To Build a Wall: American Jews and the Separation of Church and State (review)

Abstract

Book Reviews 161 for promotion to brigadier general, Spiegel took a ball in the abdomen . while. aboard the steamer City Belle; that vessel was one of five Federal boats destroyed by Confederate calvary along the Red River in the series ofactions known as Alexandria, Louisiana, part ofthe Red River Campaign. Spiegel died the next day, May 4,1864. All ofthe surviving officers and 250 men of the regiment became Confederate prisoners. While editing these letters the editors came to admire Colonel Spiegel. . Readers are likely to share that admiration. He was a passionate family man, a brave and skilled officer, and a patriot. His letters include frequent references to his religious faith. As a Jew Spiegel had infrequent encounters with religious compatriots both in the North and South (there were in 1860 only 150,000 Jews in a population of 31.5 million), and the book reveals only a single episode of antisemitism, a snide remark made by one of his political rivals in Ohio. In his Forward to the book, Jacob R. Marcus of the AmericanJewish Archives writes that," For immigrants, for Jews, the war was an Americanizing forcing house" (p. viii). Marcus Spiegel, an immigrant Jew from Germany, shared the experience of several hundred thousand other immigrant soldiers in the Union army, an experience that demonstrated their devotion to their adopted country and their increasing assimilation into American society. William 1. Burton Department of History Western Illinois University To Build a Wall: American Jews and the Separation of Church and State, by Gregg Ivers. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1995. 272 pp. $37.50. In his book, To Build a Wall, Gregg Ivers tells the story of the role played by the American Jewish Congress, the American Jewish Committee, and the Anti-Defamation League in the successful efforts to use litigation to remove Christian prayers and other religious elements from the public schools and to block public funds for private, religious schools. He tells this story in a masterful fashion. He writes in clear, engaging prose, organizes his facts well, and makes sound interpretations. The book is especially strong in relating the different approaches taken to church-state litigation by the three Jewish groups to their origins and social compositiori. The American Jewish Committee was founded in 1906 by German-Jewish settlers in the United States, who by the twentieth 162 SHOFAR Winter 1997 Vol. 15, No. 2 century were economically secure and acculturated. It tended to favor quietly using its considerable contacts with societal elites to work against continuing discrimination, fearing too much overt, public pressure would stimulate a backlash from society that would do the Jewish cause more harm than good. The Anti-Defamation League was founded in 1913, largely to combat negative stereotypes ofJews in the news and entertainment media. It was committed to influencing public opinion, education, and persuasion, and it largely had its roots in the broad Jewish middle class. The American Jewish Congress, founded in 1918, was rooted in recently arrived East European Jews. It was non-elitist in nature and committed to winning its goals by open, public confrontations with existing discrimination. It struggled with financial and organization problems until the early 1940s,but by the end ofthe 1940s had come into its own as a well organized, effective group. Ivers tells the story ofhow these three groups cooperated-and sometimes clashed-in their efforts to rid public schools of Christian religious aspects and to block public tax support for religious schools. As such it is largely. the story of the AJCongress and its legendary legal counsel, Leo Pfeffer. For it was the AJCongress that-under the leadership of Pfeffertook the lead in developing an aggressive litigation strategy. Both the AJCommittee and the ADL time and again expressed their hesitations and reservations to what the AJCongress was about, and had to be persuaded or embarrassed into supporting the more activist strategies of the AJCongress. This is an important story and Ivers tells it well. For anyone interested in the current church-state law and understanding more deeply the role played by the Jewish community in its development this book is indispensable . Ivers' interpretations also shed light on the field of public...