Religion and State in the American Jewish Experience (review)

General Book Reviews 171 Religion and State in the American Jewish Experience, by Jonathan D. Sarna and David G. Dalin. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1997. 331 pp. $40.00. Few scholars in recent years have been more prolific or instrumental in tying the story ofAmerican Jews to the larger history ofreligion in America than Jonathan Sarna. Now alongside David Dalin, Sarna has brought together a rich collection of primary source excerpts that document Jewish perspectives on matters of religion and state from the colonial period through the present. The resulting volume makes clear that perhaps contrary to popular impressions, Jews have rarely spoken with one voice on churchstate issues. Sarna's substantial introduction, "American Jews and Church-State Relations: The Search for 'Equal Footing'" (a revised version of a pamphlet done for the American Jewish Committee), establishes the book's interpretive thread. He argues that gaining and maintaining full religious equality has been the priority ofAmerican Jewish leaders since the time ofthe American Revolution. He traces Jewish efforts to achieve the goal .in the nineteenth century amid overwhelming Protestant dominance and finds that although Jews rejected claims that the United States was a "Christian nation," many embraced "the view that government should in a nondiscriminatory way support religion" (p. 6). Only later towards the end of the century did most Jews shift to the Jefferson-Madison position of a strict separation between all religions and the state. That stance generally hardened in the twentieth century as the Jewish population swelled and Jewish legal efforts to protect religious liberty and to ensure a secular state intensified. Yet issues like religion in the public schools and aid to parochial schools were not so clear-cut as to preclude disagreement within the Jewish community. In fact, Sarna believes that today the broad Jewish support for separationism that characterized the mid-twentieth century has begun to wane as some Jews wonder whether the American Jewish community is threatened less by the possibility of state-sponsored Christianity and more by the reality of a religious indifference born in part out of secular state policies. Sarna's interpretation is embodied in the selection and arrangement of the documents that comprise the bulk of this work. Organized chronologically, the book's eleven chapters each contain multiple clusters of excerpts illustrating Jewish opinion on some church-state matter. Brief editorial introductions open every chapter as well as each cluster of documents, thereby allowing Sarna and Dalin to frame the issues as they see them. Those introductions also make it possible to read selectively in the primary sources without getting lost or missing the editors' interpretive line. Among the issues most thoroughly covered are Sunday "blue" laws and religion in the public schools. Calling the former "the issue that most occupied nineteenthcentury Jews" (p. II), Sarna and Dalin provide materials that show varying Jewish 172 SHOFAR Spring 1999 Vol. 17, No.3 responses to laws that created a real-life dilemma for many Jewish workers: whether to violate the tenets of their faith or risk economic deprivation by laboring five days instead of six. Some Jews sought to overturn blue laws, claiming that they violated the First Amendment's establishment clause, others acquiesced, and still others sought a legal exemption for anyone who observed the Sabbath on Saturday. In the twentieth century, various questions relating to public and parochial education have dominated Jewish discussions for the church-state relationship. Bible reading and prayer in public schools, release time from public school for religious instruction, state funding of parochial schools, and celebrations of Christmas in public schools have all been contentious issues. The authors make clear that individuals like Leo Pfeffer and organizations like the Joint Advisory Committee on Religion and State built a strong Jewish consensus in favor of strict separationism. Consequently, Jews overwhelmingly supported the Supreme Court decisions banning Bible reading and state-sponsored prayers in public schools. Still, dissenting Jewish voices existed in the likes of philosopher Will Herberg. His concerns about strict separationism's ill effects on religion's role in the public square are now being echoed by other Jewish critics, particularly among the Orthodox. At the very least, they want...