The Politics and Public Culture of American Jews (review)

In recent years an increasing number of commentators have argued that American Jewry is experiencing an unprecedented degree of fragmentation and intra-group conflict. Pulled between the conflicting values of contemporary society, American Jews, according to writers like Jack Wertheimer and Samuel G. Freedman, have gone to war with each other, and the fabric of a once cohesive ethnic and religious community has been rent over issues such as feminism, gay and lesbian rights, Israeli politics, standards for conversion, and the very definition of Jewishness itself. ¹ In a collection of essays entitled The Politics and Public Culture of American Jews, however, Arthur A. Goren reminds us that any vision of a once stable and monolithic American Jewish community is largely an illusion. Presenting the longer history of American Jewish communal conflict and diplomacy in an effort to demonstrate "a sense of the continuity of the community and its problems" (p. 10), Goren shows that "organizational diversity, ideological ambiguity, and even contentiousness appear to be endemic to the communal experience of American Jewry" (p. 29). Bringing together ten essays that were published separately between 1961 and the late 1990s, Politics and Public Cultureexplores the difficulties of forging a collective identity in a free society, a theme that Goren first took up in 1970 with his well-known book on the Kehilla, the ill-fated Jewish community council that attempted to direct Jewish affairs in New York from 1908 to 1922. ² Exploring this issue in a number of different settings over a broad sweep of time--from the era of Eastern European immigration to the post-World War II period--Politics and Public Culture adds to and elaborates upon Goren's earlier work, digging deeper into the problems and challenges of defining "Jewish community" in the American context.

Readers of Politics and Public Culturewill be pushed to rethink some of the standard narratives of American Jewish history, ones that often try to identify a single ideological position that marks the stance of a "mainstream" or "normative" Jewish community. Goren's focus on politics underscores that Jewish life and community were shaped not by one dominant approach but by the constant interaction and engagement of many different, often conflicting, approaches, which he calls "voices in counterpoint." While he does highlight the role of American Zionists, whom he credits for being the most successful arbiters between various factions of American Jewry, Goren does not fail to present the widest possible array of Jewish opinion. Though he does not use the term, he is describing the "discourses" that bound American Jews together in a kind of conversation, even though they did not always agree. He is also able to capture this kind of diversity and interaction by examining several examples of Jewish "public culture," moments of collective action in which Jews demonstrated their multiple and overlapping definitions of Jewishness for all to see.

This attention to Jewish politics and public culture works particularly well for the period of mass immigration from Eastern Europe, when the sharp division between immigrants and acculturated Jews, as well as the competing political, religious, and cultural commitments of the immigrants themselves, makes it especially difficult to speak of a single, unified "Jewish community." In Part One, "Immigrant Encounters With America, 1900-1940," Goren conveys vividly the texture of the vast, interactive public sphere in which a number of these competing identities were articulated. A study of "The Conservative Politics of the Orthodox Press" reminds us, for example, that not only socialist journalists like Abraham Cahan wielded political power and literary influence in the immigrant quarter of New York, but so did spokesmen like Jacob Saphirstein, whose successful Morgen Zhurnal supported the Republican party and promoted an orthodox lifestyle. Similarly, a chapter on socialist politics on the Lower East Side--a landmark piece that was much acclaimed when it first appeared...