Defining "The Jew" in the Age of Eugenics: American Jewish Physicians and Biological Jewishness in the Early 20th Century
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Max Weinreich Fellowship Lecture in American Jewish Studies
The Rose and Isidore Drench Memorial Fellowship and the Dora and Mayer Tendler Endowed Fellowship in Jewish Studies Admission: Free |
The arrival of millions of new Jewish immigrants, as well as the rise of the eugenics movement, fomented antisemitic sentiment in the United States in the early 20th century. American Jewish physicians, like other Jews, represented diverse viewpoints regarding how this frightening trend should be addressed. 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 ideologically diverse Jewish physicians, Leigh Alon will show how in the 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 early 20th into the 21st century. She is a 2026 Charlotte W. Newcombe Doctoral Dissertation Fellow. She has received fellowships from the American Philosophical Society, New York Academy of Medicine, the American Jewish Archives, the American Academy for Jewish Research, the American Jewish Historical Society, the Feinstein Center for American Jewish History, the Osler Library of the History of Medicine, and the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. Before attending graduate school, she worked in HIV prevention at the Chicago Center for HIV Elimination.