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But Is It History?: World of Our Fathers as a Historicized Text

Let me open with a caveat, because the title of my essay divulges its thesis–that we must be skeptical about World of Our Fathers as a work of history. During his tumultuous life as a public intellectual, Irving Howe had his share of triumphs and embarrassments. One of those triumphs, the publication of World of Our Fathers, commands our attention in this issue of American Jewish History. As for the embarrassments, Howe found himself in the agonizing position of having to reflect on his failure to understand and morally engage two of the critical events of his time, which were for Jews the critical events of recent history: the battle against Hitler and the establishment of Israel. This failure rested on a stunning lack of historical sense, an Achilles’ heel that would hobble him again when he moved from criticism to the craft of history writing. While this essay will try to explain why World of Our Fathers is problematic from a scholarly viewpoint, I do not want to detract from the book’s well-deserved reputation as a vivid and spirited portrait offering emotional sustenance to several generations of American Jews. The question posed to the contributors to this issue of American Jewish History was this: How did World of Our Fathers influence your scholarship on American Jews? On the one hand, when I was preparing the doctoral dissertation that became my first book, I found myself relying only slightly on World of Our Fathers. When I wanted an authoritative source on Eastern European Jewish immigrants to New York City at the turn of the century, I turned to Moses Rischin’s meticulously researched The Promised City. On the other hand, as an undergraduate at Amherst College at the time World of Our Fathers appeared, I had gone out of my way to hear Howe speak and to buy his book. Like most students, I rarely bought a new book that was not required for a course, and I attended no other public lectures concerning Jewish affairs, so Howe’s appearance stands out in my memory of those