Review - American Jewish Archivesamericanjewisharchives.org/publications/.../1995_47_01_00_reviews.pdf · attitudes toward Zion.Using many of these often rare and diverse ... (Reinhold

Review Essau

Holy Land Land of Memory and Promise

Jefiey Watson

Kark, Rutk American Consuls in the Holy Land, 1832-1914 Jerusalem: Magnes Press; Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1994 388 pp.

Vogel Lester I. To SeeA Promised Land:American and the Holy Land in the Nineteenth Centu y. University Park:Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993. xviii, 358 pp.

Greenberg, Gershon The Holy Land in American Religious Thought, i62e1948:The Symbios is ofAmerican Religious Approaches to Scripture's Sacred Territo y. Lanham, Md:University Press of America, 1994. xiv,

37OPP.

Our three authors illuminate the changing images of Zion in the modem era. For centuries, Zion-in-the-Land had been a remote travel destination and a political backwater, but Zion flourished in the language of religious piety as a memory of religious heritage and a promise of future hope. After 1865,improved transportation and political stability facilitated American travel to Zion-in-the-Land. For decades most Zion-bound American travelers were Protestants, who brought biblical expectations that rarely matched realities. By the 1880s, increased numbers of Jewish immigrants entered the Land, and sought protection from European and American consuls. With the start of World War I, tourism declined, Jewish imrnigrant/settler needs became a central focus of American consular activity, andZion became a political reality that provoked anideologicalresponse from America's diverse religious traditions.

The preceding paragraph summarizes our three authors' works, and illustrates the American Holy Land Project's broad inquiry into

I American interest and involvement in the Land. Gershon Green-

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berg surveys the diversity of American thought about Zion. Lester Vogel focuses on changing Protestant perceptions of the Holy Land. Ruth Kark investigates American consular activity in the Land. Each book will be exposited and evaluated to show its con- tributions to Holy Land studies.

Greenberg's "Holy Land"

The in-gathering of American religious thought about Zion in Gershon Greenberg's book has an imposing breadth that over- shadows its debatable thesis. For many years the Holy Land Project sponsored research and published primary sources on American attitudes toward Zion.Using many of these often rare and diverse sources in summary and excerpt form,Greenberg presents each major tradition with a brief commentary. These synopses are held together by an overview of the traditions' commonalities, and a thesis alleging the symbiotic nature of American attachments to Zion, which, I will later argue,implies more than the historical record warrants.

The traditions about Zion are grouped together under four cate- gories: colonial and early American history, nineteenth-century individuals, nineteenth-century religious groups, and twentieth- century religious opinion. Puritans, their progeny, and early Jews saw Zion-as-America, and often perceived the American Indians as the Lost Tribes of Israel, whose presence foreboded Divine favor. Nineteenth-century individuals (mostly Protestant pilgrims, missionaries, and consuls) came to the Land with a sense of religious mission which Holy Land realities challenged. Nineteenth-century religious groups saw their separate Zions from a great distance: blacks saw Zion as a symbol of their own struggles; Protestant "Literalistsl'anticipated a Divinely instituted, Christian Zion-in- the-Land; and Mormons believed in a Zion-in-America and a Mormon Zion-in-the-Land, the two together restoring the earth.2 Nineteenth-century Jewish opinion varied: most Reform rabbis envisioned Zion-as-America, while more traditionally observant Jews were apt to cling to Zion-in-the-Land, but argued over the role of human and Divine initiative. Twentietkcentury religious thought has had to confront the claims of Zion-in-the-Land. Jewish

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support for political Zionism has grown, albeit with continued vocal dissent; Catholic opinion has focused on the holy places, but has been hostile to the Jewish presence in the Land; and liberal Protestants are portrayed as sympathetic to a this-worldly Zion.

Greenberg's thesis is that "the Holy Land" is an integral concept within American religious history that has spanned centuries, included most major religious groups, and involved common religious texts, ideas, and practices. Greenberg argues that America's religions were

. ..drawn toward specific religious themes: (I) Man's passive or active role under the aegis of God. (2) Jerusalem as this-worldly or otherworldly. (3)America1s negative or positive role for the Land, and the restored Holy Land's negative or positive impli- cations for the world and world Jewry(4)The redeemed Land's negative and positive meaning for the residents and local culture. (5)The Jew's radically negative or positive status in the apocalypse.

These common themes point to and reflect a common source, the sacred territory of Scripture.3

Common themes promoted shared values, but also increased intergroup competition.4 These commonalities comprise part of what he calls "religious symbiosis;' and it is here that I must begin my dissent.

This book's underlying metaphor, the biological process of symbiosis, refers to the coexistence of diverse organisms, and requires common location,interaction,and mutual advantage? Greenberg uses the metaphor, he refers to different groups "sharing sacred spaceu-not so much the Land itself, but the ideas about the Holy Land and Scripture -by using similar ideas in parallel ways with normally low levels of intergroup conflict! He does not distinguish between similar ideas and activities that are experienced entirely separately and those that are experienced in close proximity, in tandem, or simultaneously. The book does not have room to both survey attitudes toward Zion and analyze relationships among religious groups, but the biological process that he is using as a metaphor is not based on separate similarities, but on mutualadvantage and interaction in a com-

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mon location7 Greenberg emphasizes the "sharing' part of this concept,but are these groups truly "sharing sacred space" if thereis neither mutual consent,nor relationship, nor mutual advantage in the'kharing"?

Greenberg points to Protestant liberals and secular Zionists (or "kecular Jews") as his prime exemplars of symbiosis? While other groups "khare sacred space" but devalue each other, each of these two groups affirms its own ideology but leaves sacred space for others.

The few exceptions to the process of self-definition cum denial of the other, namely secularist Jews [or "secular Zionists"] and liberal Protestants, identified universal principles that tran- scended any spatial Holy Land, although those principles were associated with American values. Mutual respect was possible when the spatial boundaries were broken and purposedly transcendental values were established?

Tersely, new thought (Protestant liberalism and secular Zion- ism) promoted desacralized views of Zion that facilitated mutual respect.

Greenbergs study of liberal Protestants is a six-page analysis of three representative thinkers: one minor Protestant cleric (Adolph Berle), one major Protestant liberal (Harry Emerson Fosdick), and one major theologian (Reinhold Niebuhr). Our first question is, do these three illustrate his perspective on liberal Protestantism? Berle's opinions, I think, reflect the context of wartime idealism, and he apparently did not further write on behalf of Zionism pro- Zionist writings or activity toward Jews?' Fosdick, Greenberg admits, had objections to political Zionism, but he portrays him as one who, like Judah Magnes, would espouse a "modified form of Zionism only!''' But Fosdick's concern for cultural Zionism was incidental: his focus was to predict tragedy for political Zionism.12 Niebuhr grew up in a German Pietistic home in which his father, a pastor, espoused a socially progressive but theologically conservative Christian faith. He was influenced by theological liberalism - which was a dynamic tendency within and outside mainstream Protestantism-but intellectually distanced himself from it while holding a position at Union Theological Seminary, long a bastion of

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the liberal tradition. He is called "neo-orthodoi' or a "Christian realist" but he probably is better understood as one who opposed theological liberalism, revamped traditional Protestant theology, and blended it with left-of-center political thinking. Most relevantly for us, Niebuhr's distinctive theology and sympathy for Jews and Zionism set him apart from all mainstream and liberal protest ant^?^ In sum, for different reasons neither Berle, Niebuhr, nor Fosdick should be cited as a typical theological liberal who embraced Zionism. Greenberg's selection and handling of these three give Protestant liberalism an undue pro-Zionist cast, and provide the foundation for his suggestion of the functional or causal connection between universal principles, mutual respect, and a Zion shared by different ideological groups?*

In fact, American liberal Protestants and Jews were improving their mutual relations, but not because of Zionism. Liberal and mainstream Protestants and elite Jews found common ground in civic activities, social services, social reform, and the interfaith movement. While we know of individual Protestant liberals who favored Zionism, their sympathies often appear of limited depth, and others left notable criticisms of Zionism. Overall, Zionism was not a central concern of most liberal Protestants.15

Internationally, what most concerned early interwar liberal Protestants was the application of ethical principles to a very large scale view of international relations. The Great War had fostered visions of a new internationalism that were thwarted by postwar political realities. Despite initial setbacks, an overlapping coalition of peace advocates, political liberals, and religious liberals championed the restructuring of international relations to maximize ethical principles such as the self-determination of nations, minority rights, organized international cooperation, increased cultural and political understanding, and sanctions against arms and armed conflict.16 In the peculiar politics of the post-Great War decade, these prominent liberals and pacifists were able to promote these principles into a central place in political discourse and international agreements.

The principles of post-Great War internationalism had developed as a critique of European political history, but they were partially discordant with Zionist claims. To those already committed to Zionism, this paradigm's emphasis of right over might would seem

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resonant with the new visions of Zion. For those outside the Zionist fold, however, the new principles would have raised critical issues in assessing a nationalism that had limited support, seemed irnproba- ble in the face of overwhelming internal and external obstacles, and aroused the cultural animosity and armed opposition of an Arab majority. In short, American religious (and secular) liberals valued both their improved ties with American Jews and an internationalism that raised critical issues for Zionism. On one hand, this resulted in the anti-political Zionist but pro-Jewish sentiments of Harry Emerson Fosdick, New York Times editor John H. Finley, the editors of the Christian Centuy,and Carnegie executive Harry S. Prit~hett?~ On the other hand, many liberals appear to have resolved the tension between these two attitudes by muting their criticisms of Zionism. Ethically, this made perfect sense: despite misgivings about Zionism, Jews had unique problems, Zionism did offer advantages to the indigenous Arabs of Palestine, and other conflicts in the world cried out for resol~tion?~

Many of the liberal and moderate Protestants who eventually endorsed Zionism had limited favorable interest in it, but Zionists attempted to leverage this limited interest for maximum impact. Under Zionist urging, the Pro-Palestine Federation (PPF), incorpo- ratedin January 1930,and the American Palestine Committee, begun in 1932 gained the endorsement of some Christian leaders, but most of their interest seems to have been passive. The PPF sponsored the interfaith American Christian Conference on the Jewish Problem in 1936, and this generated publicity, but no notable r e s~ l t s?~ Only the conditions of World War' I1 prompted a dramatic change. Rabbis Milton Steinberg and Philip Bernstein, and their associates, seem to have taken the initiative to encourage the small numbers of pro-Zionist Protestants (including Niebuhr) to form the American Christian Palestine Committee in December 1942.This ad hoc small group of Protestants-heavily influenced and at least partially supported through the efforts of Reform Jewish rabbis- actively sought to publicize Zionism and to gain endorsement from the mainstream Protestant denominations and their allied religious press.20 Many Protestant institutions responded favorably to the Zionist initiative, and this was doubly good news in the face of public opinion polls that measured rising hostility and decreased


sympathy toward Jews?' These wartime endorsements, while time- lyusually were limited in scope and intensity, and reflected wartime idealism for postwar solutions to domestic and international problem^?^

Twentieth-century conservative Protestant religious leaders are totally omitted from this text, but they provide the sharpest contrast with their liberal counterparts. Conservative Protestant religious leaders tended to have far fewer contacts with Jews, but they often developed an appreciation for Jews because of Zionism. Many conservative Protestants lived in rural areas, but-contrary to common belief-many conservative religious Protestants also came from the urban north and east. In either case, their back- grounds, training, ministry, and lifestyles kept them from intimate contacts with Jews?-3 While Protestant religious conservatives were socially distant from Jews, they often had connections with social and political conservatives, some of whom had pronounced antisemitic tendencies. Nevertheless, most Protestant religious conservatives resisted blatant anti~emitism?~ For a core group of these religious conservatives, their favorable view of the Jewish biblical past and their belief in an impending End of Days overshadowed any present-day conflict with Jews and made Zionism appear as part of a Divine plan that merited their intense ~ympathy.2~

In sum, many conservative Protestants had religious-ideological bonds to Zionism but few connections to Jews; liberal Protestants had much better connections to Jews but limited attachments to Zionism. Conservative Protestant interest in Zion had little concern for intercultural, political, and economic obstacles to Z i~n i sm?~ Leading liberal Protestants usually knew far more about Jews, obstacles to Zionism, and international relations; this knowledge made Zionism into a more contestable issue with opposing view- points among liberals.

By now, I have inked many pages protesting Greenberg's concept of symbiosis and his treatment of twentieth-century liberal and conservative Protestants. But overall, his book is an ambitious synopsis of over three hundred years of American opinion about Zion. It reflects much learning, and its description of commonalities among traditions merits careful attention. I very much enjoyed his discussions of Catholic Holy Land piety, and found the chapter on

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Mormons to be a useful introduction to unfamiliar issues. Most readers would find many ways in which this work would serve as an important guide. As a whole, this text is a major contribution for which there is no substitute.

Vogel's "Promised Land"

Vogel's thesis is that the Bible-centeredness of nineteenth-century Protestant piety defined Americans' perceptions of Holy Land realities. It shaped American behavior toward the Land, and the distor- tions between image and reality were only partially corrected by increasing information about politics and history27 This "pious re- gard for a unique place:' which he calls "geopiety(' was especially pronounced among devout Protestants, but also found among mar- ginal Protestants and Catholics. Not only did Protestant cultural influence have wide impact in nineteenth-century America, but on a topic as remote from daily life as the Holy Land, few; ideological and institutional tensions arose to oppose this geopiety.

To demonstrate this thesis, the body of Vogel's book considers five different groups of American Protestants in the Land between 1865 and 19x4: tourists/pilgrims, missionaries, settlers, diplomats, and scholars. The most numerous were tourists, drawn by increased political stability, improved transportation, publicity, and the provi- sion of amenities. Even Abe Lincoln on the last day of his life talked about traveling to the Holy Land! Other notables who came to the Land included Ulysses S. Grant, Theodore Roosevelt, and Mark Twain, and their trips are described in absorbing detail?'

Vogel's four other Protestant groups are less numerous. American missionaries first came to the Land in 1821, but by 19x4 only eight missionary societies with 120 adults existed in the Land and Syria.29 The two millenarian American Protestant colonies were ephemeral: The 150-member Adams Colony in Jaffa began in 1866, but sixty soon died, seventy left within two years, and its leader was discredited. The American Colony of Jerusalem began with eighteen in 1881, added thirty in 1895, but quietly ith he red.^' American consuls had few commercial tasks, but aided tourists, missionaries, settlers, and scholars. American biblical archaeologists first came to the Land in 1838, but are most identified with the later


American School of Oriental Research in Jerusalem. These four small bands of Americans, Vogel convincingly argues, felt the tension between the culturally defined imagery of the Holy Land and its actual realities.

Another form of evidence that Vogel briefly considers are "cultural representations" of the Holy Land that were popular in America. Three noted ones are Chautauqua's "Palestine Park," a 75-foot by 120-foot outdoor model of the Land built in 1874; the"stereoscopes,~' first made in 1914, that created simple images of the Holy Land; and the lo-acre model of Jerusalem at the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair?

Vogel's last chapter turns from a description of Protestant experience in the Holy Land to an analysis that touches on many new topics: theories on "concepts of perceptions and values"; the impact of Ottoman political change on American perceptions of the Land; the erosion of mainstream Protestantism and its influence on changing views of the Promised Land;and the connections between changing Western scholarly views of the Near East and perceptions of political legitimacy. All these topics merit investigation, but they seem crammed in together in one chapter, and this contrasts stark- ly with the artful and vivid prose of the rest of the book. Vogel would have done better to develop these themes more fully.

Vogel's work has much value for American-Holy Land Studies. His narrative is detailed and well written. Students would enjoy reading it! The sixty-two-page bibliography of Library of Congress holdings should be a valuable tool for scholars. Overall, this is a n important one-volume introduction to the Protestant role in Holy Land studies. Its value is blunted by its neglect of Catholics and Jews, and by a concluding chapter that says much and suggests even more, but seems an abrupt ending to an otherwise engaging and praiseworthy book.

Kark's "American Consuls in the Holy Land"

Ruth Kark's professed goal is to examine the motivations, functions, and impact of American consular representatives at one peripheral point of the Ottoman Empire: the historic Holy Land.32 Consuls were responsible for representing the interests of citizens, not the

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policy of government, and in minor outposts they supported themselves by fees for services and the personal gains from consular ex- traterritorial privileges and customs exemptions. By 1909 America had a worldwide network of 566 consular posts while simultaneously the State Department had only 35 ranking officers, 135 clerks, and a total of 210 employee^.^^ Kark's implicit question is whether the American consular service was adequate to represent American interestd4 Our task is to consider the methodology and content of her response.

Kark considers both the institution of the consulate and individual consuls. While American consuls had legally stipulated duties, much of the decision-making process was informal, and each office was shaped by the needs of the post and the personality of the consul. Since the individuals are identified with the institution, many authors would have structured the book around the major consuls. Instead, Kark puts biographical sketches in a twenty-seven-page appendix, brief vignettes in the middle chapters, biographical data in the last two chapters, and biographicalcomments in the conclusion. This tends to fracture her description, analysis, and evaluation of complex individuals.

Consider Kark's discussion of Selah Merrill, the American consul in Jerusalem from 1882 to 1885,1891 to 1893, and 1898 to 1907. He was a Congregational clergyman and a scholar who collected and sold archaeological, zoological, and botanical specimens. He was known for being intemperate in his emotions and harsh in his criticisms of both Christian and Jewish constituents. He is portrayed as a man who stereotyped Jews and harbored "antisemitic prejudices!35 Kark presents all these criticisms in several different passages which areat times repetitious. But in two isolated passages she presents evidence which suggests that Merrill saw large numbers of Jewsperjure themselves to secure American documents or otherwise comport themselves in ways which should have troubled his moral con~cience.~~ The relationship between his interactions with Jews and his perceptions of Jews should have been explored in a study concerned with consular motivation, work, and impact. Merrill looms large in this book, but he is presented piecemeal; the results seem superficial.

By contrast, Vogel and Greenberg present terse, but more complex views of Merrill. Vogel describes him in one passage as "bumptious


with a practical outlook" that brought him into opposition with Protestants who had romantic views of the Land.37 In another passage Vogel says that Merrill, "an adherent of old-line Calvinist orthodoxy, was haughty and disdainful of the growing number of Jews who sought his protection, but even so, he applied many of the same policies his predecessors had!'38

Greenberg's two-page description of Merrill centers on his Consular Reports. Merrill claimed to have interviewed Jewish immigrants to find whether their motivations matched the realities of the Land. He stated that few Jews were prepared to settle in the Land, and that the situation would portend ominously for larger numbers of Jews.39 The failure of early Jewish settlers would have suggested this prognosis; his predictions were not unreasonable, even if they proved erroneous. In sum, Merrill is a fitting object of controversy, but his life should be a challenge for analysis, not a subject of reverse stereotyping.

Kark's lesser emphasis on biography and greater emphasis on administrative detail exposes her readers to her wide knowledge of the Yishuv, Near East, and diplomatic history. All these are critical dimensions of Holy Land studies, but understanding this material is complicated by the disjunctures that exist between the politics and history of the Yishuv and the OttomanEmpire. Her introduction and first three chapters each provide some background information on the Ottoman polity, administrative practice, diplomatic activity, trade with America, and regional political events. Even with these introductory materials, her readers would benefit from some prior knowledge of Ottoman history, and the most knowledgeable will find the greatest reward in reading the results of her research.

Kark's third and fourth chapters are linked together by their geographical scope and methodology. The third chapter is on "The United States Consulate in the Holy Land/' and the fourth is about "United States Consuls in Jerusalem; Methodologically, the third is an institutional analysis of the external relations of American consular organizations in the Land, and the fourth, an internal institutional analysis of American consular organizations in the Land. These two chapters overlap in many ways, but together they form a coherent picture.

Kark focuses her text on formal organization and institutional

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practice, and this reflects her other academic work on administrative and economic history?' Her institutional analysis of consular tasks fills her two longest and final chapters, and suggests major points of conflict between the Ottomans, the American consuls, and Jewish settlers. These tensions are of enormous importance, but are nearly obscured by her focus on administrative details.

Kark's underlying question is whether a patchwork network of part-time consuls could function adequately, and the convincing answer on the last page is that they demonstrated "reasonable ade- quacyi'America's consular posts gave an inexpensive, worldwide presence to a largely isolationist nation that lacked the political will to afford well-staffed embassies and an adequate State Department.

Kark's voluminous research work is culled from many archives, and in the long run her work should form a major corpus of study on the history of the Yishuv. Regrettably, in this volume she is less able to present complex views of the consuls themselves, a crucial deficiency in a book about one-person-dominated institutions. Her study has been translated from the Hebrew, and in English it lacks a smooth narrative style. Still, advanced students and scholars will find in it much of value on the Near East, the Holy Land, the history of the Yishuv, and international relations.

Our three authors have brought different tools and tasks to their Holy Land fields; all of them have harvested richly, but their labors present us with very different fruits. Greenberg has sifted through the mountainous literature of American attitudes toward Zion, placing before us a synopsis of three centuries of multicultural American views of Zion. While he insightfully notes the commonalities among these traditions, he overstates their symbiotic qualities and neglects the irony that liberal Protestants were apt to like Jews but not Zionism, that most conservatives were more distant from Jews but more attracted to Zionism, and that some Protestants across the theological spectrum endorsed Zion, not as a theological issue, but as a practical resolution to Jewish problems?' Vogel shows us how pre-First World War mainstream Protestants envisioned a biblically framed Zion, often were disillusioned by its realities, yet kept believing in the Holy Land as a unique place on earth. Because mainstream Protestantism was so culturally predominant in nineteenth-century America, this awe of Zion was a potent influ-


ence in many areas of American life. Focusing only on American consuls, Ruth Kark shows that these part-time officials had a wide variety of formal responsibilities that, unlike consular obligations elsewhere, focused less on commerce and more on assisting Ameri- cans in the Land. In this respect the long trend was that consuls went from assisting predominantly Protestants to aiding a mix of Protestants and an increasing numbers of Jews, most of whom were not American citizens, but proteges (a protected status permit- ted by Ottoman practice). Taken separately, each author teaches us much about separate aspects of Holy Land studies. Taken together, they illustrate the changing images and realities of Zion as it both retained much of its ancient spiritual aura yet became a place of visitation (primarily for Christians), new settlement (primarily for Jews), and an integral part of the conflicts of our modem world.

J e p q Watson is a doctoral candidate in the department of Near Eastern and Ju- daic Studies, Brandeis University. His dissertation deals with the American interfaith movement and Jewish-Christian relations, 1917-1933.

Notes

1. The development of Holy Land studies is highlighted in Robert Handy's "The America-Holy Land Studies Project: A Personal Statement:' in M. Davis and Y. Ben-Arieh, With Eyes Toward Zion, vol. 3 (New York: Praeger, 1991), pp. 33-39. See also related volumes: M. Davis, With Eyes Toward Zion, vol. I (New York: Amo Press, 197) and vol. 2 (New York: Praeger, 1986). See also the four volumes of Guide to the America-Holy Land Studies (1980-84), three edited by N. Kaganoff, and one by M. Kaufrnan and M. Levine.

2. Gershon Greenberg, The Holy Land in American Religious Thought (New York: University Press of America, 1994, pp. 231-234.

3. Ibid., p. 9. 4. Ibid.,pp. I, 9,355, and title page. 5. In my attempt to properly understand the term "symbiosis:' I have read scien-

tific texts and approximately eighty scientific abstracts on symbiosis that have been written in the past three years. There are nuances of definition among authors, but I think that my description of the term fairly reflects its metaphorical use. See Vemon Ahmadjian and Surindar Paracer, Symbiosis: A n Introduction to Biological As- sociations (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 19861, pp. ix-4, 8-11, 199-201. Clark P. Read, Parasitism and Symbiology (New York: Ronald Press, 1970), pp. 1-10. Cf. S. Mark Henry, "Foreword:' and S. W. Orenski, "Intermicrobial Symbio-

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sis," in Symbiosis, ed. S. Mark Hemy (New York: Association Press, 19661, pp. ix-xi, 1-2.

6. Greenberg, Holy Land in American Religious Thought, pp. 9,351. 7. See above, n. 5. Scientists have nuances of difference in explaining the concept

of symbiosis. In special cases symbiosis may not share all of these criteria, but they are exceptions.

8. Greenberg, Holy Land in American Religious Thought, pp. 9,286,351. 9. Ibid., pp. 351-352.

lo. Adolf Berle's extensive publications and the very limited information in the Tufts University Archives suggest that he was a Christian social ethicist covering a wide range of issues, and that his interest in Zion may have been episodic. For a long selection from Berle's one statement on Zionism, see Robert T. Handy, ed., The Holy Land in American Protestant Lqe, 1800-1948 (New York: Arno Press, 19811, pp. 238-243. See Adolf Berle, The World Significance of a Jewish State (New York: Mitchell Kennerley, 1918; reprinted in Christian Protagonists for Jewish Restoration, Arno Press, 1977)~ pp. 7-8,31-41. See his publications in OCLC and in the Library of Congress Pre-1956 Imprints.

America has produced voluminous idealistic wartime literature. The most notable examples are Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, Wilson's Fourteen Points, and FDR's Atlantic Charter, but the entire corpus is enormous, as individuals and institutions vie to justify the exceptional conditions of war and visions of what is to be gained by it. Wartime idealism tends to stretch a normal range of ethical ideas toward conclusions which might not be otherwise articulated or endorsed-or gain widespread approval. 11. Greenberg, Holy Land in American Religious Thought, pp. 282-284. 12. Harry Emerson Fosdick, A Pilgrimage to Palestine (New York:Macmillan, 19271,

pp. 273-294, esp. 293. Harry Emerson Fosdick to Stephen S. Wise, June 3, 1927; Stephen S. Wise to Harry Emerson Fosdick, May 27, 1927; both in the Stephen S. Wise Papers at the American Jewish Historical Society, p. 134, Box 52, Fosdick file. 13. Richard Wightman Fox, Reinhold Niebuhr: A Biography (New York: Pantheon,

1985), pp. 7-8; Charles C. Brown, Niebuhr and His Age (Philadelphia: Trinity Press International, 1992), pp. 9-11; Ronald H. Stone, Reinhold Niebuhr: Prophet to Politi- cians (Nashville:AbingdonPress, 1972), pp. 32-45;Reinhold Niebuhr,An Interpretation of Christian Ethics (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1935), pp. 3-17; Eyal Naveh, "Un- conventional 'Christian Zionist': The Theologian Reinhold Niebuhr and His Atti- tude Toward the Jewish National Movement:' Studies in Zionism 11, no. 2 (1990): 183-191. 14. See above, n. 9. 15. In the religious press the dominant non-ecclesiological, post-Great War issues

involved the League, war prevention, disarmament, the World Court, European problems, prohibition, and race relations. In contrast to other more dramatic issues, the British Mandate in Palestine was of much less concern. See Christian Century, Christian Work, Federal Council Bulletin, and denominational papers. 16. On utopian internationalism (with a left-of-center slant), see James E.


Dougherty and Robert L. Pfaltzgraff, Jr., Contending Theories of International Rela- tions, 2nd ed. (New York: Harper & Row, 1981), pp. 4-7; Edward Hallett Carr, The Twenty Years'Crisis, 1919-1932 (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1966), pp. 22-42; Elmer Benditier,A TimeforAngels: The Tragicomic Histo y of the LeagueofNations (New York: Knopf, 1975); and Robert H. Ferrell, Peace in Their Time: The Origins of the Kel- logg-Briand Pact (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1952). For a religious view of the new internationalism, see Federal Council of the Churches of Christ in Amer- ica, The Church and International Relations: Report of the Commission on Peace and Ar- bitration, pts. I and I1 (New York: Missionary Education Movement, 1917), pp. 1-208. On the very similar situation in Canada, see Robert Wright, A World Mission: Canadian Protestantism and the Quest for a New International Order, 1918-1939 (Mon- treal and Buffalo: McGill-Queen's University Press), pp. 2-37. See also the religious periodicals Christian Work and Christian Centu y in the postwar years. On some his- toriographical issues, see John F. Piper, The American Churches in World War I (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1985)~ pp. 1-8.

Long before American involvement in the Great War, the mainstream Protestant churches and other groups had developed a rationale for international relations that emphasized promoting virtue and deemphasized Realpolitik. During the war the churches cooperated extensively with the government, and many who previously had held pacifist convictions believed that the war was a moral imperative for a just future peace. With postwar disillusionment, the formerly pacifist forces reasserted themselves and sought internationalist goals. This postwar internationalism among liberals within and outside the church, I would argue, created a more difficult climate for Zionism in the interwar years. The new point of view tended to give "standing" to the Arab majority, logically conflicted with the Balfour Decla- ration, and undermined the willingness to use military force against the Arab majority on behalf of Zionism. 17. See John H. Finley, A Pilgrim in Palestine (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1922). Reflecting the First World War and immediate postwar context in whichthis was written, Finley wrote of the conquest of Palestine as an Allied victory "for Chris- tendom." The British government, he claimed, would "cleanse" the Holy Land of its past "abominations" under Turkish rule so that it might be a unique place for all people, especially Muslims, Jews, and Christians. He stressed that Palestine should be "internationalized or "mutualized:' not nationalized, and he believed that the Jews, above all other peoples, were fitted by their history for this non-na- tionalistic but redemptive mission. This was a gentle polemic against a Jewish state by a person who liked Jews and valued Judaism (pp. 28-29,54-55,62-63,234- 241).

Vocationally, Finley was a president of City College, commissioner of the New York State Department of Education, and eventually the editor of the New York Times. His personal interests were profoundly religious: he was a very active Presbyterian lay- man, a member of the Federal Council of Churches' International Justice and Goodwill Committee, and a recipient of the American Hebrew's Medal in recognition of his contri-

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butions to better understanding between Jews and Christians. See also his papers at the New York Public Library (Rare Books and Manuscripts).

The overall pattern in the Christian Centu y seems to have been that the editors were very respectful of individual Jews and spoke respectfully of many Reform Jewish activities as if they were counterparts to worthwhile Protestant organizations. At the beginning of the decade, it seems to have addressed Judaism as if it were a religion limited to an ethnic group. After 1926 it seems to have adopted a more benign attitude toward Judaism-reflecting the impact of the interfaith movement. This same journal, however, was increasingly hostile toward political Zionism.

See Henry S. Pritchett, "Observations in Egypt, Palestine, and Greece:' Interna- tional Conciliation, no. 225 (December, 19261, pp. 501-523, in International Concilia- tion: Documents for the Year 1926. 18. Note how Carnegie's International Conciliation only had one interwar issue that confronted the problem of Zionism. The previous piece on this topic was Richard Gottheil's "Palestine" in no. 138 (May qig) , and controversial topics involving Jews were avoided until Jacob Robinson's "Uprooted Jews in the Immediate Postwar World:' no. 389 (April1943).

Note that the pro-Zionist John Haynes Holmes admitted the problems of Zionism, but saw them as being imperfectly remedied through the bringing of prosperity to

Arab and Jew alike. Palestine To-Day and To-morrow (London: George Allen & Un- win, lgq), pp. 113-271. The relative absence of liberal criticism of Zionism suggests that other liberals with misgivings about Zionism probably dealt with their reserva- tions with a similar logic.

Other factors affected the perception of Zionism, including expectations that domestic "minorities" should acculturate and lose all but religious distinction, lack of sympathy for Jews, and the differing interests and perceptions of missionaries in the Near East. 19. The late Carl Hermann Voss's partially finished, unpublished memoirs survey

these groups, which were important precursors to the American Christian Palestine Committee. See also his article "The American Christian Palestine Committee:' in Essays in American Zionism, 1917-1948, ed. Melvin I. Urofsky = Herzl Year Book 8 (1978) : 242-262. 20. See the Milton Steinberg Papers, Box 20 (American Jewish Historical Society). 21. On Protestant responses, see Voss's unpublished memoirs; and on public wartime attitudes toward Jews, see Charles Stember et ux., Jews in the Mind of America (New York: Basic Books, 19661, pp. 110-135. 22. Pro-Zionist Protestants and Jews lobbied Protestant elites by whatever means they thought would be most effective. See Voss's memoirs and Steinberg's papers (above, nn. 18 and 19). Seeking to capitalize on sympathy for Jews as victims, this approach proposed a remedy in a distant land, not the United States, and, where necessary, avoided the political ramifications of Jewish statehood. 23. On the Northern and Eastern urban strength of fundamentalism, see George M. Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture (New York: Oxford University

112 American J m i s h Archives

Press, 19801, pp. 185-191. The other related comments are an overview of the lifestyles of Jewish and Protestant leaders. 24. Marsden notes that "by the 1920s the one really unifying factor in fundamentalist political and social thought was the overwhelming predominance of political conservatism" (ibid., p. 92). Elsewhere, he notes the presence of antisemitism as a notable but relatively minor phenomenon (pp. 207,210, 287-288 fn. i5). In the last citation Marsden explains his differences with David Rausch, who he says tends to minimize the problem of antisemitism. See also Yaakov Ariel, On BehalfofIsrael: American Fundamentalist Attitudes Towards Jews, Judaism and Zionism, 1865-1945 (New York: Carlson, q91), pp. 99-103.

The Rev. John Roach Straton provides a striking example of how a Protestant conservative could be opposed to most forms of modernity and liberalism, and critical of Jews, but have eschatological opinions that kept him from the most bla- tantly antisemitic conclusions. Straton, a New York City Baptist minister, was a prominent fundamentalist noted for his sensational attacks against the entertainment industry, liquor, vice, and A1 Smith. He wrote articles in the Dearborn h d e - pendent attacking the entertainment industry and in a public debate criticized the role of Jews in it In his sermon "Is Henry Ford Right About the Jews?" (1922), Stra- ton stated that much of what Ford said about Jewish influence was right, but argued that this was not a consequence of an international conspiracy, but a precursor of God's plan to give Jews dominion of the world during the millennium under the Divine authority of Jesus Christ. John Roach Straton Papers, Group 1075, Box 29, Folder "Jew- Catholic" (American Baptist Historical Society). 25. Marsden, Fundamentalism, pp. 52-53! 70,125,207-210. 26. Yaakov Ariel's On Behalf of Israel is a fine book-length exposition of this phenomenon among the dispensationalists, who are noted for their strong pro-Israel attitude. Many other conservatives have a much less pro-Israel attitude. 27. Lester I. Vogel, To See a Promised Land: Americans and the Holy Land in the Nine- teenth Century (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993), pp. xiv-xvi, 4,10. 28. Ibid., pp. 15-93. 29. Ibid., p. 116. 30. Ibid., pp. 134-149, 152-159. 31. Ibid., pp. I-3,11-13, 213-215. 32. Ruth Kark, American Consuls in the Holy Land, 1832-1914 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, i994), p. 14. 33. Graham H. Stuart, American Diplomatic and Consular Practice, znd ed. (New York:Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1 9 ~ 2 ) ) ~ . 21. Also, Kark,American Consuls, pp. 48-49. 34. Kark, American Consuls, pp. 79,306. 35. Ibid., pp. 296-297,325-326. 36. Ibid., pp. 233-234, 239. 37. Vogel, To See a Promised Land, p. 165. 38. Ibid., p. 180. 39. Greenberg, Holy Land in American Religious Thought, pp. 153-155.

Review Essay 113

40. Her own book-length publications include "The Development of the Cities Jerusalem and Jaffa from 1840 up to the First World War" [Hebrew] (Ph.D. diss., Hebrew University, 1977); Jafla: A City in Evolution, 1799-1917 (Jerusalem: Yad Izhak Ben-Zvi, 1990); and Jerusalem Neighborhoods: Planning and By-laws, 1855-1930, Mount Scopus Publications (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1991). 41. As examples of this, see the Steinberg Papers.

Book Reviews

Kessner, Carole S., Edited by. The "Other" New YorkJewish Intellec- tuals. New York: New York University Press, 1994.382 pp.

Logocentricity has shaped Jewish culture and given it enduring power. Language "is the Jewsf weapon:' aBritish textile manufacturer once instructed his son, the future historianSimon Schama. "We can't really be so1diers;we must always rely on the spoken word.,' Through the transmission of texts, through the exegesis of legal codes,through theremorseless ratiocination that entwinedknowledge with religion, Jews have enjoyed historic advantages in what has seemed like the mass production of intellectuals. Even many of those who propelled themselves away from Judaism have been conversant with ideas,fluent in expressing them, ambitious to test them in the light of experience. American intellectual history over almost the past century could not be adequately told without recounting how Jewish immigrants and their voluble descendants contributed to serious discourse and helped define its themes and problems.

But the NewYork Intellectuals who emerged in the 1930s and whose impact is not entirely spent, differed from their predecessors who constituted therudiments of a American intelligentsia.Unlike the Puritans of the seventeenth century, the mostly second-generation, secularized Jews did not put the exercise of reason in the service of faith. Unlike the Founding Fathers of the eighteenth century, these mostly radical cosmopolitans did not seek to apply the wisdom of the ancients to the problems of statecraft. Unlike the Brahmins of the nineteenth century, these creators and editors of mostly "little magazines" did not cultivate learning as a form of stewardship or as a sublime enhancement of individualism.They were generalists who respected no disciplinary boundaries, kibitzers ready with an opinion or an argument onvirlally any topic. The New York Intellectuals could as easily be aroused by the pressures of modern politics as by the stimulus of modem art; for them, ideas mattered.

What barely mattered,until late in their lives, were the mysterious peculiarities of Jewishidentity and the struggle for Jewish continuity,

Book Reviews 115

which is why Carole Kessner,who teaches at SUNY-Stony Brook, got theinspiredidea toproduce thisanthology,whichstemsfromtwo academic conferences. It presents an alternative world,in which ethnicity and sometimes religion animated the lives of other Jewish inte- 1lectuals.They too were articulate, passionate, criticalrand engag&; but their work is generally much less familiar than at least some of their names. Nearly all were bornabroad (HayirnGreenberg,Marie Syrkin, Trude Weiss-Rosmarin, Morris Raphael Cohen, Horace M. Kallen, Ludwig Lewisohn, Henry Hurwitz, Maurice Samuel, Mordecai M. Kaplan, and Will Herberg). A couple of others (Ben Halpern, Milton Steinberg) were the children of immigrants.They communicatednot through Partisan Review or Politics or Dissent or even Commentary but through such periodicals as the Menorah Journal (founded and edited by Hurwitz),the Jewish Frontier (edited by Greenberg,Syrkin, andHalpern),and theJewishSpectator (founded and edited by Weiss- Rosmarin). If learning is, after all, a collective and cumulative enter- prise, then its practitioners are always behind in their payments; and much of American Jewish scholarship is indebted to these figures in particular.

Their lives sometimes overlapped. Steinberg studied under Cohen at City College and then under Kaplan at the Jewish Theological Seminary, and later formed a friendship with Herberg. Samuel and Syrkin eloped, though their marriage was quickly annulled. She, Lewisohn, and Halpern were colleagues on the faculty of Brandeis University. So was contributor Milton Hindus, whose essay is devoted to Charles Reznikoff, who was married to Syrkin. Among Lewisohn's students at Brandeis University was Stanley Chyet,who writes about Lewisohn in this anthology; and among Syrkin's students was Kessner, who profiles her in the book that she has skillfully edited. But it should be acknowledged that these figures did not constitute a coterie, or a"fami1yl' since estrangement marked the lives of severalof them. Afew could perhaps be labeled curmudgeons, courting unpopularity so assiduously that they might have been disappointed had more than three cars followed the hearse to the cemetery. (Genius is, after all, supposed to be measured by the con- federacyofduncesaligned against it.)

Though the group associated with Partisan Review was indifferent to Judaism, only a few of the "other" Jewish intellectuals could be


classified as (deeply) religious. Steinberg and Kaplan were rabbis; and after the Rev. Reinhold Niebuhr had talked Herberg out of conversion to Christianity, the ex-radical transformed himself into a theologian of considerable resonance and ended up the religion editor of William F. Buckley's National Review. But Morris Raphael Cohen was a secularist, a rationalist, and an agnostic. He was also explicitly a non-Zionistwhoheldnobrief for Jewishnationalism, aswellasanout- spokenliberalwhowassilent duringtheHolocaust. According to contributor MiltonKonvitz,Kallenwasalienated from Judaism (and from his father, a rabbi). Nor did religion exert any appeal for Greenberg and Halpern, who were Labor Zionists (and lifelong socialists).

In this anthology Greenberg and Samuel are the most salvageable as thinkers. The former was a political activist, a vibrant conversa- tionalist, an embattled editor for a succession of journals (from a Russian-language Jewish periodical in Moscow like Raszvet, to Zionist periodicals in Berlin, to a Yiddish-language journal in New York like Der Yidisher Kempfer, and finally to the Jewish Frontier). Greenberg's ethical sense was acute, whether as a socialist condemn- ing Stalinism or as a Zionist criticizing Gandhi and the pacifists. Having eluded the mass murderers who were extinguishing the Eastern European Jewish world from which he sprang, Greenberg challenged the indifference and inactivity of American Jewry. Having made himself an authentic representative of Jewish self-respect, he condemned the assimilationistsand anti-Zionists,sometimesasasec- ularist champion of ongoing and essential Jewish education. Robert M. Seltzer is shrewd enough to quote extensively from Greenberg's editorials and polemics, which still have the power to sting; and the portrait that Seltzer has drawn is commensurate with the brilliance that Greenberg achieved as a publicist. He left behind no autobiog- raphy, nor has any biography been done in English; and it is sad- deningthat his owncollections of essays, ~he~nner o ye (1953,1964)~can no longer be purchased in any American bookstore - other than for- tuitously,inaused-bookshop. Maurice Samuel admired him as a sage whose sagacity was not derived from his learning but whose knowledge was cultivated and applied for the sake of wisdom.

In "The Education of Maurice Samuel:' Emmanuel S. Goldsmith hails his subject as "the leading spokesman of Jewish rejuvenation and creative survival in America for half a century. . . . In addition to

Book Reuiews 117

his work as an expositor of Jewish spiritual and cultural values and as a translator from Yiddish and other languages, Samuel was a lecturer, debaterrand polemicist of note.. . . Finally, Samuel wasacreative intellectual and a man of letters who brought his own literary personality and refined taste and judgment to the discussion of the Jewish experience" (p. 28). A Zionist, ayiddishist, and a diagnostician of antisemitism, Samuel claimed as his ancestors the maggidim who preached to Eastern European Jewry. His twenty books vibrate with urbanity and sophistication, with literary flair and moral probity. Their author gave the impression of coming closest to inhabiting the same intellectual universe as the New York Intellectuals without re- nouncing an irrepressible allegiance to Jewish learning and to a Jewish perspective.

In this collection, the essays on Greenberg and Samuel are so outstanding that Seltzer and Goldsmith deserve gold medals. At least a silver medal should be awarded to Simon Noveck, the biographer of Milton Steinberg, for compressing that work into a lovely paean: "More than any other rabbi of his time (or of our time) his life and career dramatically illustrate the fact that intellectualism, standards of excellence, and literary style are not incompatible with success in the rabbinate" (p. 313). Noveck, who served as associate rabbi under Steinberg and succeeded him at the Park Avenue Synagogue, offers a crisp and illuminating account of Steinberg's career (cut short by death at the age of forty-seven), highlighting not only his attractive personality and stalwart character but the underappreci- atedpower of his theology as well.

Stanley Chyet also deserves a silver medal for his engaging portrait of Lewisohn, searcher and seer, novelist and melodramatist, whose Zionism is shown evolving from pacifism and bi-nationalism to realism (or at least Realpolitik). Unable to live in Zion, he claimed to live instead in Zionism, while proposing to work toward an Ameri- can Jewish condition stripped of the sense of exile and yet marked by a revitalized Judaism.

Kallen "is probably better known in America today than any of the others in this book; Kessner claims, "because of the current new interest in multiculturalism and American pluralismrr (p. 13). By rep- utation ideas are dispersed in parsimonious fashion- one to a cus- tomer; and intellectual historians inevitably discuss Kallen as the


progenitor of "cultural pluralism(' which scholars like John Higham, Philip Gleason, and Werner Sollors have explored with subtlety and critical penetration. Their work supersedes Konvitz's descriptive and celebratory piece, which cites no secondary sources (not even the most extensive treatment, Sarah Schmidt's unpublished 1973 doctoral dissertation).

In an adulatory fashion, Konvitz also portrays M. R. Cohen, a gifted but cruel teacher who gave his City College students much food for thought, then turned himself into a highly efficient Cuisinart. His acerbic personality and pedagogical charisma are captured in Sid- ney Hook's remarkable contribution to Masters: Portraits of Great Teachers (edited by Joseph Epstein), which Konvitz does not cite. Failing to do his homework,Konvitz also does not bother to mention David A. Hollingerls standard 1975 biography, though the extent of Cohen's Jewish background and interests is ventilated in this anthology. Konvitz's two pieces do not justify the editor's assurance that "the essays . . . have eschewed hagiography" (p. 20).

Antisernitism in academe manifestly stunted Cohenls career. De- spite a doctorate from Harvard and letters of recommendation from the likes of William James and Josiah Royce, it took Cohen six years to find a college-level teaching job;his first book was published at the age of fifty-one. Others found their vocational paths delayed or di- verted by the turmoil of exile and uprooting, or by the pressures of political activism. Family allegiances and responsibilities also punc- tuated the lives of the two women to whom chapters are devoted. Syrkin, for example, never made aliyah, partly because she did not want to give up joint custody of her child. (Another reason was that, though she became fluent in five languages, Hebrew was not among them.) Kessner notes that Syrkin's article in Jewish Frontier in January 1937 was perhaps the first in the United States to expose the phoniness of the Great Purge trials in the Soviet Union; and less than six years later, her editorial in the same journal identified the Final Solution for what it was. (By contrast, on December 9,1942, the New York Times was minimizing its story on the murder of two million Jews in the East by positioning the report on page 20.) Men- tioning Syrkin's book The State of the Jews (1980) only in passing, Kessnerls essay is less an act of critical intellectual history than a biographical portrait;but it is gracious and informative. Weiss-Rosmarin

Book Reviews 119

was a Semiticist, a feminist, and a learned educator; she was not easily classifiable. Early in the war (but still too late), her tiny and sometimes feisty Jewish Spectator, like the Jewish Frontier, alerted its readers to theFinal So1ution.DeborahDashMoore's cogent, admiring portrait is highly informative, but grinds to a halt inexplicably early (roughly four decades before Weiss-Rosmarin's death in 1989), while also avoiding the question of how widely or deeply her impact on the community was felt.

Ben Halpern's four books were published after the Second World War; but Arthur A.Gorenrs scrupulously researched and sympathetic chapter also mysteriously stops around 1946, before his subject's con- tributions to historical sociology had been made. Thorough in its treatment of the early years, illuminating on how Halpern formulated key notions like Galut, Goren's essay can be read in dialogue with Weiss-Rosmarinfs insistence that the United States is not really different, that it is still Galut, but that it is so much more hospitable than, say, Babylonia or Alexandria that American Jewry was not estranged enough (or not hyphenated enough) to produce out of its Jewish subculture another Talmud. Halpern was also very dubious about the prospects of authenticity."We cannot see any hope for a permanent, distinct Jewish culture in America: he wrote in 1943, "nor do we care to see it. Being much attached to Jewish values we are that much in exile" (quoted on p. 87), a view Halpern didnotse- riously revise, though his perceptions (like Weiss-Rosmarin's) en- riched an American Jewish culture that he could not envision.

Of all the champions of such a subculture, Henry Hurwitz was perhaps the most deliberate and dedicated. But as an editor more than a writer, the founder of the Menorah Journal occupies an equivo- cal place in this collection. Ira Eisenstein claims that Hurwitz "left behind a treasury of literary works, not only his own but those he inspired, which can be read today with enormous interest" (p.203). Insouciant in its research, the essay fails to support such a claim. Hurwitz's own signature has faded, and his particular intellectual legacy cannot be defined-which is why Elliot Cohen, Hurwitz's managing editor and later the founding editor of Commentary, would have better served the purposes of this anthology. Suzanne Klingenstein is the author of a splendid 1991 book on the first gen- erationof Jewishacademics (includingKallen,Cohen,and~ewisohn).


But here she is a jockey in need of a faster racehorse, and has been assigned a minor figure, Marvin Lowenthal, an associate editor of the MenorahJournal, a publicist, and "a classic Jewish liberal" (p. 223).

The measure of Reznikoff, the lawyer who preferred to write po- etry, is not taken in Hindus's essay, which addresses their own relationship. It is as much a memoir and personal portrait as a forum for evaluating Reznikoff'sliterary and historicalefforts,whichRobertAl- terjudiciously assessed in Defenses of the Imagination (1977). (Hindus does not refer to it.) The Canadian A.M. Klein, another lawyer turned poet, seems to have enjoyed only limited contact with the rest of these "other" intellectuals, though friendships were formed with Samuel and Lewisohn. Klein's particular achievement as a poet and novelist is not specified in Rachel Feldhay Brenner's chapter, which misses an opportunity to consider how the emphatic ethnicity of his work affects its value.The theme of art can be Jewish, but because it is Jewish hardly makes it art, just as the object of thought can be Jewish, but because it is Jewish doesn't make it thoughtful. Making the case for the merit and durability of Jewish expression is the responsibility of criticism, which Brenner is not alone among the contributors in neglecting to discharge.

Finally there are the "spiritua11eaders~'Somuch has been published on the Reconstructionism of Mordecai Kaplan that Jack J. Cohen's slightly apologetic essay can scarcelybe expected to offer a breathtak- ingly fresh angle. At least Cohen clearly and concisely delineates Kaplan's protean project. He was unable to fulfill his mother's ambition to see him installed as chief rabbi of England, but he negotiated between cosmopolitanism and nationalism in struggling to find an agenda for creative continuity.

Though David Dalinmystifyingly doesnot cite the only biography of his subject, Harry J. Ausmus's Will Herberg (1987)~ credit should be given for so succinct apresentationof Herberg's singular trajectory from Communism to Judaism. "Man must worship something:' he insisted (quoted on p. 358). Once he had believed that Marxism was as scientifically grounded as the cosmological theories of Ein- stein, and then it proved itself bankrupt (or at least in Chapter 11). Judaism and Modern Man (1951) showed how religious faith could come to the rescue of the anguish that existentialism highlighted; and that book, Niebuhr predicted, might "become a milestone in the

Book Reviews 121

religious thought of America" (quoted on p.358).Herberg followedit four years later with an extremely influential foray into religious sociology, Protestant Catholic Jew. Dalin's essay lacks any critical edge in recounting a rather spectacular career that peaked in the i95os, which was probably the last moment in history when Ameri- can Jews tended to fancy themselves merely Americans or even Good Americans - and nothing else. They were still barely visible as Jewsinpublic life and in the arts and thought. It was the last decade in which a secretary of state could ask, as did the former international lawyer John Foster Dulles, when he received a Hebrew Bible from Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion, whether it included the New Testament.

With the celebration of ethnic diversity that was inaugurated in the 1960s, even the New York Intellectuals began to move gingerly toward their own roots; and Kessner notes that the two parallel worlds partly met after 1967. Nevertheless she probably overstates the earlier gap between the two groups, and may have exaggerated the alienation of the New York Intellectuals from their origins in the Jewish community. In the early i95os, while Partisan Review was publishing Saul Bellow's translation of I. B. Singer's "Gimpel the Fool" (1953)~ Irving Howe was already engaged in giving English readers access to other treasures of Yiddish literature; and his later World of Our Fathers (1976) remains a towering achievement in the historiography of American ethnicity and immigration. Though Leslie Fiedler's stance was assimilationist, he regularly contributed to American Judaism in the 1960s; and two essay collections and some of his fiction are preoccupied with Jewish themes. Though Alfred Kazin is undoubtedly best known for his critical appropriation of a century and a half of American literature, he himself was a Walker in the City (1951) who was highly conscious of his identity as a New York Jew (1978). For its purposes, Nathan Glazer's American Judaism (1957) remains unsurpassed (at least until the publication of Jonathan D. Sama's long-awaited book on the subject). Even if Philip Rahv's motive in bequeathing his estate to the State of Israel was to keep his property from his estranged third wife, any reason- ably canny lawyer could have found other objects for Rahv's gen- erosity. A former editor of Commentary and other magazines,Irving Kristol not only championed the social utility of religion but also


positioned himself as a spokesman for Judaism in particular. Even Lionel Trilling, the emblematiccase of an academic who repudiated the aura of Yiddish to come across as British, began his illustrious career by writing for the Menorah Journal.

The "other" New York intellectuals whom Kessner's book show- cases were not so ethnocentric nor such Jewish nationalists that they could minimize the virtues of their American home. They were dedicated to the welfare of their beleaguered people and ardent in behalf of its sovereignty in Palestine. But none emigrated to Israel, whose call for aliyah produced no movement, no "giant sucking sound" (in Ross Perot's later phrase) fromintellectuals like Reznikoff, who explained away his reluctance to visit Israel with the weird ex- cuse that he had not yet finished exploring Central Park. Since the United States had provided refuge for the Jews fleeing European oppression and irnrniserization, and had legitimated the new State of Israel, Samuel observed, gratitude was warranted in keeping the Jewish people alive. He and the "others" portrayed in this anthology loved that people (ahavat Yisrael) with a fidelity that could be labeled monogamous. The New York Intellectuals by contrast risked charges of bigamy, or accepted as their fate a lifetime of loneliness and alienated affections.

Another difference that separated their two worlds is barely addressed in this anthology, whose contributors rarely judge the caliber of the work of their subjects, the chances that these figures might have of beating the odds of oblivion. Few of the contributors to Kessner's book make a compelling case for the enduring literary or intellectual or ideological legacy of their figures, whose writings are now - alas -virtually unread and largely out of print: If these Jews are too little known (why else impose the marginality of "other- hood" upon them?), then several of the authors should have made a stronger argument that such neglect is unjustified,and should have stretched themselves beyond gestures of filial piety. Though the books and magazines that these "other" intellectuals left behind can be found in synagogue libraries and similar settings, with some notable exceptions their views do not affect the living conversation in which American Jews participate. At the outset of this anthology, Cynthia Ozick's famous assertion is quoted: "If we blow into the narrow end of the shofar, we will be heard far. But if we choose to be

Book Reviews 123

Mankind rather than Jewish and blow into the wider part, we will not be heard at all; for us America will have been in vain" (p. 9). That is simply untrue. At the end of this most awful and desolate and awesome of centuries, those who have blown at the narrow end are not necessarily audible; and those who lived through the word are not heard enough.

-Stephen J. Whitfield

Stephen J. Whitfield teaches in the American Studies department at Brandeis University. His many distinguished publications have focused on American intellectual and social history as well as on the Southern Jewish experience.


Brands, H. W. Inside the Cold War: Loy Henderson and the Rise of the American Empire, 1918-1961. New York: Oxford University Press,

1991. xi, 337 PP.

Not long before he died, looking back over a long and productive life, Loy Henderson (1892-1986) ruminated about his achievements with great modesty. I shall, he said, go down in history as a minor villain in the Zionist story?

Others did not value him so lightly. To Department of State professionals, he was and remains 'Mr. Foreign Service:' the very model and embodiment of all that acolyte diplomats should strive to become. A hall has been named in his honor, and everyone I have met who knew him has spoken of him with something closer to awe than to mere respect.

To Congressman Arthur Klein of New York, speaking for the record in the House of Representatives, Henderson was a very devil? Klein echoed the thoughts of tens of thousands who considered Henderson one of a cabal of State Department middle-management regulars who executed their own foreign policy according to their private desires, and openly subverted the policy of the president and the country. Henderson and his crew, they said, were friends and servants to Britain, but enemies to the interests of the United States. Harry Truman in his Memoirs refers at one point to open antisemitism in the Department of State. Some will suspect that he was thinking of Henderson. Yet an article in American Jewish Archives concludes that Henderson was not an anti-semite but, in fact, a patrioL3

Further, although many who remember his name do so in connection with the Zionist story, as he foretold, that was not his main contribution to American foreign policy. Professor H.W.Brands of Texas A&M University argues persuasively that Henderson was a major influence for anti-Communism and for the Cold War during America's rise to unprecedented global power, in the period from the end of World War I to 1961, when Kennedy was preparing to carry errant anti-Communist activism to its logical conclusion in Vietnam.To Brands, this period is the "American Empire."

Henderson was born in Arkansas, the son of a minister. He grew

Book Reviews 125

up with his adored twin brother, Roy, and the two planned to open a law practice together! Roy's untimely death placed a psychological burden on Loy to carry on for the two of them. When he was rejected from World War I military service owing to the consequences of a childhood arm injury, he could not accept that he would not be involved in the war effort. He joined the Red Cross, rose to the rank of captain, and played a significant role in organizing relief work during much of the war. His areas of special activity were Berlin and various areas in the Baltic.

After the war ended, he joined the Department of State and was appointed vice-consul at Dublin.! Brand observes that he was considered humorless, even a bit of a fanatic, already at that point in his career.That is a mistake. He was, rather, a man with a mission in the religious sense. He needed to find out what that mission was, what it was that he had been chosen for; and this he did.

But not in Dublin.One of the frustrations of State Department work is the underutilization of its expensive and highly trained manp0wer.A man like Henderson, with a law degree and remark- ably broad administrative and diplomatic experience in many countries under wartime conditions, typically found much of his day at Dublin going into stamping passports, filling out forms, and doing the kind of mindless one-time-pad decoding work that numbs the brain and exhausts the body with tension.

In time, Henderson became convinced that he stood between the Soviet bear and its prey whatever that might be.His reports, which Brand uses skillfully, suggest to the reader that he felt the weight of total responsibility on his shoulders and came to see his role as indis- pensable. For such a man there are no quitting times.

He worked himself into a state of collapse, so ill that he had to be sent briefly to a Swiss sanatorium to recover. He met and married Elise Heinrichson, a beautiful Latvian from a well-to-do home who had seen her family's lands and property expropriated, witnessed young people shot at her doorstep, and whose mother had died from malnourishment. Elise had a profound hate and mistrust for the Bolsheviks. Her views and his fitted together well.

In 1931 Henderson returned to Washington, and William Bullitt, the first ambassador of the United States to Moscow, took him


along as his second secretary. Henderson by now considered that he knew more about the Soviets than Bullitt did.

Nothing sealed in him the urgency of his calling like seeing at first-hand the Moscow purges, which began in 1936.During the period of the Moscow trials, Henderson was acting chief of mission. From 1936 to 1938 he reported in horror on the Moscow show trials. He had found his Devil.

Nothing Henderson did was ever for personal power or glory but in the name of principle.That was part of the source of his power. He was always a man of the highest principles and ethical standards, a man totally dedicated.

He could not openly oppose what he considered the nearsighted policies of Roosevelt, since the State Department was, in theory, the loyal servant of the president. But he let it be known that Franklin and, far more so, Eleanor were hopelessly sanguine and out of touch regarding the nature of the Soviet threat.

In 1943 Stalin had Henderson ousted from Washington as a condition of future cooperation with the United States.As ambassador to Baghdad, Henderson's influence at State increased. In March, 1945, he was appointed director of the Office of Near Eastern and African Affairs (NEA). He found himself friendly to the British, a typical and traditional position at the Department of State. When the French enforced excessive disciplinary measures in Syria and Lebanon, the British confined the French to their barracks.The United States kept out of this dispute to preserve the European alliance.

The outbreak of hostilities in Greece provided Henderson with his golden chance to campaign for the United States to support the anti-Communists. Henderson and Dean Acheson were instrurnen- tal in convincing Truman of the wisdom of adopting what became the TrumanDoctrine.They advocated strongly that the United States undertake the defense of Greece, and later Turkey, when the British pulled out in 1947.

Henderson's view of the Zionist issue, formulated and developed from his Baghdad days, was that Zionism was merely a sideshow to the major issue of the world Communist conspiracy. The value of Zionism to the Soviets was that it was a way of stirring up the Islamic world, and out of the resulting unrest and frenzy the Soviets could derive political and military advantage. Consequently, although

Book Ratiews 127

Henderson was personally sympathetic to the plight of Jewish refugees and displaced persons and Holocaust survivors, he could not let that blind him to the urgent necessity of opposing anything that might advance the Soviet plot.

Henderson argued in an interview that he was not in the least antisemitic, and there is every reason to believe him. But his position, and that of the State Department, was wrongly interpreted as doc- trinaire anglophilic and antisemitic. Even though anti-semites took comfort from the department's position, it is an error to make Hen- derson an anti-semite.

As a result of Henderson's influence, the NEA vigorously condemned Jewish immigration to Palestine on the grounds that neither jobs nor housing were possible in that country. Truman took a different view, and advocated the immediate admission of loo,ooo Jews to Palestine. Henderson countered by soliciting a War Depart- ment report which stated that 400,000 U.S.troops would have to be fielded to put Truman's plan into effect, and this became the basis on which Henderson opposed the president (pp. 170-171). Hender- son called for continuation of the British Mandate in the form of a U.S., Soviet, and British trusteeship. As this issue drew increasing public ire, Secretary Byrnes, General Marshall, Dean Acheson, and Robert Lovett kept aloof, leaving Henderson to take the heaC6Ever the man of principle, he did so, and became one of the most reviled figures in the press and in Congress (p. 175).

The Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry, a "jury" of six Ameri- cans and six Britons, was set up by Truman and returned a report advising the immediate admission of the loo,ooo together with the establishment of a unitary, unified state, which would probably have meant in time the end of the separate Jewish state. The De- partment of State opposed it, and the subsequent Morrison-Grady Commission, ostensibly set up to put the Anglo-American Com- mittee of Inquiry plan into action, returned instead a program in which Ambassador Grady, ignoring the rest of his committee, inexplicably abandoned the AACI plan and instead recommended totally following the British Foreign Office recommendations (p. in). Among the Zionists, Silver overthrew Weizmann at Basel, partly because Weizmann continued to have faith in the British. Silver's brash activism, his unstatesmanlike statesmanship, was more ap-


pealing precisely because of Henderson's tactics. In the end, against State Department obstructionism that amounted to outright insub- ordination, Truman took the position that he was forced to support the Zionist state because there was no other way to save the refugees. At this time, the Marshall Plan was coming into effect.

Henderson vigorously attacked the idea of American support for a Jewish state, and came as close as possible to actively sabotaging the president (p.184). He had by now become convinced that he and the State Department, which agreed with him, alone understood what was at stake and what absolutely needed to be done, and that the White House was either ignorant or misled, or pandering to partisan political considerations. His nemesis in the White House, he once said in an interview, was David Niles, who unfortunately appears only three times in Brands's account? Brands does not feel

' the need to develop the Niles and Clark Clifford parts of the story, because his interest is not focused on Henderson's struggle with the Zionists.

Henderson actively promoted the embargo of American arms to the Jews at the time when the British were arming the Arabs, which resulted in still more protest that he and the Department of State were faithfully representing British policy, not the will of the majority of Americans and their president. Some Arabs began to flee Palestine. At about this time, Bartley Crum, a member of the An- glo-American Committee of Inquiry, published an accusation that the committee had been shown a secret file by the Department of State people who went with them, in which was evidence that the department had systematically obtruded and unraveled every effort by both Roosevelt and Truman to aid the Zionist cause. A furor erupted, and Dean Acheson was called on to admit or deny the existence of such a file. With exquisite misdirection, Acheson replied that if such a file existed and he did not know about it, he would be unfit to hold his job?

No matter where he served, or what issue he considered, Hender- son's interest was always focused on Eastern Europe, and specifically on the Communist menace. He would have supported a Jewish state, for example, if only the Jews and Arabs had agreed on it, so that there would have been no room for what he called shenanigans by the Soviets. In the absence of such agreement, he opposed it.

Book Reviews 129

It is Brands's thesis that the adoption of the Truman Doctrine meant the triumph of errant anti-Communism, a consummation for which Henderson had worked, quite tirelessly, all his days, and which he had promoted single-mindedly within the Department of State until he saw it become the universally accepted policy of the department. Henderson's anti-Zionism was therefore altogether secondary. It is not clear that the same may be said for Henderson's State Department colleagues in the Near East club.

Moreover, Brands teaches, once America was in the business of interceding far from its own shores to stop Communism's native or imported, it was no longer in control of its own destiny. It now had to ride forth more and more to become involved in local and national struggles which, some would say, had nothing to do with American vital interests. Indeed, 'America errant? now defined resistance to Communism anywhere andeverywhere as one of its vitalinterests. It was inevitable, Brands argues, that if not in Vietnam then elsewhere, America would be so overextended that she would face defeat.

That argument seems to be an overstatement, considering that politicians are notoriously flexible when it comes to honoring com- mitments they choose not to honor, and Brands's argument also minimizes unfairly the roles of Kennedy and Johnson and their ad- ministrations. At most, Henderson was a powerful voice, not a sole determiner of national policy.

But if Brands's position is somewhat overstated for the sake of enthusiasm, it still serves to correct a prior oversight. It remains an indisputable fact that Henderson and those he influenced had a mighty impact, hitherto not rightly assessed, on determining the path America was to take. Brands in this superb study has placed Henderson and his disciples in better focus, and helped us to understand his anti-Zionism in context and in a more realistic way.

- Allen Howard Podet

Allan Howard Podet is a professor in the department of philosophy and religious studies,State University of New York College at Buffalo. Among his many publications is Success and Failure of the Anglo-American Committee of In- quiry, 1945-1946: Last Chance in Palestine (1987).


Notes

I. Allen H. Podet, Oral History Interview with Loy Henderson, Former Director, Near Eastern and African Affairs Office, Department of State, Washington, D.C., August 5,1975~13 sections; Interview 2, January 22,1976,4 sections. Transcripts are deposited in the AACI File, American Jewish Archives, Cincinnati, Ohio (hereafter cited as Henderson Interview and Henderson Interview 2). Henderson quotations are, at his request, indirect. This quotation is from Henderson Interview.

2. Congressional Record, 80th Cong., 1st sess., May 7194% R281, vol. 93, pt. 34, pp. 4728B and 4728C.

3. Allen H. Podet, "Anti-Zionism in a Key United States Diplomat: Loy Hender- son at the End of World War 11," American l m i s h Archives 30, no. 2 (November 1978): 155-187. This conclusion is from pp. 186-187.

4. Henderson Interview 2.

5. Official Biography File (on Henderson), Harry S.Truman Library, Papers of Harry S. Tiurnan, Official File.

6. Dean Acheson, Present at the Creation: My Years in the State Department (New York: Norton, Signet Reprint, 19691, pp. 231-232. Podet, "Anti-Zionism in a Key United States Diplomat," p. 158, nn. 8 and lo. Henderson Interview, sec. 7.

7. Henderson Interview. Podet, "Anti-Zionism in a Key United States Diplomat:' pp. 177 184-184 and the notes there. A.H. Podet, "Oral History Interview with Clark Clifford, White House Naval Aide to Spring, 1945, then White House Counsel to 1950." Transcripts are deposited with the American Jewish Archives, Cincinnati, in the AACI File.

8. Bartley CavanaughCrum, Behind thesilken Curtain (New York: Simon & Schus- ter, 1947),pp.34-39. Richard Howard Stafford Crossman, "Diary" for January, 1946. Unpublished manuscript held at St. Anthony's College, Oxford. Access by special permission.

Book Reviews 131

Barkun, Michael. Religion and the Racist Right: The Origins of the Chris tian Identity Movement. Chapel Hill: University of North

Carolina Press, 1994.290 pp.

The 'Christian right" is one of those things that just will not go away. When1 firstbegan speaking and writing about the topic three decades ago, liberal critics told me that the movement's days were numbered and that political fundamentalism, whatever that might be, was on the way out. However, events in the past fifteen years have shown how wrong that prophecy was, and today the Christian (or "religious") right is stronger and more effective than it ever was in the bad old days of McCarthyism and the anticommunist crusade. Al- though I as a Christian view the development of a neo-conservative evangelical right with great concern, I am especially perplexed by the fact that many Jews today find it attractive. Perhaps it is because most evangelicals and fundamentalists strongly support the State of Israel, or maybe it is that the "traditional values" espoused by the Christian right have much in common with those held by Jews.

However, Jews need to be reminded that antisemitism has infected twentieth-century fundamentalism, in spite of the valiant and thoroughly sincere efforts of its leaders to distance themselves from this odious doctrine. That was excellently demonstrated and pat- ently clear in two fine studies on the topic published in the 1980s, Leo P. Ribuffo's The Old Christian Right: The Protestant Far Rightfrom the Great Depression to the Cold War (1983) and Glen Jeansonne's Ger- ald L. K. Smith: Minister of Hate (1988). Michael Barkun of Syracuse University, author of two significant books on millennialism and political radicalism, has carried the discussion forward in his treatment of the Christian deviation known as British-Israelism and its crucial role in the formation of Identity (or Christian Identity), one of the most militant anti-Jewish hate groups in North America today. This carefully researched and well-documented study helps us to understand better this strange and unpredictable fusion of religious and political radicalism.

British- or Anglo-Israelism is a vague, unstructured set of ideas whose unifying motif is that the Ten Lost Tribes (the northern King-


dom of Israel), deported by the Assyrians in the late eighth century B.C.E., were not absorbed by their captors but instead migrated across Europe and reached a final home in the British Isles. Thus the Anglo-Saxon (or Anglo-American) peoples are the true descendants of ancient Israel and heirs of the divine promises. Jews are the false Israel who rejected Christ and were cast out by God. Barkun shows that these ideas constituted the soil in which Christ- ian Identity took root and flourished.

The first four chapters trace the history of British-Israelism, a - topic never before subjected to scholarly analysis except in an essay - by thisreviewer to which Barkun refers. The idea arose in Britain in

the early nineteenth century and the first Anglo-Israel organizations were formed in the 1870s. British-Israel concepts found their way to the United States and Canada in the 1870s and 1880s and spread widely, albeit in very diverse forms. The movement had no real center until Howard B. Rand created the Anglo-Saxon Federa- tion of America in 1930, and in the next two decades it was transformed from the extension of an English movement into a distinctly American one. At the same time British-Israelism took on an increasingly antisemitic character, and after World War I1 it began metamorphosing into Christian Identity through the influence of such people as John Lovell, Wesley Swift, Conrad P. Gaard, Gerald L. K. Smith, William Potter Gale, Bertrand Comparet, S. J., Capt. Richard G. Butler, and James K.Warner. By1975 the sectarian form of British-Israelism had virtually passed out of existence, but its ideas were now core beliefs of Identity.

Barkun then devotes five chapters to an analysis of the ideology of Christian Identity. The elements he identifies are an altered form of British-Israel millenarianism (but one that rejects fundamentalist dispensationalism), conspiratorial apocalypticism, racial antisemitism, and the belief that Jews are the direct biological offspring of the devil and thus are subhumans.The final three chapters focus on the political activities of the Identity churches. These include campaigns to bring the American legal system into conformity with laws spelled out in the Bible, gathering support for political candi- dates whose positions are deemed compatible with Identify views (for example, David Duke), the organization of self-sufficient "sur- vivalist" communities which are isolated from the larger society

Book Reviews 133

development of local radical political groups (such as the Posse Cornitatus) and refusal to participate in governments at higher levels or pay taxes to them, the use of terrorism and guerrilla tactics to overthrow federal government rule (for example, the Order), and territorial secession-the creation of an independent "Aryan nation" in the Northwest that would be free from control by the12ionist Occupation Government."

Barkun concludes that a process of "ideological mutation" oc- curred,whereby a benign and politically conformist movement was turned into one obsessed with enemies and conspiracies. As the process of transformation went forward, Christian Identity was opened up to additional influences emanating from the "cultic milieu:' the society's domain of rejected and stigmatized ideas. This openness to rejected knowledge was a product of the pervasive fear of conspiracy. When conspiratorialism was joined with a belief in the imminence of the apocalypse, Identity was converted into "revolutionary millenarianism:' that is, the final assault of the pure on the citadel of corrupt authority. Failure to achieve the intended results couldlead to quietism and withdrawal from the political order, but at the same time it may result in further engagement through armed violence.

Thus the conflict between revolutionary millenarianism and qui- etistic withdrawal makes the course of Christian Identity difficult to predict. Whether or not the movement disintegrates, it has created dangerous new potentialities. Its doctrines of demonic conspiracy and apocalyptic battle exist for others to exploit in the future. For those interested in knowing more about the hate right, this fine book will make good reading. My only complaint is its lack of a bibliography.

- RichardV. Pierard

Richard V. Pierard is professor of histo y at Indiana State University and co-author of Civil Religion and the Presidency (1988). He is currently doing research on the racist religious right.


Evans, Eli. The Lonely Days Were Sundays: Reflections of a Jewish Southerner. Jackson: University of Mississippi

Press, 1993. xxiii, 357 pp.

No Southern Jewish author writes about native turf and Southern Jewish sensibilities with the sensitivity that Eli Evans brings to the task. The Lonely Days Were Sundays not only pulls together articles and occasional pieces from his Southern Jewish roots, but takes the reader to the places and concerns-intellectual, political, ethical, and spiritual- where Evans has traveled since leaving the region after his undergraduate years at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.Those readers familiar with his "personal history" of Southern Jewish culture chronicled in The Provincials (New York, 1973) and with his more recent biography, Judah P. Benjamin: The Jewish Confederate (New York, 1988)~ will recognize the relaxed and seemingly effortless writing style that is always engaging, but will come away from Evans's latest work wishing he had devoted more space to pondering and updating the Southern Jewish experience.

Although The Lonely Days Were Sundays is divided into six parts - "Jews in the South/' "Southern Politics and Histor$!'"ePast and the Future:' "Israel, the Holocaust and Jewish History;" "Southern Im- ages and Culture(' and "Homeu- the thread that weaves all the dis- crete chapters together is Evans's ardent devotion to Jewish ideals and his keen appreciation of community, a full embracing of Michael Lerner's "politics of meaning" in the broadest sense. The chapters vary widely in length, reflecting their origins as journal entries, articles, bookreviews, or op-ed pieces, and provide the reader withaver- itable smorgasbord of Evans$interests, preoccupations, and passions over the past two decades.The overall effect, however, is somewhat disjointed, more a potpourri than a coherently conceived volume.

Evans's grandmother, Jennie Nachamson, immigrated from Lith- uania (via the slums of Baltimore) to a small town in the North Car- olina tobacco belt, where she and her peddler-shopkeeper husband raised their eight daughters. Before dying, she dictated her memoirs to one of her daughters, and years later, Evans chanced upon the old manuscript that contained the poignant phrase that became the title

Book Reviews 135

of this collection of essays. Mrs. Nachamson recalled the many lonely Sundays when she sat in her apartment, watching the townspeople on their way to church. The isolation was especially keen then, and she ached to be part of a similar village, but one full of Jews,who,like her, would be on their way to Shabbat services (frontispiece, pp. xxii, 12, and 13).

This vignette epitomizes the experience of countless Jews across the South who maintained their identity with little or no reinforce- ment and sought every opportunity to connect with other Jewish families in small towns nearby. These Jewish Southerners, culturally segregated from their gentile neighbors, were also aware of their marginality to the mainstream American Jewish experience head- quartered in New York. Evans analyzed the texture of Southern Jew- ish life in The Provincials, and, although not an academic account, it remains the best overview of the Southern Jewish experience. As president of the Charles Revson Foundation since 1977, Evans himself has long lived at the urban center of American Jewry. But the Southern expatriate acknowledges the wealth of material remaining in the virtually urunined vein of Southern Jewish life, and returns to the theme here in several variations, telling Jewish Southerners, above all, to document their past and to utilize the tools of oral history to facilitate the task. Evans emphasizes that Southern Jews need to gain sufficient "self-consciousness" (p. 34) to recognize the unique- ness of their historical experience in order to write about it.

When he turns to Southern politics, Evans's insights allow the reader to see how far the region has come in some areas - and how much farther, like the larger nation, it still has to go in providing equal justice for all its citizens. Most of his writing covers the period in which he was actively working in the region as a staff member of the Carnegie Corporation, seeking ways to provide more opportunities for minorities in the early 1970s or helping Terry Sanford, former governor of North Carolina, in his bid to secure the Democratic presidential nomination.

Although, where appropriate, Evans often updates an entry with a new introductory or concluding paragraph, he is not always as successful in integrating the material as in the brief essay, "A New Generation Takes Over:' originally published in 1984, but certainly more significant in the 1992 version. Here he compares the genera-

136 American Jmish Archives

tional politics of Kennedy's ascension to the presidency in 1960 with the failed campaigns of Gary Hart and Jerry Brown in 1984 and the 1992 election of Clinton and Gore, the first presidential team born after World War 11.

The longest essay Evans includes is his diary of Henry Kissinger's shuttle diplomacy between Anwar Sadat's Egypt and Menachem Begin's Israel in the summer of 1975, which Evans covered as a cor- respondent. In a book bearing the title The Lonely Days Were Sun- days, which strongly suggests a Southern emphasis, a fifty-page chapter on Kissinger's shuttle diplomacy seems overly long and dated. But Evans successfully conveys the centrality of Israel to this Southern Jewish son in his last essay, "Home," a tribute to his Zion- ist mother, whose death occasions a warm and nostalgic recollec- tion. Since much of her life was devoted to organizing Southern Jews on behalf of Zionist causes, Evans needed to "attach her to Is- rael" symbolically (p. 344, and he arranged to plant a tree at the Hadassah hospital in her memory, placing some North Carolina soil in the hole where it was planted. "Home," therefore, conveys both the Southerner's and the Jew's distinct sense of place and provides an apt conclusion.

In this volume, Evans gives us glimpses of himself and his views on aspects of Southern, American, and Jewish politics and culture over the past twenty years, but the panoramic sweep of his life still eludes us. What the reader misses in this narrative is how he tra- versed from one event or post to another, the perspective that allows us to assess the author's growth as he responded with compassion and dedication to the causes and opportunities in which his work has made a difference. Perhaps The Lonely Days Were Sundays will lead to a more complete memoir. Evans's many fans look forward to that work.

-Bobbie Malone

Bobbie Malone is associated with the Wisconsin State Historical Society. She received her Ph.D fuom Tulane University in American history. Dr. Malone's book on Rabbi Max Heller and the American Soul will be published shortly by the University of Alabama Press.

Book Reviews 137

Grobman, Alex. Rekindling the Flame: American Jewish Chaplains and the Survivors of EuropeanJewry, 194-1948.Detroit: Waynestate

University Press, 1993.259 pp.

The Jewish chaplains who served in the American military during World War I1 expected to spend their time conducting religious services and counseling Jewish GIs on spiritualmatters. As the war drew to a close, however, those who were stationed in Europe found themselves face to face with shattered Holocaust survivors who were in desperate need of material and spiritual succor. Alex Grobman's moving and informative study, Rekindling the Flame, relates the here- tofore - untold tale of the chaplains' heroic, and sometimes illegal, efforts to aid the survivors of the Nazi genocide.

The chaplains' sponsoring agency, the Jewish Welfare Board, apparently neglected to fully brief them on what they might find in liberated Europe. As a result, these young American rabbis were taken by surprise when,during the waning months of the war, they discovered the homeless, destitute, and often ill or dying Holocaust survivors. Since private relief agencies like the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDc) were initially barred by the U.S. Army from the liberated zones, the chaplains took it upon themselves to assist the displacedpersons (or DPS, as the survivors were known).

The survivors needed a wide range of goods and services - food, clothing, medical attention, shelter - that Anny chaplains ordinarily could not provide. To meet the crisis, the chaplains had to use a variety of imaginative tactics. In a letter to his wife, Chaplain Max Braude, who was attached to the army unit that liberated the Dachau death camp, summed up the chaplains' itinerary in thesememorable words : "We beg, we borrow, we steal, we cajole, we cuss, and we get the stuff that is needed" (p. 39). Food for survivors,for example, was procured in a variety of ways. American soldiers were asked to do- nate extra rations,and American Jewish soldiers were additionally urged to give up the thousands of rations that were distributed on Yom Kippur. But since such methods provided only limited quanti- ties, some chaplains went further. Chaplain Herbert Eskin, for example, "borrowed" army trucks and recruited a half-dozen Jewish


GIs to accompany him as he staged late-night raids on German gro- cery stores to procure food for DPs. Sometimes they forced German farmers, at gunpoint, to slaughter cattle. After distributing the food to Holocaust survivors,Eskin and company would slip back into their barracks before dawn.Chaplain Eugene Lipman went a step further, taking extra food rations for DPs from the U. S. Army's own food dumps to feed the starving survivors.

Other laws and Army regulations were likewise circumvented or ignored in order to aid the DPs. Chaplain Abraham Haselkorn illegally used his military status to pressure French church officials to surrender Jewish children whom they had been hiding from the Nazis. Chaplain Abraham Klausner illegally carried a gun as he scoured the Bavarian countryside for survivors in hiding. Chaplains illegally sent DPsf mail through the Army system disguised as their personal mail, helped DPs from other parts of Europe enter the American occupation zone in defiance of Army orders, smuggled weapons to the Jewish fighting forces in Palestine, and bribed bor- der guards to permit the passage of DPs who were on their way to

L Palestine with the Bricha underground movement. (The most valuable commodity for bribery was cigarettes;Chaplain Herbert Fried- man collected them from Jewish GIs,and Friedman's father sent a crate of 500 cartons every few days.)

Interestingly, senior U.S. Army officers repeatedly looked the other way when it came to illegal actions on behalf of the DPs. When one of Chaplain Lipman's illegal mail bundles burst open, he was called before the commander of his division for an explana- tion. Lipman pleaded that he was smuggling mail for Holocaust survivors who had no other way of contacting loved ones. "With a broad grin, the officer told Lipman,'Consider yourself reprimanded and get the hell out of hereU'(p.~o2).Chaplain Eli Bohnen received so many food packages from the United States- on one occasion, two freight cars full in a single day- that Army investigators suspected he might be involved in black marketeering; but when they realized he was giving the packages to DPs, they ignored Bohnen's activity, even though it was illegal to use the Army mail system for such purposes.

The kindly attitude of senior Army officers provided a pleasant counterpoint to what Grobman describes as the unsympathetic at-

Book Reviews 139

titude of many ordinary American soldiers toward the DPs. Not having been briefed on the plight of the Jews, many soldiers "perceived the Jews as an added burden and did not want to be responsible for providing them with food or other necessities:'Other soldiers were simply "uncomfortable in their new role as civilian administrators" (p.43). In addition, the Army's wide-ranging policy of nonfratemization with local civilians necessarily hampered relations between GIs and Holocaust survivors.

The response of Jewish soldiers to the DPs seems to have been rather mixed.On the one hand, many Jewish GIs donated rations, helped find Army jobs for survivors, forced German officials to open their storehouses to feed DPs,or acted as conduits for illegal food packages from American Jewish donors. (Chaplain Benjamin Gore- lick's wife organized their congregation in Albany, NewYork, to send some 100 packages weekly to Jewish GIs for distribution at the Brussels Jewish orphanage that Gorelick was overseeing.)Yet other Jewish GIs seem to have ignored the survivors. The subject of Jewish soldiers' responses is, however, beyond the scope of Grob- man's study; for a look at the DP problem through the eyes of a Jewish GI, one should consult Among the Survivors of the Holocaust - 1945: The Landsberg DP Camp Letters of Major Irving Heymount, United States Army, edited by Abraham J. ~eck?~learly, both the attitudes of Jewish soldiers to the plight of the DPs and the response of American Jewry to appeals for aid are topics that merit further research.

Although Grobman does not cite any instances in which Jewish GIs complained about their own needs being neglected by the chaplains, he points out that chaplains who helped DPs con- sciously neglected their Army constituents and risked court-mar- tial for doing so. No such court-martials actually took place, although Chaplain Herschel Schachter was reprimanded, and apparently denied a promotion, because he was too busy with the DPs to conduct all of the expected religious services for the men of his Eighth Corps. Schachter and his colleagues understood that "the needs of survivors were greater and more urgent than those of the Jewish soldiers" (p.64).

Both during the years of their relief efforts and later on, a number of the chaplains were critical of the Joint Distribution Committee


for not providing them with more assistance in their work with the DPs, especially during the first months after liberation, when the JDC and other private relief agencies were still barred from the Allied zones. Grobman criticizes the JDC for failing to "empower the chaplains to act in a semiofficial capacity until their representatives arrived or urge the chaplains to remain in Europe with the JDC after they were demobilized from the army" (pp.123-124). He likewise chides the JDC1s decision to stop assisting a campaign launched by Jewish GIs to have American Jews send packages of goods for DPs. Ac- cording to Grobman, the "overwhelming response" to the campaign "became a source of embarrassment to the JDC" because it highlighted the agency's own shortcomings (p. 171). In his view, the JDC1s reluctance to empower the chaplains and its withdrawal from the packages campaign were both cases of the JDC trying to protect its turf. "Had the JDC been less concerned about organizational ju- risdiction:' he believes, "it might have increased the effectiveness of its operation and avoided embarrassment when the chaplains' activities raised questions about the efficacy of JDC programs" (p. 194).

For an additional clue to the motives that shaped the JDC1s postwar policies,Grobman might have considered the positions that the organization took prior to, and during, the Holocaust.Other historians have noted the JDC's reluctance to finance any activities that were not strictly legal, such as extra-quota immigration to Palestine or il- licit money transfers for schemes to ransom Jews from the Nazis." The chaplains' involvement in a wide range of illegal activities on behalf of the postwar DPs ran counter to the traditional JDC approach.

As for the political impact of the chaplains' activities, Grobman notes that the reports the chaplains sent back to America played "a significant part" in raising American Jewish consciousness about the plight of the DPs (p. igi), which in turn led to concrete changes on the ground. Armed with the information from the chaplains' reports, American Jewish leaders appealed to President Truman for better treatment of the DPs, and mobilized members of Congress and Trea- sury Secretary Henry Morgenthau to do likewise (pp. 70-71). This political pressure led to the dispatch of presidential envoy Earl Harrison to Europe to survey the camps, and Harrison's sympathetic report prompted a presidential directive to the Army to improve

Book Reviews 141

the DPs' conditions. Other historians have described the Jewish leaders' recruitment of Morgenthau and the resulting Harrison mission;3 Grobman's account fills a gap by revealing the chaplains'reports as a crucial factor in stimulating Jewish leaders to act.

Grobman also raises questions about the attitude taken by Gen- eral Dwight Eisenhower. He notes that during the first months after V-E Day Eisenhower "had not shown much interest in displaced persons despite his role as military governorn(p. 79) and did not visit any of the DP camps until some three months after the liberation. Furthermore, Grobman writes (p. 85). Eisenhower and his staff "tried to discredit Harrison's findings by sending newspaper correspondents and other observers to visit selective displaced persons installations" (i.e., DP camps where conditions were far better than the norm). Grobman's description differs considerably from that of Isaac Alteras, whose recent study, Eisenhower and Israel, portrays Eisenhower as extremely interested in the plight of the DPs. Indeed, Alteras notes the alleged contrast between Eisenhower's sympathy for the DPs and his later lack of sympathy for Israel, which he explains as stemming from Eisenhower's perception of the DPs as a simple humanitarian problem and Israel as a complex political issue? Grobman's analysis suggests that there may actually have been more consistency thancontrast in Eisenhower's attitudes toward the DPs and Israel.

Grobman's thorough research synthesizes previously untapped archival sources, interviews, and periodical literature. At once scholarly and readable,Rekindling the Flames constitutes an important contribution to the fields of American Jewish history and Holocaust studies.

-Rafael Medoff

Dr. Rafael MedofjCis a Visiting Scholar i n Jewish Studies at the State University of New York, Purchase College.

Notes

I. Cincinnati: American Jewish Archives, 1982. 2. Monty Noam Penkower, The Jews Were Expendable: Free World Diplomacy and

the Holocaust (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 19831, pp. 122-123,158~25~-253; Yehuda Bauer, My Brother's Keeper: A Histo y of the American Jmish Joint Distribution Committee, 1929-1939 (Philadelphia: JewishPublicationSociety, 1 9 7 4 ) ~ ~ ~ . 178,286.


3. For example, Michael Cohen, in Truman and Israel (Berkeley: University of California Press, sggo), p. 112.

4. Isaac Alteras, Eisenhower and Israel (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1993). p. 28.

Book Reviews 143

Moore, Deborah Dash. To the Golden Cities: Pursuing the American Jewish Dream in Miami and Los Angeles.

New York: Free Press, 1994.358 pp.

Early in her book, Deborah Moore states that the migration of Jews to Miami and Los Angeles "rival[edI the mass migration of their immi- grantparents." This reader, forone,receivedtheclaimwithskepticism. But this scholarly and refreshing study justifies that claim and offers a new way oflookingatAmerican Jewishhistory.

The nineteenth-century migrations that brought Jews to the New World from every sector of the Old have been exhaustively studied and written about. Numerous local histories have revealed the con- tours of Jewish communities in major U.S. cities, and every theme from antisemitism to Zionism has been explored? But Moore, in her A t Home in America: Second Generation New YorkJews New York: Co- lumbia University Press, 1981) was the first historian to take as her theme the lives of the immigrants' children, the ways in which they adapted to America, and the ways in which American life was altered by them. To the Golden Cities expands this theme to its true con- tinental dimensions. Moore draws our attention to the scale of the second wave of Jewish American migration, the ways in which it conformed to American patterns, and the unexpected ways in which the migrants reshaped American and Jewish life.

Professor Moore, who directs the Program in American Culture at Vassar, traces the origins of this migration to the upheaval caused by World War 11. More than half a million Jewish men and women served in the American armed forces, the equivalent of thirty-seven divisions. National service uprooted them from their home communities, where their Jewishness had been taken for granted, and propelled them into unknown territory populated by Protestants Gather than the predominantly Catholic fellow immigrants they were already familiar with) and sprinkled with the usual assortment of good fellows, bigots, and know-nothings. More familiar now with the American milieu and empowered by their experience in battle, demobilized GIs did not all rush back home. Rather than pick up


their old lives where they had left off, many headed for the golden lands they had glimpsed while in the service.

Isaac Bashevis Singer expressed the feelings of many of them. "Let me tell you, to me when I came [to Florida] the first time, I had a feel- ing that I had come to Paradise. First of all the palm trees. Where would I ever see a palm tree in my life?" And orange juice! "That first sip was nothing less than ambrosia." Intoxicated by freedom, sun- shine, and fresh orange juice, Jews and non-Jews flocked southward. The Jewish population of Miami increased over 300 percent in the first five postwar years. Continued growth quickly made Miami the sixth American city in terms of its Jewish population - and only 4 percent of its residents had been born there. Los Angeles' growth was even more spectacular: 13,000 people migrated to that city each month during the late forties, and 13 percent of them were Jewish. Numbering 130,000 before the war, Jewish Angelenos numbered 300,000 by 1951. By the 1960s, LA was the third-largest Jewish city in the world, after New York and Tel Aviv.

Moore sets these and other statistics into meaningful patterns from which she draws considered judgments. The numbers are there, and the reader is never left wondering what to do with them. Having drawn the dimensions of the migrations southward and westward and acknowledged their similarities, she points out that the two cities shaped up differently. Miami Beach became an extension of New York, a place where old communities were drawn together by landsmanschaft circles, a place where Israel Bond salesmen pursued their quarry through the locker rooms of Jewish clubs. Los Angeles presented Jews (as others) with the opportunity to remake themselves in new images - literally so, as Jews entered the movie industry, turning it into a Jewish gesheft (business), as the garment industry had been in New York. Old family ties were more likely to be dropped by Angelenos; the trip back home was expensive, and even relatives living in the spread-out city could not be in frequent contact with one another.

Moore points out that the extraordinary postwar mobility of Americans was made possible by the GI Bill. Generous college grants and home mortgage loans meant that young people did not have to rely on their families for support; the portability of benefits allowed them to settle anywhere, including beyond the reach of the

Book Reviews 145

old neighborhood. Anyway, the old neighborhoods were themselves changing, many Jews were moving to the suburbs, and to a certain extent, the world of their childhood no longer existed. Ulti- mately, many young migrants were followed - or preceded -by their parents, whose Social Security benefits went farther in warm climes where there were no heating bills to pay and the informal lifestyle required a minimal wardrobe. In Miami or LA, writes Moore, you could be a permanent tourist in a community of strangers.

Like the earlier transatlantic migrants, many experienced a profound sense of dislocation together with their joy at discovering this new world. Jews met the challenge in different ways: Miami, by im- porting bits of New York Jewish life - the cafeterias, clubs, organizations, even synagogues - without which they could not conceive of Jewish life; Los Angeles, by reconfiguring the non-Jewish world into a syncretic blend of Yiddishkeit with beachfront culture.

The drive to reinstitute some sort of religious life derived from a sense of alienation, and of course the interest of eastern establishment leaders in extending their influence to the new communities. In the post-Holocaust world, an individual search for redemption through recreation was not enough, and each community sought out spiritual leaders to match its needs. The short biographical sketches that Moore provides of the "pioneer rabbis" who ventured into unchurched territory are alone worth the price of admission. In the ecumenical spirit that was engulfing America, these spiritual leaders tended to take the position that religion was not so much a matter of spirituality as it was an ethnic thing. With the same entre- preneurial impulse that moved their congregants, they explored ways of adapting Judaism to the leisure culture, though, Moore notes wryly, "they could not, for example, eliminate worship." Em- phasis shifted from the study of religious texts to ways in which Jews could connect with other Jews; from educating rabbis and teachers in a received tradition to developing a liberal arts education for all Jews. Sharing an encounter became a more common mode of synagogal interaction than prayer. The centrality of experience, the life of the emotions, the acceptance of women in leadership roles, and emphasis on home ceremonies that had previously been the province of women, are among elements of the American Jewish


folk religion that developed in LA and which prefigured nationwide changes in the practice of Judaism. "As permanent tourists pursued their spiritual recreation, they were changing the character of Ju- daism."

Politics in paradise came to the top of the Florida Jewish agenda in the 1950s. The community was interested in the elimination of restrictions on Jews in residential neighborhoods and stores which had existed from time immemorial. These, however, were related to the restrictions on African-Americans which the dominant white class was determined to maintain in this segregationist state. Not to challenge the restrictions went counter to the new-minted ethic of people who were just beginning to feel themselves wholly American. But challenging one restriction meant challenging the other, which, in the political parlance of the day, opened Jews to the charge of being Com- munists. Moore's masterful account of the ensuing struggle both within the community and in the public arena fully justifies her conclusion that "Jewish political activity ultimately transformed not only Miami Jews but the political character of Dade County"

The political context was different, and more dangerous, in Los An- geles, for this was a primary arena for the staging of the anti- Communist drama directed by the House Un-American Activities Committee. The story has been told before, but not - as Moore does here - from the vantage point of the organized Jewish community. In painstaking detail, she relates the early effort to unite Jews of the right and left in the interest of a world at peace with itself. This vision, and the organizations that sustained it, was blown apart by the HUAC in- vestigations, which ended with everyone putting a knife in someone else's back. In the post-McCarthy years, the LA Jewish community re- gained its cohesion, but at the cost of excluding its radical fringe. In- terestingly, the healing process was eased by growing agreement on the centrality of Israel in Jewish life. Perhaps Israel's distance from local traumas was a factor.

The story of Israel as a new frontier for Jews is told from the unique angle of its treatment in Hollywood films. This is perhaps the least successful of the book's chapters, and much of the material seems a diversion from an otherwise coherent scheme. However, ample sources for the study of American Jewry's relation to Israel already exist. What can be affirmed is Moore's conclusion that, for

Book Reviews 147

denizens of Los Angeles and Miami, an imagined Israel displaced New York as the source of authentic Jewish culture.

To the Golden Cities is one of those rare scholarly works in which the author proves able to communicate her findings to an interested public. The text combines research (notes safely tucked away at the back) with anecdotes and quotations that illustrate and enliven the argument. At the end of each chapter, Moore draws interesting and informative ideas from the facts that have been presented. Perhaps the most interesting of these is that the style and substance of Cali- fornia and Florida politics transformed Jewish politics, while Jewish participation helped change the political culture of Miami and Los Angeles.

Jewish "permanent tourists" in both these cities developed lifestyles in which few markers set them apart from their Christian neighbors. If they maintained communal bonds, it was by personal choice. These Jews "wanted it all.. . to be Jews under the American sun: and they did it by combining the best of both worlds, even if that sometimes degenerated into programs of ritual observance modeled on Weight Watchers. This designer Judaism spread far beyond California and Miami to become a nationwide phenomenon. Jews have adapted to life in a Protestant mold by replicating sects and individual creeds within Judaism. Nationwide, communities are expanding the role of women in religious and secular life and en- larging the emotional embrace of Judaism at the expense of its intellectual content. There is growing acceptance of the idea that being Jewish derives from individual choices rather than from the acci- dent of birth. This degree of individualism - unprecedented in history- is possible only because America has changed (partly under Jewish influence) and discrimination is no longer acceptable. The shape of postwar American Judaism and Jewry, this book shows, was largely foreshadowed by the choices made by migrants to Mi- ami and Los Angeles.

-Judith Laikin Elkin -

Judith Laikin Elkin is the author of Jews of the Latin American Republics and president of the Latin American Jewish Studies Association.


Note

1. The best survey of this literature is Jonathan D. Sarna's "The American Jewish Experience:' in The Schocken Guide to Jewish Books, ed. Barry W. Holtz (New York: Schocken Books, 1992).

Book Reuia0.s 149

Rausch, David A. Fundamentalist Evangelicals and Anti-Semitism. Valley Forge, Pa. : Trinity International Press, 1993. x, 253 pp.

Fundamentalist Evangelicals and Anti-Semitism traces the development of fundamentalist attitudes toward Jews to the revival movements of the 1870s, when the Reverend Dwight Moody electrified crowds of devotees with his powerfully emotional sermons. Although he allegedly preached at least one passionate sermon denouncing Jews for having crucified Jesus, Moody denied ever having given such a talk. David Rausch uses Moody and the revival movement of his times as a springboard to trace subsequent attitudes of fundamentalists toward Jews, and at best they are ambivalent. There is no question that some fundamentalist evangelicals acknowledge that the Jews were God's "chosen people: but there is also condemna- tion for the fact that the Jews did not accept Christ's preachings as true and have not accepted him as their savior. Out of love, we are told, many evangelists wish to convert the Jews and bring them "home" to Jesus. On the other hand, large numbers of evangelicals also believe that the home of the Jews should be in Palestine and have therefore supported the State of Israel.

But consistency is not what we are going to find in evangelical beliefs or publications. They may believe that God said "you will all go back to Jerusalem:' but that sentence ends with "you will all be brought to Christ at last" (p. 17). Jews who have "strayed" - and by evangelical definition, "straying" means not accepting Christ - were attacked by fundamentalist preachers like Gerlad P. Winrod in the 1930s for allegedly being communists, radicals, occultists, and wily financiers. Oswald J. Smith, another fundamentalist preacher, who visited Germany in 1930s~ reported, "Every true Christian [in Ger- many] is for Hitler" (p. 123). At the same time, other fundamentalist preachers denounced the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which allegedly indicated how Jews were planning to undermine the Chris- tian world.

Rausch's book, a once-over-lightly survey, treats selected fundamentalist individuals and publications. It is more of a summary than a penetrating analysis, and the research is thin.It is nowhere near as

150 American ] m e s h Archives

comprehensive as Robert Ross's So It Was True, nor is it as carefully thought out. The focus is primarily on the thoughts and attitudes of fundamentalists and some of their ministers; and the responses or activities of Jews in reaction to fundamentalist expressions is generally relegated to the 1960s and after. The American Jewish Com- mittee's religious affairs de~artrnent~under the direction of the late Rabbi Marc Tanenbaum,made efforts at dialogue with a number of Christian denominations in the 1960s~ and the evangelicals appeared pleased to be invited to learn more about Jews and their beliefs.

Whether evangelicals today are or are not anti-Semitic is really up to the reader to decide. I do not think that any blanket generaliza- tions are possible, since only a selection of individuals, groups, and publications are dealt with in this book. But if the philo-Semites believe that the Jewish people are in a covenant with God, they, along with most Protestants, evangelicals and others, still subscribe to what the more liberal Protestant periodical, Christian Centuy, wrote in October, 1g4g,"Christ wills the conversion of America. Of that we can be sure" (p. 174). One wonders how people who hold such beliefs can subscribe to the view that the United States is a multicultural society in which all individuals are entitled to respect regardless of their cultural heritage.

- Leonard Dinnerstein

Leonard Dinnerstein is a professor of history at the University of Arizona. His most recent book is Antisernitism in America (1994).

Book Reviews 151

LeMaster, Carolyn Gray. A Corner of the Tapestry: A History of the Jewish Experience in Arkansas. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas

Press, 1995. xxiii, 622 pp.

While American Jewish history has come of age during the last three decades, the subfield of Southern Jewish history has just begun to pick up ground since the publication of the pathbreaking anthology edited by Leonard Dinnerstein and Mary Dale Palsson ( J m s in the South, 1973) and Eli Evans's The Provincials (1976). Much of the work in Judaica appears as community studies ranging from congregational to city and state histories. In the hands of gifted professionals like Ju- dith Endelman (Indianapolis), Steven Hertzberg (Atlanta), Marc Lee Raphael (Columbus, Ohio), or William Toll (PortlandS, these volumes exemplify modern social history at its finest. Much continues to be written also by dedicated amateurs. The works by Elliott Ashkenazi (Louisiana), Mark H. Elovitz (Birminghad, Harriet and Fred Rochlin (the Far West), Natalie Ornish (Texas), Myron Berman (RichrnondS, and Leo and Evelyn Turitz (Mississippi) are among the better of these. All too often, however, this genre serves more as chronicle than so- phisticated social analysis.

Carolyn Gray LeMaster's labor of love fits into the upper level of the nonacademic category. Undertaking exhaustive research in primary sources, and conducting hundreds of interviews over many years, she brings together an immense array of factual data.

LeMaster organizes her materials into five sections, each with a short introduction: 1820s to 1860s, 1860s to 1930s (congregational development), 1860s to 1930s (mdividual economic and civic activities), 1930s to 1950s (the Arkansas Jewish Assembly), and 1940s to the 1990s. The Civil War and the Assembly seem to provide much of the rationale for the chronology. Four of the sections are organized along geographical lines, with the story moving from community to community.

The author, borrowing her metaphor, weaves a tapestry familiar to historians who have examined communities beyond the industrial metropolises. Central European Jews, particularly from the Ger- manic states, entered the frontier environment (relatively speaking)


of Arkansas, a seemingly forbidding locale (especially for Jews), almost as soon as it achieved territorial status in 1819 (the first Jew arrived in 1823).

Unlike their non-Jewish neighbors, who were predominantly farmers, the Jews started as peddlers and small businessmen (dry goods, groceries, and general merchandise) in crossroads towns. Young immigrants, they ventured to Arkansas after residing elsewhere in America and sought economic opportunity. Gradually ac- culturating and highly mobile, they relocated to communities which offered greater potential, and rapidly accumulated capital by saving, joining fellow Jews in partnerships, establishing branches in outlying towns, and investing in real estate and utilities. The outgrowth included department stores, sons who entered the professions, and daughters who married well and dedicated their lives to family, education, and volunteer causes.

Following the "they arrived/were tolerateathey contributed" nexus, Jews helped establish and lead business and service organizations, and artistic and educational efforts. Since the state lacked large immigrant groups (beyond African American/white), ethnic politics and issues appeared little in governance. Thus Jews were elected and appointed to office based on~their economic positions and community service.

Although a congregation formed in Little Rock in 1843 or 1845, Arkansas Jews were few in number (400 in 1850,1,400 in 1865, and 4,000 by 1900) and scattered, and thus were slow to begin congregations. As throughout the South, the Civil War proved a turning point, with two dozen congregations forming from 1866 to 1920, virtually all of which moved from traditional to Reform. Concordia or Harmony social clubs, B'nai B'rith lodges, and Hebrew ladies' benevolent societies were ubiquitous, as were elaborate temples dedicated with the participation of the town's hierarchy and built as symbols of Jewish success and acceptance.

The 1880s began the onslaught of the East European Jews, often launched on their journey into middle America by the Industrial Re- movals Office or the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society.The newcomers relived the process of their predecessors, albeit adjusting to a different

Book Reuiavs 153

economic environment. In the cities they were assisted by the earlier settlers, althoughintragroup frictionwasnever far from the surface.

The Jews of Arkansas, like those in small towns and commercial cities throughout America, accepted many of the ways of their neighbors and displayed loyalty in response to their general toleration. Thus, a surprisingly high one-third of the Jewish merchants fought for the Confederacy, although, LeMaster reports, only 20 percent owned slaves and few identified with slavery.

Some important themes stand out. Firstly, beyond relative toleration and their adaptation to the dominant culture, Jewish success in Arkansas, as elsewhere, was predicated on their ability to fit into economic niches. In farm communities Jews peddled. In small towns during Reconstruction they settled as "furnishing merchants:' cata- lysts in the distribution network. When the small towns atrophied, they moved to the cities, joining those who had picked the better locations earlier, and started department stores. When federateds sup- planted family department stores, they sold out and started specialty chains of their own. In each instance they succeeded while perform- ing essential services.

The second theme will be referred to as "linkages." It is farbetter developed in Carolyn Lipson Walker's Indiana University dissertation, "Shalom Y'all" (1986), but is implied here. Jews started networking through family and landsleit associations, and continued with frater- nities(Wil1iam Toll developed this notion with B'nai B'rith lodges). In the hinterland, where the number of marriageable partners was limited, institutions were developed to bring young people together (LeMaster points to the junior congregations formed during the 1930s as agents of this type of interaction). Families intertwined, as did their business connections, the linkages serving as sources of "social cohesion" (g .97).

Sometimes Arkansas Jews adjusted to their isolation in fascinating ways. In 1870s Texarkana, a Jewish convert to the Presbyterian faith ministered to a church and a Jewish congregation simultaneously. In DermottNcGehee during the I ~ ~ O S , traditionalists attended their own Sabbath services and then participated in the Reform service which followed. An area requiring greater attention is the role of He- brew Union College students and rabbis from larger communities who offered rabbinic aid intermittently to Jews in outlying locations.

154 American Jew'sh Archives

LeMaster also points to the role of road improvements in the decline of small-town Jewry, in that commuting from the cities to rural busi- nesses became feasible.

The creation of the statewide Arkansas Jewish Assembly (1931- 1951) stands out as a most unusual adjustment. Recognizing the need for outreach to Jews in small towns if Jewish identity was to be maintained, Rabbi A.B. Rhine led the state's five other Reform rabbis in founding the body, and gained the cooperation of the sole Orthodox rabbi. The Assembly encouraged larger communities to form social service federations, and smaller communities to establish congregations. A five-state Youth Assembly began, and a census was taken. The Arkansas Jewish Assembly helped finance charities, decried the rise of Hitler, and assisted in refugee resettlement efforts. Temporar- ily disbanded during World War 11, the body dissolved in 1951. Local communities had either formed their own institutions or disap- peared, as the state's Jewishpopulation stagnated at 4,000. In 1986 the New Arkansas Jewish Assembly grew out of the Little Rock federation, and the state's Jews now number only about 2,000.

Alas, the reviewer must refer to the weaknesses of LeMaster's chronicle. With the exception of the Assembly chapter, analysis beyond the section introductions is minimal. Organization by community size instead of location might have offered a comparative framework. The author seemingly attempts to list every Jew in every small town. There are undifferentiated lists of synagogue presidents, early congregants, and related families. Interesting tidbits on black- Jewishrelations and on antisemitism are never effectively brought together, and the role of women is relegated to sketches entitled "The Distaff Side1' For Arkansans who wish to see their names in print, this is the place to find it. For the historian, A Corner of the Tapestry provides avast data base in anecdotal formbegging for further analysis.

- Mark K. Bauman

Mark K. Bauman is professor of histo y at Atlanta Metropolitan College. His most recent work is Harry H. Epstein and the Rabbinate as Conduit for Change (1994). He is coeditor (with Berkeley Kalen) of an anthology on southern rabbis and blackcivil rights to be published by Alabama University Press.

Book Reviews 155

Nathan, Joan.Jewish Cooking in America. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994.463 pp.

As a member of the International Association of Culinary Profes- sionals, I was thrilled to learn that Joan Nathan's Jewish Cooking in America was the winner of the 1994 Julia Child Cookbook of the Year. This is a great achievement in the culinary world. In her acceptance speech, at IACP's annual meeting this April in San Antonio, Texas, Joan acknowledged Dr. Jacob Rader Marcus for his support and the many hours of time he had personally shared with her. This landmark cookbook is destined to become a classic and a fixture in everyone's kitchen.

Joan Nathan's scholarly endeavor began with fellowships received from the American Jewish Archives and the Quincentennial Founda- tion of Istanbul. Her research covers every region of the United States and took her to Istanbul and Izmir to study at first-hand the food of the Jews of Turkey. Using direct interviews with people like Minni Marcus in Dallas,Texas,whose husband founded Neiman-Marcus, chef Wolfang Puck of Spago fame,who shared his recipe for Jewish Pizza, and Anne Rosenzweig, chef-owner of the Arcadia restaurant in New York, to name a few, she retrieved family histories from every comer of America, east,.west, north, and south. Joan actually stayed with many of those she interviewed, among them the Lubavitcher Deitsch family of Crown Heights, Brooklyn, Ruth Hendricks-Schul- son on New York's West Side, Emie Weir's Hagafen vineyard in Napa Valley, and eighty-five-year-old David Sofer of San Rafael, Califor- nia, coming away from each visit with personal insight and feelings shemight not have realized otherwise.

An important facet when researching any cookbookis to make sure the recipes work.This responsibility lies with the author. Only after Joan's family members, friends, and professional recipe developers personally tested and tasted each one, some more than once, did the book's more than 300 kosher recipes receive final approval.

Comments from presidents, governors, Supreme Court justices, and ambassadors, and their involvement in the growth of this country,provide an inspiring,important, and educational addition to Jew-


ish Cooking in America. Over a five-year period, every facet of research brought this unique and outstanding cookbook to fruition.

Quotations and stories retold from cookbooks, history books, en- cyclopedias, and magazine articles were the source for many of the happy or sad anecdotes throughout Joan Nathan's cookbook. For those of us who are first-generation Jews,Jewish Cookingin America is a gift bringing back childhood reminiscences, and for me there were many.

Gertrude Berg's anecdote from Molly and Me (1961) recalls Friday visitsinhergrandmother'skitchenfilled with confusion.It couldhave bees my grandmother's kitchen. Soup simmering away on the range, flour covering the kitchen table to roll the dough for her delicious coffee cake, and the smell of fresh challah baking in the oven. Just recently, as I wiped my frying pan clean from the last bit ofgriben and schmaltz (rendered fat) with a piece of freshly baked challah, the memory, aroma, and flavor of those visits with my grandmother were back in my kitchen.

The design of Jewish Cooking in America may be a little difficult for those new to a kitchen, but you get used to it. Like a wonderful novel, you just can't seem to put the book down.

They say a picture is worth a thousand words. Photographs of family gatherings as well as famous storefronts like Barney Green- grass's, a New York institution on the Upper West Side, the Carnegie Delicatessen, and an unidentified store front with a sign advertising Kosher Chinese Jewish Israeli Food make you wish you were there. Portraits like the one of Abigail Franks, the eighteenth-century Jew- ish woman who wrote to her son to please keep kosher, Isaac Mayer Wise,the leader of the Reform movementland Judah Benjamin, secretary of state for the Confederacy, tie the history of the recipes together. The way the artists drew the models in some of the advertisements adds special levity.

In the introduction to her cookbook, Joan explains how America welcomed Jewish immigrants from all over the world, how they adapted their lifestyles, traditions, and recipes to the local culture. "There is no 'Jewish' food,!' she writes, "other than matzah, haroset, or cholent or chamin (the Sabbath stews that surface in different forms in every land where Jews live)!' In 1720, the first '~shkenazic" Jew-

Book Reviews 157

ish immigrants arrived in America, north of Newburgh, New York, in the Hudson Highland.

The real story of Jewish food in America began, however, more than sixty years earlier, she writes, when twenty-three Sephardic Jews arrived in New Amsterdam in 1654, seeking haven from the Spanish Inquisition in Recife, Brazil. Their relocation took place during the time when the discovery of exotic and unfamiliar foods in the Americas and the production of sugar changed forever the cuisines of the Old and New Worlds.

America offered great opportunities in the food business.The butchers, bakers, and pushcart peddlers of herring and pickles soon became small-scale independent grocers ,wine merchants, and whole- sale meat, produce, and fruit providers.

Joan explains how twentieth-century immigration came from the casbah, the concentration camps, the kibbutz, and the Caucasus. "With them; she says,"came recipesseasoned with Syrian, Moroccan, Greek, German, Polish, Georgian, and Alsatian flavors, all adapted for today's tastes."

Her introductions at thebeginning of eachchapter are likenew and exciting appetizers providing a perfect beginning for the reader, leaving you to anticipate what's coming next.In 1925 the average Ameri- can housewife prepared her food at home. By 1965~75 to 90 percent of the food she used had undergone some sort of factory processing.

Every one of the more than 430 pages transports you into a world of food facts filled with memories. The making of American Jewish food, from lox and bagels to Lindy's cheesecake, the transition from schmaltz to Crisco to Canola oil, all lead us into the world of contem- porary American cooking. It explains in minute detail how cream cheese, rennet, gelatin, junket, Jell-0, pasteurized milk, Coca-Cola, nondairy creamer, phyllo dough, and frozen foods were invented. Jewish Cooking in America takes us on an ethnic culinary adventure

we couldn't have had otherwise. Chinese, Indian, Italian, Iranian, Russian, and many other ethnic recipes fill the pages of this cookbook. Each page treats you to historical vignettes which add a personal touch to the recipes.These personal stories don't just come from "foodies" -they originate from Jews of all origins, countries, and lifestyles as well as the artistic world of authors, film makers, play- wrights, poets, and performers.


Each of the twelve chapters has interesting food history to offer. For instance,"The first to bring noodle kugels to this country were probablytheBavarianorAlsatianJewswhocalledthechalet. . . . Every year the Jewish women in Evansville, Indiana, an old river city at the boot tip where Kentucky and Illinois meet, put together an ethnic food fair as a fund-raiser for Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem. To- gether the women made hundreds of kugels.The non-Jewish community loved Jewish food. They would purchase the kugels and freeze them for the Christmas holiday".

In Italy, eggplant has often been called a Jewish fruit,perhaps because it was Jewish merchants,who had tasted it in the Middle or Far East, who brought the seeds to Italy.

If you are a deli lover, the chapter entitled "Meat: Cholent, Briskets and Albondigas (Meatballs in Ladino)"covers it all. Three and a half pages highlight the history of "Delicatessens: The Jewish Eating Ex- perience in America.'' Recipes like Kosher Hot Dogs from Nathan's, Pastrami from Mississippi, Pickled Tongue or Beef for Jewish Spe- cial Occasions, and Glazed Corned Beef expand our deli repertoire.

Nathan's attention to detail in relating the ingredients and season- ings used when preparing both familiar and unfamiliar traditional Jewish holiday dishes adds to our understanding of how the gener- ations before us used the kinds of ingredients they did, where they obtained them, and why they used them.

Many of the book's recipes derive from letters to the editor Joan Nathan came upon in Jewish newspapers or historical society newsletters across the country. Others are from people who knew her quest and wanted to share their family recipes. Still others are treasures from eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and twentieth-century pri- vatepapersand cookbooks, which Joan adapted for present-day use.

Not only do the recipes explain how to prepare and serve the food, many of them provide culinary hints and tips. I learned that the fat- ter side of a brisket is called the "point" and the leaner side the "flat." Also, when roasting a whole brisket, the point should be up; when reheating, the point should be down; and different ingredients are added to the brisket, depending on what region you live in.

The recipes are presented and designed in a modern fashion. For example, in0Fish: From Gefilte to Grouper" the recipe for Classic Gefilte Fish is preceded by an interview with Sidney Leibner, eighty-

Book Reviews 159

three, of Deerfield Beach, Florida, who shares the success story of his grandfather, who in 1910 went into the fish business.The heading reads:"From Gefilte Fish on the Hudson to Mother's Gefilte Fish in the Jar." Following this is a short story of a first-generation immigrant from New Mexico who needed a permit from the local Indians to catchlive fish, which he sold to the "bubbies and zaydes" for the Jew- ish holidays. Next follows a personal family anecdote about Joan's mother-in-law and how making gefilte fish has become a welcome, twice-yearly ritual in her house - at Rosh Hashanah and Passover. The recipe is printed withheadnotes that make a variety of interesting statements about what to look for and do when preparing the recipe, then the ingredients are printed alongside the procedure, telling how to make the recipe and when it should be served. Introducing the history of the recipes to both knowledgeable andnovice cooks in this manner is a unique,exciting, and creative method of education.

In the same chapter, I learned about Kosher Club, a guide to kosher dining facilities for Jewish travelers that hasbeeninexistence for four years. As a food writer, when traveling, I'm always looking for new culinary adventures. Kosher restaurants provide not only a taste of home but an opportunity to meet new and interesting Jewish people. I can't wait to try some of the Club's recommendations.

Food adaptation was and is to this day an important element for those adhering to the Jewish dietary laws. Joan Nathan's recipes provide interesting history and methods for adapting many of the traditional recipes and ingredients for today's modern, observant, Jewish cook.

For Eastern European immigrants, the profusion of fresh vegetables intheUnitedStatesmeantadaptingtheirrecipes.Evenincooking classes sponsored by settlement houses in large cities, where the newcomers learned to cook with the new vegetables, it was hard for them to understand that you did not have to cook vegetables to death to remove harmful germs.

Long before mock lobster products came on the market, Jews in Maine who kept kosher homes were trying to approximate the taste of the prohibited lobster. Instead of the pollock used in"1-can't-believe- it's-not-lob~ter,~~ they used the local haddock cooked in tomatoes, which made the fish look like lobster. After the tomatoes colored the fish, they were discarded.


Jewish Cookingin America offers something for every age. In a world influencedby McDonald's and Burger King, JoanNathanhas adapted Dorothy Regensteiner's Friday Night chicken recipe into chicken fingers for the children.

In this volume, I was introduced to Jewish culinary language, cooking terms, and titles I'd never known before.Yiddish words throughout the cookbook are always translated.Those new to the traditions of a modem Jewish kitchen can certainly broaden their understanding of Jewish cooking by reading the glossary. It is extensive and well written,though more transliterations to help with pronun- ciation would have been helpful here.

Joan Nathandiscovered how American Jews were influenced by regional foods - how pecans, for example, worked their way into matzah balls. From Dawson City, Alaska,to the offices of high-pow- ered executives, to the families of butchers on the Lower East Side, to the specialty food emporiums in the heart of New York, she has opened doors and invited us into the lives of our American Jewish people, their food and their stories. Jewish Cooking in America shares a five-year culinary adventure with us, and everyone who reads this book will enjoy the fruits of Joan Nathan's odyssey in creating it, as I have in reviewing it.

- Zell Schulman

Zell Schulman, food editor of the American Israelite, the oldest Jewish weekly in America, is the author of Something Different for Passover and Planning Per- fect Parties. She is a lecturer and recipe consultant for Royal Wine Corporation of New York.

Book Reviews 161

Chemow, Ron. The Warburgs: The Twentieth Centu y Odyssey of a Remarkable Jewish Family.

New York: Random House, 1993. xvii, 820 pp.

The Warburgs is a lengthy and fascinating study of a prominent German- Jewish investment house. In it, Ron Chernow, who is known for his award-winning The House of Morgan, exhaustively explores the intriguing lives of the many members of the Warburg family. The book is organized into five parts and contains forty-nine chapters. The author thoroughly explains the place of family members in light of numerous themes, such as finance capitalism, nationalism, antisemitism, totalitarianism, and other "isms" associated with the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. More importantly, the book serves as a fine illustration of "power structure research?

The first part of thebook,entitled "TheEmergenceof the Warburgs," contains interesting and detailed discussions of the family's origins and evolution from the sixteenth to the late nineteenth century. Several features characterized the early Warburgs; they became ''Court Jews," married well, and developed strong leadership skills. This is persuasively demonstrated in Chernow's accounts of the first known family member, Simon von Cassel, who settled in War- burg; of the pawnbroker Gumprich Marcus Warburg, who became established in Hamburg in 1773; and of his two oldest sons, Moses Marcus and Gerson, who five years later set up M. M. Warburg and Company the Hamburg bank directed by the family.

Especially well depicted is the matriarchal Sara, the daughter of Moses Marcus, who married her cousin, the timid Aby Samuel Warburg, and kept a watchful eye over the bank's operations. Under her capable son Siegmund, the family bank offered a variety of investment products and developed into an important financial institution in nineteenth-century Germany. It provided needed capital for industrial and urban expansion in the unified Germany of Bis- marck. Despite their financial successes, the Warburgs frequently feuded and split into two branches: the Alsterufer Warburgs, descended from Siegrnund and Theophilie, and the Mittelweg War- burgs, descended from Moritz and Charlotte.


The second part of thebook, "The Rise of the Mittelweg Warburgs,ll reveals the family's transatlantic importance in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Germany and America. The connections of the Warburgs in Germany to business and industrial activities, impe- rialism, nationalism, World War I, and culture are carefully examined, as are the ties of family members in America to investment firms, central banking, and humanitarian causes.

The book, in addition, offers a vivid account of the social life of family members in Germany and in America. Max Warburg apprenticed in 1891 at N.M. Rothschild & Sons in London, returned to Hamburg in 1892 to work in the family bank,and was made a partner the next year. Dynamic but rash, Max was quite compatible in the bank with his brother Paul, who was prudent and thoughtful. Max strength- ened the firm's business in commercial bills and foreign exchange and, through his friendship with Albert Ballin of the Hamburg- American Line, was granted entry into the exclusive world of industrial executives in Wilhelmine Germany. He served on the boards of many German corporations and was involved in imperialistic activities, helping to finance the German navy and the Baghdad Railway in 1907 and providing financial support to Germany in 1911 for its involvement in Morocco. After World War I began, this Hamburg banker, caught between his feelings of German nationalism and of enlightened internationalism, continued to advise Wilhelm I1 on financial matters and to provide loans to the German government.

Paul, the partner of Max, helped to transform M. M. Warburg & Company into Hamburg's finest bank. He married Nina Loeb in 1895 and seven years later consented to her request to move to New York. Retaining his interest in the Hamburg firm after he became an American citizen in 1911, Paul cemented the Kuhn-Warburg interests and did business on both sides of the Atlantic. During the first decade of the twentieth century he sold American railroad bonds in Europe and German treasury bonds in the United States.

Chernowls book contains an impressive account of Paul Warburg's significant contribution to American financial history: namely, his proposal for a central bank to help regulate the American economy. As is explained in great detail, the provisions of the 1913 Federal Reserve Act reflected Warburgfs thinking about a central bank and regional banks in the United States. This "shy warrior" provided

Book Reviews 163

leadership to the newly created Federal Reserve System until 1918, when President Woodrow Wilson decided against nominating him again as one of its vice-governors.

Chernow also devotes considerable attention to Felix and Aby S. Warburg. In March of 1895 Felix Warburg married Frieda Schiff, the daughter of the prominent Wall Street banker Jacob Schiff. Felix was especially known for his involvement in philanthropy, providing assistance to settlement houses and leadership to the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee. Aby who was known for his Renais- sance scholarship, his library, and his mental instability, is brilliantly depicted. There are also illuminating descriptions of Kosterberg, the exquisite estate purchased by Moritz, where the Warburg brothers and their families often spent time. Woodlands, the "small duchy in Westchester" of Frieda and Felix Warburg, where "Friedaflix" enter- tained members of "Our Crowd: is similarly described.

The third part of the book, "The Fall of the Mittelweg Warburgs7 focuses on the extensive activities of family members in Germany and America during the significant era between the two world wars. Chernow astutely examines numerous important questions: the negotiations at the Versailles Conference, the attacks on the War- burgs from left and right during the Weimar Republic, the myth of the power of international Jewish bankers, the involvement of the Warburgs in Germany and in America with the problems of the De- pression, and the efforts of family members in both nations to protect their German banking interests and save German Jews during the Third Reich.

Chernow well depicts the role of Max Warburg at the Paris Peace Conference. Max sought to maintain a low profile and opposed the German war guilt clause, but supported the establishment of the Weimar Republic and the creation of the League of Nations. The turmoil and violence in the newly established German republic is skillfully limned: the murders of the Catholic finance minister Matthias Erzberger in 1921 and the Jewish reconstruction minister Walter Rathenau in 1922, the unsuccessful efforts to assassinate Max. The discussion cogently reveals how Max, who was deeply committed to German classical culture and to the Weirnar Republic, attempted to respond to antisemitic attacks and tried, without success, to retain control of the Hamburg bank.


The Fritsch Case of 1924 showed that Jews were on trial in the Weimar Republic and that Max would openly repudiate the international Jewish banking conspiracy theory advanced by German conservative antisemites and by Hitler and the Nazis: namely, that the Warburgs were a "Secret Kaiser: manipulating German financial and political institutions for the welfare of their family and banking interests. Max encountered financialproblemsduring the Depression and became isolated in the German financial world after the Nazis assumed power in 1933. His dismissal from the boards of German corporations after the emergence of Hitler and the Nazi enactment of anti-Jewish legislation revealed that the doors in Germany were being closed to him; he was constrained to give up the operations of his Hamburg bank for a pittance and turn it over to Dr. Rudolf Brinckmann and Paul Wirtz, and then to leave with his wife, Alice, for New York.

There also is fascinating information about Max's brother Aby : the contents of his notes and lectures on classical symbols and pagan mysteries, the interdisciplinary approach to Western culture found in his picture atlas Mnernosyne, the development and saving of his splendid library, and his vacillating moods, treated by the Swiss psychiatrist Dr. Ludwig Binswanger, which resembled the highs and lows of the Weimar Republic. Chemow also provides an impressive account of the repudiation of Roosevelt's economic policies by Jimmy Warburg, Felix's son, in New Deal Noodles, and about Felix's philanthropical efforts to save German Jewry with the Joint Distrib- ution Committee and the Palestine Economic Corporation.

The activities of family members between 1939 and 1945 are examined in the fourth part, "The Wartime Interregnum." The book treats the members of the Warburg family from Altona who did not survive the Holocaust. There is also a touching account of Max Adolph Warburg, the son of Aby and Mary, and his wife Josi. Max taught at a Quaker school in Eerde, Holland, and with his wife helped Jewish children escape into the forest; Max and Josi successfully dodged the Gestapo and survived the horrors of the Holocaust.

Chernow also discusses the activities of Max and his son Eric during the war years. Max, who lived with Alice in an apartment on Park Avenue, compiled his memoirs and in addition provided assistance to organizations which helped refugees. Until his death

Book Reviews 165

in December of 1946, he expressed admiration for German culture and history, although he also spoke of the flaws in Germany during the totalitarian Nazi regime. During the war Eric served as an Amer- ican intelligence officer and in May of 1945 interrogated Hermann Goering for over two hours. At the end of the war Eric went to Hamburg, where he observed the massive destruction in the city, but was surprised to see that the family's former bank and its Kosterberg estate were not seriously damaged. Like his father, Eric was more German than Jewish; he wished to forgive Germany for its conduct during the Third Reich, and favored its economic and political restoration.

The book's final part, "The Return of the Alsterufer and Mittelweg Warburgs:' focuses on the accomplishments of important members of the family during the last half of the twentiethcentury. Particularly interesting are the sections about Jimmy Warburg, who by the early years of the Cold War had become a spokesman for World Federalism, espousing free trade and nuclear disarmament. Jimmy, who wrote over thirty books, was shocked by the economic devastation of Ger- many, opposed the Morgenthau Plan and the partition of that nation, and called for its reunification.

Chernow also devotes considerable attention to the careers of Eric and Siegmund Warburg, the former from the Alsterufer branch, and the latter from the Mittelweg branch. After World War 11, Eric became involved in the activities of the Hamburg bank, which had been directed by Max, and during the German economic miracle of the Adenauer era he helped to secure accounts for it. Repudiating the doctrine of Germany's collective guilt, he moved to Hamburg in 1960, played down attacks of antisemitism, and attempted, without success, to restore the Warburg name to the bank. Prior to his death in July of 1990, Eric was told by his son Max that the bank's name would be changed in 1991 to M. M. Warburg & Company- an act symbolic of Eric's accomplishments in postwar Germany.

Of even greater significance were the financial activities of Sieg- mund in postwar Europe. Aggressive, imaginative, and impeccably organized, Siegmund, who was steeped in German classical culture and read voraciously, became a British citizen during the war and played an active part in London investment banking after it. With Henry Grunfeld, who was known for his "nuts-and-bolts" activities


in financial markets, and with other German Jewish refugees, Sieg- mund established S. G. Warburg, Mercury Securities, and other investment banking firms in postwar London. In 1959 he helped Reynolds Metals, an American company, to acquire British Alu- minum and resisted efforts by members of the London financial establishment to prevent the merger. During the 1960s he continued to engage in merger and acquisition activities, but especially became known for issuing Eurobonds and for helping to foster Euro- pean economic integration. Prior to his death in October of 1982, Siegmund brought into the firm his "adopted sons: cultured and talented investment bankers. Under the direction of David Scholey, one of these sons, S.G.Warburg in 1991 became the largest securities firm in Great Britain and the nineteenth largest in the world.

The Warburgs is a magnificent study, and Chernow is a gifted writer. In his pages the members of the family come alive and resem- ble characters from an exciting novel. His impeccably organized study vividly profiles many of them, making use of chapter titles to associate them with significant themes or events. The book is solidly documented; it contains detailed footnotes and a fine bibliography. This work reflects enormous research and is based on letters and pertinent business documents found in European and American archives. A conclusion which offers an assessment of the Warburg legacy would have further enhanced this splendid study. Never- theless, Chernow's superb book, which is vastly superior to other studies of the Warburgs, is required reading for both general readers and scholars, and is one of the best monographs on European and American Jewish history to appear in recent years. It is a paragon for the study of investment banking, should certainly go through several editions, and hopefully will be made into a movie.

-R. William Weisberger

R. William Weisberg is a professor of his toy at the Butler County Community College. He is also an adjunct professor ofhis toy at the University of Pittsburgh. Weisberger has written Speculative Free-masonry and the Enlightenment: A Study of the Craft in London, Paris, Prague, and Vienna (New York: East European Monograph Series of Columbia University Press, 1993).

Book Reviews 167

Zola, Gary Phillip. Isaac Harby of Charleston, 1788-1829: Jewish Reformer and Intellectual. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press,

1994. xv, 284 pp.

Writing about Jews in the American South has recently experienced a renascence of sorts. Once largely overlooked, in the last few years the number of books and articles about this important religious and ethnic group below the Mason-Dixon line has increased to include some very significant studies. Happily, we may add yet another major work to the historiography of Southern Jews, as Gary Zola's well- written, well-researched, and impressively conceived biography of Isaac Harby fills a need that has lasted for some sixty years.

More than just a biography, however, Zola has written, as well, a fascinating account of Charleston, South Carolina, during the Na- tional period. Skillfully interweaving the social and intellectual history of the city and the biography of a man, Zola is to be commended for writing an engaging study. As a newspaper editor and publisher, a well-known playwright, an essayist, and a political and social commentator, Harby became a respected and prominent figure in the quintessential Southern city of Charleston. Yet, as Zola percep- tively notes, students of American Jewish history "customarily identify Isaac Harby ... as one of the founders (and very often as the founder) of the Reformed Society of Israelites, the first formalized effort to reform Judaism in North America:' Ironically, however, for most of his life Harby's contact with the Jewish community of Charleston was minimal. In an attempt to achieve a balanced account of Harby's life, Zola demonstrates quite clearly that there were two worlds to the life of Isaac Harby: the world of literature and the world of Reform Judaism. And these two seemingly separate worlds were closely connected to Harby, for as he himself wrote, "The great cause of IMPROVEMENT in government, in religion, in morals, in literature, is the great cause of mankind".

As an editor and writer Harby eventually became one of the South's best-known literati. Consequently, Harby's life and writings afford a wonderful opportunity to examine the vicissitudes of Charleston as an intellectual center in the antebellum South. When

168 American Tewish Archives

Charleston's economy grew steadily during the later years of the eighteenth century, the city's intellectual life flowered also. Yet after the War of 1812, the "life of the mind" in Charleston in particular, and the South generally, became restricted and introspective. "Isaac Harby and his generation of literati: writes Zola, "acquired their youthful inspiration when the city experienced an unprecedented period of intellectual expansion, and they suffered the poignant dis- appointment of dreams unfulfilled when that environment began to deteriorate". Indeed, throughout his life Harby held steadfast to the belief that the "surest way to improve society was by relentlessly ap- plying the power of the enlightened mind to every aspect of human concern:' As Zola notes, "In every one of [Harby1s1 occupations, he sought to convert 'ambition' into 'virtue'."

Harby's role in the Reformed Society of Israelites was an extension of his lifelong pursuit of matters intellectual and literary. "His brief but intense association with the society: writes Zola "represented a path-breaking attempt to resolve what he perceived to be the unten- able tension between the dictates of reason and the demands of traditional Jewish religious practice." And by doing so, Harby and his colleagues were the first in American Jewish history to confront the clash of values that they perceived as Jews living in an open society.

This is a fine study and one worthy of a wide readership. Writing a biographical study is no mean feat; writing as sound a biographical study as this is truly an accomplishment. For students of American Jewish history, Southern history, intellectual history, or simply those who enjoy a good "read: Gary Zola's book deserves their attention. It makes a significant contribution; one cannot, or should not, expect any more from an author.

-Jason H. Silverman

Jason H. Silverman is a professor in the department of history, Winthrop Univer- sity, Rock Hill, South Carolina. In 1990-91 he was chosen the South Carolina Governor's Professor of the Year.

Brief Notices

Singer, David, Edited by.American Jewish Yearbook (Volume 95). New York: Ameri- can Jewish Committee, 1995.xi,672 pp.

The 1995 edition of the AmericanJewish Yearbook features several important articles on American Jewish life, including a long and outstanding essay by Jack Wertheimer on "Jewish Organizational Life in the United States Since 1945,"and shorter pieces on the Jews of Canada and an obituary article on Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik.

Weinstein,Maurice A.,Edited by. Zebulon B.Vance and "The Scattered Nafion."Char- lotte, N.C.: Wildacres Press, 137 pp.

Among the most honored acts of American philosemitism has been the "Scattered Nationf'lecture delivered by NorthCarolina's Civil War governor and later senator, Zebulon B.Vance (1830-1894).Vance delivered the speech on hundreds of occasions across America after 1874. Generous in its appreciation of Ju- daism and Jewish achievements,direct in its criticism of historical Christian antisemitism, the speech and Senator Vance were honored by organizations as diverse as the Central Conference of American Rabbis, B'nai B'rith 'and the United Daughters of the Confederacy.

But if the speech was read in its entirety, one found that Vance's most glowing remarks were reserved for the Jews of Central Europe and the United States.These were theftreforming Jews,!'who,according to Vance, had eliminated many of the talmudic traditions to suit the age in which they lived. In fact,con- cluded Vance, "these Jews are Unitarians."This statement was reflective of the late nineteenth-century relationship beween liberal American Jews and Chris- tians, a relationship in which Jews perceived that liberal Christians were willing to accept Judaism only in the form which they, the Christians,were prepared to define.

Cohn-Sherbok, Dan and Lavinia Cohn-Sherbok. The American Jew:Voices from an American Jewish Community. Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans, 1994.

357 PP. American Jewry is today obsessed with its survival.Not because of the

threat of an outside enemy, but because of its own inability to pass on to its children the sense of what it means to be an American Jew at the end of the twentieth century. Heaven knows, our federations and synagogues try to define that identity for us by focusing on Israel and the Holocaust.But is that enough? What are the forces that push and pull Amerian Jews on their historic tightrope between a Jewish and an American identity?Dan and Lavinia Cohn-Sherbok, long-resident in Great Britain, have undertaken to try and understand the dy-


namics of American Jewish life through the study of one mid-sized,midwestern community.No doubt the Sherboks and those who read this book will be surprised at the diversity and complexity of American Jewish life in the 1990s.

Morrison, David. Heroes, Antiheroes, and the Holocaust. American Jewry and Historical Choice. Jerusalem and New London:Milah Press,i995.336 pp;

Every few years a book or a debate sets off another painful encounter for Germany with its Holocaust past. Just when that nation believes it has rounded the comer towards a more"nonnal"present and future,its very abnormal recent past intrudes with a thundering entrance.

American Jewry, too, although far removed from the physical and spiritual destruction of European Jewish life during the Holocaust, shares a situation analogous to the German one.

Over the past two decades,books, films, and commissions of historical inquiry have sought to examine the American Jewish response, or lack of one,to the plight of its European brethren in the years between 1933 and 1945.David Morrison's book is certainly in this tradition.Mr. Morrison approaches the questions of American Jewish powerlessness and heroism,its ability and inability to rescue with a balanced and intelligent narrative.

Young, Mel, Compiled, Edited, and Expanded by. Last Order of the Lost Cause: The Civil War Memoirs of a Jewish Familyfrom the "Old South,"Raphael Jacob Moses, C.S.A., 1812-1893.Lanham:University Press of America, 1995.352 pp.

The great fraternal struggle which we call the Civil War (or the "War between the Statesmas many Southerners have termed it) was a painful chapter in the nation's history. In a conflict where brother often fought against brother, American Jews in the North were forced to take up arms against fellow Jews in the South.

We know quite a bit about the Jewish presence in that war thanks to the research efforts of Melvin A.Young, whose 1991 book, Where They Lie, documented the Civil War careers of more than 500 Jewish soldiers of the Civil War.

In this latest volume, Mr.Young has published the memoirs and letters of Raphael Jacob Moses and his family, writings which chronicle Moses's life in the Old South, along with the Civil War and Reconstruction diaries and memoirs of Moses's wife and sons, one of whom was killed in battle.

These are important memoirs,and they allow us to understand the life and times of nineteenth-century Jews in the South with a fullness of description and insight that have rarely appeared in the scholarly and literary history of American Jewish life.

Davis, Moshe. America and the Holy Land: With Eyes Toward Zion-IV.Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1995.193 pp.

This book is volume 1V of the distinguished series With Eyes Toward Zion.

Brief Notices

The series is the brainchild of Professor Moshe Davis, and as with all of Profes- sor Davis's undertakings, it reflects the highest qualities of Literary and historical scholarship. This volume is especially significant because it contains essays by Davis himself on such diverse topics as "The Holy Land in American Spiri- tual Histo* "American Christian Devotees in the Holy Land:' and fascinating portraits of Isaac Leeser, Abraham I.Rice, and Sir Moses Montefiore.

Lavender, Abraham D., and Clarence B. Steinberg. Jewish Farmers of the Catski1ls:A Centu y ofSurviva1. Gainesville: University Press of Florida,qgg.xiv, 271 pp.

When the "Woodstock Revolution" took place in 1969 in upstate New York, the field where it took place, a dairy farm owned by Max Yasgur, became a footnote in American cultural history.

And there it might have remained if not for the efforts of two American Jewish"farmboys:'who have produced an important study of Jewish farming in the Catskills.

The Catskills were not just the weekend retreats where immigrant Jewish families fled to escape the heat of New York City, or where, later, Jewish singles flocked to find a potential mate. It was also a place where American Jews sought to make a living on numerous dairy, poultry, and vegetable farms, and ultimately some of those farms did indeed evolve into the Grossinger's and Nevele resorts.

Through interviews and the use of numerous primary and secondary sources, Abraham D. Lavender and Clarence B. Steinberg have written one of the finest studies of the American Jewish farming experience, and have placed that experience into the broader context of the Jewish farming tradition.

Heilman, Samuel C. Portrait of American J m s : The Last H a y of the 20th Cen tuy . Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1995.190 pp.

This volume originated in a series of lectures delivered by Heilman as part of the distinguished Samuel and Althea Stroum Lectures in Jewish Studies at the University of Washington.

Heilman's purpose is to examine the last half-century of Jewish life in America and to take the pulse beat of the community's active life. There are no real surprises in Heilman's findings. Like many others, he is at once optimistic and discouraged, hopeful and cautious, about the future of American Jewry. At the very least, Heilman realizes that the historic tension between an American and an American Jewish identity will not go away. It will contine to be, by definition, the focus of how American Jews live their lives.