JEWS AND THE MAKING OF MODERN AMERICA

Jews and the American Soul: Human Nature in the 20th Century. By Andrew R. Heinze. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 2004. xvi + 438 pp. Photographs, notes, and index. $29.95.

The Jewish Century. By Yuri Slezkine. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004. x + 438. Notes and index. $29.95.

Hasia R. Diner
New York University

Andrew Heinze, a scholar of American Jewish history, and Yuri Slezkine, a scholar of Russian history, have, in the same year, published books with Princeton University Press which seek to make, albeit in different ways, a similar point. The Jews, as actors in modern history, mattered a great deal. Both contend—Heinze looking primarily although not exclusively at the United States, and Slezkine taking almost the entire world as the locus of his analysis—that Jews shaped modernity. The two books, appearing at the same time, have breathed new life into an older and largely discredited paradigm, that of "contributions." While the two historians employed the "contribution" genre of historical writing in much more sophisticated and less self-serving or filiopietistic ways than did earlier practitioners, both engaged their readers with the contention that Jews made modernity and that in order to understand that concept, elusive as it might be, one needs to put Jews into the center stage of the analysis.