Jewish Studies and the Liberal Consensus

Marjorie N. Feld Jewish Studies and the Liberal Consensus (on Michael E. Staub, Torn at the Roots: The Crisis of Jewish Liberalism in Postwar America [New York: Columbia UP, 2002]) In a recent New York Times article, "Divide Among Jews Leads to Silence on Iraq War," one prominent Jewish leader expressed her frustration that a meeting of seven hundred of her peers failed to compose a statement on what was then an imminent military conflict in Iraq: "The only consensus we could come to," she said, "was that there is no consensus" (A7). This lack of consensus was said to mirror the divisions among American Jews generally , as they measured their support of a president who had been a "reliable ally" of the Israeli government against their opposition to military conflict. The artide was based, of course, on the everyday assumptions of contemporary identity politics, on the idea that American Jews' political behavior reflects aspects of their identities as Jews. The vote on the invasion of Iraq and debates over current Israeli polides arejust two fault lines in a larger intre-Jewish contest over identity and politics . For American Jews, and for scholars of American Jews, understanding this contest means taking a closer look at the American Jewish liberal "consensus ." Even as it appears likely that Karl Rove, Bush's outspoken adviser, will meet his goal of capturing the majority of American Jewish votes in the next election, the longstanding equation of American Jewishness with liberalism remains commonplace. Only recently have scholars begun investigating the origins and boundaries of American Jewish liberalism. The fields ofJewish history and Jewish studies have matured: largely celebrational studies—in which the American Jewish story was told as a successful balancing of Americanization and the perpetuation ofJewish differenœ—have given way to inquiries into the nature of Americanization and difference, the terms and price of each. In his new book, Torn at the Roots, Michael Staub examines the years after World War II, when the contested terms of American Jewish identity were negotiated in the shadow of the Holocaust. Unlike scholars such as Peter Novick, who contend that the Holocaust did not play a central role in American Jewish identity until the 1960s, Staub finds that Holocaust consdousness "became the lingua franca of intracommunal contesf' in the immediate postwar era (17). Civil Rights and Feminist activists, anti-racist Zionists, and others explidtly linked their universalist visions of sodai justice with Jewishness and with the lessons of the Holocaust. Their difference as Jews—their particularity, as many scholars would now term it—was briefly linked to their liberal or leftist universalist visions. For decades American Jewish historians have located the origins of American Jewish liberalism in a wide variety of sources: Judaism's teach- 324 the minnesota review ings, the Jewish Labor Movement, Jewish Socialism in Europe and (later) in the United States. But Staub is not concerned with demonstrating an essential Jewish liberal tradition; he is more interested in exploring who daimed that identity and why. Recently, scholars of twentieth-century Jewish liberalism have been more alert to its self-serving purposes, asserting that it was a strategy toward Jews' own "quest for indusion." But they have left the central place of American Jewish liberalism largely unchallenged: Marc Dollinger and Michael Alexander argue that it continued to be an integral component of American Jewish identity that opened up American politics and culture for other minority groups. Other scholars have been more critical. Jeff Melnick's A Right to Sing the Blues finds thatJews in the music industry dted notions ofJewish liberalism and openness to justify their use of African-American musical forms and to advance into the white majority. Stuart Svonkin's analysis of the politics of prominent Jewish organizations in the 1940s and 1950s finds that strategies for group survival prompted these groups to abandon progressive oitiques and universalist campaigns. Instead of liberalizing American politics, Jewish organizations gradually narrowed the possibilities for what it meant to be Jewish and American. This is the oitical transition that Staub opens up to a broader historical inquiry. American Jewish leaders increasingly came to fear that liberalism would make Jewishness "too visible" in radical cirdes and, more importantly...