When Did the Liberalism of American Jews Emerge?

Abstract

The liberalism of American Jews is typically traced to one of three contexts: the political realignment of the 1930s and Roosevelt's New Deal; political ideas in western Europe that Jewish immigrants brought with them in the early to mid—nineteenth century, which were then ‘triggered’ in the 1930s; or the socialist and communitarian subculture of the eastern European Jewish immigrants in the decades leading up to the New Deal. This article challenges each of these interpretations, and argues that key sentiments of what today we call a liberal orientation may be discerned among a significant part of American Jewry throughout the nineteenth century.