American Judaism: A History
(Jonathan D. Sarna)
This 350-year survey of American Jewish history informs its readers about how today's communities developed and what their prospects are. Brandeis University Professor Jonathan Sarna,who is also the chief historian of the National Museum of american Jewish history, offers a smoothly flowing study with sufficient detail to illuminate important movements and events and their consequences.
The chronicle begins with episodes familiar to many, like the unplanned arrival of the first 23 Jews in a less than warmly welcoming Dutch New Amsterdam in 1654. Fewer are aware that these South American refugees were only permitted to stay because of the intervention of influential coreligionists strategically located in the Dutch West India Company back in Holland. From this and other colonial communities, Sarna traces a continuing tension between loyalty to faith and tradition and a desire to perfect a Judaism unique to the freedom, individualism, and open spaces of the New World.
We are also given interesting accounts of now-forgotten renewal movements in the 19th and 20th centuries which sought to fight ignorance and neglected or mechanical religious practice with reinvigorated learning or focus on the Hebrew language or a Jewish homeland. Repeated efforts to forge a unified American Judaism, including those of Rabbi Isaac Mayer wise, make poignant reading.
The still-soaring revival touched off by the pre- and post-World War II transplantation from Europe of Rabbinical giants like Joseph Soloveitchik, Aharon Kotler, and the future Lubavitcher Rebbe, Menachem Schneerson, is appreciated for its impact on learning and observance along a broad spectrum. The Jewish migration to suburbia, with its attendant problems and solutions, gets a careful treatment.
Conceding that every generation has faced the question of whether its children and grandchildren would be Jewish, Sarna concludes that the Jews of America have repeatedly risen to the challenge and continued to combat assimilation with revitalization. He also tells his readers that the future is theirs to create.
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