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Manfred H. Vogel Memorial Lecture in Judaic Studies

“The Jewish Encounter with American Freedom: A New Variation on an Old Theme"

Tony Michels

No theme has loomed larger in the scholarship on American Jews than freedom. Historians, and the Jewish community more generally, tend to agree that liberties established by the Constitution, starting with freedom of religion, have enabled Jews to flourish in the U. S. like nowhere else. Why has freedom come to dominate our understanding of the American Jewish experience? And does the notion of American Jewish uniqueness offer the most useful way to understand the Jewish past?

Tony Michels is the George L. Mosse Professor of American Jewish History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the author of A Fire in Their Hearts: Yiddish Socialists in New York and editor of Jewish Radicals: A Documentary History, and co-editor of the journal Jewish Social Studies: History, Culture, Society.