This Was America 1865–1965: Unequal Citizens in the Segregated Republic by Gerd Korman (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: This Was America 1865–1965: Unequal Citizens in the Segregated Republic by Gerd Korman Steven J. Diner (bio) Gerd Korman. This Was America 1865–1965: Unequal Citizens in the Segregated Republic. By Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2022. In this recently published book, Gerd Korman provides a rich narrative of the barriers faced by Jews and Blacks in the "public square" of American life from the Civil War to the 1960s civil rights movement. Korman, an emeritus professor at Cornell University, has written extensively about the impact of the Holocaust on Jews in Europe and America. In 2006, he published an autobiography, Nightmare's Fairy Tales, about his childhood years as a Jewish refugee in Europe during and after World War II. Korman focuses much of his narrative on what he calls "ethnicking," the development of group peoplehood identities and how groups asserted these beginning in the 1960s. He devotes a great deal of attention to the study of the Holocaust and how it gets incorporated into the history of American Jews. He also asserts that no other ethnic groups had suffered as much oppression and persecution as Jews and Blacks. But I believe that this assertion is not supported by most scholarship on this subject. Notwithstanding this issue, the book is very well researched and written, and it addresses profoundly important questions in American history. Steven J. Diner Rutgers University-Newark Steven J. Diner Steven J. Diner is university professor at Rutgers University-Newark, where he served as chancellor from 2002 to 2011. His publications include A City and Its Universities: Public Policy in Chicago (The University of North Carolina Press, 1980); A Very Different Age: Americans of the Progressive Era (Hill and Wang, 1997); Universities and Their Cities (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017); and Unwelcome Guests: A History of Access to American Higher Education (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2022) (coauthored with Harold Wechsler.) Copyright © 2023 The American Jewish Historical Society