ORGANIZING THE JEWISH PAST FOR AMERICAN STUDENTS: Salo Baron at Columbia

To say that academic historical knowledge is socially constructed is neither to denigrate it nor to deny its “objectivity” and truth. Rather, it is to acknowledge that how historians envision their task—how they go about writing what they write—changes over time. I take it for granted that historians themselves can be studied historically—that how they frame their narrative changes with circumstances and their intended audience. Of course, historians respond to new discoveries and take advantage of new techniques thus to see “better” events that were already considered well understood. But beyond this, they frame altogether new questions,