Introduction

Every reader of American Jewish History is probably able to enumerate the historiographic revisions contained in Leon Jick's The Americanization of the Synagogue, 1820-1870 (1976). Lucidly argued, vividly written, Jick argued that the changes in synagogue life were piecemeal, pragmatic, and eminently American. The desires of the middle-class, middle-American laity shaped American reform far more than the rabbinical assemblies in Brunswick and Frankfurt, or for that matter, in Philadelphia or Cleveland.

Mark Bauman begins his discussion by rehearsing the well-known historiographic controversy between Jick and Michael Meyer over Reform Judaism. Whereas Jick stressed the bottom-up forces which drove the process of religious reform, Meyer stresses the arrival of a German-trained rabbinical leadership. Whereas Jick stresses the American setting, Meyer's Response to Modernity (1988) took a trans-national perspective, celebrating Reform Judaism as a global phenomenon. Bauman finds that both Jick and Meyer accept the primacy of the North-East too readily—neglecting Southern developments. These include the reforming examples of Savannah, Richmond, Charleston; the role of reform Jews as political leaders; and the prominence of Jews with Southern roots, among them Adolph Ochs, Bernard Baruch, Isadore Strauss, and the Lehmans.

Riv-Ellen Prell observes that Jick enriches his historiography with sociological and ethnographic perspectives, marking him as one of many scholars writing in the 1970s. This "new key" in scholarship, Prell argues, enabled insights into the functional uses to which the synagogue was put in the service of acculturation and identity formation, a reform counterpart to Marshall Sklare's seminal Conservative Judaism (1955) The centerpiece of Prell's essay explores the debt her own work on a counter-culture minyan in Southern California owes to Americanization. Although Prell is ultimately an ethnographer and anthropologist, and Jick is ultimately an historian, the former finds many parallels in their approach. Both study gestures, garb and styles of worship—decorum debates—as important signifiers of the negotiation of tradition and innovation. Prell places Jick's contribution alongside the interdisciplinary studies which represented a quantum leap in the study of American Jewry.

Shuly Rubin Schwartz credits Jick with introducing much that has become second nature in the study of American Judaism, beginning with the importance placed on the synagogue itself. Schwartz considers at length what must be considered the most glaring omission in Jick's work: the failure to consider the role of Jewish women in the process of religious change. Schwartz credits Jick's grass-roots perspective with encouraging her to look at women teaching Sunday school, offering b'nai mitzvah lessons, "staffing" the synagogues voluntary associations simply filling up the pews. The roles played by talented rebbetzins such as Rose Berman Goldstein in the post-World War II era clearly merits more study and, no doubt, has a late nineteenth-century counterpart.

Pamela Nadell begins her essay with the immediate reception of Jick's work. Many of the arguments later contested by Michael Meyer and Naomi Cohen, notes Nadell, were already anticipated in the initial reviews of Americanization. Marc Lee Raphael's history of Washington Hebrew Congregation, Nadell observes, challenges a clear demarcation between traditional and reform synagogues. Given the quirky nature of religious change, Nadell also wonders whether Jick can fix any terminal date for declaring American Judaism "reformed." Nadell contrasts Americanization with Jick's essay, "The Reform Synagogue," which abandons the nearly categorical rejection of German influences, and pushes back the date of Reform's triumph from 1870 to 1885, the year of the Pittsburgh Platform. Despite its shortcomings, intellectual history enjoys a clear advantage: texts and events whose dates and self-identification are unambiguous. Nadell's essay also plumbs the relationship between Jick's work and Moshe Davis's The Emergence of Conservative Judaism (1963). Nadell finds in Americanization a polemic against Davis's view of American Judaism as basically united and strongly resisting the Christian environment—Jick, in contrast, finds chaos and accomodation.

Karla Goldman's essay begins with a drawn-out, comical battle over the kashrut of a sheep in Cincinnati's Bene Israel...