World of Our Fathers at 50
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Panel Discussion
Co-sponsored by the Tenement Museum In Person:Admission: Free Zoom Livestream:Admission: Free |
World of Our Fathers by Irving Howe, originally published in 1976, traces the journeys of Eastern Europe’s Jews to America over four decades. Beginning in the 1880s, it offers a portrayal of the Eastern European Jewish experience in New York and shows how the immigrant generation tried to maintain their Yiddish culture while becoming American. The book became a New York Times bestseller and remains a popular work for those interested in understanding why these forebears to many of today’s American Jews made the decision to leave their homelands and how they experienced immigrant life in the early part of the twentieth century.
Join us for a discussion reflecting on the legacy of World of Our Fathers in honor of its fiftieth anniversary with Hasia Diner, Tony Michels, and Sam Adler-Bell, moderated by Annie Polland.
About the Participants
Hasia Diner is the Paul and Sylvia Steinberg Professor Emerita and Director of the Goldstein-Goren Center for American Jewish History at New York University. A prolific author, her book, Hungering for America: Italian, Irish, and Jewish Foodways in the Age of Migration (Harvard University Press) is now considered a classic in the field.
Tony Michels teaches American Jewish history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he also serves as director of the Mosse/Weinstein Center for Jewish Studies. He is author of A Fire in Their Hearts: Jewish Socialists in New York, editor of Jewish Radicals: A Documentary History, and co-editor of The Cambridge History of Judaism, Volume Eight: The Modern World, 1815-2000.
Sam Adler-Bell is a writer in New York City. His work has appeared in the New York Times, New York Magazine, The New Republic, Dissent, and elsewhere. He co-hosts “Know Your Enemy,” a podcast about the American right.
Annie Polland is a public historian, author, and President of the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, where she served as Vice President for Programs and Education from 2009 to 2017. Prior to her return to the Tenement Museum, she served as Executive Director of the American Jewish Historical Society. She is the co-author, with Daniel Soyer, of Emerging Metropolis: New York Jews in the Age of Immigration (New York University Press, 2013). She served as Vice President of Education at the Museum at Eldridge Street, where she wrote Landmark of the Spirit: The Eldridge Street Synagogue (Yale University Press, 2008).