In May of 1924, President Coolidge signed the Johnson-Reed Act (also referred to as the Immigration Act of 1924), limiting the number of immigrants allowed into the United States through establishing a national origins quota. One of the most restrictive immigration laws in U.S. history, the Johnson-Reed Act had a lasting impact on both individual lives and the U.S. immigration system.
Join the Museum for a panel discussion about the history and impact of the Johnson-Reed Act with Hasia Diner, Professor Emerita in the Departments of History and the Skirball Department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies at New York University, and Daniel Okrent, author of The Guarded Gate: Bigotry, Eugenics, and the Law That Kept Two Generations of Jews, Italians, and Other European Immigrants Out of America. They will be in conversation with Daniel Soyer, a professor of history at Fordham University.
Hasia Diner is Professor Emerita, New York University where she served as the Paul and Sylvia Steinberg Professor of American Jewish History and Director of the Goldstein-Goren Center for American Jewish History. A specialist in American Jewish history, American immigration history and the history of American Jewish women she has held a Guggenheim Fellowship and served as the President of the Immigration Ethnic History Society. She has written extensively in these fields and several of her books have been prize winners.
Daniel Okrent is the author of six books, most recently The Guarded Gate: Bigotry, Eugenics, and the Law That Kept Two Generations of Jews, Italians, and Other European Immigrants Out of America, which won the National Jewish Book Award for History. It is his third book since he concluded his term as the first Public Editor of the New York Times in 2005. His earlier works include Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition, winner of the American Historical Association’s prize for the year’s best book of American History; and Great Fortune: The Epic of Rockefeller Center, a finalist for the 2004 Pulitzer Prize in history. Before his tenure at the Times, Okrent spent 13 years at Time Inc., where he was successively editor of Life magazine; corporate editor of new media; and corporate editor-at-large. Earlier in his career, he worked extensively in book and magazine publishing in various editorial and executive positions. He has held fellowships at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism and the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard (where he was, in addition, the Edward R. Murrow Visiting Lecturer in 2009-2010.)
Daniel Soyer is a professor of history at Fordham University. Most recently, he is the author of Left in the Center: The Liberal Party of New York and the Rise and Fall of American Social Democracy (Cornell, 2021), and editor of The Jewish Metropolis: New York from the 17th to the 21st Century (Academic Studies Press, 2021).