The Jews of the United States (review)

Abstract

The Jews of United States, by Hasia Diner. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. 437 pp. $29.95. If Hasia Diner's new synthesis of American Jewish history is occasioned, in part, by 350th anniversary celebration of establishment of first Jewish community in North America, it also signals a scholarly reappraisal of gloom-and-doom forecast that influenced treatments of several histories that were written in early 1990s, in immediate wake of 1990 National Jewish Population Study, with its infamous (and arguably inflated) intermarriage rate. In contrast to those volumes, both Diner and Jonathan Sarna, whose American Judaism: A History was likewise published in 2004, take a cautiously optimistic view of future. To be sure, they acknowledge inevitable numerical toll on American Jewish population exacted by assimilation, mixed marriage, low birth rates, and a decrease in immigration. But they also see evidence of a renascence of American Jewish life in a variety of sectors, from almost universal day school attendance rate among Orthodox to liberal Jews' more serious engagement with Jewish ritual innovation and observance. Diner's bibliography includes no entry for Arnold Eisen and Steven M. Cohen's The Jew Within (2000), but in her volume's final pages, she provides evidence for phenomenon of the sovereign self that they documented in their study and agrees that it is symptomatic of Americanization of Judaism. While communal leaders wring their hands at highly personal and idiosyncratic Judaism practiced by most American Jews today, Diner concludes that it may indeed hold key to continuance of 'eternal people' in a new and uncharted age (p. 358). Diner's revisionist treatment of Central European immigration in five-volume Jewish People in series (Johns Hopkins, 1992), as well as her more recent scholarship on impact of Holocaust on American Jewish life, highlight her penchant for upsetting orthodoxies. A similar impulse drives present volume, as Diner makes clear in her first chapter, a powerful rejoinder to Jacob Rader Marcus's work on colonial Jewry. Although she refrains from attacking Marcus directly, she offers a compelling critique of his essentially positivist treatment. Whereas Marcus characterized colonial Jews as increasingly self-confident, increasingly receptive to American values and mores, and increasingly accepted by their neighbors, Diner emphasized tenuous nature of their existence in colonies both on individual and communal levels. Perhaps most devastatingly, she takes aim at his arguably inordinate emphasis on colonial and early national periods, implying that it betrayed a weakness for ethnic boosterism, which was born of insecurity and embarrassingly passe. To be fair, Marcus would argue that his attention was warranted because pattern of American Jewish life was essentially set by 1820. But Diner's point is that in important ways, Jewish life in colonial and early national period deviated from subsequent pattern. Moreover, conditions that made United States hospitable to Jews developed largely independently of pre-1820 miniscule Jewish presence: names and deeds of Jewish patriots of revolutionary era need to be measured against fact that no Jews signed Declaration of Independence. None sat through deliberations in Philadelphia in 1787 that produced Constitution, and none helped to persuade voters in newly independent states to ratify it. All these events would have transpired even if two thousand Jewish women and men had not set up homes, shops, and congregations in seaport cities of British North America (p. 43). Diner's early chapters do not entirely break new ground and are heavily influenced by Eli Faber's recent reassessment of colonial and early national periods. …