Andrew R. Heinze (born 1955) is an American playwright, non-fiction author, and scholar of American history. Growing up in New Jersey in a close-knit Jewish family, he left home at fourteen to attend Blair Academy, graduated from Amherst College in Massachusetts, and moved to California. He did his graduate work at the University of California, Berkeley, training in American history, with an emphasis on the history of race, immigration and the history of American Jews. During his academic career he taught both American and Jewish history at several American universities and was a tenured professor of history at the University of San Francisco, where he was director of the Swig Judaic Studies Program, holding the Mae and Benjamin Swig Chair and creating several new programs including an Ulpan and a Judaic studies lecture series.

He has written extensively about the American Jewish social, intellectual and cultural experience, and is the author of Adapting to Abundance (1990), the first full-length study of the impact of American consumer culture on an immigrant group, as well as Jews and the American Soul (2004), which hypothesizes that Jewish intellectuals provided a framework that came to shape the American psyche. He co-authored two books that deal with race and ethnicity, and he has contributed to a wide variety of scholarly journals as well as to popular newspapers, periodicals and online publications. His books and articles have been widely reviewed, praised in the scholarly community, and cited extensively.

In 2006, feeling creatively stifled by the confines of academic writing, he left his tenured full professorship at USF and moved to New York City to begin playwriting. He has written one-act as well as full-length plays, many of them focusing on the historical and Jewish themes that had absorbed him in his former career; these include a comedy about Moses and his family, a drama about a New York Jewish family adjusting to life after World War II, and a drama about an Israeli Russian immigrant who, in desperation, has turned to prostitution. His plays have been produced Off-Broadway in New York City and around the United States; several have won awards in national playwriting competitions.

Early life and education Andrew R. Heinze was born in 1955, into a close-knit Jewish family in Passaic, New Jersey. His paternal grandmother (also born in Passaic) was one of eight children born to a self-made Polish Jew who had supplied coal to the city of Passaic. Heinze memorialized his grandmother in an article he wrote for The Jewish Daily Forward shortly after she died at the age of 101; he described her as a flamboyant, stylish, and impeccably dressed woman, and he recalled that after his grandfather (her husband of 60 years) had died, she "kept on going, honestly confessing her loneliness but unflaggingly maintaining her enthusiasm for life and for us." He quoted her as frequently giving him the reminder, "We are 100% Americans, dear, always remember that!" Heinze has a close relationship with his parents; in his acknowledgements of his second book, he wrote, "I have been blessed with extraordinarily devoted parents who enabled me, as a child, to feel at home in the world." His mother, he said, is a woman of "gentle disposition, sensitivity to human qualities that others overlook, vivacious imagination, love of art, and whimsical sense of humor," and his father he described as a man of "great loyalty, heartfelt devotion, and frequent praise [that] helped me set my sights high and pick myself up when fallen low."

At age fourteen Heinze won a scholarship to Blair Academy, a private boarding school in Warren County, New Jersey. His experience at Blair was formative. It was there that he first discovered a fascination with both writing and history. In a 2005 interview, he recalled that he had relished the mental stimulation his Blair teachers had given him, that they took his intellectual growth very seriously, and that he still recalled distinct lectures from many of his classes. He honed his writing skills working for Blair's school newspaper; he started as a reporter doing local news and human interest stories and ended up as the paper's editor-in-chief. Graduating from Blair in 1973, he won a Bodman Foundation scholarship which enabled him to attend Amherst College, where he received his BA in 1977, graduating magna cum laude. After graduating from Amherst, he left the East Coast, moved to California, and attended graduate school at the University of California, Berkeley where he received his MA (1980) and his PhD (1987) in American history.

Academic career Heinze's first professorship was at San Jose State University, where he taught United States History and won San Jose State University's Meritorious Performance and Professional Promise Award for 1988–1989. He later taught United States History at the University of California, Davis and the University of California, Berkeley before becoming a tenured full professor at the University of San Francisco, where he taught American history from 1994 to 2006. He won the University of San Francisco's Ignatian Faculty Service Award in 2003.

Heinze specialized in the history of race and immigration in the United States, the evolution of American consumer culture, and the interaction between psychology and religion in American history. He researched and taught extensively on both African-Americans and Jews in the United States, and he maintained strong interests in relations between Christianity and Judaism, religion and homosexuality, racism and antisemitism.See:

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In 1997 Heinze, who was faculty adviser to USF's Jewish Student Union, was appointed to be the Mae and Benjamin Swig Chair in the Swig Judaic Studies Program and to direct the program. The Swig program was established in 1977 and is believed to have been the first such program established in a Catholic university. Heinze's first act as director was to invite Jan Karski, a man he had long admired, to speak at the program's upcoming 20th anniversary dinner. Karski, renowned for his active role in the Polish resistance movement in World War II, delivered the keynote address before an audience that included former secretary of state, George Shultz.

To solidify the Swig Program's academic standing, Heinze created a Jewish Studies Certificate program and expanded the curriculum beyond the theology department by introducing courses in Hebrew, Jewish history, The Holocaust, Jewish American literature, and Yiddish culture. Free public lectures and programs were made available to the general public, and in 1998 he created Ulpan San Francisco, an intense Israeli-style Hebrew immersion program that was scheduled during the summer and served anyone living in the San Francisco Bay area; it was the first such program to be offered there and is still a part of that community.

In 1998 Heinze inaugurated The Swig Annual Lecture Series (1998–2005) which brought distinguished scholars to the university; the lectures were presented free to the general public and were published and distributed to universities, public libraries, and individual scholars in the United States and abroad. Heinze hand-picked the topics as well as the participating lecturers, bringing public attention to a range of often controversial subjects that were of special interest to him. Two of the lectures garnered particularly strong public interest: one dealt with relations between Catholicism and Judaism (the speakers were Cardinal Edward Cassidy, president of the Pontifical Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews, and renowned British rabbi, Rabbi Norman Solomon). The other lecture focused on homosexuality. Heinze had wanted to discover if there was a way "gay and lesbian Jews and Christians [might] find a more comfortable place within their faith-communities." (He had wanted to include Muslim speakers but was unable to find anyone.) The lecture was presented in the form of a symposium and was entitled "New Jewish and Christian Approaches to Homosexuality." Even in the liberal community of San Francisco, it sparked heated debate because established religion did not normally deal explicitly with the issue.See:

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Non-fiction writing

Scholarly writings

Heinze's first book, Adapting to Abundance: Jewish Immigrants, Mass Consumption, and the Search for American Identity, was published in 1990. It was the first full-length study of the impact of American consumer culture on an immigrant group. Hasia Diner, professor of history at New York University, said about Heinze: "Historians of immigration and Jewish history will be indebted to him for opening up whole areas of behavior which they previously shrugged off as irrelevant." The Journal of Consumer Affairs remarked upon the variety of topics that the book explored: the rise of ad campaigns for major American products in the foreign-language press; the rise of the summer vacation among working people; installment-buying as a way for working families to obtain expensive furnishings such as pianos; the role of Jewish women as agents of assimilation through their control over family purchases; and the way that American abundance altered religious rituals, especially holidays such as Chanukah and Passover. Adapting to Abundance established Heinze's reputation as part of a scholarly vanguard that produced the first histories of mass consumption in Europe and America. It is widely referenced in books, articles and syllabi around the world.

In 2004 Heinze published Jews and the American Soul: Human Nature in the Twentieth Century. David Hollinger, professor of history at the University of California, Berkeley said, "Jews and the American Soul is the most forthright, probing, nuanced, and carefully documented book yet addressed to the ways in which modern American culture has been influenced by Jews. A truly distinctive work of American history." Jon Butler, professor of American studies, history, and religious studies at Yale University, said about the book, "Heinze explains how Jewish intellectuals uncovered and explicated the marrow of American identity even as, or precisely because, they sought to secure their place in an America that did not always want them. Heinze uplifts an unexpected, enlightening story with insight, grace, and not infrequent irony--a simply fascinating read." It was named one of the "Best Books of 2004" by Publishers Weekly, was runner up in the 2005 National Jewish Book Award in the American Jewish History category, and was a Finalist for the 2004 Weinberg Judaic Studies Institute Book Award, University of Scranton.

Heinze was one of nine authors who contributed to The Columbia Documentary History of Race and Ethnicity in America (Columbia University Press), and to the abridged Race and Ethnicity in America: A Concise History. The Columbia Documentary History was praised as a "massive collection of primary-source documents dealing with 'the other' in America... [including]... an extensive introductory essay by a leading historian in the field."

His scholarly articles have appeared in a wide variety of journals, including Journal of American History, Judaism. American Quarterly, Religion and American Culture, American Jewish History, Journal of the West, American Jewish Archives, and Reviews in American History.See:

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Opinion pieces and essays

Heinze's essays and opinion pieces have been widely published in newspapers, journals, periodicals and online publications. His opinion pieces are occasionally political, sometimes historical, but most focus on timely issues involving race, immigration or religion. His essays, in contrast, are often cultural critiques of popular books, television shows or movies. Sometimes his essays explore his own family or his personal life; sometimes they are serious, but often they are light-hearted or comic.See:

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Opinion pieces