Jews and American Public Life: Essays on American Jewish History and Politics PDF
Preview Jews and American Public Life: Essays on American Jewish History and Politics
JEWS AND AMERICAN PUBLIC LIFE Essays on American Jewish History and Politics North American Jewish Studies Series Editor Ira Robinson (Concordia University) JEWS AND AMERICAN PUBLIC LIFE Essays on American Jewish History and Politics David G. Dalin With a Foreword by Jonathan D. Sarna B O S T O N 2022 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Dalin, David G., author. Title: Jews and American public life : essays on American Jewish history and politics / David Dalin. Description: Boston : Academic Studies Press, 2022. | Series: North American Jewish studies | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2022014151 (print) | LCCN 2022014152 (ebook) | ISBN 9781644698815 (hardback) | ISBN 9781644698822 (adobe pdf) | ISBN 9781644698839 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Jews--United States--Biography. | Jews--United States--History. Classification: LCC E184.37 .A1325 2022 (print) | LCC E184.37 (ebook) | DDC 973/.04924--dc23/eng/20220506 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022014151 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022014152 ISBN 9781644698815 (hardback) ISBN 9781644698822 (adobe PDF) ISBN 9781644698839 (ePub) Copyright © 2022 Academic Studies Press All rights reserved Book design by Tatiana Vernikov Cover design by Ivan Grave Published by Academic Studies Press 1577 Beacon Street Brookline, MA 02446 USA [email protected] www.academicstudiespress.com This book is lovingly dedicated to: my daughter Simona and her husband Honi; my son Barry and his wife Belen; and my grandson, Simon Zev Contents Foreword by Jonathan D. Sarna IX Acknowledgments XI Introduction XIII Part One Presidents, Presidential Appointments, and American Jews 1. The Founding Fathers and American Jews 2 2. Presidents, Presidential Appointments, and Jews 22 3. The Appointment of Louis D. Brandeis, 46 First Jewish Justice on the Supreme Court Part Two German-Jewish Notables and American Jewish Public Life 4. Mayer Sulzberger and American Jewish Public Life 66 5. Patron Par Excellence—Mayer Sulzberger and the Early Seminary 79 6. Louis Marshall, the Jewish Vote, and the Republican Party 97 7. The Legacy of Julius Rosenwald 128 8. Cyrus Adler, Non-Zionism, and the Zionist Movement: 134 A Study in Contradictions 9. Cyrus Adler and the Rescue of Jewish Refugee Scholars 166 Part Three Church-State Relations and American Jews 10. How High the Wall? American Jews 180 and the Church-State Debate Part Four Jews and Civil Liberties 11. Jews, Nazis, and Civil Liberties 204 Part Five Jews and City Politics 12. Jewish Republicanism and City Politics: 232 The San Francisco Experience, 1911–1963 Part Six Jewish Intellectuals and Jewish Public Life 13. From Marxism to Judaism: Will Herberg in Retrospect 252 14. The Jewish Historiography of Hannah Arendt 262 Part Seven Jews, Baseball, and American Public Life 15. Hank Greenberg at 100: 278 Remembering Baseball’s Greatest Jewish Superstar 16. A Brief, Brilliant Career: Why We Can’t Forget Sandy Koufax 284 Index 288 Foreword Jonathan D. Sarna University Professor, Joseph H. & Belle R. Braun Professor of American Jewish History, Brandeis University The eminent American Reform rabbi and scholar Emil G. Hirsch of Chicago, writing an authoritative 1907 encyclopedia article on “Judaism and the Jews in the United States,” dismissed the subject of American Jewish politics in a mere nineteen words. “Politically,” he wrote “the Jews are divided. There is no solid Jewish vote. Most of the Jews have no political aspirations.”1 Hirsch’s characterization reflects a widespread taboo concerning the sub- ject of American Jewish politics that continues to the present day. In scholarly circles, the changing political behavior of American Jews has for the most part been ignored. Howard M. Sachar’s A History of the Jews in America, weighing in at more than 1000 pages, contains no index entry under politics at all! For all that American Jewish scholars passionately debate US politics, only rarely do they dispassionately study it. David G. Dalin stands out as a notable exception to this rule. In a career spanning more than forty years, he has devoted much of his scholarship to American Jewish political history and the role that Jews played in American public life. His authored and coauthored books include such titles as The Presi- dents of the United States and the Jews; Jewish Justices of the Supreme Court; and Religion and State in the American Jewish Experience. His articles range from the era of the American Revolution (“The Founding Fathers and America’s Jews”) to the political behavior of such turn-of-the-twentieth-century American Jew- ish notables as Mayer Sulzberger, Louis Marshall, Julius Rosenwald, and Cyrus Adler, to the post-World War II era and neo-conservatism. Uniquely, Dalin has taught us about Jewish Republicans. His luminous study of Jewish Republicanism and urban politics in San Francisco, 1911–1963, and his path-breaking article on “Louis Marshall, the Jewish Vote and the Re- publican Party” remind us that Jewish political behavior is far more complicated 1 Emil G. Hirsch, “Judaism and the Jews in the United States,” New American Supplement to the New Werner Twentieth-Century Edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica (Akron, OH: Werner, 1907), vol. 27, 467 [composed 1897]. X Foreword. Jonathan D. Sarna and variegated than generally imagined. Similarly, his study of “Jewish Critics of Strict Separationism” and his article on Will Herberg recall minority voices in American Jewish life that too many others have contemptuously ignored. One of Dalin’s most famous articles, originally appearing in the American Jewish Year Book, concerns a path breaking debate in 1977 over whether mem- bers of the American Nazi Party could be barred from marching in Skokie, Il- linois, a Chicago suburb where a significant community of Jewish survivors of the Holocaust resided. The politics surrounding the “Skokie Affair,” which saw the liberal American Civil Liberties Union defend America Nazis’ right to speak and march, anticipated battles over hate speech and the limits of liberalism that would come to divide Jews nationwide. “The political climate of the country is clearly changing,” Dalin presciently warned his readers. “There appears to be a growing indifference to Jewish concerns. Jews see themselves faced with new threats to their security.” As David Dalin shows in this volume, which brings together sixteen of his most significant articles, the history of Jews and American politics is an illumi- nating field, replete with insights both for scholars and for practitioners. Rather than ignoring the political dimension of American Jewish life and pretending that “Jews have no political aspirations,” as so many have for so long, one hopes that a future generation will walk in Professor Dalin’s footsteps and bring the study of “Jews and American Public Life” into the scholarly forefront.
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