Lila Corwin Berman
Professor of History; Murray Friedman Chair of American Jewish History
Director of the Feinstein Center for American Jewish History
Temple University

Lila Corwin Berman is Professor of History at Temple University. She holds the Murray Friedman Chair of American Jewish History and directs the Feinstein Center for American Jewish History. She received her B.A. from Amherst College and her Ph.D. from Yale. Berman is author of The American Jewish Philanthropic Complex: The History of a Multibillion-Dollar Institution (Princeton, 2020), awarded the Ellis W. Hawley Prize from the Organization of American Historians and the Saul Viener Book Prize from the American Jewish Historical Society. She is also author of Metropolitan Jews: Politics, Race, and Religion in Postwar Detroit (University of Chicago, 2015) and Speaking of Jews: Rabbis, Intellectuals, and the Creation of an American Public Identity (California, 2009). Her work has received support from the National Endowment of the Humanities and the American Council of Learned Societies, and her first book was a finalist for the Jewish Book Council’s Sami Rohr Prize. Her articles have appeared in several scholarly publications, including American Historical Review, Journal of American History, AJS Review, and Modern American History. Berman is currently working on a new book called “America’s Jewish Question” about the inclusions and exclusions of American liberalism. 

 

Selected Publications

“Jewish History beyond the Jewish People,” AJS Review 42, no. 2 (Nov 2018): 1-24

“How Americans Give: The Financialization of American Jewish Philanthropy,” American Historical Review 122, no. 5 (Dec 2017): 1459-1489

Metropolitan Jews: Politics, Race, and Religion in Postwar Detroit (University of Chicago Press, 2015)

“Jewish Urban Politics in the City and Beyond,” Journal of American History 99, 2 (Sept 2012): 492-519

Speaking of Jews: Rabbis, Intellectuals, and the Creation of an American Public Identity (University of California Press, 2009)

“Sociology, Jews, and Intermarriage in Twentieth-Century America,” Jewish Social Studies 14, no. 2 (Winter 2008): 32-60