Why write a book specifically about Jewish psychologists in America?
To show that Jews in the 20th century were central actors in the development of American ideas of the psyche, the soul, human nature, and so forth. People have been aware that there are a lot of famous Jews that’s not surprising but even among historians, there’s no sense that anything distinctively Jewish was conveyed into mainstream American thought in such an important area as popular psychology. Joseph Jastrow, Alfred Adler, Sigmund Freud, Joyce Brothers, Erich Fromm You talk about many Jewish figures in psychological thought since the 1890s. What ties them all together? The Jews involved in popularizing psychological ideas tended to say things that they had in common but were not shared with non-Jewish counterparts. For example, in the early 1900s they reacted much more to mainstream ideas about intelligence and the degree to which different ethnic groups might have different capacities and personality traits. So many were immigrants and were fighting the nativists who were using
