Henry Goldschmidt

Welcome

Henry Goldschmidt is Assistant Professor of Religion and Society at Wesleyan University, in Middletown, CT. He has also taught cultural anthropology, Jewish studies, and diaspora studies at Rutgers University, Dickinson College, and elsewhere. He received his B.A. in anthropology from Wesleyan University in 1991, and his Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of California at Santa Cruz in 2000.

Henry’s ethnographic research has explored Black-Jewish differences in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Crown Heights — a neighborhood known for its history of conflict between Lubavitch Hasidic Jews and their predominantly Afro-Caribbean neighbors, most notably during the deadly violence of August 1991. His research shows that collective identities like Blackness and Jewishness are particularly complex in today’s Crown Heights because the neighborhood’s Black and Jewish communities understand their differences in dramatically different ways — as a racial divide between Blacks and Whites, or a religious divide between Gentiles and Jews. Henry takes this collision of conceptual categories as an invitation to re-imagine both “race” and “religion.” By exploring the limits of categorical thought, he works to create space in American society for radical forms of cultural difference.

His book, Race and Religion among the Chosen Peoples of Crown Heights, was published in 2006 by Rutgers University Press, and hailed as “beautifully written” and “a major contribution” to the study of collective identity formation in the United States. His essays on Crown Heights have been published in a number of journals and edited collections. He is also the co-editor (with Elizabeth McAlister) of the interdisciplinary collection Race, Nation, and Religion in the Americas, published by Oxford University Press in 2004.

Henry’s next major fieldwork project will explore the teaching of religious and cultural diversity in New York City’s public schools. He plans to examine how students from a broad range of backgrounds learn the meanings of foundational concepts like “religion” and “culture,” as well as how — and indeed whether — they apply these concepts to their own social lives. He is particularly interested in the ways immigrant students engage with these distinctively American categories of identity — reframing their traditional practices and beliefs through the conceptual terms made available to them at school, while at the same time reworking these terms to better express their own understandings of self and community. Contrary to the claims of both advocates and opponents of multicultural education, he suspects that today’s public schools remain powerful engines of immigrant assimilation. They may no longer instill a common American culture, but they continue to instill distinctively American ways of understanding human diversity.

Books Published

2006 Race and Religion among the Chosen Peoples of Crown Heights. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Click for more information.

2004 Race, Nation, and Religion in the Americas (co-edited w/Elizabeth McAlister). New York: Oxford University Press. Click for more information.

Essays Published

2009 “Religion, Reductionism, and the Godly Soul: Lubavitch Hasidic Jewishness and the Limits of Classificatory Thought.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion, vol. 77, no. 3, pp. 547-572. Click to download a copy.

2006 “The Voices of Jacob on the Streets of Brooklyn: Black and Jewish Israelites in and around Crown Heights.” American Ethnologist, vol. 33, no. 3, pp. 378-396. Click to download a copy.

2004 “Introduction: Race, Nation and Religion.” Singly-authored introduction to Race, Nation, and Religion in the Americas, pp. 3-31. New York: Oxford University Press. Click to download a copy.

2004 “Food Fights: Contesting ‘Cultural Diversity’ in Crown Heights.” In Local Actions: Cultural Activism, Power, and Public Life in America (eds. Melissa Checker and Maggie Fishman). Pp. 159-183. New York: Columbia University Press. Click to download a copy.

2004 “More Things in Heaven and Earth: Idealism and Materialism in Russell McCutcheon’s The Discipline of Religion.” Review essay in the Bulletin of the Council of Societies for the Study of Religion, vol. 33, no. 3-4, pp. 81-82. Click to download a copy.

2003 “Jews and Others in Brooklyn and its Diaspora: Constructing an Unlikely Homeland in a Diasporic World.” In Diaspora: Movement, Memory, Politics and Identity, Clarke Center Contemporary Issues Series, no. 14, pp. 43-52. Click to download a copy.

2002 “Suits and Souls: Trying to Tell a Jew When You See One in Crown Heights.” In Jews of Brooklyn (eds. Ilana Abramovitch and Sean Galvin). Pp. 214-223. Hanover: Brandeis University Press and the University Press of New England. Click to download a copy.

2002 “‘Crown Heights is the Center of the World’: Reterritorializing a Jewish Diaspora.” Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies, vol. 9, no. 1, pp. 83-106. Click to download a copy.