...medal to Gerald Sorin for distinguished service in the field of American Jewish history. Gerald Sorin's long and distinguished career predates the first time we met, but his prominence as an historian of American Jews in some ways starts with our initial encounter, so I hope you will forgive me for beginning on a personal note. I met Gerry at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research's Max Weinreich Center for Advanced Jewish Studies in 1978. I was teaching a course on Jewish immigration to the United States. He was a professor at SUNY New Paltz and the author of two books on abolitionism, including one, Abolitionism: A New Perspective (1972), which was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. Despite these accolades so early in his career, Gerry had decided to retrain as an historian of American Jews.

The moment was ripe. Irving Howe's book on immigrant Jewish history, World of Our Fathers, had appeared two years before and had won a National Book Award. But possibilities for graduate study of American Jews, a relatively new academic field of endeavor, were few. Fortunately for me, a newly minted Ph.D., my course at YIVO didn't have much competition. Gerry enrolled as a student.

It was a great class. As you might imagine, I was lucky to have Gerald Sorin as my student. Obviously, he already knew American history very well. What he sought was a thorough immersion in the relevant historiography and sources of Jewish history.

Out of that course came his first book in American Jewish history, The Prophetic Minority: American Jewish Immigrant Radicals, 1880-1920 (1985). Gerry brought to this study some of the same intellectual questions and methodologies he had used fifteen years earlier in his first book on The New York Abolitionists: A Case Study of Political Radicalism (1970). He sought to uncover the source of moral vision behind immigrant radicalism and the reasons for their turn to socialism. What motivates people to change society? To find his answers Gerry looked at a substantial...

NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.



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