The Columbia History of Jews and Judaism in America (review)

Lee Raphael has ambitious goals for this collection. He aims to capture the tension between religious and secular identities in the Jewish community (5), as well as the Marc centrality of the relationships among Jewishness, Judaism, and Americanness for Jewish individuals (6). Is the history of American Jews to be told as a narrative of assimilation and declining religiosity? Of diminishing anti-Semitism and rapid social mobility? Of political consensus or increasing internal division? Raphael's contributors engage each of these themes. Because the book is organized first by chronology (the book's first six essays) and then by topic (the final twelve essays), it attempts to avoid one of the most troubling tendencies of U.S. Jewish history: to provide a singular narrative arc to the American Jewish experience that follows religious Jewish life and Zionism while marginalizing all other expressions of Jewishness.

The chronological essays offer useful synthetic introductions. Brief biographies of leaders and laypeople alike appear in these pages, along with discussions of suburbanization, the Nazi Holocaust, synagogue and Jewish organizational growth and decline. Even for well-read scholars of this history, there are surprise facts: Eli Faber, for example, tells us that despite much anti-Semitic exclusion, Jews could be city constables in eighteenth-century New York City (36).

There are also missed opportunities where the collection does not break out of the paradigm of a singular narrative arc, presenting a narrow reading of Jewishness. Riv-Ellen Prell, for example, proposes that the attacks on Israel in 1967 brought about a "new American Jewish consensus... that placed Israel and Jerusalem at the center of American Jewish life" (137). Though there is ample material here on Jewish contributions to American Communism and other radical movements, Prell fails to mention Jewish anti-Zionism as existing outside of this so-called "consensus." This is a glaring omission, especially since the work of Michael Staub (some of which thankfully appears here as a topical essay) has carefully documented crucial "dissenting perspectives" in the cold war era (325). A few pages later Stephen Whitfield discusses the topic of postwar anti-Semitism among African Americans, calling it the "only—and most glaring—exception to the trend (of declining American anti-Semitism)" (144). Again, the glaring absence is of a richer contextual discussion: of Jewish racism and contributions to white supremacist oppression, and too the impact of Third World Solidarity with Palestinians among African Americans. These omissions carry with them their own conservative agenda: in reading back into history a consensus on complicated issues, one stemming from a religious and Zionist brand of Jewishness, those forwarding this agenda see only one set of Jewish values and identity worth perpetuating in contemporary American Jewish life. The invisibility of dissenting perspectives continues to shape a false sense of consensus among American Jews.

In documenting some of the internal debates of American Jews, the topical essays—especially Staub's—offer other narratives and perspectives. Melissa Klapper writes of the vociferous postwar debates over the Orthodox Jewish day school movement and offers an interesting window onto internal divisions among American Jews: non-Orthodox Jews pledged loyalty to public education while "indictments of ghettoization and assimilation" were offered by both sides (209). William Toll and Mark Bauman provide two welcome essays that depart the East Coast and look at varieties of Jewish life along the Pacific and in the American South.

American Studies scholars may lament the general lack of material on American Jews' interactions with other cultural groups, and also on cultural representations of Jewishness. Jeffrey Shandler's promising title "What is American Jewish Culture?" yields a brief, disappointing study of how this culture has been studied. Linda Raphael's concluding essay is the only one dedicated to analyzing representations of Jewishness, yet she offers only a recitation of well-trod readings of the conservative canon of American Jewish literature: Cahan, Yezierska, Roth and Ozick. Ultimately, despite its ambitious title and introduction, Raphael's collection rarely strays from the old...