Speaking of Jews: Rabbis, Intellectuals, and the Creation of an American Public Identity (review)

Lila Corwin Berman's Speaking of Jews: Rabbis, Intellectuals, and the Creation of an American Public Identity examines how American Jewish leaders have described themselves to the non-Jewish world and how those descriptions have shaped the evolving understanding of their own Jewishness. Berman's work analyzes rabbis and intellectuals from World War I through the Civil Rights era, a period during which sociology played a critical role in defining and redefining Jewishness. Speaking of Jews also highlights the tension between universalism and particularism, as Jews sought to explain Jewishness as part of the universal American experience while at the same time demonstrate how they could retain their own particular group identity and consciousness.

Berman's work begins in the years after World War I by examining the Reform movement and the Jewish Chautauqua Society, an organization led primarily by Reform rabbis that sought to explain Jewishness to the non-Jewish world. Berman demonstrates how these rabbis "employed a fundamentally religious vocabulary to convey Jewishness to Americans," explaining "Judaism in terms of its beliefs, not its practices or community structure" (12). She demonstrates how these rabbis "envisioned the long history and scriptural tradition of the Jews as the true foundation of the relatively young nation" (32).

Berman then describes how these religious understandings of Judaism gave way to more sociological explanations. She uses the examples of Louis Wirth, Morris Raphael Cohen, and Salo Baron, demonstrating "how Jewish intellectuals harnessed the methods of social science to translate Jewishness into modern American terms" (36). Using the broader tools of sociologists, these intellectuals claimed that Jews were one of many different social groups that made up the fabric of American life, a notion that offered Jews "a way to position themselves as central to—not on the margins of—modernity and American society" (35). Yet while sociological definitions of Jewishness emphasized its universal nature, Berman argues they "did not carry a self-fulfilling logic for Jewish survival" (34).

While the turn to sociology had begun in the years after World War I, Berman believes that it "fully blossomed only after the Second World War," becoming the language of choice for both rabbis and intellectuals (94). Rabbis, particularly those of the emerging Conservative movement, were largely responsible for "the novel notion that the United States was a Judeo-Christian nation, and that democracy sprung from Judeo-Christian values" (75). Berman focuses on such figures as Louis Finkelstein, Milton Steinberg, and Mordecai Kaplan and suggests that "new modes of nationalist discourse provided Jews with opportunities to equate their distinctive existence with the maintenance of democracy" (74). She emphasizes how these rabbis did not view this as a theological principle but rather a political and sociological idea. Moreover, Berman also demonstrates the continued tension between universalism and particularism, noting that "the closer the rabbis tried to tie Jewishness to Americanness, the more they struggled to explain why Jews should not—or could not—simply fade into America" (91).

Berman then turns her attention to two intellectuals—Oscar Handlin and Nathan Glazer—both of whom were "instrumental in sculpting a sociological language of Jewishness that fit into postwar nationalistic aims and answered prevailing Jewish concerns" (94). Handlin and Glazer both wrote studies of Jews in the United States, and following broader intellectual trends, both believed that "all Americans were members of subgroups, and that these subgroups, no matter how inconsequential their differences, defined American social structure" (95). Religion became just one of several markers that distinguished one ethnic group from another, alongside foodways and patterns of residence, Berman argues. Thus, despite its limitations, Berman believes that "the language of sociology and ethnic identity brilliantly drew Jewishness into the center of American social theory and American life without exacting Jewish survival as its price" (96).

Berman highlights the tension between universalism and particularism when she argues that "sociological terms of Jewishness might explain Jewish similarity to other Americans, but they could...