Is this a Real Story? Learning Critical History and Learning Its Limits

T he study of history plays a central role in the Jewish educational curriculum. But when we invite students to consider the Jewish past, what are we really after? In this chapter, Wineburg brings a self-critical perspective to the commitments that we might expect from him, as a leading researcher of the teaching and learning of history. Calling on some familiar examples of the tension between what the great Jewish historian Yosef Yerushalmi called “Jewish history” and “Jewish memory,” he argues against the standard moves—some because they do not satisfactorily account for Jewish commitments, and others because they do not satisfactorily account for the absence of criteria of personal or national significance within academic history. Eschewing an easy or facile resolution of the problem, Wineburg sharpens it for us: how do we accommodate our interests and values, the very interests and values that bring us to a study of Jewish history, without compromising our intellectual integrity?