Join us for a Kiddush and talk from Scholar-In-Residence Professor Daniel Schwartz:

World of Their Children (and Grandchildren, Great Grandchildren): The Making of the Jewish Upper West Side

When Irving Howe published World of Our Fathers in 1976, he offered both an elegy for the immigrant Yiddishkeit of the Lower East Side and a critique of what followed: the “world of their children,” whose Jewishness seemed thinner, flatter, and more conventional by comparison. Yet the Upper West Side unsettled that judgment and became something singular—a Jewish urban space in America with an unmatched density of types, institutions, and energies that shaped American Jewish life and American arts and letters alike. Jews, including Howe himself, helped build that world. This talk explores how it took shape.

Kiddush will be a potluck: We’ll provide the main dish, you bring salads (green, vegetable, grain or bean), side dishes, or dessert.

In order to make sure our meal is balanced, if your last name begins with the letters A-M, please bring in a side dish or salad. If your last name begins with N-Z, please bring in a dessert.

All dishes should adhere to AC’s kashrut policy.

To help us plan, please RSVP below.

Daniel B. Schwartz is Professor of Jewish History at George Washington University. He is the author of The First Modern Jew: Spinoza and the History of an Image (2012) and Ghetto: The History of a Word (2019), and the editor of Spinoza's Challenge to Jewish Thought: Writings on His Life, Philosophy, and Legacy (2019). He writes regularly for the Jewish Review of Books and other outlets. His current project explores Jews, the Upper West Side, and American intellectual and cultural life in the 20th century.