314 American Jewish Archives

Review Essay The United States and Israel: New

Views on the Earlv Years Michael J. Cohen

Gal, Allon. David Ben-Gurion and the American Alignment for a Jewish State. Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1991. 217 pp.

Evensen, Bruce J. Truman, Palestine, and the Press: Shaping Conventional Wisdom at the Beginning of the Cold War. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1992.183 pp.

Alteras, Isaac. Eisenhower and Israel: US.-Israeli Relations, 1953-1960. Gainesville: University Press of Florida,

1993.319 PP.

The three books under review here focus on the role played by the United States in the early history of the State of Israel. They try to analyze and define the following issues: When did the United States replace Britain as the central pillar of outside support for the Zionists? What factors influenced the Truman administration to support the establishment of Israel? And lastly, was the Eisenhower administration's policy toward Israel a regression from Truman's, or did it succeed in its self-proclaimed goal of maintaining an even-handed "friendly impartiality"?

Dr. Allon Gal's David Ben-Gurion and the American Alignment for a Jewish State is an expanded English edition of the Hebrew ver- sion, which appeared in 1985. (The "expansion" consists of a few cursory comments on the making of the 1947 United Nations Partition Resolution.)

Gal's book focuses primarily on the years 1938-1942, and is molded around the thesis that it was during this period that Ben- Gurion took the vital steps to align American Zionism, and Jewry, to a new Zionist platform, the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine after the war. Gal claims that Ben-Gurion's campaign,

which began with the Munich "sell-out" in September 1938, and culminated with the Biltmore Resolution in May 1942, proved crit- ical to the eventual foundation of the state in 1947-1948.

Gal focuses on Ben-Gurion's activities to mobilize American Jewry, and through them, the Roosevelt administration, against the prewar tendency of the British government to appease the Arabs. But Gal himself notes, repeatedly, that Ben-Gurion's efforts were largely in vain. The power of the American Zionist Organization (ZOA) to influence the administration during World War I1 was very limited (cf. Feingold, Wyman). And its inclination to do so even less. American Jews feared an anti-Semitic backlash, lest they be accused of involving the United States in the war, or of embarrassing the British in their fight against the Nazis.

Further, as Gal notes, during the war the Zionists were but a minute fraction of American Jewry. ZOA membership rose between 1933 and 1939 from 9,000 to 43,000 (in 1940, Hadassah numbered 74,000). This may have represented a nearly fivefold increase, but it was still insignificant nationally.

It was not until after the war, when the stark atrocities of the Holocaust were revealed in movie newsreels, that American Jewry mobilized in significant numbers to the cause of the remnant DPs. And even then, like their President, the masses of American Jewry favored resettling Jewish DPs in Palestine, but without necessarily setting up a Jewish state there.

Gal's book, which takes us into Ben-Gurion's own deterministic world, through extensive quotations from his diary and corre- spondence, reveals how often the Zionist leader misread and mis- judged the intentions of the British and American govenunents. But Gal does not always point this out by placing Ben-Gurion's conclusions in their historical context, as revealed in recent research works.

In October 1938, Ben-Gurion noted in his diary and wrote to friends and to the Jewish Agency Executive that for the present, two dangers had passed-"(a) the halting of aliyah . . . ; (b) the establishment of an Arab state." Ben-Gurion attributed this, among other factors, to pressure from the American Zionist lobby. Of course, Ben-Gurion was totally wrong on all counts. At the very time of Ben-Gurion's writing, the British Colonial Office was

316 American Jewish Archives

working on draft proposals for ending aliyah and for the estab- lishment of an independent Palestinian state. When these propos- als, in the form of the 1939 White Paper, were brought before the British cabinet, Prime Minister Chamberlain determined that if it was necessary to choose between offending the Americans and offending the Arabs, they would have to risk the former.

In January 1939, on the eve of the St. James Round Table Conference, Ben-Gurion still believed that pressure from American Jewry would keep the British government in line. He visited the United States in order to obtain a mandate to wield against the British government. But inevitably he ran into the opposition of Western Zionist leaders who had worked closely with the estab- lishment, Weizmann in England, and Stephen Wise in the United States; and of the American Jewish establishment, represented by the American Jewish Committee.

Ben-Gurion was rebuffed, and failed in his efforts to organize a conference that would have issued a public warning to the British government. Jewish leaders maintained that the American people, and its government, would not support any sanctions against the single nation that was standing up against Nazism. The Roosevelt administration was unwilling to take any step that might prejudice Britain's military position while the Americans themselves remained neutral. Ben-Gurion is reported as chiding Wise: "You are Jews who look out only for your own skins" (p. 50). Dov Joseph, a South African-born member of the Jewish Agency Executive, expressed more empathy for Wise's stand; the latter could not give up the goal of Anglo-American cooperation against Fascism, even for Zionist interests (p. 52).

Gal entitles his third chapter "Confronting the St. James Conference and the White Paper." Yet he fails to produce evidence of any confrontation staged by American Jewry. Solomon Goldman, president of ZOA, visited Palestine in July 1939, and made it quite clear that no American Jew would support anti- British demonstrations. Judge Louis Brandeis, who Gal claims was cultivated assiduously by Ben-Gurion throughout the 1930s~ joined Wise in warning against any attempt to incite against the British government. In 1939, even Rabbi Abba Hillel Silver, the

Review Essay 317

future Zionist militant, refused to strike an anti-British note, and opposed a campaign of illegal immigration.

Given Gal's concern with the influence of American Jewry, it is ironic that he fails to note the mini-crisis stirred up by Churchill inside the British cabinet in December 1939. This followed warn- ings from the British ambassador in Washington about protests by American Zionists against the White Paper (the government had suspended aliyah for six months, and was about to promulgate the White Paper's Land Regulations). On Christmas Day, 1939, Churchill penned a memorandum for the cabinet in which he reminded his colleagues that it had not been for "light or senti- mental reasons" that Britain had issued the Balfour Declaration in 1917. It had been in order to win over the support of American Jewry; and now in 1939, with the United States still neutral, that support was needed again, no less than it had been in 1917. (The incident provides a good example at least of the exaggerated views held by Churchill about the influence of American Jewry. Of course, Churchill did not manage to persuade the Chamberlain cabinet to delay the issue of the Land Regulations.)'

In September 1940' Ben-Gurion visited the States again, to launch "an overall effort to broaden Zionism's base through real- izing the political potential, of American Jewry" (p. 103). In December 1940, following the Patvia disaster and the expulsion of a further batch of illegal immigrants, Ben-Gurion tried to persuade a meeting of Zionist leaders to protest in public against Britain's immigration policy-but failed.

He also raised before American Zionists the demand for the establishment in Palestine of a Jewish Commonwealth after the war (significantly, the word "state" had been exchanged for "Commonwealth"). The January 1941 issue of New Palestine, a leading American Zionist journal, reprinted his speech almost without editing. Abba Hillel Silver supported Ben-Gurion, but the veteran Zionist leader Stephen Wise and Hadassah still insisted that nothing be done during the war to embarrass Britain. Furthermore, in 1941 Ben-Gurion ran into widespread opposition within the Yishuv. The Jewish Agency Executive in Jerusalem refused to endorse his demand. Many feared, justifiably enough,

318 American Jewish Archives

that the demand for a Jewish state in all of western Palestine would lead in fact to partition.

Gal claims that the first breakthrough came in November 1941, when Ben-Gurion and Silver convinced Hadassah, at its annual convention, to endorse the Jewish Commonwealth idea. (This was some achievement, as Ben-Gurion did not arrive in the States until after the close of the convention.)

Gal indicts Weizmann for limiting his range of action "by his sin- gle-minded attachment to Great Britain" (p. 64). In this, Gal echoes the contemporary criticisms of Ben-Gurion and other Palestinian Zionists. But Gal fails to complete the picture, and does not recall the numerous times that the Zionist leadership continued to call upon Weizmann's unique diplomatic services, both at Whitehall and at the White House. Furthermore, as Gal informs us, Ben- Gurion himself came to appreciate that American Jewry, including the Zionists, was paralyzed by fears of anti-Semitism (p. 69).

Gal lays much emphasis on the Biltrnore Resolution of May 1942. He gives Ben-Gurion and Silver the major credit, and depicts Weizmann as reticent, urging the Biltmore delegates not to despair of Britain. But Gal fails to note that in an article published the pre- vious January in Foreign Afairs, Weizmann had been the first to state in an international forum that a Jewish state would have to be part of the new world order after the war. Neither does Gal attempt to explain the internal inconsistencies in the Biltrnore Resolution-why was it necessary to request Jewish Agency control over immigration, when full sovereignty in a Jewish Commonwealth was being demanded?

Gal states that the Biltrnore Platform guided the Zionist move- ment until the establishment of Israel in 1948 (p. 204). This is patently wrong. It is to be doubted whether the Biltmore Resolution served any purpose other than as a political rallying point during the war. In August 1946, after the failure of the Meri Ivri (Hebrew Revolt), the Jewish Agency Executive abandoned the resolution in favor of a return to partition.

Gal runs into some trouble when he strays out of his familiar milieu, that of Yishuv internal politics, and into that of the Truman presidency. President Truman did not, from 1946 to 1947, "gradu-

Review Essay 319

ally became attuned to the position of supporting a Jewish State in a part of Palestine" (p. 206). By the summer of 1946, Truman was threatening the Zionists that he would "wash his hands" of them, and was refusing them entry into the White House. Truman's atti- tude has been aptly termed "refugee Zionism"'-the finding of a refuge in Palestine for the Jewish DPs, but not necessarily within the frame of a Jewish state. The idea of a Jewish state based on race and religion was, and remained, anathema to Truman. Nor did the American delegation to the United Nations solicit votes for parti- tion during the fall of 1947 (p. 206). Their failure to do so was so noticeable that the Zionists even complained about it at the time to the State Department.

Ben-Gurion's activity in the United States was indeed a crucial factor in the struggle for a Jewish state. But Gal, who leans heavi- ly on the Ben-Gurion archives, at times makes the facts suit his pre- conceived thesis. To state that the American recognition of Israel in 1948 and American aid "resulted in large degree from the political strategy and activity of Ben-Gurion during the decade 1938-48" (p. 207) is wildly off the mark.

Ben-Gurion is the hero-figure of Gal's book, and Weizmann is left in his long shadow. But had anyone asked Truman in 1948 whom he regarded as Zionism's leader, and who of the Zionist leaders had had the most influence upon him, Truman would undoubtedly have replied, without hesitation, Chaim Weizmann.

It is to be doubted whether American Zionist protests against British policies in Palestine produced any substantial results dur- ing the war either for the Zionist cause or for the rescue of European Jewry. American Jewry openly supported the establish- ment of a Jewish state in Palestine only after the American gov- ernment announced its support at the United Nations in October 1947. American Zionism came into its own under Silver's dynam- ic leadership only after the war. This reviewer doubts whether Ben-Gurion had much to do with the new tack adopted by Silver; Gal certainly does not attempt to claim or prove it.

One final "technical" comment. The index here is of little prac- tical use. Major items are given mass page listings with no sub- headings (e.g., there are over 200 page numbers for the United

320 American Jewish Archives

States, over 160 for Great Britain, over 70 on Weizmann, etc. etc.). Bruce Evensen, a self-confessed "journalist historian" (p. 71),

claims to have found the key to Truman's muddled Palestine poli- cy, one that has so far eluded the myriad of historians who have already tackled this issue. The key, Evensen argues in Truman, Palestine, and the Press, was the influence of the American media, principally the New York Times. In an article published prior to this book, he maintained that the New York Times acted in 1948 as "a surrogate State Department on Pale~tine."~ According to Evensen, the media not only reported and commented upon, but were even permitted "to subtly reshape, the events it covered" (pp. 14, 182; emphasis added).

In partial support of his thesis, Evensen cites a press conference at which Truman claimed he read at least twelve newspapers each day (pp. 10-11). However, even if Truman is to be believed, there is no evidence on which columns or issues he read, much less about how much, or in which direction, they influenced him. Whatever the case, while a presidential press conference undoubt- edly reflects what a President wishes to tell the public, that is not always identical to the objective truth.

Evensen bases his own research and conclusions primarily on press and radio reports. Most of the standard research works (Adler, Amitzur, Bauer, Bethell, Cohen, Donovan, Ganin, Grose, Hurewitz, Snetsinger) appear in his bibliography, but their con- tents are scarcely reflected in his text or footnotes.

Evensen's book all but transforms the media into an historical factor in their own right-the central arena in which the Zionist issue was determined-rather than a mirror of, or at most an influ- ence upon, events. In respect to the Cold War, Evensen appears to be alleging that the Truman administration was concerned less about the steps it believed it needed to take to defend American interests than about how good a press its policies received. (Not mentioned by Evensen is the obvious fact that the media are never privy to all the information and sources that guide any adminis- tration's decision-making.)

According to Evensen, the media become the major player in Britain's demise in Palestine: "British bungling in Palestine and

Review Essay 321

within the halls of the U.N. General Assembly was exceeded by their complete failure to win the public relations war on Palestine" (p. 37). This claim rests primarily on the Exodus episode (for which Evensen himself relies largely on press reports, especially from the New York Times, rather than on government records or secondary sources). The episode "drew heavy press criticism on both sides of the Atlantic and created a month's worth of headlines and pictures that well served Zionist propaganda" (p. 82).

Evensen blames Foreign Minister Bevin (whose policy is put down to personal spite) for ignoring his "middle level advisors who accurately predicted how the international news media would play the story. . . . Bevin did not grasp the power of the press to transform the events it covered" (p. 72, emphasis added).

But on the very same page, Evensen concedes that the most sig- nificant event was that members of LTNSCOP (brought to Haifa by Abba Eban) witnessed the deportation of the Exodus with its cargo of 4,500 Jewish refugees. UNSCOP went on to decide, unanimous- ly, that the British mandate had to be terminated, and by a majori- ty, that Palestine should be partitioned into Jewish and Arab states.

At this point, Evensen alludes to a Zionist-conspiracy theory. UNSCOP, influenced by Zionist manipulation of the Exodus episode, "gave legitimacy to a separate Jewish state in Palestine . . . a legitimacy Zionists would exploit all the way to their declara- tion of Israeli independence in May, 1948" (p. 72). The inference, of course, is that had it not been for British blunders and mishandling of public relations, the Zionist claim to a Jewish state would not have won legitimacy.

According to Evensen, Britain's referral of the Palestine question to the United Nations in February 1947 enabled American Zionists and the State Department "to exploit rising war jitters as they competed with one another in the mass media to create a new con- ventional wisdom on Palestine" (p. 23). (Evensen gives the erro- neous impression that the Cold War began only in 1947.) After the passage of the November 1947 Partition Resolution, the American media became "the strategic site where this [propaganda] war was waged and the media itself became a contested prize in the com- petition" (p. 99).

322 American Jewish Archives

Evensen claims that the Exodus episode also had a seminal influ- ence upon Truman personally. The Zionists' successful manage- ment of it in the media "made it far easier for Truman to trust his personal and political instincts and override the State Department to endorse the creation of a Jewish State in Palestine" (p. 92).

According to Evensen, the U.N. partition vote reflected Zionist success in mobilizing public opinion, following the Holocaust, to a solution of the Palestine problem that would "include a resolution of the displaced persons problem" (p. 118). Evensen barely notes that notwithstanding public and U.N. sympathy for the DPs, the U.N. committee vote on November 25 in fact failed to secure the required two-thirds majority. The significance of the Zionist lobby in turning the issue, and procuring the extra votes during the four days prior to the vote, goes unnoticed.

Perhaps Truman's most significant decision was his impulsive recognition (within eleven minutes of its declaration of indepen- dence) of the new State of Israel, in May 1948. Once again, the media are the major player in Evensen's scenario. According to him, the process leading to recognition began on March 19,1948, when Truman "lost control of his Palestine policy . . . because he could not contain the press reaction to his decision to indefinitely postpone partition in favor of a U.N. trusteeship over Palestine" (emphasis added). The press fostered the impression that Truman's reversal was a Munich-type stab in the back, not only of the Zionists, but of the highly regarded United Nations. The result, Evensen claims, was that "the media helped to focus public indig- nation on the President and helped to create the political climate within which he abruptly recognized . . . Israel" (p. 152).

There can be little doubt that Truman was upset by the public furor aroused by the trusteeship volte-face in March 1948. However, it is a long step from this to a claim that the press reaction was the key factor in Truman's next major decision.

If Truman did fear negative public opinion, it was connected more with the upcoming presidential elections (at which he stood to lose the Jewish vote and the bankrolling of his election cam- paign) than with the status of the United Nations, as claimed by Evensen. Truman's recognition, albeit a return to supporting a

Review Essay 323

U.N. Resolution, was granted in such a bizarre fashion (taken without even notifying his own U.N. delegation) that it in fact dealt a severe blow to the morale of the United Nations (the Cuban delegate had to be constrained physically, to prevent him from pulling his country out of the U.N.).

Moreover, over and above domestic political considerations, Truman's recognition was also a pragmatic recognition of a new reality. It recognized the failure of the State Department's trustee- ship proposal to win any support at the U.N., and the fact that since April, the Yishuv had effectively carved out its state by mili- tary force. Early American recognition, claimed Clark Clifford, would also preempt the Soviets. Ordinary historians may regard it as a somewhat myopic, single-dimensional work, whose central thesis fails to bear the weight imposed upon it.

The heart of Eisenhower and Israel by Isaac Alteras is the Suez cri- sis (Sinai War) of 1956. Of course, the story has been told already in many books (Ambrose, Bar-Zohar, Beecher, Dayan, Divine, Hahn, James, Spiegel, etc.) upon which Alteras relies heavily. Curiously, many of his accounts of talks between Israeli and State Department officials are based primarily on Israeli documents, as is the protocol of Secretary of State John Foster Dulles's visit to Israel in 1953.

In his opening chapter, Alteras reminds us that Eisenhower's predecessor, Harry Truman, did not in fact adopt a uniformly favorable policy to Israel. Truman approved the arms embargo imposed on the Middle East in December 1947; he held up the first $100 million loan to Israel; he severely criticized Israel's policy of refusing to accept back Palestinian Arab refugees and its inflexibil- ity in peace talks with the Arab states.

Nonetheless, Truman left office with a reputation for having "pandered to the Zionists and Israel due to their domestic lobby. Eisenhower and Dulles, who took office in January 1953, were deter- mined to break away from the Truman tradition, while yet retaining the U.S. moral commitment to Israel's right to exist as a state.

Some of the reasons for Eisenhower's change of tack have already been recorded. Unlike Truman, he had no close Jewish advisers with any input into foreign affairs. Most of the Zionists'

324 American Jewish Archives

well-placed connections had been with Democrats, and 75 percent of American Jewry had voted Democrat in 1952. SO President Eisenhower took office free of any "debts" to the Jews. Another factor, not mentioned by Alteras, was the fact that the Republican Party enjoyed close ties with big business. Eisenhower did not face the same problems that Democrat Tmman had in 1948 in financing his election campaign.

Alteras adopts some of the insights of Abba Eban, Israel's ambassador to the United Nations during the Eisenhower admin- istration. Eban noted that Eisenhower, having a military back- ground, preferred to rely on staff work (in some contrast to Truman's notorious tiffs with the "striped-pants boys" at Foggy Bottom). However, as Alteras notes, Eisenhower was also very much in personal control, contrary to the initial versions put about concerning Dulles's monopoly over foreign affairs.

Also mentioned by Alteras, albeit briefly, are American strategic interests in the Middle East, a key issue for a President whose last job had been as supreme commander of NATO. In that capacity, Eisenhower had been involved closely in Allied contingency plan- ning for World War I11 against the Soviets. In his election campaign in 1952, Eisenhower had refused any commitment to include Israel in regional defence plans (p. 33). In the Middle East, the Arab- Israel dispute prevented the coordination of Allied theater plans. Specifically, Egypt refused to cooperate with the Allies in setting up a Middle East Command (which would have taken over the British base in Egypt). Thus, for the military Israel constituted an obstacle to relations with the Arab world (Eban tried in vain to counter this argument with an offer that Israel could field eight divisions and provide strategic airfields; p. 43).

Eisenhower's "new look," its so-called "even-handed" policy, in fact tilted toward the Arabs. Eisenhower and Dulles regarded Egypt as the key to keeping the Arabs in the Western camp. Any special privileges for Israel might alienate the Egyptians and inhib- it them from entering a pro-Western Middle Eastern defense pact (MEDO) (p. 38). The Eisenhower administration labored under this delusion until the aftermath of the Suez crisis. Only when Nasser responded to Eisenhower's sanctions against France,

Review Essay 325

Britain, and Israel by continuing Egypt's anti-Western alignment did Eisenhower come to appreciate his misjudgment. In his mem- oirs, he would express regret and contrition for his actions in 1956.

The years leading up to the Suez crisis were a period of increas- ing insecurity for Israel. The Anglo-Egyptian agreement of 1954 finally brought British evacuation from Egypt, but with no guar- antees of Israel's right to navigation through the Suez Canal, and no right of British reentry in the event of a war between Israel and Egypt. The American-initiated and -sponsored Baghdad Pact (1955). a successor-substitute for the Egyptian-based MEDO, increased Israel's sense of isolation. In the meantime, an Anglo- American initiative for an Israeli-Egyptian peace settlement, the so-called "Alpha" project, threatened to force Israel to give up large sections of the Negev. As relations between Israel and Egypt deteriorated, with fedayeen raids followed by Israeli reprisals, the Americans tried to buy over Nasser into the Western camp with a tempting arms deal.

But Nasser's intransigence was Israel's salvation. He became one of the leaders of the Third World "neutralist" camp, and incit- ed against pro-Western Arab monarchies and the Baghdad Pact. He insisted on receiving the entire Negev in return for peace with Israel (Alpha would have carved out Transjordanian and Egyptian triangles that would have been as ridiculous as the 1947 U.N. par- tition borders); he refused to accept any American control or mon- itoring of the arms offered him. When the United States made any arms deal contingent upon making peace with Israel (on the basis of Alpha), Nasser turned to the Soviet Union.

At the end of September 1955, Nasser announced a massive arms deal with Czechoslovakia. Some historians (though apparently not Alteras) have come to see the Czech deal (for Soviet arms) as the turning point that led to the 1956 war. Nasser had finally thrown in his lot with the Soviets. The Israelis feared that the new arms, espe- cially the jet aircraft, would give the Egyptians a distinct military edge. They drew the conclusion that they would have to fight Egypt before its army had the time to absorb the new weapons.

The thirteen months after the Czech arms deal saw an American race to avert war before Nasser's army was ready to attack Israel.

326 American Jewish Archives

The Americans believed that Nasser's move toward the Soviets was due to the continuing Arab-Israeli conflict. They tried to secure a negotiated settlement on the basis of Alpha, and rebuffed Israeli warnings about Egyptian military superiority. The Americans believed that any overt support of Israel (such as arms sales) would only push Nasser yet further into the Soviet camp.

Israel found a willing ally and arms supplier in the French. The latter had their own account to settle with Nasser, who was inciting and arming the FLN against them in Algeria. In the meantime, Nasser played the Americans along. He entertained American negotiators and negotiated for a Western loan to build his high dam at Aswan, all the while gaining time to absorb his new weapons.

The rest of the story is familiar already-domestic U.S. opposi- tion to the Aswan loan; the failure of the Anderson secret missions to sell the Alpha plan, followed by U.S. cancellation of the Aswan loan; American agreement to French and Canadian arms sales to Israel; Nasser's turn to the Soviets for the loan, and his reprisal nationalization of the Suez Canal; the failure of diplomatic attempts to resolve the Canal problem, the Anglo-French-Israeli collusion, the Suez crisis and Sinai war; Soviet and American warnings, and the colluders' withdrawal from Egypt and Sinai.

Alteras adds little here to the already-voluminous literature on the subject. (On the English side, there are solid works by Carlton, Kyle, and Robert Rhodes James; on the American side, by Divine and Ambrose; and several printed records of historical confer- ences. Most appear in Alteras's bibliography, but do not figure sig- nificantly in his footnotes.) Alteras relies largely on secondary sources for some sections; that on collusion, for example, is based almost exclusively on Israeli sources-in particular, Ben-Gurion's and Dayan's diaries, and the Bar-Zohar biography of Ben-Gurion.

A key question posed by the Suez episode (and one to which Alteras does not devote much attention) is whether the Suez oper- ation in fact took Eisenhower completely by surprise.

CIA Chief Allen Ddes claimed later that Eisenhower had been "technically correct" in claiming surprise because he had not been given diplomatic notification. American intelligence had spotted the Israeli mobilization against Egypt and the presence in Israel of an "air

Review Essay 327

umbrella" of French MystGres. Hugh Thomas of the British Foreign Office claimed later that U.S. Arrny intelligence had broken the French diplomatic code and had read much sensitive information.

The Israelis, with increased military activity on their eastern front, and a heavy reprisal raid against Jordan in mid-October 1956, succeeding in duping both Eisenhower and Nasser into believing that they were preoccupied with Jordan. Both Eisenhower and the British in fact warned Israel against attacking Jordan!

In the early summer of 1956, certain circles within the adminis- tration, including the Joint Chiefs and John Foster Dulles, had favored toppling Nasser by force. In a recent book (which appears in Alteras's bibliography) Peter Hahn suggests that Dulles would have preferred a decisive war to topple Nasser to the bumbling, indecisive operation that eventually took place.4 But Eisenhower insisted on resolving the crisis via the United Nations, on the basis of international law.

If Eisenhower knew in advance about the Suez conspiracy, why didn't he try to do something about it? Stephen Ambrose has sug- gested that Eisenhower was taken by surprise by the timing of the initial invasion. Others claim that he did not want to accuse his allies of lying to him. Donald Neff and Andrew Tully claim that he had calculated that the British and the French would not be dis- suaded from the use of force until the operation itself aroused world opinion against them.

Eisenhower's fury is to be understood perhaps on other counts also. He suspected that the Israelis had timed their attack on the eve of the presidential elections, in the hope that he would not dare condemn them and thus risk losing the Jewish vote. (Alteras points out that Ike's condemnation of the operation in 1956 actual- ly helped him in the presidential election. The general public had great confidence in his military judgment and feared another Korean War, even World War 111.) In November 1956, Eisenhower may not have allowed the Zionist lobby to force his hand. However, at the end of the year, and into 1957, lobby pressure on Congress did prevent him from imposing sanctions on Israel for refusing an unconditional withdrawal from Sinai. (One might also

328 American Jewish Archives

recall that in December 1948, in the closing stages of the first Arab- Israeli war, Truman's emissary to Israel, James MacDonald, deliv- ered an ultimatum to Ben-Gurion to withdraw from Sinai. Ben- Gurion complied immediately!)

Eisenhower was also personally offended by Anglo-French diplomatic disingenuousness. Their ultimatum to Egypt and Israel to withdraw ten miles from the Suez Canal was perceived immedi- ately as an insultingly transparent pretext for attacking Egypt. (The one-sided ultimatum ordered Egypt to withdraw within her own sovereign territory, while leaving Israel ten miles from the Canal.)

But perhaps at bottom lay Eisenhower's long military acquain- tance with the Anglo-Egyptian conflict. In the late 1940s~ Eisenhower had already warned the British against trying to main- tain their position in Egypt by force in the face of local nationalism. By 1956, he was sufficiently prescient to appreciate what Prime Minister Eden and French Premier Mollet apparently did not-that the days of imperialist gunboat diplomacy were over. Even if they had managed to topple Nasser, no Western puppet successor could have lasted long against the forces of Egyptian nationalism. Eisenhower was furious at the myopia of his allies. The imperial- ist collusion and the invasion of Egypt deprived the West of any moral high ground, and set back their cause in the Middle East. All this at the very time when Soviet repressions in Poland and Hungary might have been exploited to mobilize Third World sup- port for the West.

Alteras insists that Eisenhower's hard-line approach to Israel during and after the Suez crisis "should not be seen as a deliberate anti-Israel policy" but rather as "a rare case in modern history, where moral principles overrode strategic interests" (p. 317). At best, this is a debatable point. Surely Eisenhower was concerned as much about Western, particularly American, strategic interests in the Middle East, which still focused on Egypt.

Alteras's short final chapter, entitled "From Confrontation to Cooperation," deals with the rapprochement between Israel and the United States that marked Eisenhower's second term. This was due to Eisenhower's final disillusionment with Nasser, when the latter "thanked" the United States for saving him by continuing,

Review Essay 329

with Soviet support, to undermine Western interests in the region. In 1957, Alteras claims, "With Israel's encouragement," the

United States engineered an abortive coup against Syria, aided by Turkey, Iraq, and Jordan (p. 307; Alteras relies for this episode sole- ly on two Israeli books!).

The events of 1958-the outbreak of civil war in Lebanon; the murder of the royal family and Nuri Said in Iraq, and with it, the collapse of the Baghdad Pact; and the threat to King Hussein's regime in Jordan-seemed to presage the collapse of the Western position in the Middle East, and the ascendancy of the Soviets. In the light of these dramatic events, Israel's value as a pro-Westem bastion rose to a premium.

Alteras informs us that "Israel spearheaded a movement" to set up a Middle East "periphery alliance." Turkey, Iran, and Ethiopia were "linked to Israel in an unofficial alliance." According to Alteras, all these states eventually collaborated with the United States to foil Nasserist and Soviet designs in the Middle East (p. 38)! These statements are based solely on Israeli sources (two doc- uments from the Israel state archives, and the Bar-Zohar biogra- phy, published in 1977).

Ben-Gurion asked the Eisenhower administration for "political, financial, and moral support" for the countries of "the periphery alliance." Eisenhower reassured Ben-Gurion of his concern for the integrity and independence of the nations of the Middle East, including Israel, and Dulles wrote of his "full support of the idea of the peripheral pact" (pp. 310-311). But little of substance appar- ently emerged from this exchange.

Ben-Gurion did make a secret visit to Turkey, where agreements on intelligence collaboration were concluded. Israel also trained Ethiopian security and intelligence forces. The United States even sold Israel 1,ooo recoilless guns and electronic equipment, and secret- ly financed Israeli purchases of British tanks. But all this is far from being a "consummation" of a U.S.-backed "peripheral alliance."

The "warming7' in relations was crowned by a visit by Ben- Gurion to the White House in March 1960, which Alteras describes as a "triumph for Ben-Gurion. But the President would not agree to Israel's request for a bilateral pact, nor openly supply heavy

330 American Jewish Archives

weapons, especially Hawk surface-to-air defensive missiles. (That would be left to Eisenhower's Democrat successor, John F. Kennedy)

Alteras is mistaken on one small, albeit significant detail. He states that the Allied Middle Eastern Command, established in 1951, was supposed to lead to an Allied-Turkish-Arab Middle East Defense Pact (p. 304). In fact the project never got off the ground. It was because the Arabs, particularly Egypt, refused to link them- selves strategically with the West, that by the late I ~ ~ O S , even the Eisenhower administration began to look more benignly on Israel.

This reviewer finds some difficulty in concurring with Alteras's conclusion that the Eisenhower administration's "friendly impar- tiality" did not reduce the American commitment "to the existence and survival of the state of Israel" (p. 315). Alteras maintains that "Neither Eisenhower nor Dulles ever tried to impose any solutions that would endanger Israel." The single difference that Alteras perceives between the two administrations was an absence during Eisenhower's time in office of "the public demonstration of sym- pathy, warmth, and support that Truman exhibited toward Israel." It was a difference "more in tone than in substance" (p. 316).

It is to be doubted that Ben-Gurion, were he still alive, would agree with Dr. Alteras. Eisenhower's first priority was to organize Western defense interests in the Middle East around Egypt. In that context, Eisenhower and Ben-Gurion had differing views of Israel's minimum security requirements. Had Nasser "played ball" on American terms, he could have had large quantities of American (instead of Soviet) arms-that were consistently denied Israel. And Israel would have been pressed to make a settlement that would have required painful territorial sacrifices. Ben-Gurion would have regarded the cession of any part of the Negev as a dis- tinct threat to Israel's "existence and survival."

True, as Alteras reminds us, "the Truman years had not been devoid of friction and pressures on Israel regarding basic ques- tions" (p. 315). But there were significant differences. The prob- lems that Truman faced in the Middle East-the establishment of Israel, and the shock-waves that it engendered-were quite differ- ent from those which faced Eisenhower. A key factor in Truman's

Review Essay 331

policies in 1948 was to prevent the Cold War from spreading to the Middle East. In 1948, the Truman White House feared that the war in Palestine might engulf the entire Middle East. In 1948, a reason- able case could be made that swift American recognition of Israel would bring some stability to the region and preempt Soviet influ- ence over the new Jewish state.

By 1953, the Western allies' position in the Middle East was col- lapsing, and, following the British demise in Egypt, the Americans had to step in with inducements to keep the Egyptians within the Western orbit.

Paradoxically, the Eisenhower administration believed that the very same American interest-keeping the Soviets out of the Middle East-now required the appeasement of the Arabs, espe- cially Egypt, even if at the expense of Israel.

Truman had disowned drastic moves by his State Department when confronted with domestic pressures. In contrast, Eisenhower never squabbled with, nor disowned, his State Department. Israeli interests were protected not by the Eisenhower administration but by Nasser, who refused to swallow the bait the Americans dangled before him.

Alteras has produced a well-written diplomatic survey. The ground he traverses has been well broken before him.

In conclusion, it may be stated that the field of Israel's relations with the United States is a complex labyrinth, where idealism, ide- ology and realpolitik all intermingle, at times inextricably No sin- gle element in this puzzle will in itself produce a comprehensive understanding of the full picture. At the risk of repeating a truism, might I suggest that the historian of this field would do well to examine fully the wider material and strategic interests involved.

-Michael J. Cohen

Michael J. Cohen is a professor in the department of history at Bar-Ilan University, Ramat-Gan, Israel. Among his best-known books are Churchill and the Jews and Truman and Israel.

Notes I. Cf. Michael J. Cohen, Churchill and the Jews (London: Frank Cass, 1985). 2. Phillip Baram, The Department of State in the Middle East, 1919-1945 (Philadelphia:

University of Pennsylvania Press, 1978), p. 296; Michael J. Cohen, Truman and Israel

332 American Jewish Archives (Berkeley: University of California Press, iggo), chaps. 7-8.

3. Jerusalem Quarterly 67 (iggo). 4. Peter L. Hahn, The United States, Great Britain, and Egypt, 1945-1956 (Chapel Hill:

University of North Carolina Press, 1991), p. 237.

Book Reviews

Levine, Robert M. Tropical Diaspora: The Jewish Experience in Cuba. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1993. xvii, 398 pp.

The Latin American Jewish diaspora least known to us, paradoxi- cally, is the one that is geographically closest. A forty-five-minute flight from Miami is enough to put us in contact with Cuban Jews, now that travel restrictions have been eased by the U.S. Treasury Department. But more than distance stands between us and them, for they have lived an original historical experience that differs greatly from the experience of Jews in either North or South America. Furthermore, given the repression of religious practice over the past thirty years and the resultant atrophy of Jewish insti- tutions, how Jewish can they be? Robert Levine does not address these issues, for his narrative ends with the coming of the Revolution. But by providing us with a first-class history of the Jewish experience in Cuba from 1898 until the I ~ ~ O S , he offers us the means for understanding the peculiar dilemma of contempo- rary ~ u b a n s who identify as Jews.

Cuba remained a Spanish possession far longer than any of the other Latin American republics-until 1898 and the end of the so- called Spanish-American War, which was really one episode in the ongoing struggle of Cubans for their independence. The island did not become a home for Jews until the United States assumed the suzerainty it had wrested from the Spanish. The earliest Jewish set- tlers included men who had served in the American armed forces or the occupation that followed, and who subsequently settled on the island. These Americans (many of them fairly recent immi- grants from Romania) were joined by Sephardim from Turkey and the lands bordering the Mediterranean, including North Africa. (Interestingly, Cuba received more immigrants from Turkey than did any other Latin American nation, and most of these were Jews.) Ashkenazim came mostly from Eastern Europe, and many brought with them the expectation of moving on to the United States, an option that was in fact foreclosed to them from 1924 until

334 American Jewish Archives

1960. Differing from one another in language, customs, and reli- gious ritual, the two major groups, as well as their numerous eth- nic subgroups, organized themselves into separate institutions which maintained at best an uneasy truce. Time never allowed these ethnic groups to coalesce into a united community; that process would have taken more than the sixty-two years allotted by fate to the "Jewish experience in Cuba."

Utilizing a wide range of published and unpublished sources as well as extensive interviews and photographs, Levine distinguish- es the variety of ethnic strands among the Jewish immigrants and analyzes the ways in which they adapted to what was for them an exotic society. Language, social customs, political style, all had to be learned. Many of the immigrants had arrived impoverished and were either unskilled, or skilled in crafts for which there was no source of employment on the island. Nevertheless, so abundant were the economic opportunities in commerce and manufacturing that by 1959, on the eve of the Revolution, most Cuban Jews had attained middle-class status.

Cuba is the one Latin American nation of which it can be said that anti-Semitism never took root there. One could speculate that this is due to the fact that Cubans share with Jews a long history of animosity toward Spain, and therefore were unwilling or uninter- ested in adopting inquisitorial legislation and customs. But the involvement of Jewish immigrants in capitalist enterprises sealed their fate once the revolutionary government determined upon a socialist path. Those Jews who chose to remain on the island did so either for family reasons or because they were motivated by social- ist/communist ideals which overrode their attachment to private property. Fewer than one-tenth of the pre-Revolution population of 12,o~o chose to stick with the Revolution.

For the reader who approaches the book with some knowledge of Jewish history but less than ample acquaintance with Cuba, Levine provides a sturdy framework for understanding the history of that country identifying and clarifying the major trends in Cuban politics and the personalities who dominated public life for long stretches of time from both within and behind the presidential palace. A noted Latin Americanist whose name is more often asso-

Book Reviews 335

ciated with the history of Brazil, Levine is able to set developments in Jewish life into the national context within which they occurred-the elections, coups d'etat, dictatorships, and revolutions that determined Cuban destiny. His narrative is enlivened and elu- cidated by carefully selected photographs. Some of these are ama- teur snapshots, but coupled with interviews of the people pictured and set within Levine's analysis of the social ambiance, they tran- scend the everyday to create a candid image of what life must have been like. Some of the immigrants were as disoriented as Robinson Crusoe cast away on his desert island; it was years before they began to feel at home. That process, however; did occur, and the immigrants-and more to the point, their children-were quite Cubanized by the time Fidel Castro's misguided socialization of the economy cut short the process of their adaptation.

Levine devotes a chapter to the St. Louis incident of 1939, in which a shipload of Jewish refugees from Nazism, holding visas they believed to be valid, were turned away from Havana port by Cuban authorities. The incident shocked Jews worldwide (and continues to motivate current attempts to assist other boat people). Levine reminds us that there were a dozen other "ghost ships" wandering the high seas at the same time, less well known since they carried fewer than the St . Louis's 937 passengers. The author throws new light on the internal politics that went into making the decision to prohibit the refugees from landing, including pressure by the U.S. State Department to keep down the number of poten- tial applicants for admission to the United States. Overall, he con- cludes, Cuba's record on refugee admission was better than that of other Latin American nations.

The plain-spoken quotations which Levine elicited from his interviewees add fascination to his book. These Cuban Jews (now living in the United States) tell us in vivid colloquialisms about the harsh life they initially faced, their increasing enchantment with the grace and hospitality of the Cuban people, their liaisons and intermarriages, and the nostalgia they now feel for their tropical homeland. In this, they do not differ from non-Jewish Cuban exiles. One wonders what their political orientation might be, but

American Jewish Archives

this is a question Levine does not explore. In fact, one of the chief outcomes of reading this book is the strong desire to learn more about the lives of Cuban Jews since the Revolution (in more than numerical terms). But the post-Revolution history of Cuban Jewry is yet to be written.

Any review of this book must acknowledge-as does the author himself-the research by other historians that went into compiling it. Without their efforts, this book could not have been as compre- hensive as it is. It is not yet possible to consult Cuban government sources, and most local Jewish archives have disappeared into the maw of the Cuban bureaucracy, But Levine has brought together all the accessible sources, enriched them with his own far-ranging interviews and illustrations, and integrated all of this with Cuban history. It was no mean feat. We are ail in his debt for having con- tributed the first full-scale lustory of Cuban Jewry from its genesis to its heyday.

-Judith Laikin Elkin

Judith Laikin Elkin is the a~lthor of Jews of the Latin American Republics and presi- dent of the Latin American Jewish Studies Association.

Grossman, Susan, and Haut, Rivka, Edited by. Daughters of the King: Women and the Synagogue. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society 1992. xxvii, 340 pages.

Susan D. Alter depicts the frustration which the contemporary woman faces when she desires to be an active participant in the ritual life of the traditional Jewish community:

My father told me that when I turned twelve, I would no longer be allowed to sit with him downstairs, but that I would have to sit in the balcony with my mother. The ultimate achievement of my womanhood would carry with it my total exclusion from any further opportunity to be close to a Sefer Torah. . . . Iflor my brother exactly the opposite was true. "becoming a man" . . . brought with it an even closer identifi- cationwith the Torah,not only &the spiritual s en t , but also in a very real and phys- ical way. [ P 2801

The Torah is not only the life of the practicing Jew, it is also the center of synagogue worship. Exclusion from the Torah places women at the periphery of public Jewish life. In an era in which women are accustomed to stand alongside men in all other areas of life, this disenfranchisement is no longer satisfying nor accept- able to many, not only women but men as well.

Twenty-eight women and men from all branches of Jewish life contributed the thirty selections which attempt to unravel the Gordian knot constricting the activities of women within the syn- agogue. These articles fall into three main areas: the history of the role women played in the sacrificial services and the premodern synagogue, the halakhah which sets the parameters for women's participation in the synagogue, and personal vignettes expressing contemporary realities (p. 9). By surveying the historical and halakhic sources, it becomes clear that the present situation is nei- ther so clear-cut nor so monolithic as its proponents would sug- gest. As Paula E. Hyman reminds us in her conclusion, "Women's role in the synagogue has changed with time and place. . . . Jewish communities have always interacted . . . with the cultures in which they have been situated . . . [and] the development of Judaism occurs through the interplay between a revered tradition and a changing socioeconomic reality" (pp. 298-300).

While the impetus for the book arose from the editors' personal

338 American Jewish Archives

desire for the opportunity to participate more fully in all aspects of synagogue life and ritual (p. xxvi), the articles offer a careful pre- sentation and analysis of the historical and literary background and dispel several long-held preconceptions, viz., the origin of physical separation of men and women during worship and the need for women in states of "impurity" to remove themselves. Among the topics examined are the place of women in the Jerusalem Temple, the ancient synagogue, the synagogue in med:eval Cairo, and the European synagogue of the Middle Ages. Other essays discuss techines (the Yiddish tradition of women's petitionary prayers), the obligation of women to pray, the relation of the menstruant to the synagogue, women's prayer groups, and the language of liturgy. The descriptions of contemporary life include an examination of women from oriental communities as well as vignettes of women representing disparate elements of the Jewish community. The latter include a rebbetzin, a rabbi, a cantor, a chazzanit, plus reflections on "growing up Lubavitch," "coming of age in Brooklyn," "celebrating Simchat Torah in Jerusalem," involvement in the havurah movement, building synagogue skills, and wearing tallit and tefillin. Prayers for a woman who has suf- fered a miscarriage and a ritual for affirming and accepting preg- nancy are also part of this last section. The book ends with a con- clusion which looks ahead to the future.

The book is intended for both the scholar and the lay reader. To that end, footnotes enable the scholar to pursue items of interest and a glossary explains the Hebrew / technical terminology. As is the case with any anthology, the contributions are uneven. For the most part they are well written, striking a balance matched to the wide range of its audience. The exception is the first two articles, "Women and the Synagogue" and "Women and the Jerusalem Temple," which seem in places unsure of their audience and/or focus, as if they had been written for some purpose other than this book.

The importance of this book lies in the fact that it is not merely an abstract study of the role-past, present, and future-of women within the religious life of the Jewish community, but that it deals with issues with which many people struggle, issues intimately

Book Reviews 339

connected with the vitality of the synagogue and Judaism. The contributions remind us that even in the face of alienation, many women consider the synagogue very important to them (cf. pp. 3-4). The substance of this book will, no doubt, enable women to continue to create new ways to make themselves a part of the reli- gious life of the community, be it in separate women's groups or within the synagogue itself.

As the boundaries of participation change, so, too, will the con- tent of "normative" liturgy. Traditional liturgy's use of male-dom- inated language and its lack of concern with many of the realities which women face leave a void. Daughters of the King provides prayers for two such occasions-after a miscarriage and the affir- mation of pregnancy. In this area two other new books containing prayers dealing with women's concerns (although probably not by women) might be of interest. Out of the Depths I Call to You: A Book of Prayers for the Mawied Jewish Woman, edited by Nina Beth Cardin (Aronson, 1992) contains prayers gathered for an eighteenth-cen- tury Italian woman by her husband. The Merit of Our Mothers: A Bilingual Anthology of Jewish Women's Prayer compiled by Tracy Guren Klirs (Hebrew Union College Press, 1992) is a selection of techines focusing on the concerns of the Ashkenazic woman.

By providing a compact survey of the roles women have histor- ically played in public worship and offering examples of how new models can emerge from them, Daughters of the King has done a great service for all who are interested in the well-being of the reli- gious life of the Jewish community. We would do well to take to heart Rivka Haut's admonition, "more active personal participa- tion in ritual helps one to attain a greater feeling of closeness to and communion with God. Judaism can only benefit by the infu- sion of women's energies in communal worship" (p. 151). - Judith A. Bluestein.

Judith A. Bluestein is a doctoral candidate at the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, Cincinnati, and the former rabbi of B'nai Israel Congregation, Hattiesburg, Mississippi.

340 American Jewish Archives

Schrader, Achim, and Rengstorf, Karl Heinrich, Edited by. Europaische Juden in Lateinarnerika. St. Ingbert: Werner J. Rorig Verlag, 1989.507 pp.

As Clifford M. Kulwin recently noted in a book review in this jour- nal (November 1987, pp. 223-qo), "Any new study on Latin American Jewry is important. Unlike perhaps any other area with- in Jewish history, the Latin American Jewish experience has been so little examined that every additional work has something to offer, whether directly, as in new information or insights, or indi- rectly, as in the thoughts provoked by incomplete or tendentious scholarship."

The conference proceedings of the University of Miinster's autumn 1987 forum, "Latin America and Europe in Dialog," offer much information, many important and often-repeated insights, as well as some scholarship of questionable significance. The con- ference was dedicated to researching and discussing the migration of the Jews to Latin America and focused in particular upon pat- terns of resettlement and assimilation.

One-fourth of all Jews able to leave Nazi Germany settled in Latin America. For those who had careers that could be readily adjusted to the demands of the new environment, integration occurred fairly quickly. But for lawyers, journalists, and literati, there existed much to stand in the way of assimilation. Problematic relationships surfaced at every level of social, cultural, economic, and, of course, religious interaction. Corrupt governments, fascist interest groups, peoples of like national origins with widely diverse religious affiliations, Jewish political refugees, apolitical Jewish immigrants-all shared in and therefore defined the exile experience in Latin America.

Europaische Juden i n Lateinamerika addresses five major issues. Part I places the study in context, mentioning the disappearance of the topic on German soil. Part I1 treats immigration to Latin America, with chapters about Argentina and the Holocaust, Argentina's immigration politics between 1933 and 1945, Jewish immigration to Bolivia at the end of the thirties, and Jewish immi-

Book Reviews 341

gration to Brazil, to the Rolhdia and Mussolini colonies. Part I11 discusses assimilation in Latin America, presenting research on a variety of geographical locations-Rolsndia, the northern Paran, southern Brazil, and many parts of Argentina. Part IV evaluates the work of Jewish institutions like CENTRA and various Brazilian aid organizations. The final part addresses the controversial topic of anti-Semitism, with valuable comments by Judith Laiken Elkin and Arnold Spitta pertaining to Argentina, as well as discussions of Mexico and of Brazil in the thirties.

Who were the Jews that emigrated to Latin America during the Hitler period, and what were their contributions to the culture, the economy, and the intellectual milieu of their host countries? Important questions are asked about this population:

I. Were the German Jews in exile still Germans? 2. To what extent did solidarity with Israel influence the accep-

tance of German Jews in Latin America? 3. Was their shared Jewish identity enough to resolve differences

between East European and German Jews in the same Latin American congregations?

4. Were Jewish workers Jews first or workers first, in regard to union activities in Latin America?

The conference proceedings recommend greater international involvement by German scholars in the history of Jewish immi- gration to Latin America and call for immediate fieldwork atten- tion to the surviving members of Jewish communities there, many of whom are quite aged.

The immigration politics of numerous Latin American countries are discussed here. Foremost among them are Argentina, Bolivia, and Brazil. Because, even as late as 1938, Jewish aid organizations were allowed to continue operations in Nazi Germany, emigration was deterred, and the self-rescue of many European Jews was pre- vented. Where politics of neutrality deterred immigration, as in the case of Argentina, a practice of infiltration through neighbor- ing states developed. Bolivia, with Jewish congregations and com- munities offering models of societal integration and economic con- solidation, became a point of departure for emigration to neigh- boring countries, the United States, or Palestine at the end of

342 American Jewish Archives

World War 11. Brazilian colonies such as Col8nia Mussolini or Rolsndia indicate the interaction between Jews and a government sympathetic to fascism. (Parallel with Hitler's rise to power in 1932, German territorial ties to the northern Paran region were strengthened. At the same time, a fascist-inspired group, AGO Integralista Brasileira, was formed, followed by the 1937 establish- ment of the authoritarian Estado Novo regime.) The contribution of German-Jewish agriculturalists in Rolindia and of industrial and technical workers between the ages of twenty-five and forty in Col6nia Mussolini represent the welcome economic impact of a politically unwelcome population.

Success in economic endeavors does not seem to be totally inde- pendent of a decision to assimilate under emancipation. Jewish integration in Latin America is not comparable to experiences of emancipation and assimilation in Germany, although the revoca- tion of emancipation in Germany, resulting in the persecution of the Jews, sharpens our view of possible anti-Semitism in Latin America. Further research is needed to complete the portrait of Jewish contributions to the economic, spiritual, cultural, and schol- arly development of Latin America.

Throughout this study, the discussion returns to the point of identity. Zn Argentina, for example, the German Jews felt robbed of their national identity, but were still too "German" to identify with the Latino culture of the Jews already settled in the country. The result was a selective acceptance of German cultural manifesta- tions, such as the plastic arts, music, literature, or scholarship, that were free of anti-Semitism and militarism. As Karl Heinrich Rengstorf points out in his examination of German-Jewish emi- grant literature, exile brought German Jewry to its most difficult identity crisis-had there ever really been a German Jewry? His chapter examines the European influences on German Jewry in order to gauge the differences in assimilation between Latin American immigrants and Jewish immigrant writers in the United States.

Two especially valuable contributions are David Bankier's study of the German-Jewish symbiosis until 1933 and the Argentinean-Jewish symbiosis until 1950 and Henrique Rattner's

Book Revims 343

sociocultural study of identity issues for Brazilian Jewry. Bankier discusses the relationship between exiles and Jewish Fliichtlinge ("refugees") from Germany, their involvement in such groups as DaD, or Das andere Deutschland ("The Other [Better] Germany"), especially influential in Argentina, and the Communist Party-inspired BFD, or Bewegung Freies Deutschland ("Free German Movement"), in Uruguay. Also mentioned are organiza- tions led by such diverse interests as the right-wing Das wahre Deutschland, and, especially influential in Uruguay, Freies- Deutschland, led after 1934 by Erico Schoenemann, editor of the Christian conservative newspaper, Die Zeit. Paul Merker's contri- butions in Mexico are noted (he was the only member of the Politburo of the Communist Party of Germany in western exile) and the pro-Zionist stance of Mexican, Brazilian, and Argentine groups. According to Bankier, alienation between conservatives and communists disintegrated in exile, in favor of a Wiederanniiherung, a reconciliation between socialist ideologies and Jewish particularism. His conclusion, however, that "with the exception of a small group of political emigrants, in which were also found Jews, the great majority of those fleeing Germany were politically disinterested," is supported by much autobiographical writing of the era.

Henrique Rattner expands upon this discussion of immigrant identity, defining immigration not only as a change of location for an individual or a group, but also as the departure from one social structure and entry into another. Integration, according to Rattner, depended upon the motives for immigration and the sociocultural characteristics affecting assimilation. He points out that most non- German, non-Jewish immigrants (Portuguese, Italian, and Spanish Catholics) came to Brazil for economic reasons, seeking goods and prestige unreachable for them at home. The East European and German Jewish refugees immigrated in order to survive religious or racial persecution. These immigrants were often forced to break their ties with the homeland very quickly, and the fear of collective murder assailed them even abroad. Rattner balances this external force of a shared fate with the internal forces of loyalty, acceptance, common values and goods, to draw a picture of Jewish immigrant

344 American Jewish Archives

identity in Latin America. Caught between loyalty to the group of origin, enjoying legalized social and economic acceptance in their Adoptivgesellschafi ("host society"), personal boundaries arose in place of public borders. Troubled by social insecurity, traditional roles disappeared-in diet, as the kashrut laws were ignored and the shochet (ritual slaughterer) was no longer needed, in a sense of place, as schools and clubs replaced the isolation of the ghetto and the sanctity of the synagogue, and in activities, as sports and cul- tural events replaced worship and sacred celebration. In summary, the Jewish identity in exile is presented as one of diminished self- esteem among group members who had faced discrimination. Their reactions to such diminution varied, yet many responded by assimilation within the host society at the expense of the religious community.

Europiiische Juden in Latinamerib is completed by a welcome and lengthy ten-part bibliography for the study of German Jews in Latin America. Missing is an index, necessary for scholars seeking efficient references to places and individuals. - Suzanne Shipley

Suzanne Shipley teaches German at the University of Cincinnati. Her essay "In Exile: The Latin American Diaries of Katja Hayek Arendt" appeared in the November 1987 issue of American Jewish Archives.

Temkin, Sefton. Isaac Mayer Wise: Shaping American Judaism. Littman Library. Washington, D.C.: Oxford University Press, 1992. viii, 318 pp.

No individual in the American Jewish experience has been the subject of as many biographical articles and books as Isaac Mayer Wise. By way of contrast, Isaac Leeser, Max Lilienthal, David Einhorn, and Kaufmann Kohler, who are no less interesting and who were in some respects as influential and important as Wise in "shaping American Judaism," have been largely ignored.

One of the explanations of this abundant attention to Wise is his talent for self-promotion, which manifested itself throughout his life. Indeed, the first treatise devoted to Wise was his autobio- graphical Reminiscences, published during his lifetime in his German-language newspaper, Die Deborah, and in English transla- tion in 1901, shortly after his death. In addition, Wise's chief talent was as an institution builder, and those associated with the insti- tutions which he founded have provided support for the enhance- ment of his memory and the celebration of his achievements.

Dozens of articles dealing with one phase or another of Wise's life and works as well as a number of full-scale biographies have been written. Shortly after his death in 1900, a volume of his select- ed writings, edited by his students and colleagues David Philipson and Louis Grossman, appeared and included a biographical essay. In 1916, Wise's grandson Max B. May published Isaac Mayer Wise, the Founder of American Judaism: A Biography, which included a comprehensive bibliography of Wise's writings compiled by Adolph Oko, librarian at the Hebrew Union College. From Sinai fo Cincinnati by Dena Wilinsky (1937) contains "some biography" as well as summaries of Wise's positions on a number of issues and excerpts from his writings. While this work is totally uncritical, Wilinsky devotes one chapter to "inconsistencies," of which there are more than a few. None of these inhibited the adulation of Leo Franklin, who, in a 1938 work titled The Rabbi, the Man and His Message declared that Wise was a "prophet with soul as great as Isaiah's, a leader of men with courage as great as Moses," and con-

346 American Jewish Archives

cluded that "the spot whereon he stood and preached is conse- crated ground."

Somewhat less rapturous but nonetheless admiring was the 1957 biography, Rabbi in America: The Story of Isaac M . Wise by Israel Knox, which appeared in the Library of American Biography edit- ed by Oscar Handlin. It was followed two years later by Isaac M. Wise: Founder of Judaism, a book for young readers by Joseph Gumbiner. What might be regarded as the definitive biography, a work of almost 700 pages, was published in 1965, written by James Heller, who served as rabbi of the Isaac M. Wise temple in Cincinnati for thirty-two years.

In a surprising omission, none of these works is mentioned in the meager bibliographical note included in Sefton Temkin's Isaac M. Wise: Shaping American Judaism. The bibliography, which rec- ommends Margolis and Marx as a general Jewish history and Jews in America by Rufus Learsi (a pseudonym for Israel Goldberg) as the preferred American Jewish history, is not only outdated but uncritical.

Temkin's biography does not contain any startling revelations. Indeed, given the extensiveness of the literature on Wise, it is doubtful that there is much new material to unearth. However, it does present a lucid and readable account of Wise's life and career and of the evolution of his ideas and initiatives.

Unlike some earlier biographers, Temkin does not shrink from reporting the many contradictions and inconsistencies which char- acterize Wise's writings and claims. In fact, Temkin not only acknowledges that "obviously the D.D. which Wise sometimes appended to his name was never conferred by a university," he concludes that the question of Wise's rabbinic ordination "may be regarded as open and [ [Temkin] am inclined to answer in the neg- ative" (p. 23). Repeatedly, Temkin points out the "difficulties and confusion between the sources." Wise's account of an offer of a position in Charleston is "plainly contrary to truth" (p. 64). His unsubstantiated report of the altercation in his Albany congrega- tion "makes one wonder whether Wise's memory was at fault" (p. 73). "Doubt has been cast on the accuracy of his [Wise's] recollec- tion" that he met Judah P. Benjamin (p. 76). The account of his elec-

Book Reviews 347

tion to his pulpit in Cincinnati is "distorted." None other than David Einhorn accused Wise of "prevarication" (p. 219). The pat- tern of taking liberties with facts continued throughout Wise's life, and Temkin identifies examples too numerous to cite.

Apparently, given the rawness of American life in the nine- teenth century and the anarchy of American Jewish life, this pat- tern of unreliabiIity did not disqualify Wise for leadership. As Temkin concludes, "his tireless energy and lack of inhibition was in due time to establish his position as a leader of American Israel" (p. 77). In the author's opinion, Wise displayed "the rough energy of young America" (p. 87).

Wise's achievement as the organizer of American Jewry was in large part due to his emphasis on union-on practical activity-as opposed to theological uniformity. His was, as Temkin points out, "a mind working on a grand design for American Jewry . . . on practical issues, not on ideologies" (p. 150). His priorities enabled, indeed required, that Wise be ideologically vague and flexiblenno grand principle stands out" (p. 110). This flexibility made it possi- ble for Wise to succeed where Einhorn failed. In the end, of course, Einhorn's radical ideology carried the day over Wise's "modera- tion" in the very institutions which Wise had succeeded in creat- ing. It was Kaufmann Kohler, Einhorn's son-in-law, who in 1875 had denounced Wise as the "great Cincinnati agitator" (p. 104)) who succeeded Wise as president of the Hebrew Union College.

In discussing Wise's presentation of his Minhag America prayer- book, Temkin refers to the "reform alloy [which] has modified a traditional context" (p. 150). Since the term "alloy" is defined as "a deleterious element," the comment reveals a degree of subjectivity and hostility to even moderate reform which is jarring in a biogra- phy of Reform's master builder. Nevertheless, Temkin is sympa- thetic to Wise and charitable in explaining his shortcomings.

Reading Sefton Temkin's work and reviewing Isaac Mayer Wise's life and intellectual odyssey, it becomes clearer why Wise is such an attractive subject for biographers. He was deeply flawed, persistently inconsistent, consistently unpredictable-and yet suc- cessful in achieving what others more brilliant than he failed to achieve. Sefton Temkin has captured this quality in his biography

348 American Jewish Archives

of Wise, whom he correctly calls "the man of destiny" (p. 122)

- Leon A. Jick

Leon A. Jick is professor emeritus of American Jewish Studies, Brandeis University, and author of The Americanization of fhe Synagogue and numerous scholarly articles.

Chernow, Ron. The Warburgs: The Twentieth Century Odyssey of a Remarkable Jewish Family. New York: Random House, 1993.820 pp.

"The German Jew," we are informed in this massive history of the Warburg family, "were a people shipwrecked by history." After reading Chernow's loving descriptions of the Warburgian life- style, one assumes that his use of "shipwrecked" refers to a crisis of the spirit. Despite their deep loyalty to Germany, the Warburgs and other German Jewish families of their station in German life were ultimately considered to be merely guests in the Reich and so much fodder for its death factories. The tragedy was that so many had in the pre-Nazi era shed their Jewish identity so that their suf- fering was utterly incomprehensible to them. Such Jews fell between two chairs. They had become unacceptable to Germans and no longer could be nurtured by their Jewish heritage. That is the special tragedy of the Warburgs and thousands of other assim- ilated upper-class Jewish families during the Holocaust.

The reader may want to know why, other than to indulge a prurient interest in the lives of the rich and well-born, the Warburgs deserve such a family history written by a first-class nar- rator. Their fate was, after all, usually less drastic than that of thou- sands of other German Jewish families who did not survive the Holocaust. True, the Warburgs produced several generations of powerful bankers, assorted "philanthrapoids," and various and sundry talented men and women in other fields. But they also pro- duced manic-depressives, sundry philanderers, and dozens of run-of-the-mill men and women. In a word, money aside, the Warburgs had a normal proportion of wise men and knaves. Would the Warburgs have gained renown if they had possessed no great wealth? Would Aby Warburg have become a serious cultural redactor if he could not have counted on the family fortune for support for himself and his library. Similarly, did Felix Warburg's generosity as a philanthropist require talent or money? Anyone looking at the Joint Distribution Committee's disastrous settle- ment venture in the Crimea in the twenties could well question his judgment in this area. The Warburgs' claim to greatness should

350 American Jaoish Archives

rest not on how they accumulated wealth and power but what they did with it. Here the record is far from clear. And if the mea- sure of greatness is how powerful people recognize and respond to the crisis which defines their time in history, then the Warburgs emerge as failures, especially Max Warburg, who could not be con- vinced to leave his beloved fatherland until the last minute. Unfortunately this book is far stronger in detailing family gossip than in explaining the historical context in which the Warburgs operated.

The Warburgs, whose greatest influence stemmed primarily from the activities of three of the four sons of Moritz, joined by Jacob Schiff, who married into the family, became part of the group of shtadlanim ("court Jews") who dominated Jewish communal governance and served as intermediaries to the non-Jewish world. By the post-emancipation period it had become far from an absolute governance, since, with the growth of democracy, the governing threshold of Jewish communities was altered. The world Zionist movement, which would become central to the Jewish polity in the second quarter of the twentieth century, sought to democratize Jewish governance and relentlessly chal- lenged the role of the wealthy shtadlanim, and failing that, it tried to co-opt them. That is really what the establishment of the Jewish Agency in 1929 was all about. It also accounts for the conflicted relationship between members of the Warburg clan and leaders of the Zionist movement. When they weren't absolutely opposed to Zionism, like Max Warburg and Jacob Schiff, they became cultural Zionists like Felix, who supported institutions like the Hebrew University but remained adamantly opposed to the establishment of a national state as first officially proposed in the Biltmore reso- lutions of May 1942. Lola Warburg may have carried on with Chaim Weizmann and together with sister Anita become a moving spirit in Youth Aliyah. But the relationship of Felix to Chaim Weizmann was troubled. Zionists wanted to believe that the money raised belonged to the Jewish people, who would decide its disposition. When Felix spent more in a few years on a hairbrained scheme to resettle Russian Jews in the Crimea than in decades of nurturing the thin line of kibbutzim in the Emek, Stephen Wise

Book Reviews 351

became infuriated. He declared that one Chaim Nachrnan Bialik, the beloved Jewish poet, was worth a thousand Felix Warburgs. But that's not the way the world operated, especially not Jewish communal life, where the monied piper still played the tune.

The Warburgs, then, is fueled by an interest in the triumphs and tragedies of an illustrious but increasingly marginal Jewish family. What heightens the reader's interest is that we know that this fam- ily, part of a Jewish commercial aristocracy, will fall from on high. That gives the story an almost classic tragic cast. We are, after all, more moved by the assassination of a Kennedy than by the anony- mous death of a homeless person. There is, however, a significant difference between the fall of the heroes of Greek drama and these heroes of commerce. While the Warburgs have a full complement of flaws like excessive pride or immoderation, that is not the rea- son why they will fall. The flaw was that they were Jewish and continued to be considered so even after they had given up much of what made them so. The real tragedy of the Warburgs can only be understood in terms of the Jewish transaction with modernity. It is rooted in the fact that they were in the process of forgetting who and what they were. It is not a classical Greek tragedy but a distinctively Jewish one.

What Chernow does so well is to trace that progressive loss of Jewish identity and to correlate it with the loss of energy and verve. Is it a foregone conclusion that as Jews gain in wealth and climb in status their Jewishness becomes confined, as in the case of the Warburgs, to its outer ceremonial trappings which conceal the loss of content and meaning? As the stock portfolio grows, the reli- gious and cultural portfolio seems to contract. Frieda Warburg, the daughter of a Jewishly committed Jacob Schiff, witnessed the inter- marriage of five of her children and learned to accept it. If we knew why that happened we might have more certainty about the survivability of American Jewry, which, on a different scale, dis- plays a pattern of rise and decline much like that of the Warburgs.

Chernow's Warburgs has an "interiority" complex. His talent for humanizing his story through family "meises" garnered from dozens of interviews is usually not matched by an interest in drawing a full picture of the historical context in which these fam-

352 American Jewish Archives

ily events occurred. There is little sense of the flow of time and no explanation of the growing crisis which would engulf the Warburgs and all European Jewry. Repeatedly, crucial incidents and processes, like Schiff's role in bailing out the Japanese during the Russo-Japanese War, the Crimean resettlement scheme, the financial crisis of the interwar period, and the Rublee-Schacht- Wohlthat negotiations, are incompletely and too often inaccurate- ly rendered. One never learns precisely what the Warburgs were doing in their banks. The contrast between the personal and the historical is partly related to Chemowls research design. He leans heavily on interviews, family correspondence, and memoirs but fairly ignores the historical monographic literature which is avail- able in the scholarly journals and libraries. It is true that highly personalized accounts are the key to the compelling readability of this book. But I suspect that those readers interested in the role of the Warburgs in modern Jewish history would gladly have exchanged some family gossip for a solid historical context. Without it this book is always in danger of floating away in a sea of trivia. - Henry L. Feingold

Henry L. Feingold is Professor of History at Baruch College of the City College of New York. His latest work is A Time for Searching: Entering the Main Stream, 1920- 1945, the fourth volume in the five volume series, The Jewish People in America, of which he was general editor.

Kliger, Hannah. Jewish Hometown Associations and Family Circles in New York: The WPA Yiddish Writers' Group Study. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1992. 164 pp.

In the organizational history of American Jewry, few institutions have rivaled the grass-roots power and numerical strength of the immigrant landsmanshaftn (societies composed of immigrants from the same European town or village). Landsmanshaftn were a staple of immigrant Jewish life in America. As late as 1938, approx- imately 3,000 landsmanshaftn flourished in New York City, attract- ing half a million Jews within their ranks. One in four New York Jews maintained an affiliation with a landsmanshaft society. While historians have long noted the striking presence of landsman- shaftn within the immigrant Jewish community, only recently have these societies been recognized as more than fleeting attempts to recreate Old World ties in an American setting. Landsmanshaftn certainly did provide Jewish newcomers with a sense of commu- nity and a link with a common past, but more importantly, they served as agents of immigrant adaptation and adjustment. Even as Jewish immigrants rooted their landsmanshaft fellowships in the shared bonds of European heritage, they constructed elaborate networks of self-help and communal support for the purpose of building their lives in America. In this respect, landsmanshaftn were not relics of a fading past but practical, forward-looking American Jewish institutions.

In Jewish Hometown Associations and Family Circles in New York, Hannah Kliger has unearthed a valuable source for studying the grass-roots associations of immigrant Jews and offered a fresh per- spective on the organizational evolution of American Jewry. The centerpiece of the book is Kliger's presentation of an unpublished English-language manuscript, "Jewish Landsmanschaften and Family Circles of New York," compiled by the Yiddish Writers' Group of the Works Progress Administration and intended for publication by the Federal Writers' Project in the early 1940s. In 1938, the Federal Writers' Project had sponsored the publication of a Yiddish volume, Di yidishe landsmanshaftn fun nyu york, which

354 American Jewish Archives

reported the results of the Yiddish Writers' Group's extensive sur- vey of New York landsmanshaftn. Another Yiddish volume, Yidishe familyes un familye h y z n fun nyu york, followed the next year, documenting the group's study of Jewish family circles in the city. The English anthology was intended as a condensed transla- tion of the two Yiddish volumes, designed to present "those parts of the [Yiddish] books which seem of greater interest to American readers" (p. 9). Unfortunately, the Federal Writers' Project was dis- solved before the English work could be published and the text was relegated to the archives. Hannah Kliger has recovered and reprinted the forgotten manuscript, providing an opportunity for those who do not read Yiddish to reap the benefits of this pioneer- ing survey of immigrant Jewish life.

Even for those already familiar with the Yiddish texts, Kliger's work offers new insights into the New York survey and the Yiddish Writers' Group. In the first section of the book, Kliger recounts the history of the Yiddish Writers' Group and chronicles the efforts of the project's manager and principal architect, Isaac E. Rontch. A prolific Yiddish writer, Rontch successfully mediated the concerns of the project's diverse sponsors, which included both the socialist I. L. Peretz Yiddish Writers' Union and the govern- ment bureaucracy of the Works Progress Administration. Kliger accurately portrays the sophistication of the New York survey in its systematic canvassing of the city's Jewish organizations and detailed categorization of the various types of groups that flour- ished in the community. Because of its rich attention to detail and variation, this Depression-era study offers an unparalleled glimpse into the many social, cultural, political, and economic functions of immigrant Jewish institutions. For readers interested not only in the survey's findings but also in the dynamics of the WPAYiddish Writers' Group, the first section of Kliger's book pro- vides a useful introduction, albeit not a complete history of the project. In the book's first section, the appendices, as well as in the notes accompanyhg the manuscript reproduction, Kliger has also presented intereshg comparisons between the original Yiddish volumes and the proposed English translation which testify to the portrait of Jewish life that the writers intended to offer the

Book Reviews 355

American public. In the final section of her work, Kliger analyzes the activities of

landsmanshaftn since World War 11, relying upon a review of Yiddish newspapers, archival material, and her own sample study of contemporary landsmanshaft organizations. Acknowledging the sharp numerical decline and reduction of activity in lands- manshaftn since World War 11, Kliger argues nonetheless that, "despite predictions of their disappearance in the second and third American-born generations, a forecast that echoes throughout the twentieth century, there are signs of landsmanshaft continuity even as we approach the twenty-first century" (p. 120). She notes that landsmanshaft organizations have survived while their activ- ities and priorities have changed. After World War 11, landsman- shaftn became increasingly distanced from their European home- land, as aid to Europe was replaced by the publication of memor- ial books and a new emphasis on supporting the State of Israel. In contemporary landsmanshaftn, Kliger observes, membership is no longer restricted to Jews from a specific hometown, but rather the organizations attract a local neighborhood population and a wide circle of relatives and friends of original members. Kliger points to the ongoing viability of landsmanshaftn as organizations that pro- vide such services as insurance policies and burial privileges as well as retain the allegiance of American-born Jews interested in maintaining family traditions.

Kliger's purpose is to demonstrate that landsmanshaftn were vibrant American organizations that since their inception have evolved along with the changing needs of American Jews. She sets out to counter the argument that landsmanshaftn attracted only Jews interested in clinging to the Old World and to prove that landsmanshaft societies were instruments and reflections of American Jewish adjustment and continuity. While it is difficult to accept any predictions about the future viability of landsman- shaftn in the twenty-first century, Kliger's work accurately por- trays the complexity of immigrant associations and the flexible vitality of American Jewish organizations. In Jewish Hometown Associations and Family Circles in New York, Hannah Kliger has pro- vided a valuable primary source for studying immigrant Jewry

356 American Jewish Archives

and has argued forcefully for the resiliency and adaptability of eth- nic institutions as mechanisms for Jewish adaptation and survival.

- Beth Wenger - - - - - -

Beth Wenger received her Ph.D. from Yale University. She teaches in the depart- ment of history, University of Pennsylvania.

Hagy, James William. This Happy Land: The Jews of Colonial and Antebellum Charleston. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1993. xi1 450 PP.

During the early national period of American history, more Jews resided in Charleston than in any other North American city. This, however, was not the only measure of Charleston Jewry's preemi- nence; no other city in the new republic possessed a more educat- ed, more urbane, or more socially integrated Jewry. We now have a penetrating portrait of this important community thanks to James Hagy's well-organized, fact-filled history of Jewish life in colonial and antebellum Charleston.

Hagy's work constitutes the first major study to appear on the Jews of Charleston in more than forty years, and the first to con- centrate solely on the colonial and antebellum eras. His compre- hensive research in state archives, municipal records, and syna- gogue documents provides us with a much more detailed picture of the day-to-day life than did the two previously published works on Charleston's Jewry: Barnett A. Elzas's pioneering study, The Jews of South Carolinafrom the Earliest Times to the Present Day (igog), and Charles Reznikoff and Uriah Z. Engelman's bicentennial his- tory, The Jews of Charleston: A History of an American Jewish Community (1950).

As the title suggests, the author's thesis is that "by freely min- gling with their neighbors and absorbing the rationalistic ideas of . . . the Enlightenment . . . [Charleston's Jews] had become 'Americans to the core' " (p. I). Hagy contends that this thorough- going acculturation influenced every aspect of their lives. Most notably, it affected their attitudes toward Jewish ritual and obser- vance, sparking a desire on the part of many Charlestonian Jews to reform their synagogue's worship service. This aim eventually led to the establishment of the Reformed Society of Israelites in 1825-the first organized attempt to reform Jewish practice in North America. "Because of the size of the community," Hagy argues, "and the religious innovations developed by them, [Charleston's Jews] helped shape the experience of all Jews in

358 American Jewish Archives

America" (p. I). Hagy's interest in social-scientific quantification produces

research that is both original and valuable. His data present a detailed and informative picture of Jewish life in colonial and ante- bellum Charleston that corroborates many long-held theories, but contests others. On the one hand, Hagy's findings confirm the extent to which Jews were integrated into Charleston's economy. Records show, for example, that during the antebellum period Charleston Jews frequently entered into business relations with non-Jews. Yet these business partnerships rarely endured as long as those established between two Jews (p. 47).

Hagy's study also authenticates the assertion that the percent- age of Jews owning slaves during the antebellum period paralleled that of the white population. Yet Hagy's analysis contests the claim that some celebrated Jews, like Jacob Ottolengui, profited from the business of slave trading. Ottolengui was one of the few Jewish plantation owners during the antebellum era. Though some histo- rians have described Ottolengui as a wealthy slave-trader who at one time owned more than a thousand slaves, the records of the South Carolina Archives suggest that this representation of Ottolengui's involvement in the slave trade was, at best, overstat- ed (p. 94).

Each chapter is peppered with many informative tables, the most interesting of which include: (a) Patterns of Jewish and Gentile Relationships in 200 Civil Cases in Charleston, 1705-1824 (p. 51), (b) Slave Purchases and Sales by Jewish Slaveowners with Ten or More Recorded Transactions (p. 95), (c) Jews as Victims or Accusers in Court in Antebellum Charleston (p. 126), (d) Ages of Jewish Women in Antebellum Charleston at Marriage and Births of First and Last Child (p. 172). and (e) Jewish Widows Who Operated Businesses in Early Charleston (p. 233).

The volume is structured topically; its chapters explore such themes as the origins of Charleston's Jews, the level of Jewish acceptance, the character of Jewish communal life, the nature of Jewish family life, the occupations of Jewish men and women, the birth of Reform Judaism and its early development in the city's congregation, Beth Elohim. Hagy illuminates the diversity of cul-

Book Reviews 359

tural backgrounds that characterized the Jews of Charleston: Charleston's Jews "probably had as many languages among them- selves as the general population had" (p. 18). During the colonial and early national periods, Charleston was a vibrant commercial and cultural center. As an organic part of this prospering society, Jews benefited from the city's many cultural and material advan- tages: they attended theater and concerts, they were politically active, and they participated in communal organizations. Similarly, Charleston's Jews endured the same misfortunes as did their fellow citizens: crimes, disease, disasters, wars, and racial tensions. The advantages outweighed the drawbacks because the city offered most of them an opportunity to earn a respectable livelihood-and a few Jews lived extremely well.

The Jews of Charleston felt secure enough to fraternize openly among themselves on both secular and religious occasions. In doing so, they established an impressive assortment of commu- nal/fraternal organizations, some of which, like the Hebrew Benevolent Society and the Hebrew Orphan Society, were pat- terned after related institutions in North American and European communities.

Family, too, played a central role in the life of antebellum Jews, as it did for most Southerners. More often than not Jewish mar- riages were endogamous, although intermarriage was far from uncommon. Jewish parents appear to have been particularly inter- ested in providing their offspring with a good secular education. Some Jews, like Isaac Harby, Myer Moses, and Penina Moise, con- ducted private academies at which Jewish children studied.

During this period most of the city's Jews were lower-middle- class shopowners, though a few entered the professions and the arts. Jewish families frequently lived in apartments located over their shops or businesses; a few lived in separate dwellings. Hagy devotes a chapter to "Women and Work in which he demon- strates that a substantial number of women, especially widows whose financial situation was precarious, engaged actively in busi- ness affairs.

Hagyls treatment of the Reformed Society of Israelites and, sub- sequently, the emergence of religious reform at Congregation Beth

360 American Jewish Archives

Elohim is a competent albeit conventional analysis. His helpful unearthing of new documents and the quantification tables that enrich the book's other chapters are absent altogether in his chap- ter dealing with reform trends at Beth Elohim. And the two tables in the chapter on the Reformed Society of Israelites largely dupli- cate the findings previously published by Robert Liberles.'

While the book contains a sound treatment of Reform Judaism's emergence in Charleston, those who know this period of American Jewish history may disagree with Hagy's rationale as to why Jewish reform emerged in Charleston at this particular point in time. Evaluating previous explanations for the emergence of reform in Charleston, Hagy dismisses the argument (mounted most recently by Liberles) that the "Jew Bill" controversy in Maryland contributed to the emergence of reform in Charleston because Maryland's refusal to fully enfranchise its Jews increased Jewish insecurity in South Carolina. Hagy insists that Jewish anxi- ety over the Jew Bill played no role at all in spurring the move toward religious reform in Charleston: "They mixed with the rest of the community . . . they came and went as they chose . . . they were Americans first and Jews second" (p. 144).

Although the level of apprehension over Maryland's Jew Bill was negligible among Jews in Charleston, Hagy's portrait of an utterly contented and secure Charleston Jewry is not quite accu- rate. The Maryland Jew Bill did not cause the city's Jews to advo- cate religious reform, but perceived manifestations of anti- Semitism did indeed distress many of the liberally minded reform- ers. Men such as Isaac Harby and Abraham Moise expressed their abhorrence for such intolerance in writing.

Yet one of the most annoying anxieties for Charleston's Jews were the increasingly strenuous conversionary efforts of Christian missionaries. The would-be reformers viewed such proselytism as flagrant intolerance, and it provoked much apprehension: "It should also be remembered," the dissenters noted in their 1824 petition to the board of Beth Elohim, "that . . . other sects are . . . making the most zealous efforts to bring together the scattered of their flock, [and] offering the most flattering inducements to all denomination^."^ This reference to Christian proselytism in their

Book Reviews 361

petition indicates that the dissenters believed a "Jewish reforma- tion" would help Jews to resist these missionary inducements.

Hagy also ignores the fact that the reformers themselves expressed open concern about. rampant Jewish assimilation in Charleston. They were earnestly worried about the growing disaf- fection that was besetting their co-religionaires. The dissenters believed their proposed reforms would reverse this ominous trend. "It is also worthy of observation," they wrote, "that a num- ber of Israelites . . . are now wandering gradually from the true God, and daily losing those strong ties which bind every pious man to the faith of his fathers!"3

More controversial is Hagy's conclusion that the fledgling Reform movement in Europe contributed significantly to the beginnings of Jewish reform in Charleston. Speculating that Charleston's Jews probably "maintained contact" with their core- ligionists in Europe," and noting that the would-be reformers did indeed make mention of reformist trends in Holland, Germany, and Prussia in their 1824 memorial, Hagy asserts that Charleston's Jews were probably "fully aware" of European developments (p. 143).

Hagy fortifies this claim by pointing out that the dean of American Jewish historians, Jacob R. Marcus, maintained that more than anything else, events in Europe influenced the rise of Reform in this co~ntry.~ Yet Marcus was referring to American Reform in general. Regarding the emergence of reform in Charleston, however, Marcus's position is unequivocally clear: "there can be little question that the roots, the inciting causes of [the Jewish reformation in Charleston], were American."5

Hagy overlooks other considerations that precipitated the Jewish reformation in Charleston: the community's impressive concentration of liberal-minded Jews, the pervasive dissatisfaction with the quality of Jewish education for the young, and the lack of sound Jewish knowledge in the city. Yet these points do not dimin- ish the author's achievement in producing an account of Jewish life in antebellum Charleston that is filled with valuable data. This book will undoubtedly take its place as a standard work in the field, and a model for future historians to emulate.

- Gary P. Zola

362 American Jewish Archives

Gary P. Zola is national dean of admissions and college relations a t the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion. He is the author of the recently pub- lished volume Isaac Harby of Charleston, 1788-1829: Jewish Refirmer and Intellectual (1994).

Notes I. See his "Conflict Over Reforms: The Case of Congregation Beth Elohirn, Charleston,

South Carolina,' in The American Synagogue: A Sanctua y Transformed, ed. Jack Wertheimer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).

2. L. C. Moise, Isaac Harby (1931). p. 57. 3. bid. 4. Jacob R. Marcus, United States Jewry, vol. I (Detroit: Wayne State University Press,

1989), p. 615. 5 bid., p. 623.

Levine, Peter. Ellis Island t o Ebbets Field: Sport and the American Jewish Experience. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.328 pp.

My Grandpa Simon read the Jewish Daily Forward each afternoon on a bench in the park just across 161st Street from the Bronx County Court House. It may be that A1 Pacino, aka Frank Serpico, made his first drug deal in that same park, but before 1960, when the West Bronx was as Jewish as Flatbush, the only drugs in sight were Pepto-Bismol and Serutan ("nature's spelled backwards").

His son, my father, had died in 1949, bequeathing us his Bronze Stars and Purple Heart, and each other. Simon and I were a pair, and it was he whom I beguiled one fine spring afternoon in 1951 to accompany me two blocks to the south of his normal newspaper reading spot. "It's O.K., Grampa," I assured him, "you'll love the green grass and the sunshine there too."

It was his only visit to Yankee Stadium, this gentle white-haired gent who hailed from somewhere between Minsk and Pinsk (what wonderful cultural juxtaposition, the immigrant at Yenkie Stadium), but it was the first of many for me. I marveled, and can recall it to this day, at the brightness of the emerald-green grass and at the handsome, larger-than-life muscularity of the players-they seemed like gods to my radio-honed imagination. As an American boy this first glimpse of Yankee baseball (Mantle's first season, DiMaggiofs last) was nothing less than love at first sight.

But the secular, assimilated Jew in me knew better. The Dodgers, the Brooklyn Dodgers of Robinson, Campanella, Erskine, Newcomb, and Furillo, not to mention of Cal Abrams and Jake Pitler, now they were a team. The Yankees were heroic, but the Dodgers stood for the verities of Jewish American life: wonderful- ly flawed, ethnically diverse, politically liberal if not correct, ordi- nary city guys who suffered and triumphed.

Peter Levine's recent and fine book, Ellis Island to Ebbets Field, documents and interprets the role of sports in the lives of dozens of Jewish Americans of my father's generation. Covering a wide range of professional, semiprofessional, collegiate, and amateur

364 American Jewish Archives

sports, Levine convincingly and repeatedly demonstrates the way in which sport served as an important vehicle of assimilation and, perhaps more important, provided a vivid demonstration of Jewish strength, fortitude, determination, and heroism in the face of anti-Semitic calumny at home and impending genocide abroad.

Levine's social history of Jews and American sports weaves together this special perspective with bittersweet tales of achieve- ment and overcoming. From the Jewish-dominated sports legends of basketball and boxing (take that, James the Greek) to the trials and humiliations of the two Jewish track stars (one, Marty Glickrnan, my absolute favorite announcer) who were not permit- ted to run in the 1936 Berlin Olympics, Levine evokes the spirit and feel, the yearning and texture of urban American Jewish life in the interwar years. Although he doesn't quite say it, Levine shows convincingly that Jewish participation in American sports quite neatly reflected their place in American society. Slightly off to the side, on the margins, peripheral, Jewish Americans only occasion- ally cracked the halls of major league baseball, big-time intercolle- giate football, or heavyweight boxing. Hardly different from the inability of most second-generation, Eastern European, lower-mid- dle- and working-class sons (and a very occasional daughter) to crack the halls of Princeton, the New York Athletic Club, or the Philadelphia Academy of Music.

Indeed participation in sport became a way of claiming American status, of seeking entree into a social world normally closed off (even by their more affluent German-Jewish cousins) to these shtetl descendants. New York's City College basketball play- ers, and the twenty-dollar-a-game champions of the SPHA (South Philadelphia Hebrew Association), Benny Leonard and Barney Ross provided powerful role models (pace Sir Charles) to our par- ents' generation. Most American Jews couldn't live on the Main Line or on Park Avenue, and most couldn't get a shot in the big leagues. But one who did, Hank Greenberg, provides Levine with a marvelous chapter in his book.

Undoubtedly the greatest Jewish American baseball player of all time (and one of two in the Hall of Fame-If you need to ask the name of the other, you need not buy this book), Greenberg

Book Reviews 365

emerges as a Jewish and then as an American hero. Fifty-eight homeruns. A decorated veteran of the Army Air Corps. A syna- gogue attendee. Greenberg, who this writer suspects served as the actual physical model for Superman, himself a fantasy of Jewish invulnerability, underscores Levine's implicit understanding of sport as a vehicle of social mobility. Quoting Jackie Robinson's autobiography, Levine recalls the vivid moment when the two men, both outsiders, met. It was the twilight of Greenberg's career, when, in 1947, he played for the Pirates against the Dodgers. Robinson, playing first for Brooklyn in his rookie season, found himself sprawling, run down by Greenberg trying to leg out an infield hit. Greenberg stopped, helped Robinson up, and asked if he was all right. Robinson, more sage than even he knew, antici- pated Peter Levine's understated thesis: "Class tells . . . it sticks out all over Mr. Greenberg."'

- Peter M. Rutkoff

Peter M. Rutkoff is professor of history at Kenyon College. Among his publica- tions are New School: A History of the New School for Social Research, 1917-1970 (with William B. Scott) and "Two Base Hit: Baseball, Race and Demography in New York," which appeared in Baseball and the American Culture.

Note 1. Jackie Robinson, Jackie Robinson: My Own Story, as told to Wendel Smith (New York,

1948).

366 American Jewish Archives

Lichtenstein, Diane. Writing Their Nations: The Tradition of Nineteenth-Centu y American Jewish Women Writers. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992.176 pp.

Enormous changes in what was expected of women and in their own self-perception characterized the nineteenth century. In 18o0, work and home very often existed under the same roof, but by the Civil War's end, industrial revolution and the subsequent differ- entiation between business and family life placed woman not in the factories, but ideally in the homeas a True Woman: protector, educator, and moral guide. By the century's end the New Woman had emerged, and possibility seemed to be the watchword, in the workplace, the political arena, the marriage relationship, and so on. At every point, as the female sex encountered change, tension was palpable. For Jews as well, the nineteenth century presented upheaval: a tiny community grew into a prosperous and recog- nized minority, but by the 1880s confronted two major changes: an explosion in population and an increase in anti-Semitism. How Jewish women writers coped with change in this tumultuous cen- tury while attempting to influence their times is the subject of Diane Lichtenstein's Writing Their Nations, a work of social and lit- erary history. Sensitive scrutiny of texts and close attention to their historical contexts reveal how writers of German and Sephardic Jewish background-from Penina Moise to Edna Ferber-responded to and tried to shape a culture that offered conflicting messages about their roles as women and as Jews, and how these women used their dual identities to broaden definitions of American iden- tity.

Writing Their Nations-well-organized, thoroughly researched, and free of jargon-contributes to our understanding of the period in four ways. First, it explores the roles women were asked to play by others and shows us what writing women actually did with these roles, both confirming and transforming them. Illuminating the most prominent women's images, such as the "Mother in Israel," Lichtenstein emphasizes the differences between Jewish concepts and Christianity's comparable womanly ideal. For exam-

Book Reviews 367

ple, both religious groups saw women as protectors of the home and family and conveyors of values to children. But in the Jewish world, women were less concerned with battling the temptations of drink and prostitution; instead, they were determined to anchor their families in ritual (though not necessarily Orthodoxy) and gird them against anti-Semitism. The issue of power and control, of what truly lay within women's sphere, is part of this discussion, and several published essays by Jewish women who attacked anti- Semitic thought are the most interesting documents Lichtenstein analyzes.

Lichtenstein's second valuable contribution is her delineation of women's motivations as they put pen to paper. Many seem to have written out of duty or a desire to persuade; a few wrote exclusive- ly for their families and themselves. Rare indeed were those who wrote with a desire to create literature. Emma Lazarus is truly dis- tinctive because she saw herself primarily as a writer, a new American voice.

The third service Lichtenstein performs is her diligent exhuma- tion of obscure material, including little-known poems, novels, essays, and diaries. Most fascinating, especially given the author's purpose of defining a tradition, are the prose pieces by women writers contemplating earlier models, for example, Nina Morais Cohen's article on Rebekah Hyneman and Josephine Lazarus's on Louisa May Alcott, Margaret Fuller, and Madame Dreyfus.

The fourth and, I believe, most significant addition Lichtenstein makes to the literature is in establishing a basis for comparison to other minority traditions. Scholars will surely want to compare Lichtenstein's Jewish women to W. E. B. Du Bois's talented tenth, who also wrote largely to persuade a mainstream audience of their humanity and to urge reform of contemporary attitudes and behaviors. Such combining of perspectives is essential to genuine understanding of the role minorities play in mainstream culture and t6 exploring how American identity is formed and who forms it. Another particularly useful focus for scholars is Lichtenstein's contention that Emma Lazarus became a literary insider by val- orizing the outsider. One might suggest that this valorizing of the Jew is what occurs in works by such twentieth-century writers as

368 American Jewish Archives

Philip Roth and Bernard Malamud. And it is noteworthy that all the portraits of Jews by these very American writers avoid pre- senting details of Jewish ritual and belief. Thus, while the Jew as

, outsider is surely valorized, his/her foreignness is also clearly minimized, and we see that for the writers, and their subjects, to be considered part of the mainstream will demand the transformation of distinct ethnic, religious, and racial particulars into universal ones.

Without question, Writing Their Nations confirms Lichtenstein's opening contention that "without these non-canonical texts, our vision of American literature and culture remains monochromatic and even inaccurate" (p. 4). At the same time, however, Lichtenstein overemphasizes in her first, theoretical chapter the need to eschew qualitative evaluations. Of course outlining a liter- ary tradition requires inclusiveness and some suspension of stan- dards of quality. Thus, it is not at all objectionable that most of the work presented in the book is too parochial to provide genuine lit- erary pleasure. Yet it seems to me disingenuous to note, then, that Emma "Lazarus has not passed 'the test of time' for a variety of economic, political, gender, and ethnic/religious reasons," with- out considering the quality of the work. Lichtenstein says that something vital and original exists in Lazarus's work, but does not discuss those elements, perhaps because then she would be com- pelled to raise the notion of literary standards.

A related issue concerns how the artist's self-perception affects her literary voice and vision. I wish Lichtenstein had addressed it. I would also like to know the writers' definitions of Judaism, espe- cially since several of them are described as having attempted to combine the best in Judaism and the best of American life. One wonders, too, whether those few women who accepted intermar- riage as a way to unite a Jewish and an American identity believed that Judaism could and would persist beyond their own genera- tion.

Despite these reservations, 1 believe Lichtenstein has written a book that will be interesting to lay readers and useful to scholars, myself included. Most striking is how the book resonates with the ways in which contemporary women will identify with

Book Reviews 369

Lichtenstein's writers. It is to the author's credit that as she traces changes in women's worlds, she also reveals how much remained the same. Today, women who choose to accept a fully domestic role for any period of their lives can understand Mrs. Henry Meyer's desire "to invent a conciliating code through which she and her audience could continue to believe in their cultural worth as mothers and wives" (p. 84). And as other women in late-twen- tieth-century society go from career to home to volunteer activities and to board meetings, many continue to examine these responsi- bilities, contemplating the contributions they are able to make to women's lives and to the larger culture.

- Diane Matza

Diane Matza teaches writing and twentieth-century American literature at Utica College. She is currently writing a literary biography of Annie Nathan Meyer and is preparing an anthology of writings by American Sephardirn.

American Jewish Archives

Brief Notices

American Jewish Historical Society. A n Index to Publications of the American Jewish Historical Society, volumes 21-50 [1913-1961]. Brooklyn: Carlson Publishing, 1994. xxii, 439 pp.

With the publication of this index, scholars and researchers will finally have access to a quick and effective search of volumes 21-50 of the Publications of the American Jewish Historical Society, the first index to the publication to appear since 1914. The current index also contains an introductory essay by Jeffrey S. Gurock, which analyzes the major developments of the journal in the years between 1913 and 1961.

Belcove-Shalin, Janet S., Edited by. New World Hasidim: Ethnographic Studies of Hasidic Jews in America. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995. xv, 285 pp.

It is virtually impossible to pick up a major American newspa- per, not to mention the Jewish press, and not read something about events in the Hasidic community. From a relatively small and unknown element of American Jewish life before 1945, the Hasidic communities were given an important boost by the arrival of sev- eral Hasidic dynasties which survived the Holocaust.

Now 770 Eastern Parkway in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn, the world center of Chabad-Lubavitch, nearly rivals 838 Fifth Avenue, the Reform Movement's "House of Living Judaism," as a well-recognized and important address.

The ten well-written and informative essays in this volume deal with important issues in the Hasidic world, from politics to ritual to music to the role of women and the role of the rebbe. One is impressed with the nature and types of research currently in progress on this fascinating part of the American Jewish commu- nity.

Berrol, Selma. East SideEast End: Eastern European Jews in London and Nao York. Westport, Conn. and London: Praeger, 1994. xiv, 159 pp.

In this small but interesting volume, Selma Berrol sets out to puncture a myth that has long prevailed in both England and the United States: that Eastern European Jewish immigrants used edu- cation as their springboard to a middle-class existence.

Between 1870 and 1914, more than two million Jews left the Russian and Austro-Hungarian Empires, which included parts of Poland in both, and a much smaller number left Romania. Selma Berrol is interested in studying the economic and educational paths taken by the one and a half million Jews who came to America and especially to New York and the approximately 120,000 who went to Great Britain and especially London.

In her interesting comparative analysis, Berrol concludes that Jews who came to New York made,overall, the wiser decision. There were many more Jewish immigrants able to develop a sup- port system in New York, the native Jewish community was better able to support a positive communal response to the East European Jewish immigration, and the prevailing British class sys- tem, where one "knew one's place,"stifled the path to middle-class comfort in a way that the American system did not. The greatest difference, then, between the success of the two Jewish communi- ties was, in Berrol's view, time. It took American Jews much less time to leave the immigrant style of life and achieve economic comfort, although both communities have achieved a very solid position within their respective national communities.

Milstead, Jessica L., and Beverly A. Pajer. Index to the Inventory of Records of the American Jewish Committee, 1906-80. New York: American Jewish Committee, 1994. 250 pp.

Although an inventory to the records of the American Jewish Committee and its extraordinary history as an American Jewish and human rights defense organization exists, this index will sub- stantially improve its accessibility to scholars. In light of the fact that comparatively little research has been carried out on the activ- ities of the organization and Naomi Cohen's institutional history failed to incorporate scholarly documentation, this index should provide the impetus for a new generation of scholars eager to understand the policy developments and changes in the history of an internationally admired Jewish organization.

Brief Notices 373

Patt, Ruth Marcus. Uncommon Lives. Eighteen Extraordinary Jews from New Jersey. New York: Vantage Press, 1994.191 pp.

Ruth Marcus Patt has long been a one-person force in the his- torical circles of Jewish New Jersey. She has numerous books to her credit, from studies of the "Jewish scene" in New Jersey's Raritan Valley to the Jewish experience at Rutgers to the Sephardim of New Jersey.

Uncommon Lives focuses on eighteen notable Jews who had some connection to New Jersey. These include Albert Einstein, the Nobel laureate Selman Waksman, whose discoveries helped in the struggle against tuberculosis, the artist Ben Shahn, and Libby Sachar, New Jersey's first female judge. The only serious oversight in the book is the failure to include a nineteenth extraordinary Jew, namely the author herself.

Massey, Irving. Identity and Community: Reflections on English, Yiddish, and French Literature in Canada. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1994.205 pp.

This volume is intended in part as a "reexamination" of the author's cultural roots and connections. Those roots lie in the Jewish community of Montreal and in Massey's connection to the world of Yiddish literature as embodied in the person of his moth- er, the poet Ida Maza, and her place in the Montreal Yiddish renais- sance of the 1930s. While Massey also devotes chapters to Canadian writers such as Sir Charles G. D. Roberts and Michel Tremblay, and to themes such as Anglophone individualism and Francophone communitarianism, it is precisely in the discussions of his mother's poetry (translated from the Yiddish by Massey) and of Yiddish Montreal in the 1930s that Massey's narrative voice reaches a noticeable intensity.

Raphael, Marc Lee, Edited by. What Is American About the American Jewish Experience? Williamsburg, Va: College of William and Mary, 1993.122 PP.

It is to be regretted that this little volume did not find a larger publisher and method of distribution. Its contents are important

374 American Jewish Archives

because its authors are among the best of those scholars who research in the area of the American Jewish experience. Specifically, the authors set out to answer the question: what was the American context or contexts in which the Jewish and Judaic experiences unfolded? Authors such as Stephen J.Whitfield, Jeffrey S. Gurock, Pamela S. Nadell, and Benny Kraut, among others, seek to answer this question from numerous perspectives and do it exceedingly well.

Singer, David, Edited by. American Jewish Yearbook (Volume 94). New York: American Jewish Committee,1gg4. xi, 655 pp.

With the appearance of the 1994 edition, the American Jewish Committee has become the sole publisher of the American Jewish Yearbook, thus ending a relationship with the Jewish Publication Society of America that extended over eight decades. The 1994 edi- tion features an important and enlightening article by Steven J. Gold on the Soviet Jews in the United States.

Wind, James P. and James W. Lewis, Edited by. American Congregations. Vol. I. Portraits of Twelve Religious Communities; Vol. 2. New Perspectives in the Study of Congregations. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994. vol. T: 712 pp.; vol. 2: 292 pp.

These two volumes are landmarks in the history of American religions. The essays in volume I seek to answer three general questions: "Where is the congregation located on the broader map of American cultural and religious life? What defines congrega- tions-what are their distinctive qualities, practices, tasks, and roles in American culture? And what patterns of leadership and organi- zation characterize congregations in America?" The array of con- tributors to the volume-among them Martin E. Marty, Dorothy C. Bass, Jay P. Dolan, and R. Stephen Warner among others-is intel- lectually stunning.

Volume 2 provides a portrait of American life and religion through the histories of twelve American religious communities from various Protestant denominational congregations, to Roman Catholic, Greek Orthodox, Muslim, Hindu, and Jewish. Among

Brief Notices 375

the very best of the essays is one entitled "From Synagogue- Community to Citadel of Reform: The History of K.K. Bene Israel (Rockdale Temple) in Cincinnati, Ohio" by Jonathan D. Sarna and Karla Goldman.