“Israel is an ethno-democracy. A democracy for Jews only.” Those were the words that stood out to Professor Emerita Hasia Dinar on her journey of questioning and rupture with her childhood faith she had placed in the state of Israel.
In her confessional video, Professor Emerita Hasia Dinar chronicles how a college professor punctured her worldview by explaining how, between 1948 and 1966, Arabs citizens in Israel lived under martial law – a fact that Professor Dinar was never taught.
About Hasia Diner
Hasia Diner is the Paul S. and Sylvia Steinberg Professor of American Jewish History; Professor of Hebrew and Judaic Studies, History; Director of the Goldstein-Goren Center for American Jewish History at New York University. Diner retired from her New York University professorship in 2023 CUNY Graduate Center.
She won the 2009 National Jewish Book Award for “We Remember With Reverence and Love: American Jews and the Myth of Silence after the Holocaust, 1945-1962” CUNY Graduate Center. The author of 21 books, Diner has written extensively about American Jewish history, including work on Jewish peddlers, American Jewish foodways, and how American Jews memorialized the Holocaust The Forward.
Among her publications are “Lower East Side Memories: The Jewish Place in America” (2000), “Hungering for America: Italian, Irish, and Jewish Foodways in the Age of Migration” (2001), and “The Jews of the United States: 1654-2000” (2004) Smith College. Her recent book “Opening Doors: The Unlikely Alliance Between the Irish and the Jews in America” describes how Jewish and Irish immigrants worked together to secure legitimacy in America at the turn of the 20th century Amazon.
A Guggenheim Fellow, Diner is an elected member of both the Society of American Historians and the American Academy of Jewish Research.
