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The Meaning of American Jewish History
- Jewish Quarterly Review
- University of Pennsylvania Press
- Volume 96, Number 3, Summer 2006
- pp. 423-432
- 10.1353/jqr.2006.0018
- Review
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Jewish Quarterly Review 96.3 (2006) 423-432
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The Meaning of American Jewish History
Michael Alexander
In a television interview a few years ago, Ben Stiller, son of a Jewish father and Catholic-born mother, was asked whether he had been baptized. When Stiller heard the question his face contorted as though he'd bitten into something gone bad. One could practically see his skin crawl. "No!" he snapped back. "I'm Jewish! I was bar mitsvahed." The innocent interviewer, embarrassed for asking such a ridiculous question and for somehow offending his guest, moved along to safer topics.1
Many Jews in America have the visceral feeling of being Jewish, and that seems to bewilder both television interviewers and scholars alike. American Jews have not gone the way of the Huguenots, who vanished after their migration from France, but rather have become a powerful and visible American minority with a most recognizable minority culture. Some find this phenomenon of Jewish vitality confounding because the most basic sociological borders with which Jewish identity has typically been enclosed are absent in America: America does not recognize Jews de jure, but neither are they outlawed or restricted as individuals or as a group; Jews have no authoritative leadership or membership requirements; and perhaps most importantly, they have no grave enemies. This great experiment in borderless Jewry has been going on since the birth of the republic and before. So what makes the five or six million in the United States continue to call themselves Jews? What does being Jewish mean to them?
Two great scholars of the American Jewish experiment have taken [End Page 423] their best stabs at determining what it means to be a Jew in America. They have done so through presentations of American Jewish history, from 1654 to the present, and of course in their demarcations of what to include as American Jewish history. Individually these scholars run two of the largest graduate programs for American Jewish history in the country, and judging not just from their own publications but from the work of their students, they are grounding the study of the American Jewish experience among the most rigorous of disciplines. They have written two very different books, even opposite ones: one that issues trepidation and warning, and the other reassurance and confidence. Both of these books are magisterial in their research, delivery, and conclusions, and both emanate from deeply felt positions about the meaning of our American Jewish experience.
Of the two books, Jonathan Sarna's American Judaism takes a more traditional approach. His study of American Jewry is patterned on an older paradigm of American religious history codified by Sydney E. Ahlstrom in his A Religious History of the American People.2 Ahlstrom wished to break free from a European Religionsgeschichte that belabored ecclesiastical history and rather sought to describe American religion as something occurring within a broader social context of economy, culture, politics, and even psychology. Ahlstrom also allowed the term "religion" itself to signify a larger compass, no longer restricting it to doctrine and ritual but widening it to include any experience that William James might have listed among his varieties. For Sarna, this means "Jewish secularism," "communism," and even the ever ambiguous "'Jewishness," or 'Yiddishkeit' . . . fall within the purview of American Judaism" (p. xvii), which he views in the context of American religious trends.
Sarna's scholarship also replicates many of the matrices that an older generation of American religious historians used when discussing the American context of religion. The market revolution is one such matrix, one that underscores changes in industry, production, and associated work routines; Sarna makes less of recent scholarly interest in consumer revolutions and habits. Another example of Sarna's historiographical traditionalism is his use of democratic choice as a model to understand American religious affiliations, whereas...