Conflicts Between Jews and Christians and Within the Jewish Community in America

Abstract

A generation ago the wisdom of the profession was that minority groups should not study their own history. In many cases-among them the history of American Jewry-such courses of study were regarded as unimportant, and in any case, it was felt that members of these groups could not be objective scholars about the enclaves to which they belonged. Not long after Irish-American historians wrote about the Irish-American experience in this country, and African-American historians explored their own past, JewishAmerican historians began to examine their people's life in America. Jews in Christian America and A People Divided are products of the proliferating and now professionally respected field of American Jewish studies. A felicitous and accurate capsulization of Jews in Christian America is Jerold Auerbach's dust jacket comment that the book is an analysis of the enduring tension between religious identity and civic obligation. Beginning in colonial times and ending in the 1960s, Naomi W. Cohen investigates an important phase of the quest of the Jews to be equal citizens of America. She focuses on federal, state, and local legislation and adjudication on church-state issues that concerned Jewish-Gentile relationships, and traces the movement from toleration to equality of Jewish aspirations and actions. Since the formation of the republic, Jews pursued two strategies to gain total acceptance. In the nineteenth century they sought government neutrality toward all sects, and in the twentieth they worked for a separation of religion and state. Although these were dominant trends, they were not uniformly pursued by Jews. Differences within the Jewish community over accommodation versus confrontation, assimilationism versus distinctiveness, and orthodoxy versus