Readers of Joshua Loth Liebman’s Peace of Mind

In 1946, Simon & Schuster published Rabbi Joshua Loth Liebman’s bestselling book Peace of Mind, a self-help manual that explained how psychiatry and religion together could help individuals achieve emotional and spiritual maturity, and ultimately happiness. At the time of its publication, Liebman was a rabbi at Boston’s Temple Israel and was well known from his sermons on the NBC radio program Message to Israel, broadcast in Boston and New York City. Significantly, Liebman was, in the words of Matthew S. Hedstrom, the first “non-Christian author to reach a mass audience in the United States” and Donald Meyer has called Peace of Mind “the book first heralding the whole flood of postwar religious bestsellers.”¹ The book reached readers on six continents, was on the New York Times bestseller list for 173 weeks and the Publishers Weekly bestseller list for 147 weeks, and, by 1964, went into its thirty-eighth printing.²

The significance of Peace of Mind lay in the way Liebman blended religion, psychology, and self-help and the degree to which his readers accepted him as an expert in all three areas. Prior to World War II, self-help books were gaining momentum, largely owing to the popularity of Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People (1937) and Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich (1937). Religious authors such as Harry Emerson Fosdick and Norman Vincent Peale also had a following. Psychology and psychiatry became a part of popular culture; discussions of personal experiences with psychoanalysis appeared in the New York Times, Ladies’ Home Journal, Good Housekeeping, and Vanity Fair in the 1910s, as well as in books and movies such as Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (1925) and Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound (1945).³

By blending religion, self-help, and psychology, Liebman’s book provided simplified views and easy methods for incorporating faith, God, psychology, and psychiatry into everyday life to achieve happiness. As a rabbi who counseled his congregants, he recognized that many people had emotional insecurities, but they often feared admitting them or dealing with their mental health. According to Joel Pfister, Peace of Mind provided a “therapy for the normal,” giving its readers the tools of both psychiatry and religion to fulfill their quest for happiness. Both fiction and nonfiction bestsellers of the 1920s and 1930s reflected a reevaluation of religion and science, a search for new faiths and philosophies, and what John Tebbel has termed a “religious renaissance.”⁴ Liebman believed he was different from both clergy and psychiatrists because his goal was to bridge the gap between religious books that made the individual “feel more guilty and more sinful” and psychological books that added “to his inner confusion by making him feel somehow that he [was] a ‘case history’ in abnormal psychology.”⁵ Liebman expected his readers to accept his views on the compatibility of psychology and religion, but he invited them to interpret those views to best serve their beliefs in God, religion, psychiatry, and themselves. According to his readers’ letters, they did both.

This study’s purpose is to explore the breadth of a sample readership of Peace of Mind: how readers viewed Liebman, why they wrote to him, what problems they had, how they read and used the book, and how it contributed to and reflected their values, concerns, and religious and psychological culture. It draws on the personal papers of Liebman held by Boston University and Temple Israel, including readers’ letters, reviews, advertisements, church programs, and other documents that provide evidence about the reception of Peace of Mind. Of the 1,497 letters examined, 898 constitute my sample of “fan mail” and are the foundation for this analysis.⁶

Few historians have thoroughly critiqued Liebman’s book through its reception by readers, but three have provided brief analyses of its readership. Citing an unspecified number of Liebman’s readers, Andrew Heinze speculated that most were women, Jewish, or both. He pointed out that women historically were often responsible for the “therapeutic tendencies” in both Protestantism and Judaism. Like Heinze, Matthew Hedstrom argued that, coming when it...