ferziger: Editors’ Introduction
volume devoted to his alma mater, the Ramaz School. Both presented
fresh primary materials that facilitated incisive critical observations
regarding the ways in which Orthodoxy perceived and addressed edu-
cational challenges in the New World.8 Gurock also collaborated with
Jacob J. Schacter in an examination of the development of the unique and
complex perspective of Mordecai M. Kaplan (18811983)—the founder
of Reconstructionist Judaism—during his formative period as a young
Orthodox congregational rabbi, as well as of the reaction to Kaplan of
Orthodox rabbis and lay people.9 For this work, Gurock and Schacter
were awarded in 1998 the American Jewish Historical Society’s Saul
Viener Prize for the “best book written in American Jewish History.”
Gurock also honed in on the many mid-twentieth century Jews who
were institutionally allegiant to Orthodoxy, without adhering consis-
tently to a halakhic lifestyle. Adopting the seemingly contradictory term
“nonobservant Orthodoxy” to describe this group, he argued that its
existence explains in part the blurred boarders between the Orthodox
and Conservative movements during the period in question.10 This con-
ceptual model is potentially instructive for scholars who examine Jew-
ish Orthodox life in other periods and geographical settings, in which
liminality is a core characteristic.
Regional studies represent another significant component of Gurock’s
oeuvre. In his original work on Harlem Jewry, Gurock already demon-
strated the importance of urban and neighborhood geography. This sense
of nuance received further expression in his bibliographical guide from
1983. There Gurock lamented that “local and regional communal histo-
riography has also been slow to attract objective, conceptually-oriented
scholars to its study.”11 Gurock listed a few good examples of histories
8. Jeffrey S. Gurock, The Men and Women of Yeshiva: Higher Education, Orthodoxy,
and American Judaism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988); and “The Ramaz
Version of American Orthodoxy,” in Ramaz: School, Community, Scholarship and Or-
thodoxy, ed. Jeffrey S. Gurock (Hoboken: Ktav, 1989), 4082.
9. Jeffrey S. Gurock and Jacob J. Schacter, A Modern Heretic and a Traditional Com-
munity: Mordecai M. Kaplan, Orthodoxy, and American Judaism (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1997).
10. Jeffrey S. Gurock, From Fluidity to Rigidity: The Religious Worlds of Conservative
and Orthodox Jews in Twentieth Century America (Ann Arbor: Frankel Center for Judaic
Studies, the University of Michigan, 2008); “Twentieth-Century American Orthodoxy’s Era
of Non-Observance, 19001960,” Torah u-Madda Journal 9 (2000): 87108; “Yeshiva
Students at the Jewish Theological Seminary,” in Tradition Renewed: A History of the
Jewish Theological Seminary, vol. I, ed. Jack Wertheimer (New York: the Jewish Theologi-
cal Seminary of America, 1997), 471514; “The Winnowing of American Orthodoxy”
Approaches to Modern Judaism I (Chico, CA: Scholars Press, 1984), 4154.
11. Gurock, American Jewish History, 11.
xii AMERICAN JEWISH HISTORY
of Jewish communities in Massachusetts, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. On the
whole, he noted, more was required to gain a fuller appreciation of the
American Jewish experience. To this end, his publications demonstrate a
command of Jewish life both in large centers and smaller concentrations
such as Charleston, South Carolina.12
Gotham, though, looms the largest for Gurock. A New York native
to the core, he was fully aware that a substantial secondary literature
did exist regarding his hometown. Yet Gurock did not list these publi-
cations in the section of his bibliography on “communal histories.” It
would appear that, like so many other historians of American Jewry,
for Gurock, New York was not a mere region, but the essential hub of
American Jewish life. By the second decade of the twenty-first century,
however, he decided to address this theme through a full-length mono-
graph, which highlighted the local urban geographical development of
North American Jewry’s largest population center.13
Parallel to his concentrations on Orthodoxy and urban Jewish life,
the wide-ranging list of topics addressed in Gurock’s publications in-
clude: Jews and civil rights, denominational divisions, Jewish-Christian
relations, the American rabbinate and synagogue, American Jews and
sports, and American Jewish reactions to the Holocaust. In addition
to his own highly-productive research output, Gurock also edited or
co-edited three collected volumes, as well as a thirteen-volume series of
over two hundred of the most influential essays published on American
Jewish history during the past four decades.14
Finally, throughout his career Gurock assumed a number of leadership
roles within the scholarly community. Prominent among these was his
long tenure as associate editor of this journal, together with Marc Lee
Raphael. He also chaired the academic council of the American Jew-
ish Historical Society. Through these positions he assumed the roles of
organizational steward and agent of scholarly change.
We therefore present this festschrift, very aware of the challenge in
honoring someone who has probed so many subjects and boasts such
an extensive scholarly portfolio. The contributors to this issue represent
a cross-section of historians. Some emerged along with Gurock, just as
the field was professionalizing, during the late 1970s and early 1980s.15
12. Jeffrey S. Gurock, Orthodoxy in Charleston: Brith Sholom Beth Israel and Or-
thodox Jewish History (Charleston: College of Charleston Library, 2004).
13. Jeffrey S. Gurock, Jews in Gotham: New York Jews in a Changing City, 19202010
(New York: New York University Press, 2012).
14. Jeffrey S. Gurock, ed., American Jewish History, 13 Volumes (New York: Rout-
ledge, 1997).
15. Jeffrey S. Gurock, “From Publications to American Jewish History: The Journal
of the American Jewish Historical Society and the Writing of American Jewish History,”
American Jewish History 81 (Winter 19931994): 246.
xiiiZev Eleff, Kimmy Caplan, and Adam Ferziger: Editors’ Introduction
Others are a younger cohort of students and scholars who have benefited
from Gurock’s research and mentorship to further develop the critical
study of American Jewish history. Six of the eight articles included in
this special issue focus on American Jewish Orthodoxy and New York
Jewry; they reflect upon Gurock’s significant contributions to these fields
and point to new related directions and topics.
Kimmy Caplan’s essay examines the work of Moses Auerbach in
creating an independent genre of Orthodox historiography in the United
States, within the framework of Leo Jung’s “Jewish Library” series. Re-
placed by a subsequent generation of history writers, Auerbach, argues
Caplan, offered a unique perspective on Orthodox Judaism that was
innovative in its time and unappreciated afterwards.
David Ellenson’s article studies a yet overlooked topic in the writings
of the Orthodox thinker and legalist, Rabbi Haim Hirschensohn. In
1918, just one year after the announcement of the Balfour Declaration,
Hirschensohn expressed remarkable ideas about the role of religion in
responding to political and historical change.
Through their essay on Orthodox Scouting, Adam Ferziger and Hil-
lel Spielman expand our understanding of American Jewish camping.
The article fills an important gap, as very little scholarly work has been
written on Jewish Boy Scouts, and none until now on Orthodox Boy
Scouts. Their work demonstrates how Boy Scout camps bucked the trend
toward denominational camping that segregated campers from other
Jews who did not share their religious orientation.
In his examination of the sources related to American Jewish involve-
ment in the political unrest in North Africa in the early 1940s and its
implications for local Jews, Raphael Medoff demonstrates how one of
Gurock’s fundamental principles of historical writing yields fresh insight.
Medoff proves the importance of reexamining critical sources to explicate
the nuances of communal and political decision making.
Deborah Dash Moore’s illuminating essay on Irwin Chanin underscores
and celebrates Gurock’s role in furthering our knowledge of New York
Jewry. As Moore indicates, Jews were conscious of their role in chang-
ing the shape of both residential communities and the more visible New
York skyline in the postwar period.
Pamela Nadell’s contribution to American Jewish Historys ongoing
“Signposts” series is another wonderful addition to this special issue.
As Nadell acknowledges, Gurock was one of the earliest scholars to pay
close attention to gender in his scholarly writings. Accordingly, Nadell’s
examination of this journal’s treatment on American Jewish women is
most fitting for this occasion.
The article co-authored by Jonathan Sarna and Zev Eleff on immi-
grant rabbis mines archival materials to better understand how a spe-
xiv AMERICAN JEWISH HISTORY
cial exemption in immigration legislation passed in the early twentieth
century allowed ordained rabbis from Europe to more easily migrate
to the United States. While rabbinic personalities of all stripes took
advantage of this policy, Sarna and Eleff make clear that the legislation
was particularly important for Orthodox Judaism and the trajectory of
its leadership throughout the twentieth century.
Beth Wenger’s article is the final installment in this volume. Her work
returns us to New York City, a site she uses to investigate how fundrais-
ing rhetoric and other areas of Jewish philanthropy helped transform
this realm into a male space.
We, the editors, and all of the writers are united in acknowledging
the manifold ways that we have learned from Jeffrey Gurock over the
past decades and benefited from his guidance and vision for the field of
American Jewish History. We are grateful to both Dianne Ashton, the
former editor of AJH, and to the incoming editorial team, particularly
Adam Mendelssohn, for their encouragement and professional involve-
ment throughout the multiple stages of bringing this special issue to
publication.
Zev Eleff, Kimmy Caplan, and Adam Ferziger
ResearchGate has not been able to resolve any citations for this publication.
From Publications to American Jewish History: The Journal of the American Jewish Historical Society and the Writing of American Jewish History
  • Jeffrey S Gurock
Jeffrey S. Gurock, "From Publications to American Jewish History: The Journal of the American Jewish Historical Society and the Writing of American Jewish History," American Jewish History 81 (Winter 1993-1994): 246.