Historian Jonathan Sarna and Zev Eleff of Gratz College speak on a panel on “Jews of the Gilded Age” at the American Jewish Historical Society in Manhattan, Oct. 2, 2022. (Courtesy Center for Jewish History)
By Andrew Silow-Carroll
July 6, 2025
(JTA) — Journalists I know joke that the only Jewish historian they ever need to call is Jonathan Sarna.
Jews and the Civil War? Sarna knows where the bodies are buried.
Need a quote about Jews and bagels? Sarna will give you one with everything.
The history of American Jewish prayer? Amen.
That Sarna is quoted on so many topics is probably a sign of laziness on the part of the reporters, but it is also a testament to Sarna’s dominance in the field of American Jewish history.
The Joseph H. and Belle R. Braun Professor of American Jewish History at Brandeis University, Sarna has been a force in his field almost since he first got his doctorate at Yale University when he was 24. His magisterial 2004 book, “American Judaism: A History,” is considered the definitive work on the subject.
Now, at 70, Sarna announced he will officially retire from teaching duties after 35 years at Brandeis, and will focus on research and writing. He’s looking to complete a book about Mark Twain and the Jews, and has plenty of other projects in the works. The Twain book will be the third in a sort of 19th-century trilogy, following works on Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant.
“I’ve never met a professor who said, ‘Oh, I wish I’d gone to two more meetings,’” Sarna, who has survived a number of health scares over the years, said in a recent interview. “But I’ve known a lot of professors who say, ‘Oh, I wish I’d written this book or that article.’ I felt that whatever time I have, devoting it to research and scholarship would really be what I wanted to do, and I’ll let other people handle the university. There’s a lot of politics at universities nowadays.”
Sarna’s decision to step back has allowed him to enjoy a sort of victory lap. He received an honorary degree and delivered the undergraduate keynote address during this year’s commencement exercises at Brandeis — 50 years after he graduated there with a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in Near Eastern and Judaic studies.
Last month the Maimonides Fund and the American Jewish Historical Society hosted a symposium in his honor, mostly featuring talks not by fellow academics but by rabbis and Jewish communal leaders who explained how his ideas and influence extended beyond the Ivory Tower.
His academic contributions were celebrated, meanwhile, at a daylong event at Brandeis in May, featuring a number of leading American Jewish historians, including Michael Cohen of Tulane, Zev Eleff of Gratz College, Sylvia Barack Fishman of Brandeis, Pam Nadell of American University and Laura Liebman of Princeton.
In her remarks, Nadell spoke about one of Sarna’s most important contributions to the field: a series of books and articles that put antisemitism in the American context. In papers like “The Pork on a Fork: A Nineteenth Century Anti-Jewish Ditty” (1982) and “Anti-Semitism and American History” (1981), Sarna refuted the historians and Jewish leaders at the time who suggested that antisemitism was a brief and fading problem in American life.
He “carefully and with nuance demanded that American antisemitism had to be understood ‘on its own terms,’” Nadell said at the Brandeis symposium. “More than four decades later, in our very different moment, we must heed that clarion call to the particularity of the Jewish experience in the U.S.”
Sarna agrees that those were some of his most influential articles. “History has very much vindicated my cyclical approach to antisemitism, as opposed to those who felt that antisemitism, like anti-Catholicism and anti-Mormonism, would become simply a historical subject, a relic from the past,” he said.
Although antisemitism has hardly been the main focus of his scholarship, he returned to the subject again in his popular 2012 book “When Grant Expelled the Jews,” about a short-lived decision by the union general to expel all Jews under his military jurisdiction. Antisemitism was also the subject that sparked his interest in a career as a historian of American Jewish history.
“I am probably the only person in the world who decided to become an American Jewish historian in high school,” said Sarna, who grew up outside of Boston, the son of Nahum Sarna, a renowned Bible scholar, and Helen Horowitz, a Hebraist and Judaica librarian. “When I went to Brookline High School, they allowed you in your senior year to write a kind of big research paper, and you could stay off campus and research. And I wrote the history of antisemitism in America, believe it or not, and I loved it. I was reading old books and learned a lot.”
That paper also had a sequel of sorts: In order to fulfill a weird requirement that driver’s ed students write a research paper, he wrote about the antisemitism of automaker Henry Ford. “The driver’s ed teacher told me he never had such a long and footnoted paper, and he gave me an A plus,” Sarna recalled. “There was only one little problem with my scheme, which was that it didn’t help you at all on the road test, which I failed and had to retake.”
As an undergraduate at Brandeis, Sarna fell under the allure of the American Jewish Historical Society, which was then housed on the campus, and the researchers who used it. When he applied for a doctoral program, however, he sought out the best history program he could get into, not a Jewish college.
He wound up at Yale, which seemed interested in his niche. “They hadn’t had a student who was doing American Jewish history, and they wanted one, and I was the one,” he said. He studied with Sydney Ahlstrom, the great historian of American religious history, who helped Sarna, an observant Jew, place the Jewish experience within the scope of American religious history.
“I was one of the very first people who came to American Jewish history with the knowledge of American religion. American religion had been a very Protestant subject for a very long time, and Jews shied away from it,” he said. “I met [Ahlstrom], and the idea of studying American religion with the man who had written a religious history of the American people was very exciting.”
In his own teaching, Sarna said he wanted students to understand the parallels between American Judaism and other American religions. He calls a paper he wrote on the late 19th-century American Jewish awakening — which paralleled a religious revival among American Protestants — as “among my most influential articles.”
Another mentor Sarna cites is Jacob Rader Marcus, the rabbi and historian who founded the American Jewish Archives at the Hebrew Union College campus in Cincinnati. Marcus invited Sarna to HUC on a post-doctoral fellowship, and Sarna stayed for 11 years, before Brandeis came calling with the promise of a chair.
Marcus instilled in him the idea that a historian of American Jewish history needed to know the whole field, and that the story of Jews in America did not begin at Ellis Island. “In Israel, and also in some other universities, almost no attention was paid to American Jews until the coming of the East Europeans,” said Sarna. “I’ve written about the post-World War II era, but it’s never been as important to me as the work I’ve done on the early period. I’m very unusual in having published, literally, from the 17th century material until the present day.”
The results include a biography of Mordecai Manuel Noah, the 19th-century journalist and diplomat who tried to establish a Jewish utopia in upstate New York; the rediscovery of a lost novel by the 19th-century poet, essayist and novelist Cora Wilburn; and, with Adam Mendelsohn, anthologies about Jews in the Civil War and in the Gilded Age.
Sarna often worries about students who do not share this appreciation for the sweep of history, or who, he says, “read present-day morality into the past” — failing to acknowledge, for example, that “our horror at slavery was really not shared well into the 19th century.” That doesn’t excuse its practitioners, he said, but provides the context for writing perceptively about them.
Sarna offered another example of students hesitating to write about topics they might consider politically suspect. For years Sarna urged students to consider writing a history of the rebbetzin, or the rabbi’s wife, and the quiet but important influence such women had on their communities. “I had [feminist] students who could have written that, but who said to me, ‘that represents everything we don’t want for ourselves, for our children. This is not a subject that we want to be part of,’” he said.
(Sarna was gratified when Shuly Rubin Schwartz, now the chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary, wrote “The Rabbi’s Wife: The Rebbetzin in American Jewish Life,” which won a 2006 National Jewish Book Award.)
Sarna is also worried about a strand of anti-Zionism among some in his field, and said that it is leading some scholars to exaggerate American Jewish opposition to a Jewish state, especially in the 1930s, or to misrepresent why Zionism captured the American Jewish imagination.
“I lament in some ways that they’re two very, very different institutions that think about the issues so differently,” he said, referring to the Zionist and anti-Zionist camps. “It would be better, in a way, if students were exposed to multiple perspectives and really could understand why some dissipate.”
He also laments how few positions are available in the academy. “And now with the federal cutbacks, I think there is a sense that it’s worse than before,” he said. “Even Harvard has more or less shut down all appointments there.”
The irony is that the Trump administration is targeting academia in large part in the name of fighting antisemitism. Sarna didn’t remark on that, but in a recent article in the Forward, he spoke as a historian about a split among Jewish leaders: those who have quietly accepted Trump’s purge of the universities, and those who think such moves are fundamentally anti-democratic.
About the former camp, Sarna told the Forward, because “there’s no agreement as to what the highest Jewish priorities should be, they’re going to go with supporting Israel and fighting antisemitism — knowing, I think, that there’s a price to pay for that.”
Sarna often engages in Jewish communal debates in ways that some academics prefer to avoid. “I always kept my hand in the community side of the field, in order to strengthen American Jewish life. That was a goal, which some people have argued is antithetical” the role of the scholar, he said.
But Sarna is dedicated to the idea that a community should understand its past in order to make sense of its present. Eleff, the president of Gratz College, spoke about this at the Brandeis symposium honoring Sarna. “One of the striking characteristics of Jonathan’s writing is that all of the hours of looking and studying in archives, assembling all those bits and pieces, Jonathan always sees the big story, and he writes about the big story,” he said.
Sarna illustrated that point when I asked him if he had his white whale – a subject or artifact that has so far eluded him. He mentioned a report from the 1990s that he thinks broke the culture of American Jewish fundraising.
The paper, written by the McKinsey consulting group at the request of what was then known as the Council of Jewish Federations, urged the big Jewish fundraising outfits, for the sake of their bottom lines, to stop chasing the “small givers” and instead focus on the deep-pocketed machers and foundations.
Sarna hasn’t been able to locate the document, but thinks that the federations that accepted its recommendations did not think about the big story:
“Those [small] donations were a statement of Jewish citizenship: ‘Once a year I identified with the Jewish community.’ Now we have a whole generation today of people who hardly know what the federation does and certainly don’t [think] they’re citizens of that federation, because they’re not in a position to make those kinds of big donations.”
And that insistence — that history speaks to the present — is why he always makes himself available to reporters, said Sarna.
“That’s not something every academic is comfortable with,” he said. “But there are things a historian can talk about and compare and put into perspective that someone just dealing with the moment can’t do.”
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of JTA or its parent company, 70 Faces Media.
