February 16, 2024 The College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences, the Humanities Center, the Department of History, and the Alabama Holocaust Commission will host two events in March featuring Dr. Beth Wenger, Moritz and Josephine Berg Professor of History, University of Pennsylvania. Sunday, March 3, at 6:00 PM at the Temple B’Nai Sholom located at 103 Lincoln Street SE Huntsville, AL 35801, Dr. Wenger will be presenting “Jews and American Holidays.” The event is free and open to the community. Monday, March 4, at 7:00 PM on the UAH campus in Morton Hall, room 145, Dr. Wenger will be presenting “Antisemitism in American History.” The event is free and open to the community. Dr. Beth Wenger holds a BA from Wesleyan University, MAs from Columbia University and Jewish Theological Seminary, and a PhD from Yale University, and she has been teaching at the University of Pennsylvania since 1993. As the 2022 recipient of the Lee Max Friedman Medal for research, teaching, and service in the field of American Jewish Studies, Dr. Wenger is one of the most distinguished scholars of American Jewish history in the United States today. Dr. Wenger is the author of 3 single-authored books, History Lessons: The Creation of American Jewish Heritage (Princeton University Press, 2010), New York Jews and the Great Depression: Uncertain Promise (Yale University Press, 1996), which won the Salo Baron Prize in Jewish History from the American Academy of Jewish Research, and The Jewish Americans: Three Centuries of Jewish Voices in America (Doubleday, 2007), which she prepared to support the 2008 PBS series The Jewish Americans (for which she served as an advisor), and which was a National Jewish Book Award finalist. Additionally, Dr. Wenger has co-edited and contributed to Gender in Judaism and Islam: Common Lives, Uncommon Heritage, with Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet (NYU Press, 2014), Remembering the Lower East Side: American Jewish Reflections, with Hasia R. Diner and Jeffrey Shandler, (Indiana University Press, 2000), and Encounters with the “Holy Land:” Place, Past, and Future in American Jewish Culture, with Jeffrey Shandler (Brandeis University Press, 1997), which received honorable mention as one of the American Library Association’s Exhibition Catalogue Awards for Excellence. Dr. Wenger has also published numerous articles and book chapters, received many fellowships and grants, and served on multiple academic advisory boards and journal editorial boards. In addition, she served as one of the four founding historians for the Weitzman National Museum of American Jewish History in Philadelphia. In 2015, she was elected a fellow of the American Academy for Jewish Research. For more questions about the event, please contact Dr. Molly Johnson, Associate Professor of History, at johnsonw@uah.edu.
