Please save the dates May 12-14, 2024 for next year’s AJHS biennial conference to be held in NYC. Returning to the Center for Jewish History for the first time since 2016 after the Covid-19 pandemic shifted 2020’s conference fully online, next year’s conference seeks to reconsider New York City as a central locus of Jewish life in the United States and around the world. We hope to interrogate the specific amalgam of “Jewish” and “New York” in varied ways, such as its inner diversities, its boundaries and limits, and its relationship with populations beyond its borders. By revisiting “Jewish New York,” we will also discuss how ‘center’ and ‘periphery’ operate in multiple areas of American Jewish history.
We are also excited to announce that our keynote speaker event on Sunday, May 12 will be a lively discussion between writers Lara Vapnyar and Gary Shteyngart. Both authors were born in the former Soviet Union and moved to New York as children, and they will explore topics such as the role of New York in Jewish life, how public education was formative, the impact of the city on creative life.
2024 Biennial Conference Co-Chairs: Hasia Diner and Leah Garrett
Conference Committee Members: Allan Amanik, Hadas Binyamini, Jonathan Karp, Eddy Portnoy
Call For Papers
Revisiting Jewish New York: Centers and Peripheries
The Academic Council of the American Jewish Historical Society invites submissions from now until January 31st.
In light of the recent flowering of scholarship in the field of American Jewish history which has emphasized life outside of New York, this conference seeks to reconsider New York City as a central locus of Jewish life in the United States and around the world. The program committee hopes not so much to recenter New York and reestablish its primacy, but to interrogate the specific amalgam of ‘New York’ and ‘Jewish’, its inner diversity, its boundaries and limits, and its relationship with Jewish populations beyond its borders. We wish to explore what ‘Jewish New York’ means and has meant to Jews, non-Jews, the rest of the United States, and even globally as well as its endurance as a historical category. By revisiting “Jewish New York,” we will also discuss how ‘center’ and ‘periphery’ operate in multiple areas of American Jewish history. After all, in no other city in the United States had so many Jews established roots, and as such in no other place did their presence impact public institutions so profoundly.
We encourage a range of papers on the diverse spectrum of Jewish New York in terms of origins, ideology, class, language, and gender. We are particularly interested in public institutions and such crucial elements of civic life as courts, police, public education, and more. We hope to examine as well the notion of ‘the city’ and what this means when it houses the nation’s largest Jewish population. Similarly, while Jews have lived in every city and region and made their presence felt in all of them, the phrase, “New York Jew” conveys a range of ideas and images that have pervaded popular culture that we can take to be unique.
Although we particularly welcome submissions connected to the theme, the Scholars Conference Committee will gladly consider proposals exploring any aspect of American Jewish history and culture. The Committee encourages the submission of complete panels and nontraditional types of panels, including seminars, roundtables, and lightning sessions. It will also consider individual paper submissions. In all cases, the Committee urges contributors to approach the conference as an opportunity to share ideas through interactive conversation and accessible presentations. International scholars, graduate students, and scholars with limited financial resources are all encouraged to apply. Once acceptance decisions are made, a limited number of travel grants will be made available.
