Historian Hasia Diner will discuss the topic of her most recent book, Opening Doors: The Unlikely Alliance Between the Irish and the Jews in America. Contrary to prevailing wisdom, a productive alliance blossomed in American cities from the late nineteenth century into the 1930s, bringing Jewish and Irish Americans into each other's orbit. In crucial places, like the labor movement, the political machine and the public schools, Irish Americans, well settled and indeed entrenched, helped Jewish immigrants, more recent arrivals to the United States, to achieve integration into American society.

 

About the speaker: Hasia Diner is Professor Emerita, New York University where she held the Paul and Sylvia Steinberg Chair in American Jewish History. She also served as interim director of NYU's Glucksman Ireland House. Her work has focused on American Jewish history, American immigration history, and the history of American women. A prolific author, several of whose books have won prizes, she has won a Guggenheim Fellowship as well as a Fulbright award.

 

Copies of Opening Doors will be available for purchase and signing courtesy of Newtonville Books.

 

This program is part of the Newton History Series, co-sponsored by Historic Newton and the Newton Free Library.