Jewish Voices in American Jewish History

It is a great pleasure to read historical works by historians who excel at their craft, who can construct a nuanced historical narrative that is both assertive and careful. History is not there to discover but to be recovered, and that constructive process requires the sifting through of mounds of primary sources, and the essential selection of evidence—choices that dramatize, assert, or legitimate claims that our storyteller seeks to make transparent. Recovering those sources presumes that the historian knows what to look for, where to find it, and then what to do with the material once located. I do not pretend to fully comprehend the historian’s craft, but I still recognize and appreciate the judgments each must make to recover a source as a historical one and then to draw it within a meaningful narrative.

What both Beth Wenger and Lila Corwin Berman do for their readers is to showcase the historian’s craft in its most reflective form. By this I mean that Wenger and Berman are self-conscious of historical construction; they each weave a tale stitched together by choices they willingly reveal and justify. I find this refreshing and mature, for they confront their readers with sources that, in my reading, do not fully support their narrative construals of American Jewish history. They both strenuously defend their interpretive work, and they each are skillful in culling historical sources. But they also help their readers to learn how to read those sources and so empower them to argue back. The stories each tells are compelling, and so too their decisions about how to best read the historical record. Being attuned to those choices enables readers to better assess what is most persuasive, and perhaps what is still missing, in two transformative works in American Jewish history.

Beth Wenger’s History Lessons: The Creation of American Jewish Heritage (henceforth HL) and Lila Corwin Berman’s Speaking of Jews: Rabbis, Intellectuals, and the Creation of an American Public Identity (henceforth SJ) share a number of themes that subtend the American Jewish experience. Both emphasize Jewish concerns about survival, about belonging and ethnic identity, about the stigma of Jewishness in America, and the anxieties provoked by idealized visions of America. Yet even with this common set of issues, their differences are more apparent, and one can sense this in the subtitles to their works. Wenger seeks to recover popular renditions of history from the late nineteenth through the mid-twentieth century, and she appropriates the term “heritage” to thematize the various modes by which Jewish Americans made sense of their experiences. To Wenger, heritage production offers “a clear window into the selective and creative process of American Jewish self-definition” and reveals “the meanings that Jews assigned to their still evolving encounter with America as well as their expectations for Jewish life in the United States” (HL, 19). Unlike many of her peers who distinguish heritage from history, Wenger understands this to be a tenuous dualism, and she is more comfortable thinking of heritage as a broader category that need not “be measured by the standards of professional history” (HL, 20). Her focus is squarely on “popular narratives,” and Wenger brilliantly recovers how these texts foster a sense of belonging and continuity with the American nation. To be sure, as her subtitle suggests, these narratives “create” that sense of belonging and continuity, but in doing so they also have something to teach us—and so the clever title of the book, History Lessons.

Berman’s Speaking of Jews, on the other hand, focuses on “elite” texts from rabbis and Jewish lay leaders, and the sociological discourse they adopt to explain American Jewish identity to a non-Jewish public. Berman calls this the “social-scientific turn” (SJ, 2) in the ways that Jews talked about their Jewishness, beginning in...