Hi, everybody.

Welcome to episode two of Ask Chaviv Anything, the forgotten history of American Jews.

That's our topic.

We're going to cover answers to multiple questions asked by subscribers that all centered

around this question of American Jews. How did American Jews become who they are, the institutions

that they built, the culture, and the trouble that American Jews are having facing this moment.

It's a fascinating story, and one of the most

fascinating things about this story is that American Jews seem convinced that it's not a

fascinating story. It's one of the strangest things about American Jewish culture, the quiet

conviction that American Jews are actually very boring. What is American Jewry?

What is its cultural identity?

It's a question that can even seem hard to actually pin down as a question because

it's not hard to answer the question for the Jews of Yemen or the Jews of Russia or the Jews of Iraq or the Jews of Germany over the course of

the centuries.

There was a distinctly Jewish culture, even as they participated in the cultures around them

and interacted with them.

And in America, it's not clear that there is one outside of specifically religious observance.

And it goes deeper than that, the sense that there's an emptiness at the heart of the American Jewish experience.

A sense that you hear from American Jews themselves. I'm not critiquing.

This is a question American Jews ask and have asked me even when I've come to give a talk on history to an American Jewish community somewhere.

When I visit an American Jewish community, the single most important piece of feedback that I get, the single thing that I actually am told by the people I've spoken to is the

statement, I don't know anything about my history. American Jewry is profoundly ignorant about its own

...