AMERICAN JUDAISM BETWEEN THE TWO WORLD WARS
In 1924 the editors of the American Hebrew, a “National Jewish Weekly,” were very worried about the impact upon their community of the congressional legislation passed that year, which effectively ended a century or more of constant Jewish immigration to this country. “Up to this time,” these journalists observed, the “accretion of our numbers has been like a river which fructifies and blesses the land.” But now, the “landlocked” Jews of America, “virtually isolated from the Jews of the rest of the world” and no longer the beneficiaries of “diverse infiltration of European Jewish culture, religion or language,” were on their own. Would the indigenous community, these writers wondered, “adjust” and “adapt” itself to these new conditions? Might it draw upon “American sources” and its own “spiritual springs” to “survive environmental assimilation” as its “cultural contact and social commingling with the Gentile” inevitably increased? Could those born in the United States prove that “the ghetto ideal” was not “essential to the perpetuation of Judaism?”
The future that the editors hoped for, a “foretelling” they said required “only a little imagination,” was a new American Judaism devoid of “every vestige of the Old World distinctiveness,” but vibrant and progressive. While American Jews would “dispense with those externalities which constitute the heritage of ghetto days”—certainly “extreme East European orthodoxy” would be cast off—the next generation of that community, comfortable with the world around it, would remain “staunch” Jews and would “accept Judaism and practice it as a noble code of living.” The exact details of what that religious world would look like were also left to the imagination.1
Possibly, to allay whatever doubts they may have harbored about their community’s destiny, the American Hebrew turned to “the three heads of the three leading institutions of Jewish learning in America” for their predictions on what lay ahead for American Jewry. The trio of respondents, Dr. Julian Morgenstern of the long-standing Reform Hebrew Union College, Dr. Stephen S. Wise of the newly established Reform Jewish Institute of Religion, and Dr. Cyrus Adler of the Conservative Jewish Theological Seminary all rested assured that their community had good days ahead of it. (For the record, Dr. Bernard Revel, of the Orthodox Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary, aka the Yeshiva, was not approached for his opinion.)
Unqualifiedly the optimist, Dr. Morgenstern was unconvinced, to begin with, that it was “the Jewish immigrants to America during the last forty years who have kept Judaism alive here,” and that without them and their spirit “Judaism in America would either have disappeared already or be well on the road thither.” What he was certain of was that just as Judaism had “lived on through all the ages and in all the lands,” it would survive and indeed prosper here, whether or not America’s portals were ajar. He prophesied that “this American Judaism of tomorrow will not be the mere continuation of any one single, present day movement . . . neither of Reform nor Orthodoxy.” Rather, the faith of the future would rest upon an adroit blending of “the old, eternal foundation of Jewish principles, history and tradition,” adapted well to “the peculiar life we Jews must live here as American citizens.”
For Morgenstern, his vision was neither a “prediction,” a “hope,” nor a “dream,” as “the beginning has already been made; the process is well under way.” He was heartened that “all over the land, new congregations are springing up so rapidly that their demand for rabbis and trained spiritual leaders cannot be satisfied.” To meet the demand, “new departments and schools are being organized and planned for the training of professional Jewish workers of all kinds.” As the rabbi saw it, a renaissance was underway, as American Judaism, “astir with activities,” was “vigorously and earnestly alive.”2
Dr. Wise was not nearly as sanguine about the future as he acknowledged that it was inevitable that “American Israel will slough off the faint-hearted whose spiritual standards seem to derive from chaos, from topsyturvyism.” Still, the “thinning of the ranks” in the land of freedom, with no new large cohorts coming in to America, would not leave “Israel desolate.” Rather, as this rabbi looked ahead to coming decades, even to as distant a year as 2000, Wise was confident that American Jews would demonstrate their continued affinity “for spiritual values,” distinguish themselves through their valuing of “the treasures of Jewish tradition, intellectual, ethical, [and] spiritual,” and be remarkable in their “passionate insistence” in “bear[ing] the torch as makes [them] the maintainer of the tradition, the utterer of the Jewish truth.” Indeed, he believed that, at the present moment, in the 1920s, “we are in a new era in Jewish education,” spurred on by those “Jews who will remain Jews” who comprehend “that they must repossess themselves of their Jewish spiritual treasures.”3
Unlike his colleagues, Dr. Adler did not deign to offer an extensive response to the interrogatory. Still, in his terse, eighteen-line statement, he opined that he did not believe the immigration laws would “in the least injure Judaism in America.” Ultimately upbeat in his estimation, he wrote, “I have a firm faith in the maintenance and normal development of traditional Judaism in America.” Nonetheless, Adler did temper his optimistic prediction with a troubling admonition that “if the three million and a half of Jews in America cannot maintain Judaism without a constant stream of immigrants, they are unworthy of Judaism.”4
These affirmative prognostications proved essentially incorrect. In the decades that immediately followed this 1924 symposium, American Judaism did not live up to these hopes and expectations. The community did not do all that well on its own in its landlocked environment. Quite the contrary, the years that bridged the two world wars did not witness an American Judaism engaged in an “onward march,” to borrow a phrase from an American Hebrew headline.5 Instead, devoid of that vibrant immigrant cohort of staunch Jewish identities rooted in a European past, even if these new Americans did not always practice what their traditional faith preached, Jewish religious life became mired in a state of crisis and decline. If anything, Cyrus Adler’s dark bottom line may have been substantially true.
For example, disinterest in synagogue life—of any denominational sort—was rampant among the masses of second-generation east European Jews, who then constituted the largest individual cohort of American Jews. Unlike their parents, they were manifestly disinclined to identify formally with their people’s religious past and showed little enthusiasm for charting its future. So disposed, they approximated, in their religious values and commitment to Jewish observances, the level of dissociation that earlier groups of this country’s Jews had sunk to some generations earlier.
Arguably, what kept interwar communities from complete disintegration, at least within this country’s larger cities, where most Jews lived, had much to do with the residential propinquity of Jews to one another in their urban neighborhoods. While 1920s–1930s Jews at home on their own turfs might never set foot in their local synagogues or open a prayer book after learning enough Hebrew to recite a bar mitzvah portion by rote on that memorable day, they still spent their lives among other Jews. Housing discrimination played a part in keeping Jews together as did, for that matter, the evident desire of other ethnic groups to live in their own largely homogeneous groupings. This was an era when social antisemitism restricted Jewish integration in education and occupational realms. America’s best schools were often off-limits to aspiring Jewish students. Barriers in employment opportunities kept them from access to elite professions, like medicine or prestigious law partnerships. Accordingly, Jews found each other, on an ongoing basis, in their own ethnic-based industries. Or, to put it another way, “the environmental assimilation,” born of the “cultural contact and the commingling with the Gentile” that so concerned the American Hebrew people, did not take place on a grand scale. Given this set of social circumstances, even a Jew who never found his or her path from outside a synagogue to inside the sanctuary might end up in a sacred space on one special occasion. He or she would be in a shul or temple when marrying a fellow Jew who had also grown up in that predominately Jewish neighborhood, attended the same school, or worked in the same job.6
Jews in smaller town and cities had a more difficult job avoiding ongoing “commingling” and keeping their Judaism afloat in places where they were truly a minority group. Memoirists of that time and those places where there was no “Jewish street” have suggested that to survive “in the small towns of America, Jews organized weekly, monthly and yearly visits, tying one family or a few Jewish families in a small town to Jewish families in another small town.” In some cases a communal barbecue was the way “you get to know other Jewish kids [as] Jewish families made their own Jewish life, because there wasn’t enough in any one town.” Elsewhere, creative parents organized dances for youngsters in their region. They would, “pick up whole groups of Jewish kids” from neighboring towns, and afterward the youngsters “would stay in the house of the [host] people there.” One historian who has closely studied this social nexus has argued that “in a sense, the Jews of America’s smaller communities . . . developed a sort of New World landsmanshaft [special relationship among people from the same shtetl] mentality in the interwar decades.” The concern people had “for each other’s welfare” cemented enduring relationships.7
Lee Shai Weissbach has also argued that in these environments “the establishment of congregations” was far more important than in the “larger communities in this country [where] Jews could interact with each other, as Jews, in a variety of settings. . . . If they felt the need for any specifically Jewish connections, even Jews who did not have strongly held religious convictions were inclined to affiliate with the local congregations.” Meanwhile, social antisemitism here too also played its role in keeping these Jews together. As a Jew who grew up in the 1930s in Danville, Virginia has remembered, “We did not mix with the Christian community socially. In business affairs, in club work—very few Jews were ever taken into the Kiwanis. No Jews could join the country club, and there was only one country club.” Or, as Weissbach has put it, “even though antisemitism never dominated Jewish life in small-town America . . . few members of small Jewish communities felt completely comfortable. Every interaction between Jews and non-Jews had a certain edge.” Just like the big cities, prejudice of all sorts undermined the commingling that was anticipated.8
There was, however, one dimension to interwar American Judaism about which prognosticators were right on target. As the two decades proceeded, increasingly the religion widely practiced in this country’s synagogues and the faith preached from its pulpits looked neither like the transplanted Orthodoxy of the prior generation nor the deritualized Reform Judaism of the late nineteenth century. Rather, a new American Judaism evolved that defied easy denominational labeling. A blending of traditions, ideas, and practices was palpable in the land. As one observer of the 1930s scene put it: “Orthodoxy, Conservatism and Reform are gradually coming together, flowing down different streams into a river yet to be, whose depth and reach will comprise them all.”9 But, notwithstanding this confluence of movements, the Jewish religion in this country proved to be somewhat less than “astir with activity” and “vigorously and earnestly alive.”
Only one community in America differed substantially from this pessimistic pattern and possessed a robust and highly visible core of staunchly committed second-generation Jews, youngsters whose lives revolved around Jewish schools, clubs, synagogues, and other forms of religious institutional life. Though many of the Jews of Brooklyn between the two wars contributed their share to this national pattern of religious decline, within specific local neighborhoods, like Williamsburg, Brownsville, East New York, and Bensonhurst, there were groups of youths born in the United States who kept alive forms of that “extreme East European orthodoxy” that the American Hebrew’s editors believed was destined to be cast off as an unwanted “heritage of ghetto days.”
Not incidentally, noticeable cohorts of very Orthodox immigrants to this country contributed more than their share to this pious polity. Notwithstanding the discriminatory laws of 1924, some east European Jews did get into this country in the 1920s through the 1940s. The most religious types often found their way to Brooklyn. But this pattern of dissociation from America’s way of life with which the newcomers were most comfortable and that the next generation sustained in that outer borough was hardly approximated elsewhere in this country. Not even the Lower East Side, which during this era lost much of its Jewish population, carried as many of the “vestiges of Old World distinctiveness.”10
Only toward the end of this era the larger American Jewish community began to arise from its stupor. Indeed, Jonathan D. Sarna has suggested that in the years immediately preceding the Second World War “significant changes” took place in “American Jewish education, religion, and culture as well as in American Zionism.” Furthermore, he has contended that these positive circumstances constituted a veritable renaissance in Jewish life, which “set the stage” for even greater growth and expansion in the postwar era. While positive change started to take place in locales both near and nowhere near Brooklyn, this outer borough’s neighborhood youth and their families—particularly in Flatbush, Crown Heights, and Borough Park—contributed more than their share to the beginnings of this reversal of Jewish fortunes. But, whatever the dimensions and early impact of these innovations, as we will presently see, the revivalists of the late 1930s had their jobs cut out for them as they sought to change American Judaism’s direction.11
Sociological studies conducted during this era of crisis and decline had to have provided little comfort and encouragement to those concerned with Judaism’s future. Every investigation revealed how profoundly disaffected so many American Jewish young people were with religious life. For example, those who looked into the lives and attitudes of Jewish college students, from upstate New York to New England to as far west as North Dakota, found only a negligible minority feeling that synagogue attendance was essential to their lives. Everywhere the younger generation was shown to be less interested than their elders in the “preservation of existing religious organizations.”12
And, from “Easttown,” an un-named city situated some sixty miles from New York City, came a similar word, in 1931–32, that “religion played a relatively small part in the life of the Jewish family as compared to the aspects of making a living, marrying and educating one’s children,” secularly. Meanwhile, another on-the-scene reporter in Stamford, Connecticut made it known that “only three times a year [did] the synagogue fill all its pews.” Then it was a combination of nostalgia, awe over the Days of Judgment, and the desire to be among, and to be seen by, fellow Jews that brought families near the shul.13
Striking a comparably discordant note, a rabbi in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania of just about the same time lamented that even those Jews who might attend Sabbath morning services on a somewhat regular basis did not stay around long. In order to attract “a considerable number of men to Sabbath services,” he had to make sure that all religious activities were ended by 11 AM. “In the whole congregation of about 250 families,” he explained, “there are not one half-dozen men who are not compelled to go to business on Saturday.”14
By the way, Brooklyn and its synagogues did not do much better than the rest of the country, except, that is, in its circumscribed, Orthodox hotbeds. Memoirists who grew up in Brownsville have related that even though that community could boast of “eighty-three synagogues . . . and dozens of Hebrew and Yiddish schools” in a “less than two square mile” section of that neighborhood, few young men “continued their Jewish education or frequented synagogue with any regularity.” A 1940 sociological survey revealed, along these same lines, that “only about nine percent of adult males in Brownsville attended synagogue with any regularity.” Even on the High Holidays there were more people standing on the Jewish street outside the synagogue than praying within the sanctuary.15
Clearly, all through this country, the tenuous holds traditional folk religion had maintained over immigrants who lived in inner city hubs were broken as those born and raised in America resided in those new neighborhoods situated toward the outskirts of the city. And, as the next generation moved away both physically and spiritually from “downtown,” relatively few new arrivals came off the boats to replace them. In “Medurbia,” that city locale situated somewhere between the immigrant hubs of the past and suburbia of the future, acculturated Jews continued their efforts to advance in America, leaving behind them most commitments to the demands of Judaism. And during the Depression decade many of those who might have liked to be more observant found the pressure to work at a job—any job, even on the Sabbath—unavoidable. As one young man who grew up in the 1930s has recalled, “with the Depression, things changed with my father even in religious practice. Before, he never failed to take us to the synagogue every single Saturday. After the crash, he didn’t seem to care anymore.” Meanwhile, the synagogues that they now attended less and less “struggled under heavy financial burdens and mortgage debts.”16
Significantly, this dilemma of religious decline afflicted all Jewish religious expressions, and almost to an equal degree. Rabbi Henry P. Mendes, president of the Orthodox Union said as much when he surveyed an unhappy national scene at the very beginning of this era. “It is perfectly true,” he admitted, “that Sabbath desecration is painfully noticeable in the Middle-West, the West and the South, where Reform Judaism is so powerful. But it is also true in the east, where Orthodox Judaism has its strongholds.” Some twenty years later, Orthodox Union lay leader Bert Lewkowitz took an even more jaundiced viewed of his own movement when he toured the country. He reported, with an angrier tone, that “Jews who do not observe the Sabbath, who do not take their children to any Hebrew school and do not give them a Jewish home atmosphere consider themselves Orthodox Jews because they have a seat on the High Holidays.” These people surely evinced no commitment to sustaining the forms of Orthodoxy the older generation harbored.17
If matters were not bad enough, interwar religious life also suffered at the hands of other nominally Jewish institutions that competed with synagogues and Jewish schools for the allegiances of Jewish youngsters. In many Jewish communities nationwide the local YMHA or Jewish Community Center (JCC) was the neighborhood’s central congregating place. These were places where Jews came to play, or to dance, or to do artwork, or to perform in theater troupes, all with folks of their own ethnic background. Its national leaders asserted that the young men and women who were its devotees also imbibed “the rich cultural heritage of the Jewish group” and were “prepar[ing]” themselves for “Jewish living in America.” But, reportedly, “in many associations the Jewish phase of the program is made a side issue, and too little attention is paid to the development of the religious side.” Critics charged, with much evidence to support their claims, that at most YMHAs “the term, Hebrew, seems to play a more important part in the name [of the organization] than in the work” of the Ys. The worst offenders were those centers that kept their “general offices, gymnasium, pool, lunch-counters, restaurants etc.” open on the Sabbath day in an epoch where a canvass of some fifty-nine JCCs revealed that “develop[ment] in Jewish atmosphere” ranked at the bottom of the list of institutional objectives.18
For rabbis and other concerned religious Jews, who were often bedeviled by their inability to attract youngsters to their precincts, the JCCs were tarred as among the last places Jewish kids should go to if they were interested in Jewish content in their lives. Indeed, by 1936 Reform rabbi Louis I. Newman of Manhattan’s Rodeph Shalom would characterize “the [Jewish] cultural and educational activities . . . of the Center” as “in a sense a side show to adorn the circus” of its “central aim,” social and athletic activities. In 1939 Rabbi Simon Greenberg of Philadelphia went even further as he called upon his fellow Conservative rabbis—and his Orthodox and Reform counterparts too—to “display some leadership and get together” to “remove the non-religious Jewish Center . . . this palpable evil from our midst.”19
These rabbis had weapons at their disposal to battle back against these offending institutions. Many Conservative and American Orthodox congregations offered Synagogue Center programs—a few Reform synagogues had Temple Center institutions that dated back to the late nineteenth century—predicated upon the “translation” of Jewish sacred space into a place “where all the members of the family would feel at home during the seven days of the week. There they could sing and dance and play,” just like they could at a JCC. But here they would be congregating in a religious Jewish environment. Such, at least, was the viewpoint of Rabbi Mordecai M. Kaplan, the seer most closely associated with the concept and strategy that those who came to play, and to recreate, might be moved, over the long haul, to stay to pray.20
But, did the “magic” that Kaplan disciple Rabbi Israel Herbert Levinthal spoke of when he predicted that “many [who] will come for other purposes than to meet God . . . will be won from outside the door into the portals of the Synagogue proper” really work? Many contemporary rabbinical colleagues were unconvinced that Judaism ultimately gained from having sports and games on holy premises. Brooklyn’s Rabbi Harry Weiss argued that the layman “has only a certain amount of energy at his command, and when, during the week, one attends a card party, one feels that one’s duty towards the Congregation is fully performed and the Friday night and Saturday morning services are of necessity neglected.”21
Some contemporaneous and troubling statistics on “synagogue attendance” seemed to bear out his reservations. A 1928 survey within United Synagogue congregations revealed that the “majority of [reporting] rabbis having experience with synagogue centers indicate that the results thus far have been negative or very slight . . . in augmenting attendance at the religious services.” Still, Synagogue Center advocates persevered.22
In the meantime, leaders of each of America’s Jewish expressions found common cause in developing other schemes to battle back the tide of religious indifference. The Synagogue Council of America was one such venue for cooperative efforts among Jewish denominations that ostensibly were competitors and antagonists. Although this national umbrella organization eventually devoted almost all its energies to speaking out “on social and international issues” that worried the Jewish people in America, when formed in 1926, it had Reform, Conservative, and Orthodox leaders working together to further common religious concerns.23
For example, in 1934 Rabbi David de Sola Pool of the Orthodox Union took the lead as chair of the Synagogue Council’s Committee on Community Planning in fostering the building of local councils coast to coast to combat “isolation or competition” among the several movements engaged in outreach work. Along these same lines, from 1933–35 some of these same individuals worked together, both within and without the council, in an interdenominational Back to the Synagogue movement. The plan that officials of the Reform Union of American Hebrew Congregations, the Conservative United Synagogue, and the Orthodox Union hatched in “synagogue drive” conferences was to call the Sabbath of Return (Shabbat Shuvah of 1935) a “Loyalty Sabbath” (October 1935). The idea was to have “every Jew present and accounted for” in their houses of worship, just as Christians were then rallying their communicants to “reaffirm . . . faith in God and their fellow men” during the depths of the Great Depression.24
Orthodox enthusiasts for “a movement to unite all the forces of Jewry to combat religious indifference wherever it may exist” were sure to assert that they stood “with the first rank against all compromise that might undermine the principle and unalterable truth of the Torah.” But clearly that stance did not preclude them from working with their theological opponents. Such a swipe at liberal Judaism was also of no concern to those Reform rabbis who appreciated any, and all, help they could get with their own flocks. It was within that cooperative spirit that Rabbi Samuel H. Markowitz of Fort Wayne, Indiana observed trenchantly in 1935 that “Orthodoxy, Conservatism and Reform are coming together, not because they are recognizing themselves in agreement, but because they face a common enemy, assimilation.” An increasingly united Jewish front was on the rise since “the main current in Jewish thought and life today is assimilation.”25
Jewish religious leaders of this era could resonate to calls for common cause because, notwithstanding their affiliation with often antagonistic movements, so many Conservative, American Orthodox, and even some Reform rabbis then ministered in congregations that, as the two decades proceeded, were starting to resemble each other in ritual and orientation. There was, in fact, a new American Judaism in progress in the land that defied easy denominational labeling. Certainly, the lines of demarcation setting off Orthodox Union from United Synagogue congregations were difficult to discern.
On this point Rabbi de Sola Pool was particularly candid when, in 1942, he observed that “American Orthodoxy no longer mirrors east European life. It is adapting itself to the American environment.” (His words were similar to those of the American Hebrew editorialists who had predicted a decade or so earlier that a new American Judaism would be free of “every vestige of Old World distinctiveness.”) De Sola Pool noted specifically that “innovations like the late Friday night evening service or the removal of the women’s gallery, or the confirmation of girls or a community seder . . . would have shocked worshippers of a generation ago. Today such practices are accepted in numerous congregations.” As he surveyed the national scene it was clear that “today it is increasingly difficult to discern any essential organic differences between Orthodoxy and Conservatism.”26
Indeed, had he looked at the practices at Orthodox Union congregation Ahavath Achim of Atlanta, Georgia, he would have witnessed a Friday night service held not at sundown but at a time that permitted members to “attend the synagogue after work or before the theatre,” where women were allowed to come down from the balcony and sit across the aisle from men. They took part in a service that featured “a choir, songs prayers, English readings and, of course, an English language sermon.”27
Mixed seating and late Friday night services could also be found within the Orthodox Union’s New York hub. Interestingly enough, at the Mosholu Jewish Center, in the North-East Bronx, congregants were comfortable during the year with seating patterns where men and women sat across an aisle from each other. But on the High Holidays men and women prayed together in the main sanctuary. The large number of Jews who attended the synagogue only on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, liked, or maybe demanded, this mode of operation.28
At the same time that Orthodox Union congregations were playing loose and fast with Orthodox strictures, there were United Synagogue associates, like Manhattan’s the Jewish Center or, for that matter, the Young Israel of Brooklyn (both were affiliates until at least 1929), where religious activities did not deviate at all from halakhic norms. These so-called Modern Orthodox synagogues did not change the basic structure or timing of the prayers while they campaigned for the unaffiliated with a panoply of American-style social activities conducted before and after services.29
On balance, however, at most Orthodox Union synagogues, coast to coast, the rituals and observances that were proffered did not raise the eyebrows of its lay and rabbinic leaders in the New York home office. And, for that matter, when it came to their religious practices and outlooks, the clear majority of United Synagogue congregations were incipient Conservative affiliates. Still, there was a general fluidity in the land among all traditional-leaning Jewish religious groups that worked so hard—and often unsuccessfully—to create forms of services that might be attractive within their local communities or neighborhood.30
Initiatives within some Reform temples during the 1920s–1940s designed to bring some adored past synagogue practices back into their services also contributed to this sense of ongoing religious homogenization. Leaders of that Jewish movement also sought out formulas for attracting those second-generation Jews of east European descent who had left their parent’s immigrant Orthodox shuls and had yet to find a modern synagogue to which they could relate. Even the most traditionally minded Reform congregations of this era had a long way to go in integrating the most popular features of old-time liturgy and behavior into their rituals. Still, in those temples where boys celebrated their bar mitzvahs or where kiddush was recited or where congregations sang “traditional Jewish hymns” or where a rabbi blew the shofar on Rosh Hashanah (sometimes with the help of a “trumpet mouthpiece”), these Reform Jews unabashedly linked themselves with the most fondly remembered aspects of their family’s Orthodox past. In so doing they started, said one of its supporters, to move “[Jewish religious] liberalism” away from its “purely intellectual or logical formulae,” which would not “grip the hearts” of lay people who described themselves as “born of orthodox [sic] parents and raised in an orthodox [sic] atmosphere.”31
Such advocates certainly had many battles ahead of them against those from within their own movement who early on were already carping that Reform Judaism was “as now indistinguishable from Conservatism.” These critics openly feared that “the entire American Jewish community was becoming homogenized” and they were “apprehensive for their identity.” Sometimes discord led Reform forces in the same city or neighborhood to harbor two or more Union of American Hebrew Congregations affiliates, each with a very different liturgy, ideological orientation, and appeal to varyious types of potential worshippers.32
The commonality of backgrounds—and sometimes long-standing friendships—among young rabbis who came on the scene in the 1920s–1940s likewise added to this perception of a new, all-inclusive American Judaism in the making. And their personal linkages arguably played a role in increasing the possibilities for common cause among those who struggled to rouse a somnambulant Jewish population. Like the flocks to whom they sought to minister, the majority of these leaders were second-generation east European Jews. Commenting on who were the change makers in his movement, Rabbi B. Benedict Glazer of Detroit, the son of an immigrant Orthodox rabbi, observed that “the complexion of Reform Judaism” has been altered “in recent years” because of a “Reform rabbinate [that] is almost exclusively composed of the offspring of East European immigrants.” Glazer was on target in his estimate of the presence of those of his Jewish ethnic background within his movement. A 1933 study of Hebrew Union College students revealed that over the prior quarter-century—actually from 1904–1929—more than seven out of every ten Reform rabbis in training in Cincinnati had parents who hailed from east Europe. “Twenty-eight percent had themselves been born there” and very likely came as youngsters, with their elders, to these shores. The Russian Jewish majority was undoubtedly even greater at the new Reform rabbinical school, the Jewish Institute of Religion, which Rabbi Stephen S. Wise organized in New York in 1922. The latter group would also have much to say about the directions Reform would increasingly take.33
Conservative and American Orthodox rabbis, most of whom were also children of Russian and Polish newcomers, shared even more than their ethnic roots. Many of them grew up in the same neighborhoods—like the Lower East Side or that interwar Brooklyn Orthodox hotbed to which we will return presently. These future leaders received their early and secondary intensive Jewish education at the same schools. Moreover, the Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary, much to the dismay of Dr. Revel, served as the prime “feeder school” of students who eventually would be ordained at the Jewish Theological Seminary. Basically, every time the Orthodox institution showed signs of instability or impermanence, students, desirous of careers as American rabbis—not necessarily as Conservative rabbis—left Yeshiva and enrolled at the Jewish Theological Seminary. For Orthodoxy, this talent drain was particularly acute in the years 1940–1943 when, after Revel’s death and no successor was quickly appointed, the word on Washington Heights streets was that the school’s days were numbered. The classmates that stayed behind and weathered Yeshiva’s financial and leadership crisis would enter the Modern Orthodox rabbinate. But they frequently kept close contact with Jewish Theological Seminary men when they entered the American Jewish communal field.
As significant, more than a few erstwhile Yeshiva men did more than just relate well to their Seminary brethren. In search of sustainable pulpit careers, they joined them in United Synagogue or Orthodox Union pulpits that featured mixed seating, late Friday night services, and other characteristics that fell outside the pale of religious strictures that Yeshiva faithful hoped to maintain.34
The truly fluid American Jewish religious scene of this era can be, thus, inventoried as follows: immigrant-generation Orthodox rabbis and their faith communities were dying out, except, as we will presently see, in some places in Brooklyn. And relatively few staunchly observant newcomers were taking their place. At the other extreme of the religious spectrum, the hegemonic days within their own movement of old-line Reform rabbis and their temples were beginning to be numbered. The countdown started in 1937. Then, that movement’s Columbus Platform affirmed—albeit by the smallest of majorities among the rabbis at its annual conference—the importance of “the retention and development of such customs, symbols and ceremonies as possess inspirational value . . . in our worship and instruction,” even as it spoke loudly of the need for Reform to support the Zionist endeavor and the Jewish national presence in Palestine.35 Meanwhile, nominally Orthodox and Conservative congregations nationwide displayed comparable forms of ritual behavior with the goal of reaching the many children of east European immigrants who cared little for synagogue life. Graduates of both the Jewish Theological Seminary and the Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary led this uphill battle with Yeshiva men often in “Conservative” pulpits while Seminary ordainees served “Orthodox” constituencies. Fledgling Reform rabbis emerging from the new Jewish Institute of Religion and their groups added to this indistinct mix that made up the struggling American Judaism of the 1920s to the mid-1940s.
For Mordecai M. Kaplan, philosopher and leader of the incipient Reconstructionist movement, this lack of rigidity to Jewish religious life made it possible to dream of a future ideal situation where “one may be a Reconstructionist-Orthodox Jew, Reform Jew or Conservative Jew [with] the Reconstructionist part of the hyphen [representing] those goals that all Jews have in common.” A united and engaged Jewish community was possible, if thoughtful leaders, freed from longstanding denominational fragmentation, would only seize the opportunity to be creative. “The so-called enlightened Orthodox or Conservative” amalgam held out unique promise “of evolving as complete a Jewish life as we can hope for in this country” addressing “Jewish life as a problem in social and spiritual adjustment.” But, even this most optimistic and peripatetic Jewish thinker of his era, who traveled the country and mediated among Jews who sought to create synagogue environments attractive to young people, also knew that much needed to be done to reverse the endemic religious malaise that he observed in his peregrinations.36
There was, however, during this era of crisis and decline, a unique, deeply committed Orthodox community in Brooklyn that lived a religious existence fundamentally different from almost all other Jews then in the United States.37 For the families that supported old-line yeshivas like Williamsburg’s Mesifta Torah Vodaath—or its distaff counterpart, Bais Yaakov, ensconced in that same neighborhood—or Yeshiva Chaim Berlin of Brownsville, the 1920s through the mid-1940s was a time where faith commitments and levels of practice intensified rather than ossified. For these individuals strict observance of the Sabbath and the other demands of Jewish law were a given. And when they chose to pray publicly—and they did so quite often—they offered their devotions with great regard for past traditions. Old-world-style shtibls (storefront houses of worship) were common fare in those locales.38 While Jews like these had great concerns that the “Torah is increasingly being forgotten by our youth and the best of our young people,” they did not view Conservative, Reform, or even accommodating Americanized Orthodox congregations as in any way legitimate partners, worthy of emulation or common cause as colleagues addressing these troubling trends.39
Most important, when parents in these neighborhoods sent their youngsters to their local yeshivas or Orthodox schools for girls, they committed themselves and the next American-born generation to a religious culture and movement that aspired to sustain the religious civilization of eastern Europe on foreign American soil. These Jews were part of a transplanted civilization dedicated to the survival of “extreme East European orthodoxy” and possessed of the “heritage of ghetto days,” to again quote the American Hebrew, that had largely died out elsewhere on this continent. In these schools the highest premium was placed on the transmission of Torah and Talmud learning while students were discouraged, as much as possible, from pursuing secular studies beyond the years prescribed by state law. In an era when most American Jewish kids were taught, in public schools, to embrace American culture—and often did so without any Jewish education in their lives—in Brooklyn every effort was made to inculcate a studied separatism from the American way of life.
As fate would have it, the arrival on these shores, and the settlement in Brooklyn during the 1930s, of the first refugees from the terrors of Hitlerism strengthened the resolve and deepened the constituency for old-world-style institutions on American shores. These founders of the incipient so-called yeshiva world and Hasidic communities in America would pave the way for the emergence of an even more strident and separatist Orthodoxy in the post–World War II period.
If these early refugee communities presaged one new dimension of American Judaism after 1945, the interwar period, especially the latter years of the 1930s, also witnessed some discernible movement within the indigenous community—the “creativity” Kaplan called for—that augured better days for the faith in this country. Amidst an era of religious aridity and dissolution, some initial actions were taken to build new forms of communal life that could potentially attract the next generation’s interest in its ancestral identity. For example, Jewish educational camping found its first firm footing with its formula of round-the-clock summer exposure for youngsters to the practices and ethos of Judaism in a fun-filled environment. Nationally based congregational youth movements also started to spring up, providing creative ideas, programs, and events for youngsters during the school year. However, the most impressive of these innovations was the Jewish day school movement. This system granted youngsters diversified Jewish learning, often with a cultural Zionist flavor, and a general studies curriculum that approximated, and, more important, rivaled the assimilatory public schools.40
At their core these institutions, argued one of their earliest proponents, were “Jewish Public School[s] . . . in contradistinction to Jewish Parochial Schools [like Torah Vodaath] which to the average Jewish mind savors of sectarianism.” Rather, the system he believed in would raise “our sons”—and we will say also our daughters—“to be good Americans . . . [and] good and loyal and enlightened Jews.” Max Kufeld, who for many years served simultaneously as general studies principal of Borough Park’s Hebrew Institute (aka Etz Chayim Yeshiva), Flatbush Yeshivah, and Shulamith School for Girls articulated this mission statement in 1924. Similar sentiments informed activities at the Crown Heights Yeshiva, which from its start in the 1920s also offered this innovative dual curriculum education. These efforts set the stage—if they did not offer models—for several comparable initiatives in the 1930s. An early banner year for this movement was 1937 when in Manhattan, in Far Rockaway, New York, and in Brookline, Massachusetts the Ramaz School, the Hebrew Institute of Long Island, and the Maimonides School were founded.41
What these schools ultimately represented was a communal recognition that, even at its best, the Jewish supplementary school system was ultimately unsuccessful in keeping many Jewish youths close to their religion. The Talmud Torah’s afternoon and weekend hours were, in the end, no match for the week-long hold that public schools, those temples of Americanization, maintained on Jewish youngsters. And, although fewer than eight thousand students would be enrolled in day schools as of 1940, a new tradition in Jewish education was established before World War II that would be an all-important component in the quest for the survival of Jewish identity after 1945.42
The calculus of American Jewish religious life changed dramatically after the Second World War. The arrival of refugee and survivor cohorts added both numbers and, often, an uncommon level of dynamism to Judaism’s life in this country. Although not all these newcomers were observant or Orthodox, those who were practiced what the faith preached fervently and with great stridency. The intensity of their commitments—and their not so subtle criticism of all Jews who came before them—was predicated upon their vision that they were the bearers of the only authentic Orthodoxy and were thus alone the preservers and perpetuators of Judaism. Ultimately their uncompromising positions would permeate the existent accommodating Orthodox camp and undermine its willingness to find common cause with other Jewish religious groups on communitywide issues.43
Essentially, those so-called right-wing Orthodox elements embraced more than just the “vestiges of the Old World distinctiveness.” They hallowed those “externalities which constitute the heritage of ghetto days,” those elements of the “extreme East European orthodoxy” that the American Hebrew’s writers, back in 1924, predicted and hoped would not be part of the future American scene.
Meanwhile the indigenous-communities—those of east European extraction who were well into their third generation—suburbanized. Along the “crabgrass frontier,” affiliation with the synagogue of their choice became an American value that many Jews wanted to uphold. As parents of baby boomers reacted to the large-scale commingling that took place among their kids in their religiously diverse new hometowns, it became essential for them to identify with that touchstone institution, the synagogue. Jews joined suburban Conservative, Modern Orthodox, and Reform congregations en masse, with the United Synagogue experiencing the most dramatic growth.44
The youth-oriented institutions that made their early appearances in the decades before the Second World War—like camps, synagogue youth groups, and, of course, day schools—were also called upon to play major roles in stemming the tide of assimilation in an ever more accepting American society. But, even as rabbis and concerned lay leaders of all Jewish expressions battled against common social and cultural foes, they also started to struggle—much more than before—against each other for primacy among post–World War II Jews. After 1945 the beginning of the ideological rigidity and competition that would characterize the last years of the twentieth century increasingly became a communal reality. The story of this disengagement and the end of possibilities for an all-inclusive American Judaism would form an important chapter in the contemporary history of Jewish life in the United States.
NOTES
1. “Landlocked in America,” American Hebrew, September 26, 1924, 521.
2. Julian Morgenstern, “American Judaism in the Year 2,000,” American Hebrew, September 26, 1924, 524, 560.
3. Stephen S. Wise, “The Bond of Jewish Oneness,” American Hebrew, September 26, 1924, 520, 583.
4. Cyrus Adler, “Not Concerned Over Future,” American Hebrew, September 26, 1924, 520.
5. “The Onward March of Judaism,” American Hebrew, October 10, 1924, 673, 676.
6. On informal neighborhood associations preserving Jewish identities in interwar New York, see Deborah Dash Moore, At Home in America: Second Generation New York Jews (New York, 1981), especially 19–60. On the tensions between Jews and other ethnic groups in that city’s neighborhoods, see Ronald Bayor, Neighbors in Conflict: The Irish, Germans, Jews, and Italians of New York City, 1929–1941 (Baltimore, 1978), especially 150–63. On the varying forms of social antisemitism that limited Jewish integration, see Digby Baltzell, The Protestant Establishment: Aristocracy and Caste in America (New York, 19 64).
7. Howard Simons, Jewish Times: Voices of the American Jewish Experience (Boston, 1988), especially 4–5, 207–9, 225. See also Lee Shai Weissbach, Jewish Life in SmallTown America: A History (New Haven, 2005), 279.
8. Simons, Jewish Times, 225; Weissbach, Jewish Life in Small-Town America, 157, 278.
9. Samuel M. Gup, “Currents in Jewish Religious Thought and Life in America in the Twentieth Century,” Central Conference of American Rabbis Yearbook (hereafter CCARYB) 41 (1931): 301.
10. On the impact the interwar new arrivals made upon the indigenous Orthodox community in Brooklyn, see George Kranzler, Williamsburg : A Jewish Community in Transition (New York, 1961), 18–19 and passim. For statistics on how the new Brooklyn neighborhoods superseded the Lower East Side as a hub of Orthodox Jewish life, see Jeffrey S. Gurock, “Jewish Continuity and Commitment in Interwar Brooklyn,” in Ilana Abramovitch and Sean Galvin, eds., Jews of Brooklyn (Hanover, 2001), 240, note 8.
11. Jonathan D. Sarna, “Reimagining American Judaism: From Declension to Revival,” paper delivered at the conference “Imagining the American Jewish Community,” Jewish Theological Seminary, March 23, 2004, 5.
12. Nathan Goldberg, “Religious and Social Attitudes of Jewish Youth in the U.S.A.,” Jewish Review 1 (1943): 146–49.
13. Langer, “The Jewish Community of Easttown, 1931–1932,” unpublished abstract of thesis written at the Graduate School for Jewish Social Work, New York, 1932, on file at the Library of the American Jewish Historical Society; Samuel Koenig, “The Socioeconomic Structure of an American Jewish Community,” in Isacque Graeber and Stuart Henderson Brit, eds., Jews in a Gentile World: The Problem of Anti-Semitism (New York, 1942), 227, 229.
14. Louis M. Levitsky,” The Story of an Awakened Community,” Reconstructionist 1, no. 20 (February 7, 1936): 9.
15. Gerald Sorin, The Nurturing Neighborhood: The Brownsville Boys Club and Jewish Community in Urban America, 1940–1990 (New York, 1990), 15–16.
16. On the so-called Spiritual Depression, see Beth S. Wenger, New York Jews and the Great Depression (New Haven, 1996), 166–73. For the young man’s recollections, see Joseph A. D. Sutton, Magic Carpet: Aleppo-in-Flatbush, the Story of a Unique Ethnic Community (New York, 1979), 124, quoted ibid., 173–74.
17. Henry Pereira Mendes, “Orthodox Judaism (the Present),” Jewish Forum 3.1 (January 1920): 35; Bert Lewkowitz, “The Future of Judaism as a Layman Visions It,” Jewish Forum 23.10 (December 1940): 177.
18. On the great growth of JCCs in the 1920s–1930s, see the Jewish Center (hereafter JC) (September 1942): 6. On the vision articulated by its national leadership about the JCC’s Jewish mission, see Louis Kraft, A Century of the Jewish Community Center (1854–1954) (New York, 1954), 20–21. For criticism of what actually went on in these institutions, see Tobias Roth, “Jewish and Religious Elements,” JC (October 1922): 29; Mordecai Soltes, “A Program of Jewish Activities for Jewish Community Centers,” JC (September 1925): 42–45; and Samuel Leff, “Health and Physical Education in Jewish Community Centers,” JC (September 1930): 14, 18.
19. Louis I. Newman,” The Organization of American Jewry,” CCARYB 46 (1936): 242; Simon Greenberg, “President’s Message,” Proceedings of the Rabbinical Assembly of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America (1939): 33.
20. The idea of a synagogue center dates back to the incipient Temple Center movement that began under Reform Jewish auspices in America. See David Kaufman, Shul with a Pool:The Synagogue Center in American Jewish History (Hanover, 1999), 10–49. On the Kaplan version of the “seven day a week synagogue” metaphor as it was instituted in his Jewish Center synagogue on New York’s West Side in the late 1910s to early 1920s, see Jacob J. Schacter, “A Rich Man’s Club?: The Founding of the Jewish Center,” in Yaakov Elman and Jeffrey S. Gurock, eds., Hazon Nahum: Studies in Jewish Law, Thought and History Presented to Dr. Norman Lamm on the Occasion of His Seventieth Birthday (New York, 1997), 693, 713.
21. Israel Herbert Levinthal, “The Value of the Center to the Synagogue,” United Synagogue Recorder (June 1926): 19; Harry Weiss, “The Synagogue Center,” Problems of the Jewish Ministry (New York, 1927), 131–33.
22. Alter F. Landesman, “Synagogue Attendance (A Statistical Survey),” Proceedings of the Twenty-Eighth Annual Conference of the Rabbinical Assembly of the Jewish Theological Seminary (1928): 439.
23. On how the functions of the Synagogue Council of America has been remembered, especially the omission of its decidedly religious work among denominational groups, see Sidney L. Regner, “Synagogue Council of America,” Encyclopaedia Judaica (CD Rom edition).
24. For reports on Synagogue Council activities, see CCARYB 44 (1934): 48–50. See also, on the “Sabbath of Return” idea, Orthodox Union (August 1935): 1, 7; and Minutes of the Administrative Council [Orthodox Union], January 11, 1934, 1, files at the Library of the American Jewish Historical Society.
25. On the Orthodox Jewish mixed message on the question of cooperation with liberal Judaism’s leaders, see Orthodox Union (April 1935): 14 and (February 1935): 1. On a Reform rabbi’s view of the situation, see Samuel M. Markowitz, “Discussion,” CCARYB 41 (1931): 336–37.
26. David de Sola Pool, “Judaism and the Synagogue,” in Oscar Janowsky, ed., The American Jew: A Composite Portrait (New York, 1942), 50–54.
27. On the history of Atlanta’s Ahavath Achim, including the religious behavior patterns of its members, see Michael J. Safra, “America’s Challenge to Traditional Jewish Worship: Changes in Atlanta’s Synagogues, 1867–1972,”, 64–65, Honors Thesis, University of Michigan, 1997; Kenneth Stein, A History of Ahavath Achim (Atlanta, 1978), 44.
28. On the nature of synagogue life at the Mosholu synagogue, see Gurock interview with Rabbi Herschel Schacter, July 22, 1997, noted in Gurock, From Fluidity to Rigidity: The Religious Worlds of Conservative and Orthodox Jews in Twentieth-Century America, David W. Belin Lecture in American Jewish Affairs, the Frankel Center for Judaic Studies, University of Michigan, 1998, 28.
29. On early Jewish Center involvement with the United Synagogue and its self-definition as Orthodox, see Jeffrey S. Gurock and Jacob J. Schacter, A Modern Heretic and a Traditional Community: Mordecai M. Kaplan, Orthodoxy, and American Judaism (New York, 1998). On the Young Israel of Brooklyn’s affiliation, see National Council of Young Israel, Annual Convention:5694/1934 (brochure on file at the Library of the American Jewish Historical Society), 48. See also United Synagogue Recorder 3.2 (April 1923): 11.
30. For a full discussion of the ritual patterns of congregations affiliated with both national Jewish religious organizations, see Gurock, From Fluidity to Rigidity, 16–32.
31. On the introduction of traditional forms of worship into Reform congregations during this period, see CCARYB 36 (1926): 314; 50 (1940): 172–74; 51 (1941): 102–4. See also Leon Jick, “The Reform Synagogue,” in Jack Wertheimer, ed., The American Synagogue: A Sanctuary Transformed (Cambridge, 1987), 100–1. For a statement reflective of what potential congregants, born of east European Jewish stock, wanted out of Reform synagogue life, see Meyer Jacobstein, “Mobilizing the Laymen,” CCARYB 32 (1922): 243–50.
32. For sources on criticisms within the Reform camp that worried about an all-embracing “native American Judaism,” see Samuel Cauman, Jonah Bondi Wise (New York, 1959), 175; and Felix Levy, “President’s Message,” CCARYB 46 (1936): 163–64, where a supporter of changes within Reform Judaism toward traditionalism identifies his opponents’ allegations that he and his compatriots were rendering Reform “indistinguishable” from Conservatism. For an example of a community where Reform forces were split, see these studies of 1930s Detroit: Sidney Bolkovsky, Harmony and Dissonance: Voices of Jewish Identity in Detroit, 1914–1967 (Detroit, 1991), 225–29; and Leon Fram, “The Saga of Rabbi Leon Fram, Dean of the Michigan Rabbinate: An Interview on His Seventy-fifth Birthday,” Michigan Jewish History 11.2 (November 1970): 12–28. Additionally, the capture by traditionalists with the Reform camp of the hearts and minds of its movement’s Jews was gradual. See, for a study that points out the lack of observance of traditional rituals in Reform Jewish households in the 1930s, Union of American Hebrew Congregations, Commission on Research, Reform Judaism in the Large Cities: A Survey (New York, 1931), 10, 47–51.
33. B. Benedict Glazer, “The Spirit and Character of the American Jewish Community,” CCARYB 50 (1940): 326. For a brief biographical sketch of Glazer, see New York Times, May 16, 1952, 23. On the background of Glazer’s Orthodox rabbi father, Simon, see Encyclopaedia Judaica 7:618. For a statistical study of the ethnic background of Reform rabbinical students at Hebrew Union College, see Abraham N. Franzblau, “A Quarter-Century of Rabbinical Training at the Hebrew Union College,” mimeograph (Cincinnati, 1933). No comparable study of the then fledgling New York Reform rabbinical school exists.
34. On the commonality of neighborhood and educational background of Yeshiva and Seminary students during this era, see Gurock, “Jewish Continuity and Commitment in Interwar Brooklyn,” 236–39. On Yeshiva as a “feeder school” for the Jewish Theological Seminary, see Jeffrey S. Gurock, “Yeshiva Students at the Jewish Theological Seminary,” in Jack Wertheimer, ed., Tradition Renewed: A History of the Jewish Theological Seminary (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary, 1997), 473–513.
35. It may be noted, with reference to the pace of the more traditional form of Reform taking over from its classical Reform predecessor, that on the ideological issue of Zionism, which won out in Columbus, the position triumphed by one vote. It would take time for that position to win out totally within the denomination. Still, arguably, the momentum was in that direction. See CCARYB 48 (1937): 418–22.
36. For a discussion of Kaplan’s ideas on what we might today call transdenominationalism, see Deborah Musher, “Reconstructionist Judaism in the Mind of Mordecai M. Kaplan: The Transformation from a Philosophy to a Religious Denomination,” American Jewish History 86.4 (December 1998): 415, which contains the quote from Kaplan’s Journal, vol. 24, April 29, 1968. I am suggesting that this unrealized hope was closest to reality during the 1920s–1940s. On Kaplan’s frequent tours of the United States and his advice to those who would abide by his words, see his accounts in his Journal, vols. 3, 4, and 10 (1925, 1928, 1929, 1942).
37. While pockets of profound observance and strict religious ideology could be found in some other parts of the metropolis and in places like Baltimore and New Haven, no American community possessed such an intense Orthodox presence as Brooklyn communities. Using commitment to old-line yeshiva education as a barometer to east European ways, Brooklyn was home in the 1920s–1940s to five such schools, with Torah Vodaath being the largest and most comprehensive. As of 1933, over 1,350 boys were attending such elementary schools in that borough as opposed to less than 900 in Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Also, as of 1940, some 1,000 students attended Torah Vodaath at a time when nationally only 7,700 students received any sort of Orthodox yeshiva education. During this time period, Baltimore and New Haven also had yeshivas whose approach to American life corresponded to that of the Brooklyn Orthodox epicenter. For studies of this group of intensely committed Jews, see Kranzler, Williamsburg, 141; William Helmreich, The World of the Yeshiva: An Intimate Portrait of Orthodox Jewry (New York, 1982), 26–37, which also notes the yeshivas outside of Brooklyn; Meir Kimmel, “The History of Yeshivat Rabbi Chaim Berlin,” Shevely Hahinuch (Fall 1948): 51–54; Alter Landesman, Brownsville: The Birth, Development, and Passing of a Jewish Community in New York (New York, 1969), 234–35; Jacob I. Hartstein, “Jewish Community Elementary Parochial Schools,” unpublished thesis, circa 1934, Yeshiva University Archives, table 1, 14; and Alvin Irwin Schiff, The Jewish Day School in America (New York, 1966), 39, 69.
38. For the best study of Williamsburg, an idiosyncratic community for the interwar period by virtue of its high level of Orthodox practice, see Kranzler, Williamsburg, especially 17–18, 164–67, 214–17.
39. For an example from the 1930s of a staunchly committed Orthodox Jew’s attitude toward noncooperation with Conservative and Reform Jews and their problems with accommodationist Orthodox activities like late Friday night forums that seemed to emulate what liberal Jews were doing, see Ha-Pardes (December 1930): 6.
40. Sarna has argued forcefully for the recognition of camping, youth movements, adult educational initiatives, Jewish publishing, etc., in addition to the growth in popularity of Jewish day school education as among the signs of an incipient “revival” of American Judaism during an era of declension. See Jonathan D. Sarna, American Judaism: A History (New Haven, 2004), 267–71.
41. Max Kufeld, “The Jewish Institute of Boro Park,” Jewish Forum (April 1924): 268–69. See also, on the founding of these modern schools, Moses I. Shulman, “The Yeshivath Etz Hayim–Hebrew Institute of Boro Park,” Jewish Education (Fall 1948): 47; Noah Nardi, “A Survey of Jewish Day schools in America,” Jewish Education (September 1944): 22–23; Yeshiva of Flatbush Golden Jubilee Commemorative Volume, 1917–1977 (Brooklyn, 1977), 31, which notes Kufeld’s role in a number of local schools; Jeffrey S. Gurock, ed., Ramaz: School, Community, Scholarship, and Orthodoxy (Hoboken, 1989), 40–82; Seth Farber, An American Orthodox Dreamer: Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik and Boston’s Maimonides School (Hanover, 2004), 46–57.
42. The estimated figure of seventy-seven hundred students—mostly boys enrolled in thirty-five day schools and yeshivas in the United States and Canada—utilized by Schiff, The Jewish Day School in America, 49, runs the educational gamut from Torah Vodaathtype schools to the day school institutions. It is impossible to determine the precise percentages among school-types.
43. For the best analysis of the arrival and progress of those who fled the terrors of Hitlerism, which notes the diversity of their religious identities and affiliations, see Helmreich, Against All Odds: Holocaust Survivors and the Successful Lives They Made in America (New York, 1992). For a study that takes significant note of the impact of the arrival of these highly Orthodox newcomers upon the indigenous community, see Haym Soloveitchik, “Rupture and Rapture: the Transformation of Contemporary Orthodoxy,” Tradition 28.4 (1994): 63–120. For a discussion of a turning point moment in Orthodoxy Judaism’s move away from common cause with other Jewish expression, the 1956 demand from right-wing circles that the Orthodox Union and other Modern Orthodox organizations leave the Synagogue Council of America, which then dealt only with nonreligious issues, see Jack Wertheimer, A People Divided: Judaism in Contemporary America (New York, 1992), 12, 178.
44. For contemporaneous accounts of the so-called Jewish revival in suburbia, see Nathan Glazer, American Judaism (Chicago, 1957), 107–28; Will Herberg, Protestant-Catholic-Jew: An Essay in American Jewish Sociology (Garden City, NY, 1955); and Marshall Sklare, Conservative Judaism: An American Religious Movement (Glencoe, IL, 1955).