Abstract
Over a decade ago I was invited to participate in an American studies programme at Thammasat University in Thailand, and was expected to lecture on the history of American studies as it evolved in the United States. So I recounted the halfcentury of the formal discipline from its origins at Harvard at the end of the depression of the 1950s, through the height of the myth-and-symbol school in the 1930s, and down to the emergence of multiculturalism beginning in the 1980s. At no point in the course of the presentation in Bangkok did I refer to jews; my remarks were