Academic Activities
From its founding in 1892, the American Jewish Historical Society has encouraged the scholarly study of the American Jewish experience. At first, Jewish communal leaders, rabbis and a handful of scholars worked virtually alone to study and present American Jewish history, especially in the pages of the Society’s journal. In the 1950s, the first historians with graduate training in the field of American Jewish history attained positions at universities.
The Society’s Peekskill Conference in 1954, held to mark the 300th anniversary of Jewish settlement in North America, served as a stimulus to professionalization and specialization of the field parallel to other social science disciplines. In 1973, the Society created the AJHS Academic Council to serve as advisors to the Board of Trustees and to provide a forum in which historians of the American Jewish experience could exchange ideas and research findings. To date, more than one hundred scholars from universities worldwide as well as independent scholars, all recognized for their writings on the American Jewish experience, have been elected to the Academic Council. Because of this growth, an Executive Committee administers the Council’s activities.
The American Jewish Historical Society’s 2004 Biennial Scholars’ Conference on American Jewish History was held in Washington, DC, June 6-8, 2004.
The conference was co-sponsored by American University’s Jewish Studies Program and the partners of the Commission for Commemorating 350 Years of American Jewish History: the Library of Congress, the National Archives and Records Administration, the Jacob Rader Marcus Center of the American Jewish Archives, and the American Jewish Historical Society.
The 2006 Biennial Scholars' Conference was held in Charleston, SC in June, 2006. More information.
The AJHS Academic Council’s scholarly activities include
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