I have been teaching history and Jewish Studies at Michigan State since 2001. My interests center around the historical meanings and problematic nature of ethnic identity in the United States: I am particularly interested in secular Jews as both members of and outsiders to the Jewish community. I am also interested in the ways that gender, race, class, and family intersect with ethnic identity.
My first book, American Dreams and Nazi Nightmares (Brandeis University Press, 2006), looked at secular Jewish intellectuals’ uses of the Holocaust in the early 1960s. My current project, tentatively entitled A Rosenberg by Any Other Name, explores the history of name changing in the United States in the twentieth century. I am also co-editing, with Lisa Fine, the Norton Critical Edition of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique.
I teach undergraduate classes in American Jewish history and culture, as well as undergraduate and graduate classes in United States history after 1865.
