Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Speaking of Jews: Rabbis, Intellectuals, and the Creation of an American Public Identity. By Lila Corwin Berman. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009. xii, 266 pp. Cloth, $55.00, ISBN 978-0-520-25680-4. Paper, $22.95, ISBN 978-0-520-25681-1.)

2009; Oxford University Press; Volume: 96; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/jahist/96.3.888

1945-2314

Jonathan D. Sarna,

Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies

How did Jewish leaders present themselves—or “talk about Jewishness”—to the larger American public from the end of World War I through the 1960s? The short answer, according to this well-researched, sprightly written volume, is “sociologically.” By “fitting Jews into emerging models of the American minority group,” Temple University's Lila Corwin Berman argues, “Jewish leaders were able to explain Jewishness in terms familiar to Americans and indispensable to the functioning of democracy” (p. 73). They simultaneously linked democracy with diversity, encouraged group identity and pluralism, and promoted the value of endogamy (which they defended sociologically as critical to marital success). Thus they balanced the seemingly contradictory goals of being at once universal and par ticular, part of American life and apart from it. Berman weighs the words of a whole slew of fascinating twentieth-century Jews, including Kaufmann Kohler, Louis Wirth, Morris Raphael Cohen, Julius Drachsler, Louis Finkelstein, Milton Steinberg, Oscar Handlin, Nathan Glazer, Morris Kertzer, and the leaders of the Jewish Chautauqua Society. Her portraits of Handlin and Glazer are particularly strong. Both worked in different ways to redefine America, inscribing Jews as insiders. She is far less persuasive with respect to Finkelstein and Steinberg, perhaps because they fit her model far less well. Finkelstein's widely distributed The Jews: Their History, Culture, and Religion (1949), written for a larger American public, downplays sociology in favor of religion and faith. Steinberg's masterly semiautobiographical novel, As a Driven Leaf (1939), was advertised, significantly, as “the story of … a man who tried to live in two worlds, and lost them both.” Berman makes no mention of either book.