Tony Michels

My specialization is American Jewish. My Research and Teaching Interests include American Jewish history, Yiddish culture, Russian Jewish history, socialism, working-class history, and nationalism.

Education

Ph.D., Stanford
M.A., Stanford
B.A., University of California

Books

The Cambridge History of Judaism: Volume 8. The Modern World, 1815–2000

Tony Michels (Co-editor), and Mitchell B. Hart (Co-editor). The Cambridge History of Judaism: Volume 8. The Modern World, 1815–2000. Cambridge University Press, 2017.

The eighth and final volume of The Cambridge History of Judaism covers the period from roughly 1815–2000. Exploring the breadth and depth of Jewish societies and their manifold engagements with aspects of the modern world, it offers overviews of modern Jewish history, as well as more focused essays on political, social, economic, intellectual and cultural developments. The first part presents a series of interlocking surveys that address the history of diverse areas of Jewish settlement. The second part is organized around the emancipation. Here, chapter themes are grouped around the challenges posed by and to this elemental feature of Jewish life in the modern period. The third part adopts a thematic approach organized around the category ‘culture’, with the goal of casting a wide net in terms of perspectives, concepts and topics. The final part then focuses on the twentieth century, offering readers a sense of the dynamic nature of Judaism and Jewish identities and affiliations.

Jewish Radicals: A Documentary History

Tony Michels. Jewish Radicals: A Documentary History. NYU Press, 2012.

Jewish Radicals explores the intertwined histories of Jews and the American Left through a rich variety of primary documents. Written in English and Yiddish, these documents reflect the entire spectrum of radical opinion, from anarchism to social democracy, Communism to socialist-Zionism. Rank-and-file activists, organizational leaders, intellectuals, and commentators, from within the Jewish community and beyond, all have their say. Their stories crisscross the Atlantic, spanning from the United States to Europe and British-ruled Palestine. The documents illuminate in fascinating detail the efforts of large numbers of Jews to refashion themselves as they confronted major problems of the twentieth century: poverty, anti-semitism, the meaning of American national identity, war, and totalitarianism. In this comprehensive sourcebook, the story of Jewish radicals over seven decades is told for the first time in their own words.

A Fire in Their Hearts: Yiddish Socialists in New York

Tony Michels. A Fire in Their Hearts: Yiddish Socialists in New York. Harvard University Press, 2005.

In a compelling history of the Jewish community in New York during four decades of mass immigration, Tony Michels examines the defining role of the Yiddish socialist movement in the American Jewish experience. The movement, founded in the 1880s, was dominated by Russian-speaking intellectuals, including Abraham Cahan, Mikhail Zametkin, and Chaim Zhitlovsky. Socialist leaders quickly found Yiddish essential to convey their message to the Jewish immigrant community, and they developed a remarkable public culture through lectures and social events, workers’ education societies, Yiddish schools, and a press that found its strongest voice in the mass-circulation newspaper Forverts. Arguing against the view that socialism and Yiddish culture arrived as Old World holdovers, Michels demonstrates that they arose in New York in response to local conditions and thrived not despite Americanization, but because of it. And the influence of the movement swirled far beyond the Lower East Side, to a transnational culture in which individuals, ideas, and institutions crossed the Atlantic. New York Jews, in the beginning, exported Yiddish socialism to Russia, not the other way around. The Yiddish socialist movement shaped Jewish communities across the United States well into the twentieth century and left an important political legacy that extends to the rise of neoconservatism. A story of hopeful successes and bitter disappointments, A Fire in Their Hearts brings to vivid life this formative period for American Jews and the American left.

Selected Publications

• “The Russian Revolution in New York, 1917-1919, Journal of Contemporary History 2017, Vol. 52 (4): 959-979.
• “Donald Trump and the Triumph of Antiliberalism,” Jewish Social Studies Vol. 22, No. 3 (Spring/Summer 2017), pp. 186-192.
• “Is America ‘Different’?: A Critique of American Jewish Exceptionalism,” American Jewish History vol. 96, no. 3 (Sept. 2010): 201-224.
• “Exporting Yiddish Socialism: New York’s Role in the Russian Jewish Workers’ Movement,” Jewish Social Studies vol. 16, no. 1 (Fall 2009): 1-26.
• “I Am Not Hippy Johnny: How Jonathan Richman Used His Outsider Status to Revolutionize Rock and Roll,” Guilt and Pleasure no. 6 (Fall 2007): 82-87.

Advisor To

• Alex Scheepens
• Ri Turner

History Courses

• History 213 – Jews and American Popular Culture – Syllabus 2026 (pdf)
• History 219 – American Jewish Experience – Syllabus 2020 (pdf)
• History 374 – Modern Political History of the Jews
• History 500 – Reading Seminar: Zionism and Its Critics – Syllabus 2023 (pdf)
• History 500 – Reading Seminar: Blacks and Jews in Urban America – Syllabus 2026 (pdf)
• History 600 – African Americans and Jews in Urban US
• History 600 – Immigrants in Urban America
• History 891/History 901 – Modern Jewish History in Comparative Perspective: “Russian and the United States” – Syllabus 2020 (pdf)
• History 901 – Zionism and Its Critics – Syllabus 2017 (pdf)
• History 901 – Communism and Anti-Communism in U. S. History
• History 901 – Political History of American Labor
• History 901 – American Jewish History – Syllabus 2019 (pdf)
• History 902 – Research Seminar in U. S. Social History