Louis Marshall and the Democratization of Jewish Identity

Abstract

Louis is a luminous figure in American Jewish history. The list of Jewish leadership posts he held at various phases of his career, includ ing positions as president of the American Jewish Committee, president of Temple Emanu-El, and chair of the board of directors of the Jewish Theological Seminary, is imposing. Along with his work as a Jewish organizational leader, labored in a long and successful career as a corporate and constitutional lawyer, and also served in a number of voluntary public service roles, especially for New York State. The extraordinary range of his activities and interests, particularly in the decade of the 1920s, propelled him to the center stage of Jewish life. Following the death of banker and philanthropist Jacob H. Schiff in 1920 and the end of Louis Brandeis' presidency of the Zionist Organization of America the following year, filled the leadership void and, according to some accounts, imposed Marshall law on the country's Jewish community.1 At the heart of Marshall's career is an apparent paradox: he became proactively engaged with issues connected to the democratization of Jewish life, but also retained a deeply conservative belief that solutions would develop naturally, without undue human interference. In other words, Marshall's legacy combines and anticipates liberal-activist and conservative poles of American Jewish politics that consolidated in the decades after his death. Changing circumstances dictated whether Marshall's activist inclina tion to shape new democratic patterns in global Jewish experience or his conservative distrust of popular downtown politics gained the upper hand. Indeed, owing to the sheer diversity of his activities and the com plexity of Jewish affairs in the United States and overseas, it is difficult