Andrew R. Heinze

Who is Andrew R. Heinze?

Andrew R. Heinze is an author, journalist, playwright, and scholar of American History.

Heinze grew up in Matawan, New Jersey. At age fourteen, he won a scholarship to Blair Academy in Warren County, where he graduated in 1973. He subsequently won a Bodman Foundation scholarship that enabled him to attend Amherst College, where he received his B.A. in 1977, graduating Magna Cum Laude. He attended graduate school at the University of California, Berkeley, receiving his M.A. in 1980 and his PhD in 1987 in American History. He has taught U.S. History at a number of schools, including San Jose State University, the University of California, Davis, and the University of California, Berkeley. From 1993–2006 he was a tenured Professor of American History at the University of San Francisco, where he was also Director of the Swig Judaic Studies Program.

Heinze's book Adapting to Abundance was the first full-length study of the impact of American consumer culture on an immigrant group; it established his reputation as part of a scholarly vanguard that produced the first histories of mass consumption in Europe and America. To date, it has been referenced in hundreds of books, articles, and syllabi around the world. Heinze's book, Jews and the American Soul: Human Nature in the Twentieth Century was named one of the "Best Books of 2004" by Publishers Weekly. Additionally, it was runner up in the 2005 National Jewish Book Award in the American Jewish History category, and it was a Jewish Book Council Finalist for the 2004 Weinberg Judaic Studies Institute Book Award, University of Scranton. With Jews and the American Soul, "Heinze has made an important contribution to broadening our perspective on what counts as Jewish thought, and has helped to clarify the significant role that Jews and Jewish ideas have played in American intellectual history."