Diner, Hasia R.
DINER, HASIA R.
DINER, HASIA R. (1946– ), scholar of American Jewish history. Born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, the daughter of Morris and Ita Schwartzman, she received her Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Wisconsin at Madison in 1968 and her doctorate from the University of Illinois in 1975. In 1975 Diner became an instructor in history at the University of Maryland, College Park; she served as a research associate at Radcliffe College from 1978 to 1980. From 1980 to 1984 she taught at the American University in Washington, d.c., and then from 1984 to 1996 was professor of history in the Department of American Studies at the University of Maryland.
In 1996 Diner became the Paul S. and Sylvia Steinberg Professor of American Jewish History at New York University, and she was appointed as director of the Goldstein-Goren Center for American Jewish History at New York University in 2003. She was a visiting lecturer at numerous academic conferences and universities, including Williams College, Michigan State University, the Jewish Theological Seminary, and the University of Munich.
Diner was a specialist in immigration history and the history of relations between American Jews and other ethnic and racial groups. Her many books and articles explore various aspects of immigration, identity, women's experience, and relationships between, for example, Jewish Americans and African Americans. Her works include In the Almost Promised Land: American Jews and Blacks, 1915–1935 (1977); A Time for Gathering: The Second Migration, 1820–1880 (1992); Lower East Side Memories: The Jewish Place in America (2000); Hungering for America: Italian, Irish, and Jewish Foodways in the Age of Migration (2002); Her Works Praise Her: A History of Jewish Women in America from Colonial Times to the Present (with Beryl Lieff Benderly, 2002); and The Jews of the United States, 1645 to 2000 (2004). Lower East Side Memories received warm critical reception for its exploration of the transformation of the Lower East Side from a neighborhood of Jewish immigrants to a locale of nostalgia and myth within American Jewish memory.
One of 20 living women historians included in American Women Historians, 1700s–1900s (1998), Diner is a fellow of the American Academy for Jewish Research and a member of the Society of American Historians; she serves on the Executive Committee of the Academic Council of the American Jewish Historical Society and on the Executive Board of the Association for Jewish Studies. She was coeditor of the Newsletter of the Association for Jewish Studies from 1999. As an expert in Jewish immigration history, Diner served as a consultant to numerous films and public history projects, including They Came for Good: A History of the Jewish People in America, Jews and Blacks in the Civil Rights Movement and "Sitting Shiva with the Rogarshevkys" at the Lower East Side Tenement Museum.
[Dorothy Bauhoff (2nd ed.)]