American Jewish Historical Society

This program originally aired online via Zoom on Thursday, June 25, 2026. Julie Salamon, New York Times best-selling author and journalist, sat down with author and psychiatrist Michelle Friedman to discuss her latest book, Divine Corners. Friedman’s memoir is named for her small rural hometown in upstate New York. The daughter of Holocaust survivors, she and her siblings spent their childhood on a chicken farm, playing in the surrounding woods.

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Reminiscing about his youthful summers in the Catskills, Jewish author and sociologist Phil Brown wrote of “a magic land, enveloped in a rich legacy and a rampant mythology.” The son of hoteliers, Brown cherished the Catskill Mountains – known colloquially as the “Jewish Alps” for its high preponderance of Jewish vacationers – as a transformative space in the 1950s and 1960s where “Jews were playing, vacationing, and relaxing at a time of fresh and piercing memories of the Holocaust.” The...

This program was originally held in person at the Center for Jewish History on June 22nd at 6:30 pm Eastern. The American Jewish Historical Society in partnership with the Jack Kirby Museum and the Center for Jewish History, hosted an evening of comics and cocktails with the curators of The Jack Kirby Way: How a boy from the Lower East Side became the King of Comics.

Lt. Col. Rachel Diane (Rae) Landy Papers (P-785), Box 1, Folder 9 Lt. Col. Rachel Diane “Rae” Landy (1884-1952) was a military nurse who served in both World War I and II and was one of the first of two American nurses sent to Palestine by Hadassah, the Women’s Zionist Organization of America, to support the development of community public health initiatives. Landy was born in Lithuania; her family emigrated to Cleveland in 1890 when she was six years old.

The American Civil War was fought from April 1861 to April 1865 by an estimated 10,500 Jewish soldiers according to the National Museum of American Jewish History. Within AJHS’s breadth of deeds, morning reports, letters, and newspaper clippings from the period, there exists information on three American Jewish officers of varying rank who have a shared wartime history despite being preserved in separate collections.

This program originally aired online via Zoom on May 21, 2026 at 12:30pm Eastern New York Times best-selling author Julie Salamon sat down with Senior Political Reporter for the Forward Jacob Kornbluh to discuss his career, love of politics, and his experience reporting as a Hasidic Jew. From a young age, growing up in London’s Hasidic Stamford Hill neighborhood, Jacob loved to write.

To search our database catalog and museum collection see "Collections."

Over the past several months, AJHS has added container lists to a number of archival finding aids. A finding aid helps researchers identify archival records relevant to their work, and a container list makes that discovery more specific by showing what is in each box or folder.

Gentle Reader, Future historians will see the date of our new issue—Volume 108, #4, October 2024—as ahead of its time. Let the record show that we’re introducing this issue in May 2026. Our publisher informs us that rushing ahead to the present may be too hasty; and how could we disagree, given the developments of the past two years? Instead, we put those matters into the hands of future historians. (By the way, anyone want to succeed us as editors?