Thursday, November 20, 2025
4:00PM – 5:00PM
Venue
This will be a virtual event. Login information will be included in your confirmation email.
The event is free.
Please join New York Academy of Medicine Library for a presentation by our 2025 Klemperer Fellow in the History of Medicine, Leigh Alon, on research she conducted using the Library’s resources.
Abstract
The arrival of millions of new Jewish immigrants, as well as the rise of the eugenics movement, led to an increase in antisemitic sentiment in the United States in the early 20th century. American Jewish physicians, like other Jews, represented a wide range of ideologies regarding how this frightening trend should be addressed at home and globally, running the gamut from religious orthodoxy, to Jewish immigration to Palestine, to Jewish autonomous communities in the United States, to the complete integration of Jews with their fellow Americans. Unlike most American Jews, however, they were especially well equipped to couple these recommendations with their authority on Jewish biology, directly countering the scientific racism of eugenicists. This insider knowledge, along with the high esteem medical men were held by Jews at the time, made the voices of American Jewish physicians central to the community’s answer to “The Jewish Question” in the United States. While they disagreed on some biological nuances, early 20th century American physicians were broadly united in their resistance to a hereditarian notion of Jewishness: that Jewishness was biologically inscribed and that the Jewish body was inevitably distinct from the rest of the human race. By delving into the published writings, personal correspondences, and diary entries of two Jewish physicians who were in many ways ideologically opposed, I will show how early 20th century American Jewish physicians, regardless of their politics, saw delegitimizing the biological basis for Jewishness as imperative towards securing their community’s future.
About the Speaker
Leigh Alon is an MD/PhD student in the History of Medicine at Johns Hopkins University, in her fifth year of the PhD. She is working on a dissertation tracking how American Jewish physicians defined Jewishness in biological terms from the late 19th into the 21st century.