An Unlikely Union: The Love-Hate Story of New York’s Irish and Italians by Paul Moses (review)

. . . secularization” (p. xii) that liberal Protestants face in the “post-Protestant” period that characterizes the United States since the second half of the twentieth century. What follows ties much of the final few chapters of the book together, particularly Hollinger’s reflections on the role of religion in the public sphere. Hollinger takes to task those who at once assert the right to insert religious ideas into the public sphere and then claim that those ideas are exempt from the same analytical and critical scrutiny that applies to nonreligious ideas. Hollinger relies upon a distinction between motive and warrant to accept that religious adherents’ public proposals might arise out of a religious conviction but the public warrant justifying them must be open to critique. Hollinger finds his model for such an approach in a quotation from President Barack Obama and nod to Abraham Lincoln that, although insightful, misses an opportunity to engage more recent and sophisticated treatments of religion’s constructive place in public life by scholars such as Linell Cady, Jeffrey Stout, and David Tracy. Despite this relatively minor matter of how best to critique and construct religion ’s participation in public life, After Cloven Tongues of Fire succeeds in offering a nuanced and compelling interpretation of liberal Protestantism’s engagement with the increasingly complex and diverse cultural and intellectual climate of the twentieth century. Hollinger’s work offers much to historians and students of this era as well as to the study of Protestantism in the United States. Brite Divinity School JEFFREY WILLIAMS An Unlikely Union: The Love-Hate Story of New York’s Irish and Italians. By Paul Moses. (New York: New York University Press. 2015. Pp. xii, 381. $35.00. ISBN 978-1-4798-7130-8.) Jay P. Dolan’s well-received social history of New York Catholicism, The Immigrant Church: New York’s Irish and German Catholics, 1815–1865 (Baltimore, 1975), led a number of historians to adopt his approach to the study of American Catholic history. One of the most recent and successful examples of this genre is Paul Moses’s An Unlikely Union: The Love-Hate Story of New York’s Irish and Italians. The author is professor of journalism at Brooklyn College–CUNY; former city editor of Newsday; and author of The Saint and the Sultan (New York, 2009), which won the award of the Catholic Press Association for the best history book in 2010. In this book he draws upon his own background as a native New Yorker of Jewish, Irish, and Italian ancestry to trace in convincing detail the process whereby the Italians replaced the Irish as the dominant ethnic group in the Catholic community in New York City after the turn of the twentieth century. In the 1890s the Italian-born population of Manhattan increased from 39,951 to 178,886, and it grew rapidly thereafter. However, even as the number of Italian immigrants mushroomed and Irish-Catholic immigration experienced a steady decline, the local Irish American hierarchy kept firm control of the levers of power. When the Archdiocese of New York observed its centenary in 1908, it was almost 644 BOOK REVIEWS exclusively an Irish-American celebration, presided over by Michael Logue, archbishop of Armagh and Primate of All Ireland. On the parish level the situation was more complex, and Moses is commendably even-handed in discussing the cultural clashes between straight-laced Irish pastors and Italian immigrants who were accustomed to a more exuberant expression of their Catholic faith. The Catholic Church was not the only theater of conflict between the Irish and the Italians. One of the most revealing chapters in this book describes the discrimination experienced by young Italian Americans in the police departments of New York City and Brooklyn (a separate city until 1898). Although these idealistic young men were often motivated by a desire to combat crime in their own neighborhoods and were admirably equipped to do so because of their fluency in Italian, they found it almost impossible to gain the confidence of their Irish American superiors. Another source of conflict between the Irish and the Italians was competition for jobs on the waterfront. The turf war was settled when the Irish...