Historian Hasia Diner to Speak on “Jewish Peddlers in America"

Historian Hasia Diner will give a talk, “Jewish Peddlers in America,” on Thursday, January 24, 2013, at 7 p.m. in Miller Forum, Moyer Hall.

 Monday, January 21, 2013 09:58 AM

This event, part of the series “Jews, Money and Capitalism,” is free and open to the public.

Diner is the Paul and Sylvia Steinberg Professor of American Jewish History at New York University, with joint appointment in the department of history and the Skirball Department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies. She is also director of the Goldstein Goren Center for American Jewish History. She has built her scholarly career around the study of American Jewish history, American immigration and ethnic history, and the history of American women. She has written about the ways in which American Jews in the early twentieth century reacted to the issue of race and the suffering of African Americans, and the process by which American Jews came to invest deep meaning in New York’s Lower East Side. Her most recent book, “We Remember with Reverence and Love: American Jews and the Myth of Silence After the Holocaust” (2009), won the National Jewish Book Award in the category of American Jewish Studies. She has also written about other immigrant groups and the contours of their migration and settlement, including a study of Irish immigrant women and of Irish, Italian and east European Jewish foodways.

The programs in this series are an extension of the College’s Jewish studies major that will take effect in the fall of 2013. The college has had a Jewish studies minor since 1988. This program is the first new major to be added to the curriculum since film studies and finance in 2006.

“Jews, Money and Capitalism” is sponsored by the Legacy Heritage Jewish Studies Project, directed by the Association for Jewish Studies (AJS). Support for the Legacy Heritage Jewish Studies Project is generously provided by the Legacy Heritage Fund Limited. These events are co-sponsored by the Jewish Federation of the Lehigh Valley, the Center for Jewish-Christian Understanding, as well as Muhlenberg College departments and local Jewish institutions.

For more information on the series, please visit www.muhlenberg.edu/main/academics/jewishstudies/events_and_programs.html.