For 250 years, American Jews have helped shape, challenge, and reimagine the nation’s democratic ideals. All We Have Standing Between Us: 250 Years of Jews and American Democracy invites you to explore this dynamic history, where debates over freedom, equality, and justice have never been settled, but have always been fiercely engaged.
Presented by the American Jewish Historical Society, the Center for Jewish History, and the Yeshiva University Museum
For 250 years, American Jews have helped shape, challenge, and reimagine the nation’s democratic ideals. All We Have Standing Between Us: 250 Years of Jews and American Democracy invites you to explore this dynamic history, where debates over freedom, equality, and justice have never been settled, but have always been fiercely engaged.
Presented by the American Jewish Historical Society, the Center for Jewish History, and the Yeshiva University Museum
About The Exhibition
Drawing on the expansive collections of the American Jewish Historical Society, this powerful exhibition traces Jewish participation in American political life from the Revolutionary era to the present. Through rare objects, compelling stories, and voices both renowned and lesser-known, visitors will encounter figures such as Emma Lazarus, Henry Morgenthau Jr., and Betty Friedan alongside activists, thinkers, and everyday citizens who pushed the boundaries of what American democracy could be.
Spanning seven thematic sections, the exhibition reveals a community deeply committed to the democratic experiment, even when divided on how best to achieve its promise. At once inspiring and thought-provoking, All We Have Standing Between Us offers a timely opportunity to reflect on the past and consider the future of democracy in America.
All We Have Standing Between Us is on view July 21 – December 31, 2026 at the Center for Jewish History. Plan your visit, and view hours and other visitor information.
About The Podcast
From the American Jewish Historical Society comes a new narrative podcast featuring previously untold stories straight from the archives. All We Have Standing Between Us is an exploration of the history of the United States, told through the lives of the American Jews who not just lived through it, but helped shape it. Hosted by AJHS Executive Director Gemma R. Birnbaum.
All We Have Standing Between Us - Podcast Episodes
Episode 101
Coming July 1, 2026
The Rest of Mankind
Episode 102
Coming July 1, 2026
A Leap Into the Unknown
Episode 103
Coming July 15, 2026
Coming Soon
Episode 104
Coming July 29, 2026
Coming Soon
Episode 105
Coming August 12, 2026
Coming Soon
Episode 106
Coming August 26, 2026
Coming Soon
Episode 107
Coming September 9, 2026
Coming Soon
Episode 108
Coming September 23, 2026
Coming Soon
Managing Curators
Gemma R. Birnbaum has been the Executive Director of the American Jewish Historical Society since 2021, where she has worked to expand digital outreach and public engagement, including launching the podcast series’ The Wreckage in 2024 and The World in Front of Me in 2026. She previously spent 10 years at The National WWII Museum in New Orleans, overseeing K-12 and higher education programs, distance learning, media production, public engagement, and interpretation, and served as creator and head writer of the narrative podcast “To the Best of My Ability.” An Emmy and Webby-nominated producer, she holds a bachelor’s in history and Judaic Studies from New York University and a master’s in modern U.S. history from Tulane University.
Gavriel D. Rosenfeld is President of the Center for Jewish History in New York City and the Robin and Joseph Kanarek Professor of History at Fairfield University. His work focuses on the history of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust, memory studies, and counterfactual history. He is the author of numerous books, including the new two-volume study, Predicting the Past: Counterfactual History from Antiquity to the Present (Berlin, 2026), The Fourth Reich: The Specter of Nazism from World War II to the Present (Cambridge, UK, 2019), Hi Hitler! How the Nazi Past is Being Normalized in Contemporary Culture (Cambridge, UK, 2015), Building after Auschwitz: Jewish Architecture and the Memory of the Holocaust (New Haven, 2011), The World Hitler Never Made: Alternate History and the Memory of Nazism (Cambridge, UK, 2005), and Munich and Memory: Architecture, Monuments and the Legacy of the Third Reich (Berkeley, 2000). He is the editor of What Ifs of Jewish History: From Abraham to Zionism (Cambridge, UK, 2016), the co-editor (with Janet Ward), of Fascism in America: Past and Present (Cambridge, UK, 2023), and the co-editor (with Paul Jaskot) of Beyond Berlin: Twelve German Cities Confront the Nazi Past (Ann Arbor, 2008). He edits the blog, The Counterfactual History Review.
Contributors
Ronnie Grinberg is Associate Professor of History and core faculty member of the Schusterman Center for Judaic and Israel Studies at the University of Oklahoma. She is the author of Write Like a Man: Jewish Masculinity and the New York Intellectuals (Princeton University Press 2024), which was longlisted for a National Book Critics Circle (NBCC) Award in criticism and was a finalist in two categories for the National Jewish Book Award. The book also received wide critical acclaim in venues including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and the Times Literary Supplement. Grinberg has published academic articles in the Journal of American History and American Jewish History. She is currently co-editing a volume on an American Jewish intellectual tradition to be published by Rutgers University Press and is also co-editor of the Journal of Women’s History.
Adam Jortner is the former Goodwin-Philpott Professor of History at Auburn University, and the author of four books on American history, including A Promised Land: Jewish Patriots, the American Revolution, and the Birth of Religious Freedom. His books have received multiple national awards, and his essays have appeared in The Washington Post, Current, and The Conversation, and hosts numerous lecture series on Audible.com. This June, he will host an online streaming series offering a global history of the American Revolution, entitled Years that Mattered: 1776, a global history of 1776.
Laura Arnold Leibman is the Leonard J. Milberg ’53 Professor in American Jewish Studies and director of Judaic Studies at Princeton University. Her work focuses on religion and the daily lives of women and children in early America and uses everyday objects to help bring their stories back to life. She is immediate past President of the Association for Jewish Studies, and the author of The Art of the Jewish Family: A History of Women in Early New York in Five Objects which won three National Jewish Book Awards. Her earlier book Messianism, Secrecy, & Mysticism: A New Interpretation of Early American Jewish Life won a Jordan Schnitzer Book Award and a National Jewish Book Award. Her most recent monograph, Once We Were Slaves: The Extraordinary Journey of a Multiracial Jewish Family was a finalist for a National Jewish Book Award and the Saul Viener Book Prize, and is about an early multiracial Jewish family who began their lives enslaved in the Caribbean and became some of the wealthiest Jews in New York. She is currently working on a book about Jews and textiles during the long nineteenth century.
Adam Mendelsohn holds the Isidore and Theresa Cohen Chair in Jewish Civilisation at the University of Cape Town where he is Director of the Kaplan Centre for Jewish Studies. The Centre, the only of its kind in Africa, conducts research focused on Jews in southern Africa, past and present. He is the author of Jewish Soldiers in the Civil War: The Union Army (2022) and The Rag Race: How Jews Sewed Their Way to Success in America and the British Empire (2014), and co-editor of Jews and the Civil War: A Reader (with Jonathan D. Sarna, 2010), Transnational Traditions: New Perspectives on American Jewish History (with Ava Kahn, 2014), and Yearning to Breathe Free: Jews in Gilded-Age America (with Jonathan D. Sarna, 2022). He has co-curated exhibitions at the New-York Historical Society, Princeton University Art Museum, and the Center for Jewish History, and is a former co-editor of the journal American Jewish History and currently co-editor of Jewish Historical Studies.
Tony Michels is the George L. Mosse Professor of American Jewish History and Director of the Mosse/Weinstein Center for Jewish Studies at the University of Wisconsin. He is co-editor, with Mitchell Hart, of the forthcoming Cambridge History of Modern Judaism: The Modern Era(Cambridge Univ. Press). His first book, A Fire in Their Hearts: Yiddish Socialists in New York (Harvard Univ. Press), won the Salo Baron Prize from the American Academy for Jewish Research. He is currently finishing a book on American Jewish responses to the Russian Revolution.
Deborah Dash Moore is the former director of the Frankel Center for Judaic Studies and a Frederick G.L. Huetwell Professor of History and Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She serves as the editor-in-chief of “The Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization,” a ten-volume anthology of original sources translated into English from the biblical period to 2005. Her recent book, Walkers in the City: Jewish Street Photographers of Mid-Century New York (Cornell University Press, 2023), won the National Jewish Book Award.
Pamela Nadell holds the Patrick Clendenen Chair in Women’s and Gender History at American University. Her new book, Antisemitism, an American Tradition (W.W. Norton, October 2025), won the National Jewish Award in American Jewish Studies. The Wall Street Journal named it to its October list of “books to read.” Hadassah Magazine and Religion News Service named it to lists of the best books of 2025. Nadell’s last book, America’s Jewish Women: A History from Colonial Times to Today, (W.W. Norton, 2019), won the National Jewish Book Award’s Everett Family Foundation “Book of the Year” and was translated into Hebrew A past president of the Association for Jewish Studies, Nadell is a member of the Advisory Board planning the rebuild of Pittsburgh’s The Tree of Life. However, to her chagrin, she may best be known for testifying before Congress in the hearing with the presidents of Harvard, MIT, and the University of Pennsylvania.
Shari Rabin is professor of Jewish studies, religion, and history and chair of Jewish studies at Oberlin College. She is the author of Jews on the Frontier: Religion and Mobility in Nineteenth-century America (NYU Press, 2017), which won the National Jewish Book Award in American Jewish Studies, and The Jewish South: An American History (Princeton University Press, 2025), which was a finalist for the same award. She currently serves as vice president of the Southern Jewish Historical Society.
Esther Schor, the John J. F. Sherrerd ’52 University Professor and Professor of English at Princeton, is a scholar, biographer, poet and essayist. Her 2006 biography Emma Lazarus won the National Jewish Book Award. She has published three books of poems, including The Hills of Holland and Strange Nursery: New and Selected Poems; with poets Meena Alexander and Rita Dove, she is also the co-author of Poems for Sarra, a bilingual collection about the Venetian intellectual Sarra Copia Sullam. Her scholarship includes Bearing the Dead: The British Culture of Mourning from the Enlightenment to Victoria and The Cambridge Companion to Mary Shelley. Her cultural history of the Esperanto movement is Bridge of Words: Esperanto and the Dream of a Universal Language. Recently she was awarded an NEH/Center for Jewish History Fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellowship to support her research on a biography of the philosopher Horace M. Kallen. She lives in Princeton, New Jersey and London.
Daniel B. Schwartz is Professor of History and Judaic Studies at The George Washington University. His work focuses on modern Jewish intellectual, cultural, and urban history. He is the award-winning author of The First Modern Jew: Spinoza and the History of an Image (Princeton, 2012) and Ghetto: The History of a Word (Harvard, 2019), a contributing writer for the Jewish Review of Books, and Chair of the Academic Advisory Council of the Center for Jewish History. He is currently writing a book on how Manhattan's Upper West Side became one of the great intellectual capitals of twentieth-century America — what made that possible, what unmade it, and what remains.
Daniel Soyer is professor of History at Fordham University. His books include Jewish Immigrant Associations and American Identity in New York, 1880-1939 (Harvard, 1997), winner of the AJHS’s Saul Viener Award, The Emerging Metropolis: New York Jews in the Age of Immigration, 1840-1920 (with Annie Polland, NYU, 2012), winner of a National Jewish Book Award, and Left in the Center: The Liberal Party of New York and the Rise and Fall of American Social Democracy (Cornell, 2021), and, as editor, My Future Is in America: Eastern European Jewish Immigrant Autobiographies (with Jocelyn Cohen, NYU, 2006).
Andrew Sperling is the Historian & Director of Academic Initiatives at the American Jewish Historical Society. He earned his PhD in History from American University in 2024 and subsequently became the Leon Levy Fellow at the Center for Jewish History. His research expertise includes the history of American antisemitism, Jewish refugee experiences, and Jewish political movements in the US. His first book, The Menace Among Us: The Jewish Fight Against Antisemitism, from the Ku Klux Klan to the White Power Movement, will be released by NYU Press in January 2027.
Britt P. Tevis is an assistant professor of history and the Phyllis Backer Assistant Professor in Jewish Studies in the Department of History at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University.Tevis has held fellowships at the Institute for Israel and Judaic Studies at Columbia University, the Center for Antiracist Research at Boston University, the Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, the Program for the Study of Antisemitism at Yale University, and the Center for Jewish History in New York City. She has taught courses on history and law at Brooklyn College, Deakin University (Melbourne, Australia), Yale University, Columbia University, and Columbia Law School. Tevis earned her Ph.D. in History from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and J.D. from the University of Wisconsin Law School.
Sponsors
All We Have Standing Between Us is made possible thanks to generous funding from the Leon Levy Foundation. Additional funding provided by the Knapp Family Foundation, the Achelis and Bodman Foundation, the Atran Foundation, and Anonymous.
PRESS
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