The Jews of the United States (review)

If Hasia Diner’s new synthesis of American Jewish history is occasioned, in part, by the 350th anniversary celebration of the establishment of the first Jewish community in North America, it also signals a scholarly reappraisal of the gloom-and-doom forecast that influenced the treatments of several histories that were written in the early 1990s, in the immediate wake of the 1990 National Jewish Population Study, with its infamous (and arguably inflated) intermarriage rate. In contrast to those volumes, both Diner and Jonathan Sarna, whose American Judaism: A History was likewise published in 2004, take a cautiously optimistic view of the future. To be sure, they acknowledge the inevitable numerical toll on the American Jewish population exacted by assimilation, mixed marriage, low birth rates, and a decrease in immigration. But they also see evidence of a renascence of American Jewish life in a variety of sectors, from the almost universal day school attendance rate among the Orthodox to liberal Jews’ more serious engagement with Jewish ritual innovation and observance.

Diner’s bibliography includes no entry for Arnold Eisen and Steven M. Cohen’s The Jew Within (2000), but in her volume’s final pages, she provides evidence for the phenomenon of “the sovereign self ” that they documented in their study and agrees that it is symptomatic of the Americanization of Judaism. While communal leaders may wring their hands at the “highly personal and idiosyncratic” Judaism practiced by most American Jews today, Diner concludes that it “may indeed hold the key to the continuance of the ‘eternal people’ in a new and uncharted age” (p. 358).

Diner’s revisionist treatment of the Central European immigration in the five-volume Jewish People in America series ( Johns Hopkins, 1992), as well as her more recent scholarship on the impact of the Holocaust on American Jewish life, highlight her penchant for upsetting orthodoxies. A similar impulse drives the present volume, as Diner makes clear in her first chapter, a powerful rejoinder to Jacob Rader Marcus’s work on colonial Jewry. Although she refrains from attacking Marcus directly, she offers a compelling critique of his essentially positivist treatment. Whereas Marcus characterized colonial Jews as increasingly self-confident, increasingly receptive to American values and mores, and increasingly accepted by their neighbors, Diner emphasized the tenuous nature of their existence in the colonies both on the individual and communal levels. Perhaps most devastatingly, she takes aim at his arguably inordinate emphasis on the colonial and early national periods, implying that it betrayed a weakness for ethnic boosterism, which was born of insecurity and embarrassingly passé. To be fair, Marcus would argue that his attention was warranted because the pattern of American Jewish life was essentially set by 1820. But Diner’s point is that in important ways, Jewish life in the colonial and early national period deviated from the subsequent pattern. Moreover, the conditions that made the United States hospitable to Jews developed largely independently of the pre-1820 miniscule Jewish presence: “All the names and deeds of Jewish patriots of the revolutionary era need to be measured against the fact that no Jews signed the Declaration of Independence. None sat through the deliberations in Philadelphia in 1787 that produced the Constitution, and none helped to persuade the voters in the newly independent states to ratify it. All these events would have transpired even if two thousand Jewish women and men had not set up homes, shops, and congregations in the seaport cities of British North America” (p. 43).

Diner’s early chapters do not entirely break new ground and are heavily influenced by Eli Faber’s recent reassessment of the colonial and early national periods. Far more novel is her treatment of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In part two of the book, covering 1820–1920, Diner rejects the conventional periodization of American Jewish history that Marcus adapted from Peter Wiernik’s History of the Jews in America (1912) and popularized in the 1950s. Diner dispenses with the three...