Israeli Historiography on American Jewry

[...]the vast and abundant literature created in America about the history of the Jews on the American continent in general and the United States in particular is a closed book for our reading public.4 In the present article I examine Israeli historiography’s treatment of American Jewry, and try to understand why Israeli historians, born and educated in Israel, hardly studied the American Jewish community until the 1990s and early years of the current century. According to Davis, the Hebrew-language series of studies of American Jewish community was intended “to satisfy the increasing need for books on this topic, a need that has been felt in the past, especially in teaching at the universities and other institutions of higher education in Israel and the Diaspora.” [...]even in the United States research about American Jews as a field in its own right was still in its infancy and exerted no influence on the young State of Israel. 1. First Temple period, Benjamin Mazar, Avraham Malamat, and Hanoch Reviv; Second Temple period, Shmuel Safrai and Menachem Stern; Middle Ages, Yitzhak Baer, Haim Beinart, and Haim Hillel Ben-Sasson; the Modern Age, Ben-Zion Dinur, Israel Heilperin, Shmuel Ettinger, Uriel Tal, and Baruch Mevorach.