The Center for Jewish Studies presents: Mark A. Raider

This talk surveys the long arc of the Zionist and Israeli hero as perceived in the American setting. Taking a page from scholars of semiotics and iconography, it pays close attention to a variety of texts, visual images, and cultural artifacts drawn from Zionist propaganda and recruitment literature, photographs and films, poetry, novels, and memoirs, art, music, and dance, textbooks, children’s literature and memoirs, etc. By examining how the trope of the Zionist and Israeli hero changed over time, I seek to enhance our understanding of the strong bond between the Jews of America and Israel as well as help to explain the ideational linkages that inform the contemporary U.S.-Israel relationship.
Mark A. Raider is Professor of Modern Jewish History in the Department of History at the University of Cincinnati and a Research Associate in the University’s Center for Studies in Jewish Education and Culture. He is also Visiting Professor of American Jewish History at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion.

Dr. Raider’s scholarly articles have appeared in The American Jewish Archives Journal, American Jewish History, Jewish Social Studies, The Journal of Israeli History, and elsewhere. In 2010 he was awarded the American Jewish Historical Society’s Leo Wasserman prize for the best article published in American Jewish History (“The Aristocrat and the Democrat: Louis Marshall, Stephen S. Wise and the Challenge of American Jewish Leadership”).

His books include The Emergence of American Zionism (1998); Abba Hillel Silver and American Zionism, with Jonathan D. Sarna and Ronald W. Zweig (1997); The Plough Woman: Records of the Pioneer Women of Palestine–A Critical Edition, with Miriam B. Raider-Roth (2002); American Jewish Women and the Zionist Enterprise, with Shulamit Reinharz (2005); and Nahum Goldmann: Statesman Without a State (2009). He also wrote a book-length history of the American Jewish experience for the new edition of the Encyclopaedia Judaica (vol. 20, 2006).

He most recently completed an edited and annotated anthology titled Free Associations: Selected Writings of Hayim Greenberg–A Critical Edition, which is under advance contract with the University of Alabama Press. An excerpt from this volume appeared in the summer 2013 issue of The Jewish Review of Books. He is now working on a full-scale biography of Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, one of the twentieth century’s most important and controversial American Jewish and Zionist leaders.

Dr. Raider teaches courses on U.S. history, the American Jewish experience, modern Jewish history, and Zionism and Israel. He is married to Dr. Miriam B. Raider-Roth and they have three children–Jonah, Emma, and Talia.