Discussion: The Jewish Metropolis: New York from the 17th to the 21st Century

Join contributors to The Jewish Metropolis: New York from the 17th to the 21st Century (Academic Studies Press, 2021) Daniel Soyer, Ayelet Brinn, John M. Dixon, Diana L. Linden, and Devin Naar in a discussion of the diversity of the Jewish experience in New York. Over the centuries, Jews have influenced the city’s culture, politics, social fabric, and economy, and in turn, been influenced by them. New York Jews have contributed to the development of American Judaism, to the rise of modern art, and to world Jewish culture in English, German, Yiddish, Ladino, and other languages. Since the 1890s, New York has been the greatest Jewish metropolis of all time. It’s no wonder that Academic Studies Press has included a volume on the city in its Lands and Ages of the Jewish People series, the only city so featured.

About the Speakers
Soyer is a professor of history and Jewish studies at Fordham University. He is editor of The Jewish Metropolis: New York City from the 17th to the 21st Century (Academic Studies Press, 2021). His other books include The Emerging Metropolis: New York Jews in the Age of Immigration, 1840-1920 (NYU, 2012), which he wrote with Annie Polland, and which won a National Jewish Book Award, and Jewish Immigrant Associations and American Identity in New York, 1880-1939 (Harvard, 1997), winner of the Saul Viener Award of the American Jewish Historical Society. He is co-editor of the journal American Jewish History. Keep an eye out for his forthcoming book, Left in the Center: The Liberal Party of New York and the Rise and Fall of American Social Democracy, due out in January from Cornell University Press.

Brinn is an American Jewish historian with expertise in gender and popular culture. She received her Ph.D. in history from the University of Pennsylvania in 2019, and is currently an associate fellow at Fordham University and a scholar in residence at the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute. She is working on a book about the role of gender politics in the development of the American Yiddish press.

Dixon is an associate professor of history at the College of Staten Island and is affiliated with the Graduate Center at the City University of New York. A historian of colonial New York and the Atlantic world, and a former fellow of the Goldstein-Goren Center for American Jewish History at New York University, he is currently completing a history of Jews in the early modern Americas.

Linden is a historian of American art. Her book, Ben Shahn’s New Deal Murals: Jewish Identity in the American Scene (Wayne State University Press, 2015), was a finalist for a National Jewish Book Award. She was part of the team behind the award-winning City of Promises: A History of the Jews of New York (NYU Press, 2012). In 2019, the journal Smithsonian Studies in American Art awarded her the Frost Prize for excellence in scholarship.