Forged in America: How Irish-Jewish Encounters Shaped a Nation(Goldstein-Goren Series in American Jewish History)

Examines how Irish and Jewish Americans defined their place in a complex society. The story of America is the story of the unlikely groups of immigrants brought together by their shared outsider status. Urban American life took much of its shape from the arrival of Irish and Jewish immigrants in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and Forged in America is the story of how Irish America and Jewish America collided, cooperated, and collaborated in the cities where they made their homes, all the while shaping American identity and nationhood as we know it. Bringing together leading scholars in their fields, this volume sheds light on the underexplored histories of Irish and Jewish collaboration. While mutual antagonism was clearly evident, so too were opportunities for cooperation, as settled Irish immigrants served to model, mentor, and mediate for Jewish newcomers. Together, the chapters in this volume draw fascinating portraits that show mutuality in action and demonstrate its cultural reverberations.

About the Author :
Hasia R. Diner (Editor) Hasia R. Diner is Professor Emerita at the Departments of History and the Skirball Department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies at New York University, and Director of the Goldstein-Goren Center for American Jewish History. Among her many books are Hungering for America: Italian, Irish and Jewish Foodways in the Age of Migration, The Jews of the United States, 1654 to 2000, We Remember With Reverence and Love: American Jews and the Myth of Silence after the Holocaust, 1945–1962, and Immigration: An American History, with Carl Bon Tempo. Miriam Nyhan Grey (Editor) Miriam Nyhan Grey has been affiliated with NYU's Glucksman Ireland House in various roles since 2008. Her first book is a social history of Ireland's only Ford factory and she is the editor of Ireland's Allies: America and the 1916 Easter Rising. A regular co-editor of the American Journal of Irish Studies, Grey was the inaugural associate editor of the NYU Press Glucksman Irish Diaspora Series. In 2019, she originated the acclaimed Black, Brown and Green Voices project at NYU.

Review :
"Packed with surprises, this pioneering work of comparative scholarship in ethnic relations highlights many parallels between the two groups." - Stephen Whitfield (Jewish Book Council) "An impressive contribution to the field of ethnic and immigration history. Forged in America is broad and diverse in the topics it considers and in the methods and approaches of the uniformly accomplished scholars involved. Readers will encounter new insights into a wide range of political and cultural topics connecting these two important groups." - David Brundage, University of California, Santa Cruz ""Tells a rich story of a varied and highly transactional communal relationship." - Robert Siegel, Moment Magazine" (https://momentmag.com/hasia-r-diners-book/) "Together the 10 essays (six are cited here), with the foreword and the introduction, go a long way towards beginning to tell the story of how Irish-Jewish encounters played a role in 19th- and 20th-century American life." (The Irish Echo)