American Jewish Orthodoxy in Historical Perspective (review)

108 SHOFAR Summer 1998 Vol. 16, No.4 Book Reviews American Jewish Orthodoxy in Historical Perspective, by Jeffrey S. Gurock. New York: Ktav, 1996. 457 pp. $39.50 (c); $22.95 (p). For many years, historians tended to depict the millions of East European Jews who immigrated to the United States in the late 1800s and early 1900s as having quickly, happily, and almost unanimously shed their religious traditions in order to become complete Americans. The pathbreaking research of Jeffrey S. Gurock shattered that myth and fundamentally altered the course of American Jewish historiography. For nearly 20 years, Professor Gurock's studies ofthe immigrant community, and especially its Orthodox component, have been emiching our understanding of the nuanced processes by which many Jewish immigrants struggled to preserve-not abandon-their traditional ways while at the same time becoming Americans. American Jewish Orthodoxy in Historical Perspective brings together his most important research essays. The centerpiece of American Jewish Orthodoxy is Gurock's masterful essay, "Resisters and Accor.1ffiodators: Varieties ofOrthodox Rabbis in America, 1886-1983," which details how some Orthodox rabbis vigorously resisted Americanization, while others sought to accommodate aspects of American culture without surrendering the core elements of Jewish tradition. Resisters sought to transplant European-style Orthodoxy to America with the fewest possible concessions to modernity. Accommodators, by contrast, favored sermons in English rather than Yiddish, insisted on decorum in prayer services, and improved their synagogues' aesthetics. By contemporary standards, such changes of style rather than substance might not seem particularly momentous, but to a generation only recently removed from the East European shtetl, they were sometimes traumatic and often controversial. To this day, resisters and accommodators within the American Orthodox rabbinate continue to debate how best to meet the challenges posed by modernity. Considering the comparatively small percentage of contemporary American Jewry that may be regarded as Orthodox, it will no doubt surprise some readers to learn from Gurock that during the interwar years, Orthodoxy may well have been numerically larger than its Conservative and Reform rivals. The persistence of Orthodoxy contradicted the expectations of many early twentieth-century sociologists, who believed that religious observance would vanish as Jewish immigrants (or their children) moved out ofareas such as the Lower East Side. In this volume as in his nowclassic study of Orthodoxy in early suburbia, When Harlem Was Jewish (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979), Gurock describes how the "accommodators" who Book Reviews 109 Americanized their synagogues managed to sustain Orthodoxy beyond the inner-city ghetto. In the suburban New York areas where Orthodox and Conservative synagogues "battled for second-generation allegiances" in the 1920s and 1930s, Orthodoxy "more than held its own," Gurock reports. Orthodox-affiliated synagogues in Queens and Long Island, for example, outnumbered Conservative congregations 19 to 11. In 1938, the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations counted 900 affiliates in 27 states; hence its plausible claim to constitute "the largest Jewish religious group numerically in the United States." On the other hand, in smaller communities far from New York, where socioeconomic pressures (such as the six-day work week, the difficulty of obtaining kosher food, and the absence of Jewish day schools) took a particularly severe toll on Jewish observance, membership in an Orthodox synagogue was not necessarily indicative ofan individual's personal religiosity. "Still," Gurock notes, "when they went to shul; they expected services to be authentically Orthodox as carried over from Europe." Prior to World War II, the differences between Orthodoxy (that is, the segment now known as Modem Orthodoxy) and Conservatism were far from obvious. This is another of the many important and original points to be found in Professor Gurock's studies. When the Jewish Theological Seminary was established in 1886, it was not the rabbinical school of a distinct "Conservative" Judaism, but rather the proponent of a traditionalist orientation that was, for all intents and purposes, Orthodox. Many of its early faculty members were Orthodox rabbis, and some of its graduates served in prominent Orthodox pulpits-such as Manhattan's Kehillath Jeshurun-for decades to follow. Even after Solomon Schechter became president ofthe Seminary in 1902 and began moving it towards a more identifiably "Conservative" approach, the lines dividing Conservatism from...