The Jewish People in America: A Time for Healing, American Jewry Since World War II.

The five volumes in this excellent history of Jews in the United States are a tribute to the foresight and dedication of Henry Feingold who more than a decade ago decided that the best way to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the founding of the American Jewish Historical Society (1892) would be to produce a multi-volume account of Jewish experiences in this nation. Feingold devoted the bulk of his professional life in the 1980s to obtaining this goal, and the publication of these books attests to his intelligence, perseverance, and judgment. As entrepreneur Feingold did all of the right things. His choices for the authors of the volumes were superb and each of the individuals has written a thoroughly engaging, carefully researched, and professionally impressive synthesis of an aspect of the American Jewish past.

Each of the volumes is delineated by a chronological era but within these works there is a topical division of chapters that is generally effective. Moreover, while the volumes follow one another almost seamlessly, there is sufficient overlapping and some slight, but necessary, repetition for each of the authors to make his own points in context. Any of the books, therefore, can be read and understood by itself. The authors have distinctive personalities and interests and these come across to the readers. Faber's narrative is so smooth that one goes through it like a knife through melted butter; the works of Diner, especially, and Sorin are informed by feminist and new cultural perspectives; Feingold's chapters on the American response to the Holocaust are as good a short synthesis of that subject as one is likely to find, and Shapiro's concern for the direction taken by most contemporary American Jews is abundantly clear. Collectively, by reading these five books one gets an excellent sense of when the Jews came to the New World, why, and how they arranged their lives. Each of the authors discusses, in some fashion, the ever present tension of Jews who had to grapple with decisions about acculturation and maintenance of group traditions. The freedoms, openness and opportunities in American society seduced newcomers while Jewish leaders and coreligionists reminded one another of a five thousand year heritage that needed to be preserved. Until the last volume, when Shapiro indicates a few areas that he could not cover in the space allotted, no topics of significance are ignored although on several occasions they are not given sufficient coverage or analysis.

Faber had both the easiest and most difficult task. His volume covers the longest time frame, 1654-1820, when the Jews were barely a dot on the American landscape. He has to settle and establish them, give a full account of the European background, and try to show that they made some impression, first in the colonies and then in the United States. He succeeds admirably. Faber, unfortunately, adds nothing new for scholars but his synthesis is nicely written and easy to follow. He reminds readers that an Atlantic world of colonial Jewry bound by marital ties and commercial interests united Jews in the various colonial American cities where more than fifty or one hundred of them lived at any one time: Newport, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Charleston, and then Savannah. We also get a glimpse of one of the traditional intra-Jewish conflicts over the centuries: the old timers looking askance at the newcomers as less than worthy members of the group. Thus Sephardim turned their noses up at the arrivals from central Europe just as the German Jews would keep a distance from their east European cousins in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. But colonial Jewry was generally quite happy in the New World. They were thankful for the religious freedom offered, the abundant and generally unrestricted commercial opportunities, and then, after the American Revolution, the perceived equality that they thought might ultimately come to each of them.

Diner's book covers the years 1820-1880 and her postscript suggests that she would have been happier carrying her narrative through the curtailment of massive immigration in the early 1920s. Her work also suggests the influence of feminist and new cultural history perspectives. In her account she emphasizes that most of the "German" Jews were from no single country but generally from central and eastern Europe with a smattering of western European Jews among them. They arrived in the United States with little money or training and engaged in a myriad number of occupational endeavors including railway building, garment manufacturing, baking, shipping, exporting, and so forth. Most of the men started as peddlers but wound up with different occupations. She deliberately avoids the great man syndrome and informs readers that although Jews obtained solid middle-class status by the end of the Civil War, most were not bankers like the Seligmans and Lehmans, or department store magnates like the Gimbels and Strauses. Her coverage is broad, both geographically and chronologically, and if one does not have a good sense of the growth of the Jewish communities in the nineteenth century, it is difficult to follow it in a topical chapter arrangement. Fewer than three thousand Jews lived in America in 1820, more than a quarter of a million dwelled there by 1880. Nonetheless one does learn that Jews settled not only in the northeastern section of the nation but in every region, that women as well as men arrived, and that the newcomers developed a variety of charitable, fraternal, and cultural institutions. Diner's coverage is thorough; there are explanations of how communities evolved and thrived, and how Jews both acculturated and remained attached to one another while moving up the socio-economic ladder. Jews appreciated their new found opportunities in the United States, generally prospered, but for the most part did not assimilate into the mainstream of Christian America. In some places they were tolerated, in others they were not, but always they had a sense of themselves as outsiders no matter how much they may have acculturated.

Sorin's book covers a forty year period but he, perhaps, had the most formidable task of the five authors. More hooks, articles, memoirs, accounts, and analyses have been written about the Jews who arrived in this country between 1880 and 1920 than there have been, combined, on all other aspects of American Jewry before the end of World War II. Research for this volume alone must have been an insuperable assignment. Nonetheless Sorin has accomplished his feat with aplomb. He focuses upon the east Europeans, as he should, and on New York City, as he must, but he also casts a broad net covering Jews in all parts of the country, deals with the evolution of Reform and Conservative Judaism, notes the conflicts and other kinds of interactions between German and east European Jews, and spends time, as well, on the Jewish socialist movement, Zionism, and the vigor and variety of Jewish cultural life. His narrative is sprinkled with telling quotes and anecdotes and he carries his work into the early 1920s.

Feingold's volume picks up where Sorin's leaves off. Aside from Deborah Dash Moore's At Home in America, I can think of no major analysis of the Jewish American experiences in the United States in the 1920s and 1930s although there are numerous monographs covering special topics. Feingold begins in an unusual way for a history of American Jewry with a chapter on American anti-semitism and Jewish reactions to it. (None of the other authors avoids this subject, and, in fact, they weave it into their analyses where appropriate. Nothing, in fact, distinguishes this whole series as much as the ease with which the topic of anti-semitism is included discussed in its proper setting, and then moved away from. Before the 1970s practically all American Jewish historians took pains to minimize accounts of American anti-semitism as if by writing about it they would nurture and spread the noxious weed.) Feingold's narrative of Jewish experiences in the 1920s is good, his attention to the activities of Jewish women reflects the impact of current societal concerns,and his analyses of Jewish cultural activities, the decline of Jewish religiosity, the gradual transference of leadership in the American Jewish community from Germans to east Europeans, the proliferation of American Jewish organizations, and the economic and entrepreneurial successes of the 1920s are vastly superior to any other synthesis written on these subjects. Discussions of Zionism, philanthropic developments, New Deal policies toward Jews, and American actions and inactions in regard to rescuing European Jewry from Hitler round out the rest of the book.

Given Feingold's studies of American reactions to the Holocaust and Roosevelt's indifference to the issue of rescue it is understandable why he is somewhat negative in his assessment of the President. "From the present perspective," the author writes, "it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the New Deal was no 'Jew Deal,' nor did it deal especially benevolently with Jews, especially on the crucial refugee issue". Despite this evaluation, however, Feingold is even handed in assessing the opportunities afforded to Jews who came to Washington during Roosevelt's years as President, and the devotion and adoration that most contemporary Jews had toward this President whom later generations of Jewish critics have scorned. Feingold also notes, and he is right on the mark with this one, that "the American Jewish response to the Holocaust cannot be understood without an awareness of the prevalence of despair".

The fifth volume in the series, by Edward S. Shapiro, may be the most delightful one for Jews to read. Everything he discusses emphasizes how successful and accomplished American Jews have become since the end of World War II, how anti-semitism has "diminished almost to the point of insignificance", and how Jews are wealthier, more accomplished, and better educated than any other group of identifiable Americans. He even points out how a group of suburban Jews had difficulty in providing food for the Jewish poor at Passover because they could not find any poor Jews to assist. Throughout this volume there are vignettes of outstandingly accomplished individuals like Bess Meyerson, the first Jewish "Miss America," Hank Greenberg, the most famous and accomplished of Jewish baseball players, and the two Shapiros: Irving, who became Chairman of Du Pont, and Henry, who assumed the presidency of Princeton University. Jewish movement into the suburbs, Israel as the tie that binds American Jews, and incredible Jewish achievements in business, law, medicine, academic life and the arts are also covered. Shapiro, writing as a totally self-confident American Jew, does not even hesitate quoting from a Lenny Bruce routine on Jesus: "We killed him because he didn't want to become a doctor, that why we killed him".

On the other hand, despite the phenomenal success and acceptance of American Jews Shapiro is concerned that there is a decline in religious attachments and too great a tendency for Jews to abandon their heritage. The "problem" of intermarriage receives extensive discussion. Although I cannot agree with his despair about the trends and the ultimate outcome, his point of view is certainly one that is talked about extensively in Jewish circles and therefore his discussion of the "problem" is apt for this volume.

All told, the five volumes work well individually and together. The themes of acculturation, accomplishment and anti-semitism weave in and out of all of them. The twentieth-century books also have extensive discussions of Zionism and later of American involvement with Israel. Each of the authors should be pleased with his or her accomplishments--none more so than Henry Feingold who put the team together.

Leonard Dinnerstein University of Arizona