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Overview
—-David A. Hollinger, Preston Hotchkis Professor of American History, University of California, Berkeley
"A fascinating anthology whose essays crystallize the most salient features of American Jewish life in the second half of the twentieth century."
—-Beth S. Wenger, Katz Family Associate Professor of American Jewish History and Director of the Jewish Studies Program, University of Pennsylvania
"A wonderful collection of important essays, indispensable for understanding the searing conflicts over faith, familial, and political commitments marking American Jewry's journey through the paradoxes of the post-Holocaust era."
—-Michael E. Staub, Professor of English, Baruch College, CUNY, and author of Torn at the Roots: The Crisis of Jewish Liberalism in Postwar America
"This provocative anthology offers fascinating essays on Jewish culture, politics, religion, feminism, and much more. It is a must-read for all those interested in the intersection of Jewish life and identity politics in the modern period."
—-Joyce Antler, Samuel Lane Professor of American Jewish History and Culture, Brandeis University
"This collection of essays invites the reader to engage with some of the best writing and thinking about American Jewish life by some of the finest scholars in the field. Deborah Moore's introduction offers an important framework to understand not only the essays, but the academic and political contexts in which they are rooted."
—-Riv-Ellen Prell, Professor and Chair, American Studies, University of Minnesota, and editor of Women Remaking American Judaism
This collection of essays explores changes among American Jews in their self-understanding during the last half of the 20th century.
Written by scholars who grew up after World War II and the Holocaust who participated in political struggles in the 1960s and 1970s and who articulated many of the formative concepts of modern Jewish studies, this anthology provides a window into an era of social change. These men and women are among the leading scholars of Jewish history, society and culture.
The volume is organized around contested themes in American Jewish life: the Holocaust and World War II, religious pluralism and authenticity, intermarriage and Jewish continuity. Thus, it offers one of the few opportunities for students to learn about these debates from participant scholars.
The book includes a dozen photographs of contemporary Jewish experience in the United States by acclaimed Jewish photographer Bill Aron. Like the scholars of the essays, Aron participated in struggles within the Jewish community and the Jewish counterculture in the 1970s and 1980s. His images reflect shifting perspectives toward spirituality, community, feminism, and memory culture.
The essays reflect several layers of identity politics. On one level, they interrogate the recent past of American Jews, starting with their experiences of World War II. Without the flourishing of identity politics and the white ethnic revival, many questions about American Jewish history might never have been explored. Those who adopted identity politics often saw Jews as an ethnic group in the United States, one connected both to other Americans and to Jews throughout the world and in the past. On another level, these essays express ideas nourished in universities during the turbulent 1970s and 1980s. Those years marked the expansion of Jewish studies as a field in the United States and the establishment of American Jewish studies as an area of specialization. Taken together they reveal the varied sources of American Jewish studies. Finally, one must note that in many cases these essays anticipate major books on the subject. Reading them now reveals how ideas took shape within the political pressures of the moment.
These articles teach us not only about their subject but also about how issues were framed and debated during what might be called our fin de siecle, the end of the twentieth century and beginning of the twenty-first. The authors of these articles include several, most notably Arthur Green, Alvin Rosenfield, and the late Egon Mayer, who collectively could be thought of as the founding fathers of this new generation of Jewish scholars. Green in theology, Rosenfield in literature, and Mayer in sociology influenced younger academics such as Arnold Eisen. A slightly different relationship exists among the historians. Several come to their subject though the study of American history, including Hasia Diner, Stephen Whitfield, and Jonathan Sarna, while others approach through the portal of Jewish history, such as Paula Hyman and Jeffrey Gurock.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780472032884 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Michigan Press |
| Publication date: | 08/15/2008 |
| Pages: | 344 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.90(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
American Jewish Identity Politics
THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN PRESS
Copyright © 2008 University of MichiganAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-472-11648-5
Chapter One
When Jews Were GIs: How World War II Changed a Generation and Remade American JewryDeborah Dash Moore
It is a commonly accepted, if rarely explored, truism that World War II marked a turning point for American Jews. Everyone knows that after the war American Jews moved to the suburbs, entered the professions, achieved a secure middle-class status, acquired political clout, and became accepted as Americans by their fellow citizens. The formidable prewar barriers of anti-Semitic discrimination and prejudice appeared to melt away: each succeeding year after the war fewer and fewer Americans admitted to pollsters that they disliked Jews or feared that Jews had too much power. Here was the American success story so aptly described by Charles Silberman in his book A Certain People or personified in Alan Dershowitz's remarkable autobiography Chutzpah. Of course, social scientists recognized that Jews were well prepared to take advantage of the postwar era of economic abundance and social mobility. Both their culture and social position during the Great Depression provided them with tools to transform themselves into middle-class, liberal suburbanites.
I am not interested in revising this postwar portrait so much as exploring its dynamics. I also want to examine howit happened that after a devastating world war in which Jews sustained many times more deaths than Americans, American Jews emerged with the resilience and optimism to press their specifically Jewish claims upon the world. How did a Reform rabbi come to speak before the United Nations gathered at Lake Success to urge them eloquently to support the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine? From where did the courage come to oppose quotas limiting Jewish enrollment in colleges in the face of the opportunities offered by the GI bill? What led Jewish defense agencies-from the patrician American Jewish Committee to the populist American Jewish Congress, from the socialist Jewish Labor Committee to the bourgeois Anti-Defamation League-to overhaul their programs in the early cold war years and embark upon new approaches to combating discrimination and prejudice, methods that differed radically from those of the prewar period? In an era of political quietism and social conformity, American Jews not only rushed to the suburbs to purchase single-family homes and build synagogue centers, but they also aggressively pursued programs of liberal change. The conjunction of these behaviors deserves the historian's attention.
If we accept the truism that World War II was a watershed for American Jews, it behooves us to look more closely at Jewish experience on the home front and in military service during the war years. Even a cursory appraisal should prove illuminating, though it neglects such important topics as Jewish women's work in war industries or the attitudes of immigrant or even second-generation parents toward their children's decision to enlist.
Most American Jews and their fellow citizens did not see active military service; rather they experienced the war on the home front. Thus the home front should serve as our starting point. The vast majority of American Jews made their homes in the nation's largest cities. In fact, New York and Chicago accounted for over half the American Jewish population. Contemporaries often saw this concentration as problematic. As the historian Salo Baron observed in an address on what war had meant to American Jewish community life, for decades "observers of American Jewish life have deplored the ... agglomeration of nearly two-thirds of American Jewry within a radius of two hundred miles from Times Square." No matter where one put the emphasis, urban America was the Jewish home front.
In the beginning of his history of America's fight at home and abroad during World War II, William O'Neill notes that "America has changed so much that those who grew up in the interwar years remember a nation that, to a significant degree, no longer exists." He then points out that "to modern eyes the most striking feature of American cities in 1941 was the absence of people of color." Rather, "what most impressed foreign visitors was the remarkably varied ethnic backgrounds of white Americans." Irrespective of size, the cities Jews called home shared common characteristics. Ethnicity animated their neighborhoods, influenced occupational distribution, and dominated politics. Here Jews were one ethnic group among many. Jewish religion, culture, politics, and occupations stemmed from immigrant origins. Divisions among Jews-of class, birth, background, ideology, and religion-ultimately paled before the differences separating Jews from other immigrants, mostly Catholics, many from peasant cultures. Their interaction with each other, and with the local, often Protestant, elites, shaped each city's character.
In every city except New York, Jews were simply one struggling minority among others. Jews in New York City enjoyed the luxury of numbers and diversity. Almost two million strong and roughly 30 percent of the population, they were the city's largest single ethnic group. Because of their critical mass, their internal differences did count. New York Jews could separate themselves from their fellow Jews on the grounds of ideology or religion, class or politics, and still find enough other similar Jews to fill an apartment house, an organization, or even a neighborhood. Gerson Cohen, the future chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary, grew up speaking Hebrew in an immigrant household, an unusual pattern of Jewish family culture. When he was a teenager he met a Polish boy who had studied "within the Hebrew secular system of Poland. He and I played ball together, talking away in Hebrew, from which I drew the following inference: New York City was a place where people, however isolated they were from the mainstream, did not need to be alone."
The diversity and numbers of New York Jews allowed them to settle large sections of the city and to endow those areas with a Jewish ambiance. Growing up in East Flatbush, Victor Gotbaum remembered that section of Brooklyn as "really insulated, wrapped in a false sense of security, what with Jews to the left of you and to the right of you and across the street from you." Although they shared the streets with other ethnics, New York Jews often were remarkably provincial. "Much later," the labor leader continues, "I was impressed when my Chicago friends told me that right across the street there might be a Polish family and a Polish gang ready to get you. I never had that problem. Neither did most Jews raised in Brooklyn. When you went to school the minority would be two or three non-Jews per class." The writer Grace Paley "grew up being very sorry for Christians. My idea was that there were very few of them in the world." Kate Simon knew that Italian immigrants lived on the east side of LaFontaine Street but she considered them "just Jews who didn't talk Yiddish. They didn't go to synagogues, either, but a lot of Jews didn't." Comfortable in their own world, New York Jews rarely ventured outside of it. "The Jewish immigrant world branded upon its sons and daughters marks of separateness even while encouraging them to dreams of universalism."
The organized Jewish community in northeastern and Midwestern cities presented a picture of institutional completeness. Schools of all types-religious, congregational, communal, Zionist, Yiddishist, socialist, communist-and of all levels-elementary, secondary, vocational, college, teacher training, graduate-flourished or expected to flourish. Jews established hospitals, orphanages, old-age homes, homes for delinquents and unwed mothers, community centers, settlement houses, and young men's and women's Hebrew associations. Gender provided a fulcrum for organization, and women's organizations represented a wide political and religious spectrum. Even occupational groups reflected ethnic background. There were organizations of Jewish public school teachers and policemen, unions of Jewish garment workers and bakers, of Yiddish writers and social workers. Most numerous were the small societies of Jews from the same home towns in the old country, landsmanshaftn. These groups directly linked Jews with their European cousins. Religious activities increasingly fractured along denominational lines with growing distinctions among Reform, Conservative, and Orthodox. Finally, national Jewish organizations, from fraternal orders to Zionist groups, participated through their branches in local city life.
Although few Jews growing up in the big cities in the 1930s were aware of the extent and diversity of Jewish organizational activity, most participated in public expressions of Jewishness, and many engaged in activities under Jewish auspices. Urban Jews knew about synagogues, even if they did not attend them, as most did not; indeed, they were as likely to walk by them on the streets as they were to pass a church. Similarly, Jews were conscious of the Yiddish dailies that shared newsstands with English-language papers, and they experienced the rhythm of the Jewish calendar because they refrained from school, or work, or shopping like others in their neighborhood. In the metropolitan milieu, even the secular worlds of work, commerce, and recreation reflected Jewish associations. Special sales in local stores coincided with Jewish holidays like Rosh Hashanah or Passover, promoting patterns of consumption linked to Judaism. Strikes in Jewish industries, especially the garment trades, resonated throughout the streets of Jewish neighborhoods. Young Jews played basketball and attended dances at the local Jewish community center; the lucky ones would spend summer vacations at Jewish country resorts, cottages, or camps; and all had some friends who became bar mitzvah at the age of thirteen.
Just as young Jews were aware of a Jewish world, they were similarly conscious of discrimination and prejudice. "Almost every Chicago boy born into the 1930s Depression and the pre-World War II years had a Siamese twin brother: fear. A cold, knowing terror that a pogrom of science-fiction dimensions might soon be launched from Hitler's Germany." Clancy Sigal's awareness came from radio broadcasts. "It took no brains to figure this out," Sigal recalled, "just a pair of ears to listen to Adolf's harangues from Berlin, rebroadcast on one of the city's radio stations, and enough filial piety to tune in on the tales of Old Country persecution by parents who never forgot the Cossacks." For many of Sigal's friends on the West Side, "the question was, Do we run again, or do we resist?" One did not have to encounter anti-Semitism to know it existed, even to plan one's life and tailor one's aspirations so that one would avoid it. "I knew that I was a good student and that I was going to apply for graduate school," Maxwell Greenberg, a Harvard-educated lawyer recalled. "I knew that there were quotas in various graduate schools. I also knew that if I worked very hard and made good grades, and did everything that was expected of me by my parents and by society, that I would qualify for graduate school." Jewish vocational patterns often reflected this reality. Few Jews tried to obtain engineering degrees, for example, because prospects for employment were slim. Some Jews changed their names to increase their chances at jobs in large firms. But most navigated the prejudice and discrimination as facts of life. Compared to the violent anti-Semitism in Europe, the American brand seemed tame.
Then the war came and uprooted Jews from their established routines, comfortable neighborhoods, and mundane affairs. Initially, however, the war did not seem to change their lives. Jews read the papers, raised funds, and sent packages of food to help Polish Jews, the newest victims of Nazi attack. They protested and urged their political representatives to help rescue Jewish refugees desperately trying to leave Europe. They signed affidavits of support to assist near or distant relatives obtain visas. They helped the Yishuv, the Jewish settlement in Palestine, as it struggled against the encroaching reality of war. But at the same time they held banquets and dinners to raise monies for their local synagogues and hospitals. They continued their intramural political struggles. They celebrated the ordinary rounds of holidays and family occasions, births and weddings, bar mitzvahs and confirmations.
When the United States declared war in December 1941 after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Jews threw themselves into the war effort together with their fellow citizens. Some young Jews did not wait to be drafted but enlisted in the armed forces. But only a minority chose to leave college as Nathan Perlmutter left Georgetown University to enlist. The majority followed the more common track of continuing to work or remaining in school until called by their draft boards. A few intrepid individuals were forced to battle American anti-Semitism in order to enlist, the experience of one recent Yale graduate. Rebuffed by biased Manhattan recruiters who refused to enroll him in the navy's officer corps, Martin Dash went down to Baltimore to use his relatives' address to sign up. Seymour Graubard faced similar problems with Air Force Intelligence. A Columbia Law School graduate, Graubard had a deferral from the draft but "was insistent on getting into action. All my non-Jewish friends were accepted, but my application was lost three times running. I was finally informed by a sympathetic Air Corps officer that the Air Corps didn't want Jews." Graubard then pulled strings to get a commission in the army. A handful of Jewish pacifists faced a different dilemma. Convinced that World War II "would be an imperialist one," committed Jewish socialists like Paul Jacobs had to decide: "should we or should we not support the Allies against the Nazis and the Italian Fascists?"
Many more American Jews shared Nathan Perlmutter's sentiments; when asked why he wanted to join the marines, Perlmutter told a surprised recruiter, "I want to fight Fascism." Most Americans saw Japan, not the Nazis, as the crucial enemy. "The primary objective of our war is to defeat the Japs-not Hitler, and certainly not Nazism," reported Ari Lashner with dismay. He found among his fellow recruits in the Maritime Service Radio Cadet School "no sympathy for what I presented as the fundamental issue of the war: the defeat of Fascism." While Lashner praised a healthy skepticism of American soldiers toward naive and idealistic slogans of war, he recognized that their sentiments derived from prejudice. "With the Japs it's different. They hate the Japs."
Jews entering the armed forces faced a choice in how to identify themselves; they were asked to indicate their religion on their dog tags. As a confirmed socialist and secularist, Jacobs initially told the army air corps that he had no religion "and then found out that this made me fair game for all the chaplains. After being bombarded for a week by suggestions that I attend Catholic, Protestant, Hebrew, and I even think Christian Science services, I gave up." He had his "dogtags stamped with the initial 'H' for Hebrew, thus at least removing myself from the anxious ministry of the other groups."
Approximately 550,000 Jewish men and women served in the United States armed forces during World War II, the equivalent of thirty-seven divisions. The participation of 11 percent of the Jewish population in the service or 50 percent of the men age eighteen to forty-four ensured that few Jewish families would not have a close relative in uniform. Widespread involvement in the military turned Jews into fighters. They became seasoned soldiers, competent in handling arms and comfortable in taking risks. It was the only generation of American Jews to know military life firsthand. The experience changed their lives, their perceptions of the world, and their self-understanding as Jews. "The experience of the war years," Lucy Dawidowicz observed, "had a transfiguring effect on American Jews and on their ideas of themselves as Jews."
Military service lifted Jews out of their cities and sent them to bases located often in rural areas of the country, especially the South and West. The first encounter produced a kind of culture shock. "I was in a strange land among people who hardly spoke my own language," wrote one GI from Brooklyn. "On this foreign soil one could not find lox or bagels or pumpernickel. Here Southern fried and grits were the popular delicacies." To many Jews' amazement, "this foreign soil" was indeed America. The United States turned out to be a Protestant nation, not a Catholic one. Jews in the armed services discovered a world beyond their provincial neighborhoods. "Most of us were kind of insulated," Abe Shalo remembered; "we had very little knowledge of the rest of the country. Whatever we learned about the United States was for the most part from geography books.... we knew very little about the people." And the geography books "didn't tell you how different the average American was." Jews acknowledged their surprise upon realizing how Protestant the United States was. They had mistaken the heavily Catholic cities of their childhoods for the entire country.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from American Jewish Identity Politics Copyright © 2008 by University of Michigan . Excerpted by permission.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Introduction Deborah Dash Moore....................1When Jews Were GIs: How World War II Changed a Generation and Remade American Jewry Deborah Dash Moore....................23
The Americanization of the Holocaust Alvin H. Rosenfeld....................45
Before "The Holocaust": American Jews Confront Catastrophe, 1945-62 Hasia R. Diner....................83
Rethinking American Judaism Arnold M. Eisen....................19
American Judaism in Historical Perspective Jonathan D. Sarna....................39
From Fluidity to Rigidity: The Religious Worlds of Conservative and Orthodox Jews in Twentieth-Century America Jeffrey S. Gurock....................59
New Directions in Jewish Theology in America Arthur Green....................207
Jewish Feminism Faces the American Women's Movement: Convergence and Divergence Paula E. Hyman....................221
The Paradoxes of American Jewish Culture Stephen J. Whitfield....................243
A Demographic Revolution in American Jewry Egon Mayer....................267
Relatively Speaking: Constructing Identity in Jewish and Mixed-Married Families Sylvia Barack Fishman....................301
Contributors....................321
Index....................323