Who Is American? Citizenship, Law, and Jewish History in the United States
additional resources
Several resources from the Posen Library and beyond are useful for teachers and students who wish to deepen their knowledge about Jewish citizenship in the United States. Additionally, a growing body of secondary literature offers new frameworks for understanding citizenship from broad historical and theoretical perspectives. Finally, recent critics of citizenship challenge the premise of connecting rights to nations, reprising discussions about international rights and other models for detaching citizenship from the conflicts, inequalities, and injustices of nationalism.
The sources listed below from the Posen Library offer tools to explore Jewish citizenship outside of the United States, while a series of external sources indicate pathways for examining American citizenship broadly. The short bibliography identifies recent examples from modern Jewish history, American Jewish history, and critical theories that will help orient teachers and students to the breadth of secondary scholarship.
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Lila Corwin Berman, Who Is American? Belonging and the Question of Jewish Citizenship (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2026).
A twentieth-century history of how Jews fit—and did not fit—into U.S. citizenship law that offers discussion of the central legal categories of race, nationality, and religion and how they changed over time.
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Linda Bosniak, The Citizen and the Alien: Dilemmas of Contemporary Membership (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2006).
Written from the perspective of critical legal studies, Bosniak argues that the borders of citizenship law—how the “alien” is treated—also influence internal domestic policy and attitudes, causing citizens and documented people often to face treatment as aliens.
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Margot Canaday, The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2009).
In this groundbreaking history, Canaday explains how U.S. citizenship policies crafted and recrafted modern categories of sexuality.
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Frederick Cooper, Citizenship, Inequality, and Difference: Historical Perspectives (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2018).
A broad and clear overview of the topic of citizenship across time and space that employs both historical and theoretical lenses.
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Amanda Frost, You Are Not American: Citizenship Stripping from Dred Scott to the Dreamers (New York: Beacon Press, 2021).
A legal history of the instability of citizenship. Frost examines cases since the mid-nineteenth century of citizens who lost their citizenship, proving that citizenship is neither a point of arrival nor a final answer to the question of rights.
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Kate Masur, Until Justice Be Done: America’s First Civil Rights Movement, from the Revolution to Reconstruction (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2021).
Illuminates the slow and uneven fight for citizenship among Black Americans and how it influenced the terms of national citizenship that arose after the Civil War.
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Mae Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2014 edition).
A close examination of immigration policy that reveals its contradictions, inconsistencies, and cruelties, while also showing how so-called “impossible subjects,” people ineligible for citizenship, became core to the definition of American national identity.
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Ayelet Shachar, The Birthright Lottery: Citizenship and Global Inequality (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2009).
A legal scholar challenges the link between citizenship and the nation, arguing that accidents of birth have become the strongest correlate to resource access and, thus, a vector of extreme inequality in the world.
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David Sorkin, Jewish Emancipation: A History across Five Centuries (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2019).
A sweeping survey of Jewish citizenship, Sorkin’s book notes key differences among regions and suggests that emancipation is the central struggle of the modern Jewish experience.
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Sarah Abrevaya Stein, Extraterritorial Dreams: European Citizenship, Sephardi Jews, and the Ottoman Twentieth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016).
Stein highlights the extraordinary varieties of citizenship that early twentieth-century Jews experienced, and how their citizenship was fashioned to serve competing state and imperial interests.
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National Museum of African American History and Culture exhibit tracing Black Americans’ citizenship struggles around the Fourteenth Amendment, raising themes of exclusion, rights, and historical contingencies that also shaped Jewish Citizenship.
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An online exhibit from the National Museum of American History explores major moments and questions in U.S. citizenship. Students can consider how the museum narrates citizenship’s story and why its curators made particular interpretive choices.
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A complement to the New York Historical Society’s exhibition on diverse paths to U.S. citizenship (September–December 2017). Students can examine the primary sources and consider how the exhibit’s themes might differ if created today.
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The National Archives holds extensive federal records on immigration, naturalization, passports, and other citizenship matters. Explore how bureaucracies, paperwork, and legal categories shaped citizenship experiences for Jews and other groups.