Review of Kenneth D. Wald, The Foundations of American Jewish Liberalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019). 270 pp (original) (raw)

TORN AT THE ROOTS: The Crisis of Jewish Liberalism in Postwar America

Columbia University Press, 2002

When Jewish neoconservatives burst upon the political scene, many people were surprised. Conventional wisdom held that Jews were uniformly liberal. This book explodes the myth of a monolithic liberal Judaism. Michael Staub tells the story of the many fierce battles that raged in postwar America over what the authentically Jewish position ought to be on issues ranging from desegregation to Zionism, from Vietnam to gender relations, sexuality, and family life. Throughout the three decades after 1945, Michael Staub shows, American Jews debated the ways in which the political commitments of Jewish individuals and groups could or should be shaped by their Jewishness. Staub shows that, contrary to conventional wisdom, the liberal position was never the obvious winner in the contest.

From Multiculturalism to Antisemitism? Revisiting the Jewish Question in America

American Journal of Cultural Sociology, 2023

Previous scholarship suggests that American Jews have been the beneficiaries of a multicultural mode of incorporation since the 1960s. If so, what explains the recent resurgence of antisemitism in the United States? Evidence of such a resurgence is adduced in the form of increasing antisemitic incidents and changing patterns of cultural representation. The contemporary resurgence of antisemitism is then traced in part to problems of boundary definition and identity that multiculturalism generates. These problems lead to anxiety within the core group about the continuing viability of its own identity and the national identity, which fosters antisemitic efforts to reestablish hierarchical boundaries that multiculturalism has obscured. The article provides additional support for this thesis by means of a historical comparison to cultural attitudes toward Jews in the Calvinist tradition, particularly among the Puritans. Although the Puritans were not multiculturalists, their identification with Jews gave rise to similar problems of boundary definition and identity, which the Puritans resolved by redefining the boundaries of their community to exclude Jews. The article's conclusion discusses the implications of this argument for the relation of Jews to the civil sphere in the United States today.

Jewish Religious Disaffection and American Anti-Semitism

National Jewish Post & Opinion, 2013

Challenges the claim that Jews in the U.S. are experiencing dysfunctional fear of anti-Semitism, and that the U.S. is "structurally hospitable" to Jews so as to preclude more dangerous forms of anti-Semitism here; considers the primary character of contemporary American anti-Semitism; and considers the link between anti-Semitism and outmigration of Jews from Jewish religious life.