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Mission to America: The Reform Movement’s Missionary Experiments, 1919–1960

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 June 2018

Lila Corwin Berman
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Extract

In 1938, Jerome Folkman, a Reform rabbi from Grand Rapids, Michigan, attended a dinner party hosted by one of his congregants. The guests had finished eating and were settling into typical after-dinner chatter, when the audacious “Mr. R.” broke the rhythm and declared, “We should send missionaries to the gentiles and try to win converts to Judaism.” Side conversations halted and the guests, all Jewish, curiously peered at Mr. R. as he continued: “Why aren't we more aggressive? Why don't we ask others to join our ranks?” The guests tittered. Some giggled nervously, others muttered that Jews just don't do that. A pragmatist interrupted—the suggestion, in his mind, was only as good as its actual consequences. “Do you think we would get any converts?” he asked. Rabbi Folkman, who later divulged he, too, had toyed with the idea of Jews becoming missionaries in America, tried to clarify the kernel of wisdom behind Mr. R.'s shocking statement.

Type
Research Article
Information
Religion and American Culture , Volume 13 , Issue 2 , Summer 2003 , pp. 205 - 239
Copyright
Copyright © Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture 2003

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References

Notes

This article was initially written in a research seminar at Yale University under the direction of Nancy Cott. Professor Cott, along with the students in the seminar, offered insightful criticism. I also would like to thank Jon Butter and Paula Hyman for reading multiple drafts of this article and suggesting countless ways to improve it. My gratitude as well to Deborah Dash Moore, Bob Morrissey, Noam Pianko, Anne Rose, Aaron Sachs, Adriane Smith, Catherine Whallen, and Sandy Zipp.

1. Jerome Daniel Folkman, “Jewish Missions—to the Gentiles!” Christian Century, September 7, 1938, 1059-60.

2. Ibid., 1060.

3. Ibid.

4. Todd Endelman, for example, points out that, despite England's liberalism in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Jews recoiled from converting Christians who wanted to become Jews because they worried about the reaction of the host society. See Endelman, Todd, The Jews of Georgian England, 1714-1830: Tradition and Change in Liberal Society (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1979), chap. 9Google Scholar.

5. Perry Miller first expounded the notion that America was founded by a holy Puritan errand. See Miller, Perry, Errand into the Wilderness (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1956)Google Scholar.

6. Among the recent books that take Jewish institutions, organizations, and material circumstances as the building blocks of ethnicity are: Heinze, Andrew R., Adapting to Abundance: Jewish Immigrants, Mass Consumption, and the Search for American Identity (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990)Google Scholar; Joselit, Jenna Weissman, The Wonders of America: Reinventing Jewish Culture, 1880-1950 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1994)Google Scholar; Kaufman, David, Shul with a Pool: The “Synagogue-Center” (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1999)Google Scholar; and Soyer, Daniel, Jewish Immigrant Associations and American Identity in New York, 1880-1939 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997)Google Scholar.

7. Jacob Katz's seminal work on the relationship between Jews and non-Jews in the Ashkenazic world has deeply influenced my belief that Jewish identity and, in America, Jewish ethnicity cannot be understood without considering Jewish contact with and ideological beliefs about non-Jews. He argues that, by the sixteenth Century, Jews conceived of their communities as wholly separate from the Christian world; thus, Jewish society developed more or less as a closed system of thought. During the Haskalah or Jewish Enlightenment, Jewish thinkers questioned the rigid boundaries between the Jewish and non-Jewish world, and some, like Moses Mendlessohn, dreamed of a world where religious or racial tags would be meaningless to people's social interactions. Nonetheless, the slow and disappointing path of emancipation exposed a gap between enlightened hopes of Jewish assimilation into larger national identities and social realities of anti-Semitism and Jewish insecurity. See Katz, Jacob, Exclusiveness and Tolerance: Studies in Jewish-Gentile Relations in Medieval and Modern Times (New York: Schocken Books, 1962)Google Scholar.

8. For a general history of the German Reform movement, see Meyer, Michael A., Response to Modernity: A History of the Reform Movement in Judaism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988)Google Scholar.

9. See Hyman, Paula, The Jews of Modern France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998)Google Scholar; Katz, Jacob, Out of the Ghetto: The Social Background of Jewish Emancipation, 1770-1870 (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1973)Google Scholar; and Sorkin, David, The Transformation of German Jewry, 1780-1840 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1987)Google Scholar, for insightful histories about Jewish involvement in and reaction to the Enlightenment and emancipation efforts.

10. Arnold Eisen's study on chosenness offers valuable insight about the disjuncture between the chosen people idea and post-Enlightenment values. His study focuses specifically on ways that second and third-generation Americans reformulated the idea of chosenness to mesh with the demands of American democracy. By following Eisen's intellectual development through his later book on modern Judaism, one can discern his ultimate conclusion that practice, not theology, enabled Jews in the United States to retain a level of distinctiveness while still embracing an American identity. See Eisen, Arnold, The Chosen People in America: A Study in Jewish Religious Ideology (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983)Google Scholar; and Rethinking Modern Judaism: Ritual, Commandment, Community (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).

11. Ironically, the number of conversions to Judaism (mainly motivated by intermarriage) increased after the 1960s, bearing testimony to the uneasy shifting lines of division between Jews and non-Jews in America. See Massarik, Fred and Chenkin, Alvin, “United States National Jewish Population Study: A First Report,” American Jewish Yearbook 74 (1973)Google Scholar, for the statistical correlation between intermarriage and conversion.

12. Michael Meyer's exhaustive study of the Reform movement offers some details about Rabbi Samuel Schulman. Schulman lived from 1864 to 1955, and he was rabbi for many years at Temple Emanu-El in New York. Meyer classifies him as a classical Reformer “who believed fervently in the Diaspora Jewish mission and who placed Jewish religion far above Jewish peoplehood” (318). He served as the CCAR president and fought an unsuccessful battle against the passage of the Columbus Platform that stressed greater Jewish observance and the concept of peoplehood. See Meyer, Response to Modernity.

13. Because my intention is to provide a historical treatment of Jewish missionary thought in America, I have avoided delineating the traditional source-based arguments for and against a Jewish mission. Isaiah is the most often cited prophet to buttress missionary claims. In the Book of Isaiah, God is attributed with commanding Jewish missionary activity: “I am the Lord, I have called you in righteousness, I have taken you by the hand and kept you; I have given you as a covenant to the people, a light to the nations, to open the eyes that are blind.” (Isaiah 42: 6-7, New Revised Standard Version). For a thorough analysis of the biblical and prophetic attitudes toward conversion and proselytism, see Cohen, Shaye, “Conversion to Judaism in Historical Perspective: From Biblical Israel to Postbiblical Judaism,” Conservative Judaism 4 (Summer 1983): 31–45 Google Scholar, as well as his broader study on the means of differentiation between Jews and non-Jews, The Beginnings of jewishness: Boundaries, Varieties, Uncertainties (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).

14. Kaufman Kohler, “The Mission of Israel and Its Application to Modern Times,” Central Conference of American Rabbis Yearbook (CCARY) 29 (1919): 265-305.

15. In 1892, the CCAR discussed the requirements for male proselytes and concluded that they could be admitted into Judaism “without any initiatory rite, ceremony or observance,” including circumcision. See CCARY 3 (1892): 36. Although there was no explicit missionary component to this resolution, see Kaplan, Dana Evan, “W. E. Todd's Attempt to Convert to Judaism and Study for the Reform Rabbinate in 1896,” American Jewish History 83, no. 4 (December 1995): 429-44Google Scholar, for a discussion about how the resolution did play into missionary ideas. Kaplan argues that, despite the rhetoric, few late-nineteenth-century Reform rabbis would commit themselves to active proselytizing of non-Jews.

16. For an excellent study on the relationship between early-twentieth-century foreign policy, reminiscent of American Manifest Destiny, and attitudes toward immigrants, see Jacobson, Matthew Frye, Barbarian Virtues: The United States Encounters Foreign Peoples at Home and Ahmad, 1876-1917 (New York: Hill and Wang, 2000)Google Scholar.

17. Within Jewish historiography, there is a debate about the origins of the American Reform movement. See Jick, Leon, The Americanization of the Synagogue (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1976)Google Scholar. Jick argues that the American Reform movement uniquely developed in the American context and was not imported from Germany. The catalysts, he claims, for the rise of the Reform movement in America were Jewish upward mobility and Americanization. I agree that the Reform movement in America has unique origins, but it is clear that the antecedent of the missionary debate rests in post-Enlightenment German thought.

18. For more information about Kaufman Kohler, see Meyer, Response to Modernity, 264-95; and Goldman, Karla, Beyond the Synagogue Gallery: Finding a Placefor Women in American Judaism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), 151-71Google Scholar.

19. CCARY 29 (1919): 280.

20. Many Reform rabbis realized the danger of pure ethical monotheism as they helplessly watched one of their own, Felix Adler, establish the Ethical Culture Society outside the communal and institutional structures of Judaism. See Kraut, Benny, From Reform Judaism to Ethical Culture: The Religious Evolution of Felix Adler (Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press, 1979)Google Scholar.

21. See Katerberg, William, “The Irony of Identity: An Essay on Nativism, Liberal Democracy and Parochial Identities in Canada and the United States,” American Quarterly 47, no. 3 (September 1995): 493–524 Google Scholar. Katerberg argues that nativism “involves a redefinition of culture and a search for a new relationship between the prevailing culture and changing social and political institutions” (502). By comparing nativism to jeremiads, he tries to expose the central constructive aim of nativist rhetoric. His analysis helped me understand how some Reform rabbis may have perceived a prescriptive quality in nativist rhetoric. Katerberg, however, deracinates nativism to fit into his analysis and ignores the violent and hateful coercion that characterizes it.

22. CCARY 29 (1919): 303-4.

23. Barkan, Elazar, The Retreat of Scientific Racism: Changing Concepts in Britain and the United States between the World Wars (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 81 Google Scholar.

24. The German ancestry of most of the 1920s Reform rabbis distanced them to a degree from race-based reports and restrictive legislation that shaped reality for their eastern European coreligionists. See Cohen, Naomi, Encounter with Emancipation: The German Jews in the United States, 1830-1914 (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1984)Google Scholar; and Diner, Hasia, A Time for Gathering: The Second Migration, 1820-1880 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992)Google Scholar.

25. See Higham, John, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860-1925 (New York: Atheneum, 1963)Google Scholar, for a thorough treatment of American nativism.

26. “Why the Jews Are Not Missionaries,” Literary Digest, August 30, 1919, 36.

27. Ibid.

28. Kraut, Benny, “A Wary Collaboration: Jews, Catholics, and the Protestant Goodwill Movement,” in Between the Times: The Travail of the Protestant Establishment in America, 1900-1960, ed. Hutchison, William (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 203-4Google Scholar.

29. Ibid., 207. For information on nineteenth-century missions to Jews, see Sarna, Jonathan, “The American Jewish Response to Nineteenth-Century Christian Missions,” Journal of American History 68, no. 1 (June 1981): 35–51 Google Scholar. For a thorough account of missions to Jews from an essentially although not entirely, Christian perspective, see Ariel, Yaakov, Evangelizing the Chosen People: Missions to the Jews in America, 1880-2000 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000)Google Scholar.

30. CCARY 34 (1924): 49. This committee had existed in a slightly different form prior to 1924 as “The Committee on the Preparation of a Manual for Conversion.”

31. “Preliminary Report: Committee for the Preparation of a Manual for the Instruction of Proselytes,” CCARY 35 (1925): 111.

32. CCARY 35 (1925): 110.

33. My opinion that religious practice often acts as a distinctive or nonuniversal element of religion has been influenced by a body of literature on ritual studies. See, for example, Douglas, Mary, Purity and Danger (New York: Praeger, 1966)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Zerubavel, Eviatar, The Fine Line: Making Distinctions in Everyday Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991)Google Scholar.

34. CCARY 35 (1925): 110.

35. CCARY 37 (1927): 194.

36. Ibid., 195.

37. Even into the 1920s, the Reform movement was still guided by earlier pronouncements against ritual practice. The fourth tenet of the Reform movement's 1885 Pittsburgh Platform states, “We hold that all such Mosaic and rabbinical laws as regulate diet, priestly purity and dress originated in ages and under the influence of ideas altogether foreign to our present mental and spiritual state. They fail to impress the modern Jew with a spirit of priestly holiness; their observance in our days is apt rather to obstruct than to further modern spiritual elevation.” Found in Meyer, Response to Modernity, appendix.

38. CCARY, 35 (1925): 111.

39. Ibid.

40. For the classic thesis that America experienced a religious depression paralleling its economic depression, see Handy, Robert T., “The American Religious Depression, 1925-1935,” Church History 29 (1960): 3–16 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Since the publication of this article, historians have contested his interpretation of Depression-era religion. Joel Carpenter, for example, argues that evangelical Christians established crucial institutional and popular strength during the Depression. See Carpenter, Joel A., Revive Us Again: The Reawakening of American Fundamentalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997)Google Scholar. For the best and most thorough study of Jews and the Great Depression, see Wenger, Beth, New York Jews and the Great Depression: Uncertain Promise (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1999)Google Scholar.

41. Wenger, New York Jews and the Great Depression. See chapter 7, “The Spiritual Depression,” for an excellent analysis of the way in which the Great Depression reconfigured synagogue life and religious expression.

42. I find it necessary to note that anti-Semitism also delimited the public role that Jews could play in the United States, but taken alone anti-Semitism does not explain the lull in missionary discussions. In the 1920s, when the Reform rabbis were actively discussing the Jewish mission, Jews were seriously barred from universities and experienced other forms of social discrimination. For interesting studies about Jews in higher education, see Klingenstein, Susanne, Jews in the American Academy, 1900-1940: The Dynamics of Intellectual Assimilation (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1999)Google Scholar; and Ritterband, Paul and Wechsler, Harold, Jewish Learning in American Universities (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994)Google Scholar. Hollinger, David, Science, Jews and Secular Culture: Studies in Mid-Twentieth-Century American Intellectual History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996)Google Scholar, also has an essay (chap. 2) about the entry of Jews into academic culture in the mid twentieth century in which he traces their earlier exclusion from it.

43. Mattuck, Israel and Montefiore, C. G., Jewish Views on Jewish Missions (London: Jewish Religious Union for the Advancement of Liberal Judaism, 1933)Google Scholar, located in “Conversion,” nearprint file, American Jewish Archives, Hebrew Union College (Reform Movement), Cincinnati, Ohio (cited hereafter as AJA). The AJA had no record of who donated this pamphlet, so it is impossible to tell who had received and saved it. The fact, however, that Dr. Mattuck is referred to in the later discussion seems to indicate that a number of rabbis were aware of the pamphlet and aware of Mattuck's views.

44. For further information about C. G. Montefiore, Israel Mattuck, and England's Liberal Judaism movement, see Meyer, Response to Modernity, 212-21.

45. Mattuck, “Reply from Dr. Mattuck to Mr. Montefiore's Paper,” in Mattuck and Montefiore, Jewish Views on Jewish Missions, 51.

46. In the Christian world, by the 1950s, the formulation of a darker-skinned heathen who needed religion to become civilized had fallen out of vogue in many missionary circles. A new rhetoric was devised that stressed a more holistic approach; instead of merely trying to save the souls of foreigners, many foreign missions increasingly spoke about educating foreigners and giving them the tools with which to improve their material and spiritual conditions. For an excellent study on the shifts in missionary ideology, see Hutchison, William, Errand to the World: American Protestant Thought and Foreign Missions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), esp. chap. 7Google Scholar.

47. Meyer, Response to Modernity, 293.

48. For information about the Columbus Platform, see Meyer, Response to Modernity, 294-95, 389.

49. Mitchell Hart elaborates on this central tension in Zionist thought. If one of the claims of Zionism was that Jews needed their own nation because they did not fit into any other nation, then were they not implicitly accepting a racialized view of Jews as unassimilable? See Hart, Mitchell, Social Science and the Politics of Modern Jewish Identity (Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2000)Google Scholar.

50. Morris S. Lazaron, “Judaism as a Universal Religion,” Christian Century, August 30, 1939, 1042. Lazaron became the rabbi of Baltimore Hebrew Congregation in 1915. During World War I, he served as an army chaplain, and later he was a member of the National Conference of Christians and Jews. As Thomas Kolsky and Monty Noam Penkower illustrate, Lazaron was also one of the most dogmatic members of the American Council for Judaism, a spin-off organization from the Reform movement that vehemently opposed the Reform movement's reconciliation with Zionism in the 1930s. See Kolsky, Thomas, Jews against Zionism: The American Council for Judaism, 1924-1948 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990)Google Scholar; and Penkower, Monty Noam, “The Genesis of the American Council for Judaism: A Quest for Identity in World War II,” American Jewish History 86, no. 2 (June 1998): 167-94CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

51. See Cohen, Naomi, American Jews and the Zionist Idea (New York: Ktav Publishing House, 1975)Google Scholar, and Urofsky, Melvin, American Zionism from Herzl to Holocaust (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Press, 1975)Google Scholar, for two thorough studies of the political and policy worlds of American Zionism. For a newer study, see Raider, Mark, The Emergence of American Zionism (New York: New York University Press, 1998)Google Scholar. Raider adeptly analyzes the material culture of American Zionism, despite his vague argument about the centrality of Labor Zionism in America.

52. “Parley of Reform Rabbis Hear Bold Proposal: That Jewry Readopt Pre-Christian Proselytism,” Southern Israelite, March 24, 1950; “Jewish Missionary Effort Proposed at Rabbis’ Meet,” Jewish Press, March 24, 1950; “Reform Rabbis Suggest That Judaism Become Active Missionary Religion,” Jewish Floridian, March 24, 1950; “Urge Judaism Be Missionary Religion,” Jewish Independent, March 24, 1950. All in “Conversion,” nearprint file, AJA.

53. The same exact copy was published on three different occasions in two different newspapers prior to the conference: “Dr. Ferdinand I. Isser-man,” Cincinnati Times-Star, March 17, 1950; “Reform Jewish Theology Study Conference Set,” Cincinnati Times-Star, March 18, 1950; “Reports of Jewish Meetings,” Cincinnati Post, March 18, 1950. All in “Conversion,” nearprint file, AJA.

54. Quoted in all of the March 24, 1950, articles (listed above). I was able to find out that Albert Goldstein was an army chaplain in his article, “Faith and the Army,” Jewish Spectator 9, no. 1 (November 1943): 23-25.

55. For an excellent study on the Judeo-Christian idea in America, see Silk, Mark, Spiritual Politics: Religion and America since World War II (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988)Google Scholar. In part, the growing acceptance of Jews into the socioreligious mainstream of America correlated to the importance of the chaplaincy during World War II. As historian Deborah Dash Moore argues, the visible presence of Jewish chaplains in the American armed forces legitimated Jewish belonging in America and enabled thousands of soldiers to experience a Judeo-Christian spiritual order. See Moore, Deborah Dash, “Jewish GIs and the Creation of the Judeo-Christian Tradition,” Religion and American Culture 8, no. 1 (Winter 1998): 31–53 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For more general arguments about Jewish ascendancy into social power through the category of whiteness, see Brodkin, Karen, How Jews Became White Folks and What That Says about Race in America (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1998)Google Scholar; Jacobson, Matthew Frye, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigmnts and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998)Google Scholar; and Rogin, Michael, Black-face, White Noise: Jewish Immigmnts in the Hollywood Melting Pot (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996)Google Scholar.

56. See Whitfield, Stephen, The Culture of the Cold War (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), chap. 4Google Scholar. Whitfield offers a lucid analysis of the rise of religion against the backdrop of the fear of communism and repressive government policies. For a more general argument about the effects anticommunism had on American culture and politics, see Schrecker, Ellen, Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998)Google Scholar.

57. “Report of Commission on Social Justice: Judaism, Communism, and Fascism,” CCARY 46 (1936): 80. The rabbis reaffirmed and reprinted the 1934 resolution at the 1936 CCAR meeting.

58. Herberg, Will, Protestant-Catholic-Jew: An Essay in American Religious Sociology (1955; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 75 Google Scholar.

59. Many historians have chronicled the way that the American state attempted to create a culture of conformity under the guise of American defense and unity. See Dudziak, Mary L., Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy, Politics and Society in Twentieth-Century America (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000)Google Scholar; Gerstle, Gary, American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001), chap. 6Google Scholar; and Whitfield, The Culture of the Cold War.

60. I am grateful to Riv-Ellen Prell for awakening me to the fissures in the smooth narrative of Cold War conformity, especially among American Jews. This insight about contestations of conformity is drawn from her talk, “Contesting Post War Triumphalism,” given at the Biennial Scholars’ Conference on American Jewish History in Albany, New York, on June 10,2002.

61. “Report of Committee on Resolution,” CCARY 60 (1950): 208.

62. Andrew Heinze argues that Jews participated in the growth of self-help therapeutic religion in the 1950s as a way of “insert[ing] Judaism into the American mainstream.” Reading his essay helped me understand how Jews in the 1950s configured their religious difference through a new understanding of democratic pluralism and an essential desire to see their way of life represented in the mainstream. See Heinze, Andrew, “Peace of Mind (1946): Judaism and the Therapeutic Polemics of Postwar America,” Religion and American Culture 12, no. 1 (Winter 2002): 31–58 Google Scholar.

63. “Cavorting with Converting,” California Jewish Voice, March 24, 1950.

64. CCARY 60 (1950): 212. Rabbi Mark served pulpits in South Bend, Indiana, and at Vine Street Temple in Nashville, Tennessee. By the early 1950s, he assumed the position of senior rabbi at New York City's revered Temple Emanu-El. For a short biographical essay and a compilation of his sermons, see Mark, Julius, Reaching for the Moon and Other Addresses (New York: Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1959)Google Scholar.

65. CCARY 60 (1950): 211.

66. Russell Kazal points out that Cold War consensus historians continued to believe in an “Anglo Core,” even as they recognized that different American groups were not simply assimilating into a homogenous American model. Likewise, Philip Gleason notes that cultural pluralism, although a central social philosophy in the 1950s, tolerated only certain kinds of ethnic and religious difference and almost no racial difference. See Gleason, Philip, “American Identity and Americanization,” in Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups, ed. Thernstrom, Stephan (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980)Google Scholar; and Kazal, Russell, “Revisiting Assimilation: The Rise, Fall and Reappraisal of a Concept in American Ethnic History,” American Historical Review 100 (April 1995): 437-71Google Scholar.

67. For information about Kallen's intellectual development, see Konvitz, Milton, “Horace M. Kallen,” in The “Other” New York Jewish Intellectuals, ed. Kessner, Carole (New York: New York University Press, 1994)Google Scholar.

68. CCARY 60 (1950): 212. Rabbi Bamberger (1904-1980) served as the rabbi at Congregation Shaaray Tefila in New York City for almost thirty years. He was also president of the CCAR for three years in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Rabbi Bamberger was active in the CCAR's debate about intermarriage. In 1949, he argued that non-Jews who convert to Judaism because of marriage should be fully accepted into Judaism. He was disturbed by the trend toward trying to dissuade non-Jews from converting, especially those whose intentions were deemed more motivated by marriage than religious conviction. See Bernard J. Bamberger, “Piain Talk about Intermarriage,” Reconstructionist, December 16, 1949, 10-14. For biographical information, see http://huc.edu/aja/BernardBamberger.html, which, as of June 14, 2002, had a full biographical sketch of him.

69. CCARY 60 (1950): 215.

70. Moore, R. Laurence, Selling God: American Religion in the Marketplace of Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994)Google Scholar. Moore argues that the secularization that many scholars have perceived in American religious history should more accurately be described as the commodification of religion and that a crucial aspect of American religion has been its ability to fit into the growth of the consumer culture. See also O'Neill, William, American High: The Years ofConfidence, 1945-1960 (New York: Free Press: 1986), 212-15Google Scholar, for statistics on the 1950s religious revival.

71. CCARY 61 (1951).

72. See Boyer, Paul, When Time Shall Be No More: Prophecy Belief in Modern American Culture (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1992)Google Scholar. In chapter 5, he offers a clear explication of the religious metaphor that was used to demonize Russia and communism. See also Whitfield, The Culture of the Cold War, chap. 4.

73. See Henry, Patrick, “‘And I Don't Care What It Is’: The Tradition-History of a Civil Religion Proof-Text,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 49 (1981): 35–47 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, for a unique methodological approach to Eisenhower's dictate. See also Whitfield, The Culture of the Cold War, 88.

74. “Report of Commission on Social Justice: Domestic Policy,” CCARY 62 (1952): 179.

75. For a description of the rise of American anxiety, especially related to the aftermath of World War II, see Graebner, William, The Age of Doubt: American Thought and Culture in the 1940s (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1991)Google Scholar. Also see Heinze, “Peace of Mind (1946): Judaism and the Therapeutic Polemics of Postwar America.”

76. Wolsey, Louis, “Shall Jews Seek Converts: Let's Begin to Missionize Now,” American Judaism 2, no. 3 (January 1953): 10–11 Google Scholar.

77. Eichhorn, David, “Conversions to Judaism by Reform and Conservative Rabbis,” Jewish Social Studies 16, no. 4 (October 1954): 299–318 Google Scholar; and CCARY 64 (1954): 107, 115-18.

78. Eichhorn, “Conversions to Judaism by Reform and Conservative Rabbis,” 310. Notably, not one of the rabbis remarked on what, given statistics of the time, almost all of them must have realized; the bulk of converts to Judaism was made up of non-Jewish women who married Jewish men. Although not developed in this particular article, the gender component is integral to understanding the function of missionary discussions for American Reform rabbis. Their goal of proving the intellectual worth of Reform Judaism was simply not furthered by non-Jewish women who fell in love with and married Jewish men. Eichhorn concluded that one out of four of all Reform converts were men, while only one out of six or seven Conservative converts were men. For statistics supporting the claim that more Jewish men intermarried in the first half of the twentieth Century, see Barron, Milton, “The Incidence of Jewish Intermarriage in Europe and America,” American Sociological Review 11, no. 1 (February 1946): 12 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Archival sources from the Ratner Archive (RA), located at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York City, the AJA and the American Jewish Historical Society at Brandeis University also support the contention that non-Jewish women were entering the Jewish fold either formally or informally in far greater numbers than non-Jewish men because of marital choices. For an enlightening study about the way that Judaism and Jewish culture has assigned specific roles and value to men and women at different moments and in different regions, see Hyman, Paula, Gender and Assimilation in Modern Jewish History: The Roles and Representations of Women (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1995)Google Scholar.

79. CCARY 64 (1954): 116.

80. Ibid., 117-18.

81. Eichhorn, “Conversions to Judaism by Reform and Conservative Rabbis,” 318.

82. “American Judaism Has Gains in Converts,” Christian Century, November 17, 1954, 1390.

83. Wolsey, “Shall Jews Seek Converts: Let's Begin to Missionize Now,” 10.

84. See Silk, Spiritual Politics. Silk's excellent study explains that the notion of a Judeo-Christian nation rose as the traditional Protestant establishment withered.

85. Herberg, Protestant-Catholic-Jew, 260.

86. See, for example, Edgar E. Siskin, “Should Judaism Seek Converts?” January 27, 1956, box 5, folder 2, AJA; Rabbi Levi A. Olan, “On Seeking Converts to Judaism” May 2, 1958, box 27, folder 5, AJA; and Rabbi Robert E. Goldburg, “Is Judaism as Good as It Sounds?” March, 1954, MSS B54, box 23, folder A, New Haven Colony Historical Society.

87. Siskin, “Should Judaism Seek Converts?” 4.

88. Petuchowski, Jakob, “The Jewish Mission to the Nations,” Commentary 20, no. 4 (October 1955): 314 Google Scholar.

89. Ibid., 317, italics in the original.

90. For more information about Trude Weiss-Rosmarin's extraordinary life, see Deborah Dash Moore, “Trude Weiss-Rosmarin and The Jewish Spectator,” in The “Other” New York Jewish Intellectuals, ed. Kessner, 101-21. I have also written a short article about Weiss-Rosmarin, in Notable American Women, vol. 5 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, forthcoming)Google Scholar.

91. Weiss-Rosmarin, Trude, “Jews by Conversion?” The Jewish Spectator 21, no. 10 (October 1956): 4 Google Scholar.

92. “Report of the Committee on the Unaffiliated,” CCARY 67 (1957): 99.

93. Ibid.

94. Sociologists, more so than historians, have tracked the increased security and sense of belonging that Jews felt in America after World War II. See, for example, Glazer, Nathan and Moynihan, Daniel R., Beyond the Melting Pot: The Negroes, Puerto Ricans, Jews, Italians, and Irish of New York City (Cambridge: M.I.T. Press, 1970)Google Scholar, and Sklare, Marshall, Conservative Judaisni: An American Religious Movement (Glencoe, Ill: Free Press, 1955)Google Scholar. American Jewish historians are starting to look more seriously at the postwar period. For a long time, only a few books examined that period, including Moore, Deborah Dash, To the Golden Cities: Pursuing the American Jewish Dream in Miami and L.A. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994)Google Scholar; and Shapiro, Edward, A Time for Healing: American Jewry since World War II (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992)Google Scholar. Very recently, Eli Lederhendler published a book chronicling what he believes was the downfall of Jewish ethnicity in the postwar era. In large part, he argues that the decline of a strong ethnic identity was related to the fact that Jews in the fifties and beyond felt far less alienated and marginalized from American society than they had in years prior. It seems to me that his disillusionment with the path that American Jewry took after the war is exaggerated because he refuses to believe that true Jewish identity could exist outside of an urban environment. See Lederhendler, Eli, New York Jews and the Decline of Urban Ethnicity, 1950-1970 (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2001)Google Scholar. For a compelling book that questions the paradigm of Jewish liberalism after the war, see Staub, Michael, Tom at the Roots: The Crisis of Jewish Liberalism in Postwar America (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002)Google Scholar.

95. “Jewish Proselytizers?” Time, February 24, 1958, 43.

96. “Israelis Predict Japanese Influx,” New York Times, March 2, 1958 (AJA). See also “Japanese Jews,” Time, October 12, 1959, 75-76.

97. “Judaism's Missionaries,” Newsweek, July 20, 1959, 60.

98. Mission statement is taken from, “In Days of Old,” Jewish Information 1, no. 3 (Winter 1960): 24.

99. For a periodization of the central concerns of postwar American Jewry, see Goren, Arthur, The Politics and Public Culture of American Jews (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 6 Google Scholar. He dates the turn inward to the late 1960s, slightly later than I have. I would argue thatby the early 1960s the communal concern with intermarriage and questions of Jewish survival were already reorienting the Reform movement's agenda. For a primary source example of the turn in the communal agenda toward concerns about intermarriage and Jewish survival, see Weiss-Rosmarin, Trude, “Comments and Opinions: Intermarriage and Jewish Survival,” Jewish Spectator 29, no. 5 (May 1964): 3–6 Google Scholar. See also, Massarik and Chenkin, “United States National Jewish Population Study: A First Report,” 295, for a chart of intermarriage rates from 1900 to 1972. Until 1961, the rate of intermarriage remained less than 7 percent. For a number of reasons, Jews affiliating with the Reform movement accounted for a disproportionate number of intermarriages. Lastly, see Arthur Goren, “Inventing the ‘New Pluralism,’” in Goren, The Politics and Public Culture of American Jews, 205-23, for his assertion about the relation-ship between Jewish identity in the 1960s and the Black Power movement.

100. For evidence of a continuing strain of Jewish missionary thought, see Jewish Information. For current examples of missionary proposals, see Epstein, Lawrence, The Theory and Practice of Welcoming Converts to Judaism: Jewish Universalism (Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press, 1992)Google Scholar; Epstein, , “Why the Jewish People Should Welcome Converts,” Judaism 43, no. 3 (Summer 1994): 302-12Google Scholar; Russell Shorto, “McLaughlin? Is That a Jewish Name?” New York Times Magazine, March 24, 2002, 44-47; and Tobin, Gary, Opening the Gates: How Proactive Conversion Can Revitalize the Jewish Community (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers, 1999)Google Scholar.

101. Soloveitchik, Hayim, “Rupture and Reconstruction: The Transformation of Contemporary Orthodoxy,” Tradition 28, no. 4 (1994): 66 Google Scholar.