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Historian discusses American Judaism

Oct. 23, 2008

KALAMAZOO--An expert on American Jewish and immigrant history will make a presentation Wednesday, Oct. 29, at Western Michigan University as part of the Department of History's lecture series on "Religion and the Uses of the Past."

Dr. Hasia R. Diner is the Paul S. and Sylvia Steinberg Professor of American Jewish History at New York University. She will speak on "Filling the Void: American Judaism's Engagement with the Holocaust in the Postwar Era" beginning at 4 p.m. in the President's Dining Room of the Bernhard Center.

Diner has a joint appointment at NYU in the departments of history and the Skirball Department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies and is director of the Goldstein Goren Center for American Jewish History. She was previously a professor in the Department of American Studies at the University of Maryland at College Park and held a Fulbright Professorship at the University of Haifa in Israel from 1990-91.

Diner has been a Lilly Fellow at the Mary I. Bunting Institute at Radcliffe College and won election to membership in American Academy of Jewish Research in 1998 and to the Society of American Historians in 2004. She has also been a fellow at the Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Research at Princeton University.

Diner earned her doctoral degree in history at the University of Illinois-Chicago. She earned a bachelor's degree from the University of Wisconsin in 1968 and a master's from the University of Chicago in 1970.

A specialist in immigration and ethnic history, American Jewish history and the history of American women, she is the author of numerous published books, including "In the Almost Promised Land: American Jews and Blacks, 1915-1935," "Erin's Daughters in America: Irish Immigrant Women in the 19th Century" and "A Time for Gathering: The Second Migration, 1820-1880," the second volume in the Johns Hopkins University Press series called The Jewish People in America.

"Lower East Side Memories: The Jewish Place in America" was published in 2000 by Princeton University Press. In December 2001, "Hungering for America: Italian, Irish and Jewish Foodways in the Age of Migration" was published by Harvard University Press. Basic Books released her history of American Jewish women, titled "Her Works Praise Her," in spring 2002 which Diner co-authored with Beryl Leif Benderly. In the fall of 2004, the University of California Press released "The Jews of the United States: 1654-2000," a history of American Jewry as part of its series on the histories of modern Jewish communities.

Diner currently serves as chair of the executive committee of the Academic Council of the American Jewish Historical Society. She lectures widely to academic and community audiences on various aspects of history, focusing on her specialties of American Jewish history, American women's history and immigration history.

Media contact: Mark Schwerin, (269) 387-8400, mark.schwerin@wmich.edu

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