Forged in America

How Irish-Jewish Encounters Shaped a Nation

Hasia R. Diner, Miriam Nyhan Grey

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2023
• Print ISBN:
  9781479826070
• eBook ISBN:
  9781479826094
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Irish History
• Index: History

Examines how Irish and Jewish Americans defined their place in a complex society.

The story of America is the story of the unlikely groups of immigrants brought together by their shared outsider status. Urban American life took much of its shape from the arrival of Irish and Jewish immigrants in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and Forged in America is the story of how Irish America and Jewish America collided, cooperated, and collaborated in the cities where they made their homes, all the while shaping American identity and nationhood as we know it.

Bringing together leading scholars in their fields, this volume sheds light on the underexplored histories of Irish and Jewish collaboration. While mutual antagonism was clearly evident, so too were opportunities for cooperation, as settled Irish immigrants served to model, mentor, and mediate for Jewish newcomers. Together, the chapters in this volume draw fascinating portraits that show mutuality in action and demonstrate its cultural reverberations.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword: A Good Place to Meet
• Introduction: Forged in America
• 1. A Singular Encounter: Irish and Jews in Their American Home
• 2. The Right to Choose: The Public Health and Birth Control Movements of Lillian Wald and Margaret Sanger
• 3. “Tammany’s Chosen People”: How the Irish Courted the Jewish Vote in Progressive-Era New York
• 4. Jews, Paul O’Dwyer, and a New York Life
• 5. Defending Literary Genius: James Joyce’s Ulysses on Trial
• 6. Laughter and Love between the Irish and the Jews
• 7. Irish-Jewish Couples in American Film and Television
• 8. Playing the Nation: Constructing Cultural Revivals in the Irish and the Jewish Diaspora
• 9. The Irish, the Jews, and Wilson’s “Self-Determination”
• 10. A Tradition of Acceptance: Jews and Their Basketball Players at an Irish Catholic College
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• About the Editors
• About the Contributors
• Index