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Electronic Theses, Treatises and Dissertations The Graduate School

2007 "The Exodus Is Not yet Accomplished…": Reform Jewish Arguments for the Civil- Rights Movement in the Race Relations Messages, 1954-1970 Jessica Leigh Carr

Follow this and additional works at the FSU Digital Library. For more information, please contact [email protected] THE FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY

COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES

“THE EXODUS IS NOT YET ACCOMPLISHED…”: REFORM JEWISH ARGUMENTS FOR

THE CIVIL-RIGHTS MOVEMENT IN THE RACE RELATIONS SABBATH MESSAGES,

1954-1970

By

JESSICA LEIGH CARR

A Thesis submitted to the Department of in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts

Degree Awarded: Spring Semester 2007

The members of the Committee approve the thesis of Jessica Leigh Carr defended on March 27, 2007.

______John Corrigan Professor Co-Directing Thesis

______Martin Kavka Professor Co-Directing Thesis

______David Levenson Committee Member

Approved:

______John Corrigan, Chair, Department of Religion

The Office of Graduate Studies has verified and approved the above named committee members.

ii

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Abstract ...... iv

INTRODUCTION ...... 1

1. DYNAMICS IN THE HISTORIOGRAPHY OF REFORM ...... 8

2. AMERICANIZATION, CIVIL RELIGION AND ...... 27

3. SUBURBANIZATION, SECURITY AND PARTICULARISM ...... 44

CONCLUSIONS ...... 62

REFERENCES ...... 70

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH ......

iii ABSTRACT

This thesis is a discourse analysis of the Race Relations Sabbath Messages, issued annually by the Central Conference of American , from 1954-1970. Chapter 1, through a historiography of American and related works on American , argues for the need to study denominations of Judaism in terms of and social factors, primarily culture and race. With an understanding of American as one of being in tension with the mainstream society, seeking security in America though not complete assimilation, the function of Reform Jewish theology and interface of theology and social constraints become clear. Using this definition of American Jewish identity, Chapters 2 and 3 then serve as an example of how to treat religious rhetoric in its social context. Chapter 2 characterizes the period from 1954 to 1959 as one of universalism and civil religion due to the discrimination and segregation associated with urbanization. Reform used an inclusive theology to argue for African-American civil rights. Based on the dignity of all individuals, Reform Jews sought to use universalist theology to point to the insignificance of group identity and therefore the need to create legislation that protected whites and blacks equally in order for Americans to establish a just society. Then Chapter 3 argues that, after Jewish integration into suburban neighborhoods and mainstream society, Reform Jews turned to particularism for their self-understanding. The universalism of the 1950’s had allowed them to establish that group identity could not be used for the purpose of discrimination, but the need for Reform Jews to distinguish themselves from their Christian neighbors led them to develop a particularism in which group identity could be used in such a way that the distinct histories of each group offered a unique contribution to American society. and Jews, as well as other minorities, deserved to be integrated into American society because they each had something to offer. In particular, Reform Jews offered a special contribution to America because of their insight into suffering and achieving freedom. Because of their Jewish history, Reform Jews could instruct Americans how to establish the most enlightened society. A theocentric, liturgical theology fostered Reform Jews’ civil-rights arguments in the 1960’s because it gave them special access to the lessons available in Jewish history. This periodization shows that the particularism typically associated with the late 1960’s after the Six-Day War can be located as a gradual development beginning in 1960. American

iv social factors, as well as Jewish concerns, thus influenced Reform Jewish identity, theology and rhetoric. Furthermore, particularism should not be classified as a rejection of effort to integrate African Americans into American society; Reform Jewish particularism was developed in such a way specifically tailored to continue to argue for African-American civil-rights in response to the shifting American culture.

v INTRODUCTION In the 1950’s, the Central Conference of American Rabbis, the clerical body affiliated with the Union of American Hebrew Congregations (now the ), distributed what it termed “Race Relations Sabbath Messages” calling for brotherhood and equality. They espoused universalist values, available not just to Reform Jews but all Americans, encompassing both religious sources and the founding documents and institutions of America, citing the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the president, national legislature, and the Supreme Court as parallel embodiments of the values represented by Biblical Scripture. These Race Relations Sabbath Messages were issued annually by the Committee on Justice and Peace of the Central Conference of American Rabbis until 1970. The event was held on the weekend closest to Presidents’ Day, and the messages were intended to aid congregations in calling attention to the continuing injustices in American race relations. The Race Relations Sabbath Messages are now available in the American Jewish Archives at the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion campus in , Ohio, with the exception of the 1968 message which cannot be located. An analysis of this confined body of documents will provide useful insight into the function of Reform Jewish religious rhetoric to describe public American space and issues, highlighting the gradual changes in Reform Jews’ self-understanding in a pluralist national context. Religious rhetoric was incorporated into the discussion of social objectives – such as integration in housing, jobs and education – to provide motivation and justification for political action. For example, the 1958 message explained why religion was important for the improvement of society. “We cannot offer social security, unemployment insurance, better housing and old-age pensions, and still expect a man, or his family, to reconcile himself to second class citizenship. It is an age of phenomenal advantage, but man is spiritually discontented when he must live by bread alone.” In the committee’s view, no member of society could accept the benefits of inclusion in the American mainstream without wanting those same advantages for all Americans. would keep political discourse in check by ensuring that Americans sought the most inclusive form of society. In other words, religion would reinforce the universal vision of human rights and citizenship expressed in the Constitution and Bill of Rights, providing a means to bring all Americans together and erase the division among groups that led to discrimination.

1 However, in the 1960’s, such universalist rhetoric ceased to be a useful means for Reform Jews to argue for social action and the civil-rights movement. “The Exodus is not yet accomplished…” according to the 1964 message, because all the advantages and opportunities of American society had not been extended to African Americans. Reform Jews conceived of their freedom as linked to all other humans’ freedom, and so the continued discrimination negated the optimism of 1950’s universalism and led Jews to turn to other forms of identity for direction in the civil-rights movement. The Race Relations Sabbath Message for 1969 argued for equality and African-American civil rights through explicitly particularist language, available only to Jews and not other American religious groups, referencing Theodore Herzl, who championed ethnic Jewish identity; , the renowned Jewish philosopher; ; and the State of . The 1970 message articulated the power of Jews as a group to teach Americans how to establish racial harmony and true democratic principles. How did Reform Jews come to view those specifically Jewish entities as legitimate sources of their own religious and civic identity in America, and why did they believe that they had unique insight into how American society should look? During the 1950’s, this Jewish particularism was not present in American Reform Jews’ petitions for African-American equality. The rhetoric drew from American court cases, presidential actions, and Biblical scripture only when it contributed to a universal connection among Protestants, Catholics and Jews. The Race Relations Sabbath Messages sustained an argument for an over-arching ‘American dream’ of equality from 1954 until 1970, but there was a shift from a universalist account of individual rights to a particularism which argued for rights based on the merits and contributions of each varying group. During the 1960’s, African Americans relied on the story of the Exodus to bolster their group unity, wherein Jews became figurative and literal role models for African Americans. Thus Jews were conceived of less as partners in the struggle for rights during the 1960’s, and their unity and power as a group in the Exodus story and in America made Jews a desirable example for African Americans to follow. Jews increasingly accepted this idea, so that universalism became less useful for Jews or African Americans in achieving social equality. The Reform goal of social action remained present in the Race Relations Sabbath Messages, but they incorporated uniquely Jewish sources such as ethnicity and into the Reform vision for American society. By articulating a more particularist identity, Reform Jews continued to show

2 how they fit in American society by highlighting their contributions to society as a model for the success of other minorities. This shift in worldview, while still puzzling, is less surprising given the changes in the Reform Jewish platforms in the mid-twentieth century. The Columbus Platform of 1937 stated, “In Judaism religion and morality blend into an indissoluble unity. … The love of is incomplete without the love of one’s fellowmen. … [Judaism] aims at the elimination of man- made misery and suffering, of poverty and degradation, of tyranny and slavery, of social inequality and prejudice, of ill-will and strife.” 1 With this strong vision of social justice that focused on fixing all the problems of society through national and international means, establishing the State of Israel was a priority only insofar as it contributed to the religious values of Judaism and provided a place of refuge to the oppressed throughout the world. Furthermore, the platform’s assertion that “We affirm the obligation of all Jewry to aid in [Palestine’s] upbuilding as a Jewish homeland by endeavoring to make it not only a haven of refuge but also a center of and spiritual life” 2 defined the people of Israel as and no mention is made of ethnic Jewish identity as privileged.3 The 1937 platform articulated a tentative concept of Jewish nationhood, which was a new introduction to the movement as represented in the 1885 platform. Meyer explains that the split between Zionists and those in staunch opposition within Reform Judaism led to the nearly neutral plank in the 1937 platform regarding Israel. Plans for settlement were not aggressive, and the terms ‘Zionism’ and ‘Zion’ are omitted. Though Meyer states that there was an increasing number of Reform Zionists at this time, too many remained opposed to Zionism for the movement to overthrow the historical Reform Jewish opposition to Jewish , most clearly established in the following plank of the 1885 :4“We consider ourselves no longer a nation, but a religious community, and therefore expect neither a return to Palestine, nor a sacrificial under the sons of , nor the restoration of any of the laws concerning the Jewish state.”5 This statement is an example of Eric Goldstein’s argument that, during the first half of

1 “The Guiding Principles of Reform Judaism,” Columbus, 1937, Central Conference of American Rabbis. Accessed online July 6, 2006. http://data.ccarnet.org/platforms/columbus.html 2 “The Guiding Principles of Reform Judaism,” Columbus, 1937. 3 “The Guiding Principles of Reform Judaism,” Columbus, 1937. 4 Michael Meyer, Response to Modernity: A history of the Reform Movement in Judaism (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1988), 326-30. 5 “Declaration of Principles,” Pittsburgh, 1885, Central Conference of American Rabbis. Accessed online March 8, 2007, at http://ccarnet.org/Articles/index.cfm?id=39&pge_prg_id=3032&pge_id=1656.

3 the twentieth century, Jews used religious group identity to downplay racial barriers and thereby expand the sense of pluralism and equality possible in American society.6 Reform Jews emphasized universalism and the commonalities among Jews and other groups in America, either the white majority or other minorities, as a strategy to distribute power among all Americans. The ethnic component of Jewishness was intentionally obscured so that Jews would appear more like other groups and so that race would seem like an unimportant issue for Americans. By 1976, when the San Francisco Platform was released, Reform Jewish priorities had changed. “A Centenary Perspective” specifically stated that Reform Jews had lost their optimism and did not wish to depend on non-Jewish societies for values, The Holocaust shattered our easy optimism about humanity and its inevitable progress. The State of Israel, through its many accomplishments, raised our sense of the Jews as a people to new heights of aspiration and devotion. The widespread threats to freedom, the problems inherent in the explosion of new knowledge and of ever more powerful technologies, and the spiritual emptiness of much of have taught us to be less dependent on the values of our society and to reassert what remains perennially valid in Judaism’s teaching. 7

As a result, surviving as a distinct group overrode any other concern for Reform Jews. Reform Judaism’s mission was thus to remain distinctly Jewish, i.e. give increased attention to particularist concerns, in order to make the world better, as opposed to struggling universally for social justice. Blurring the line between Jewish culture and American culture was no longer useful for Reform Jews, and their religious and ethnic self-understanding was consciously defined as one of distinction from all other groups. The State of Israel is recognized for its religious and ethnic significance, and making is encouraged to “those who wish to find maximum personal fulfillment in the cause of Zion.” 8 Although Zionism is not strictly mandated by the 1976 platform, the movement had clearly shifted away from a stance of neutrality to endorsement of Zionism. The State of Israel had become the primary contemporary source of Reform Jewish identity and action; this allowed Reform Jews to see the sources of their political and social efforts as separate from all other Americans.

6 Eric L. Goldstein, The Price of Whiteness: Jews, Race and American Identity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 108. 7 “Reform Judaism: A Centenary Perspective,” San Francisco 1976, Central Conference of American Rabbis. Accessed online July 6, 2006. http://data.ccarnet.org/platforms/centenary.html 8 “Reform Judaism: A Centenary Perspective,” San Francisco 1976.

4 The gradual shift of rhetoric used in the Race Relations Sabbath Messages plays a role in the dramatic change between the 1937 and 1976 Reform Platforms. The statements of the 1937 platform align with the sentiments of the 1950’s messages; I begin with 1954, the year that Brown v. Board of Education overthrew segregation as unconstitutional, in order to understand the Reform Jewish universalism that characterized Reform Judaism in the mid-twentieth century. The alleviation of tension between Reform Jews and mainstream society during the 1950’s led to new concerns for the movement. Using Jonathan Sarna’s rubric of assimilation versus Jewish identity for understanding tensions in Jewish history, my language of universalism versus particularism will point toward the ways Reform Jews saw themselves as part of American society though not the same as American society.9 During the 1960’s, Jews did not have to fight as hard to fit into society because of their acceptance into the racial and religious mainstream, so a gradual increase of particularism seeped into the Race Relations Sabbath Messages. This counter-acted a threat of a total assimilation of Jews into American society, an undesirable potential outcome of a successful implementation of universalism. To allow Jews to participate in American society and support social justice without erasing all of the distinctions between Jews and other Americans, Reform Jews began to favor a more particularist notion of group identity. The 1969 and 1970 Race Relations Sabbath Messages and the 1976 platform represent the culmination of Reform particularism, but the overt group identity contained in those documents did not appear out of nowhere. Reform Jews had developed their particularism throughout the 1960’s in response to suburbanization and their full . Although issues of Black Power and African American particularity, as well as the effects of the Six-Day War, added to the polarization of Jewish group identity in comparison to other groups in the late 1960’s, Reform Jews embraced the social constructions and particularity toward which they had already shifted in the 1960’s to negotiate those issues – they did not turn to particularism merely as a result of the events of the late 1960’s. Particularism developed in such a way in the early 1960’s as to articulate the instabilities and failures of universalism for African Americans and Jews; the civil-rights movement was not solving racial discrimination and Jews feared a loss of the group unity that gave them power in American society and the civil-rights movement. The

9 Jonathan Sarna, The American Jewish Experience Second Edition (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1986), xvi-xix. Sarna lays out several rubrics for understanding “ongoing tension” in American Jewish history: “Assimilation- Identity,” “Tradition-Change,” “Unity-Diversity” among Jews, “Majority rule-Minority Rights,” and “Historical Experience-American exceptionalism.” These other tensions also play an important role in the dynamic of Reform Judaism.

5 universalism which marked the 1937 platform and which soared in 1950’s America legitimated Jewish identity only so long as Reform Jews believed it increased social justice. The frustrations of the 1950’s and early 1960’s in the civil-rights movement caused Jews to lose their optimism about the state of American society and the ability of strictly universalist goals to provide an authentic Jewish identity. From the 1950’s through the 1970’s, Reform Jewish authenticity was explicitly tied to African-American freedom. Neither universalism nor particularism was inherently tied to American Reform Jewish identity construction, but Reform Jews utilized whichever viewpoint most successfully led to the practice of social action, the ethical principle upon which Reform Jews had staked their authenticity as Jews. Since universalism stalled in the effort to improve African-American rights in the early 1960’s, it was not a useful means for articulating Reform Jews’ commitment to social action, which was the only source of Jewish identity available. For Reform Jews to live in America knowing that their status in society perpetuated discrimination against African Americans would have made their own identity inauthentic. Therefore Reform Jews recognized broad universalism as no longer useful for their own identity and turned inward for more particular sources of identity that would allow them to more successfully fight for racial equality. The first chapter, on the historiography of Reform Judaism, will explain how historians of American Judaism have come to understand Jewish identity construction from the beginning of the twentieth-century through the 1950’s as an effort to overcome problems of race and through appeals to the universalist aspects of Judaism. The themes of culture, nationality and race provide a way to analyze theology as a changing dynamic that is affected by the historical context in which the theology is articulated. In this way, theology is shown to be different as the social status of Jews changed, although the tension between optimism and social constraint provides a way to envision a common struggle faced by all generations of . The years 1954 to 1959 represent the period of Reform Jewish universalism; the second chapter highlights the sense of optimism that Reform Jews had in their universalist theology for success in America. Reform Judaism latched onto civil religion as a means to away from racial divisions in society and therefore cultivate a greater sense of pluralism and equality. Theology provided a means for Reform Jews to work out their social ideas and construct an identity that allowed them to negotiate the tensions between their religious commitments and

6 their desire to be involved in the American political arena. Through theology, Reform Jews found a way to change themselves in a way that fulfilled their social aspirations. The third chapter on Reform particularism illuminates the problems Reform Jews faced in constructing an optimistic theology. As Reform Jews began to recognize shortcomings associated with the universalist worldview, 1960 signaled the beginning of increased Reform Jewish particularism. Although universalism had led to the incorporation of Jews into the mainstream and their integration into white neighborhoods, it did not achieve the same equality for African Americans. Continued discrimination created the need for an alternative argument for the civil-rights movement. At the same time that this frustration with the failure to attain social progress manifested itself, Reform Jews also began to sense a need to maintain their identity as a group. Although they were pleased with the success of their religious arguments in allowing them to overcome the limits whites had placed on Jews, Reform Jews still wished to see their religion in terms of a distinct entity from . By appealing to more particularist Jewish sources and distinctions among groups, Reform Jews constructed a theology that suited their needs as Americans and Jews. A new argument for the civil-rights movement was articulated in which Reform Judaism had something unique to teach Americans about the need for social justice. This particularist argument overcame the overly idealistic problems of universalism because it recognized social constraints, and it gave Reform Jews a way to see themselves as different from other religious groups. This periodization shows that the particularist ideas expressed after 1969 were not at all unprecedented and that the Reform movement had shifted toward this particularism to maintain their authenticity through social action that most effectively benefited African Americans. Reform Jews turned to particularism in the early 1960’s to articulate the role they saw themselves playing in American society, just as they had turned to universalism in the previous decade. In my conclusion, I will explain how the Race Relations Sabbath Messages show Reform Jews as part of larger American social and political trends. Reform is not merely an isolated group experience, but part of a larger American history. Then I will return to issues in the historiography to show how the messages affect the periodization of American Jewish history, beyond the denomination of Reform Judaism. Again, the Americanness of Reform Jews will be crucial in understanding the function of particularist theology in the 1960’s: it was not a result solely of Jewish concerns such as the Six-Day War. Nor was the shift to particularism a negative reaction to black separatism in

7 America. Reform Jews increasingly used particularist rhetoric in the Race Relations Sabbath Messages in the 1960’s because they believed it would contribute to the most authentic American identity for themselves and the greatest inclusion of African Americans in society.

8 CHAPTER 1 – DYNAMICS IN THE HISTORIOGRAPHY OF REFORM JUDAISM Introduction Although Dana Evan Kaplan is one of the most prolific contemporary writers on American Reform Judaism, his work is a return to methods of scholarship that have been enhanced by recognizing historical developments to analyze the movement. His book American Reform Judaism promotes an understanding of American Reform that presents the movement from a theological perspective, so that his history of the movement overlooks important tensions with social problems and practical application of its ideology.10 Kaplan makes a good contribution to scholarship because he addresses contemporary issues such as the treatment of women, gays and lesbians, and converts, but the emphasis on the theology of the movement presents these issues in a way that ignores how the history of the movement has actually played out. He presents the contemporary situation of the Reform movement as having met a crisis in applying the movement’s liberal theology to these controversial groups, but Reform ideology has been idealistic since the Pittsburgh Platform in 1885, so this difficulty or tension is not new. The history of the movement includes continuous discrepancy between the optimistic rhetoric of Reform doctrine and the ability of the movement to reflect that doctrine in practice, but this perspective of the movement is only possible if the historical methods includes both Reform thought as well as an assessment of how social factors have influenced and constrained the realities of the movement. By focusing on theology as the governing theme in the movement’s history, Kaplan’s work does not fully treat the struggles that have brought Reform to its tenuous contemporary situation; whatever the movement has glossed or omitted, so too Kaplan’s work, and if the movement suggests unequivocal commitment to causes such as equality and social action, Kaplan assumes that this has always been the truth. Reform theology has not always been successful in working out its ideological promises, and in the same way that the movement has had to come to terms with this problem, so has the historiography of the movement. Scholarship prior to Kaplan had shifted toward a historiography that recognizes the social tensions throughout the movement; as a result, his use of a theological narrative blind to these problems, seems an inadequate return to a historiographical method from before the academic study of Reform Judaism. The historiography of American Reform Judaism needs to avoid a

10 Dana Evan Kaplan, American Reform Judaism: An Introduction (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2003).

9 one-sided theological narrative of the movement so that all the facts about the movement come into play, providing the most complicated and therefore historically accurate assessment. Other historians have been unable to give the focused picture of Reform Judaism that Kaplan provides, so the most accurate history of Reform Judaism will come out of a synthesis of Kaplan’s project with other historical methods in American Jewish historiography. As in specific histories of Reform Judaism and more general histories of American Judaism, Reform Jews’ identity construction as Americans is the focus of the scholarship that I am using to frame my narrative of American Reform Jews in the civil-rights movement. The trend in understanding Jewish and socio-political involvement with mainstream America is to examine the ‘tools’ American Jews used to acculturate – though not assimilate. Dash Moore began by looking at the interwar period and understanding how Jews made themselves ‘at home in America,’ but later scholars complicate her narrative by showing that Jews have never been fully at home in America, nor have they necessarily wanted to be. By showing that tradition, modernity and peoplehood were common tools used by all American Jews regardless of ethnicity or time period, Jonathan Sarna and Stuart Svonkin show that a crucial element of American Jewish identity has been to see oneself in tension with society, which challenges the early Reform narrative of the movement as a means to fit in with American religion and culture. This newer development of recognizing tension better envisions the larger story of American Jews as well as the sub-narrative of American Reform Jews. By focusing on the ways American Jews have tried to work out some tensions while maintaining particularism, i. e. creating new tensions, there is a greater sensitivity to the multiple issues that have arisen in American Jewish history. Using this emphasis on tension, it becomes clearer that during the civil-rights movement, Reform Jews worked out the conflict between the universalism that allowed them to argue for African-American rights (and their own rights) with the particularism that sustained American Jews as a group after 1960. Diner and Goldstein incorporated race into the narrative of American Jewish history, emphasizing the cultural nature of Jewish identity and not merely theological importance of Jewishness. However, for all of these later historians, Reform Judaism cannot be written as a separate chapter in American Jewish history. It is occasionally revisited as the country and people change throughout history, but the ability to understand the trajectory Reform Jewish history as a movement must be revisited after these developments in the broader American Jewish historiography. An analysis of the significance of

10 theology in terms of the expanded sense of the social factors affecting it, especially including race, will enhance the understanding of Jewish culture, as the broadening of culture has helped explain theological shifts.

Enlightenment Ideas in Reform Judaism The theological historiography of American Reform Judaism emphasized the idea that Reform Jews fit in perfectly with modern society and its values. In 1922, Samuel Cohon, a Russian-American Reform in Chicago who was also involved with the construction of the 1937 Columbus Platform, argued that the mission of Reform Judaism was different from pre- modern Judaism because a religious messiah no longer made sense in modernity.11 Beginning with Jews in Europe, Cohon’s history posited that after emancipation Jews did not need to be rescued by a messiah because they were no longer outcasts from society.12 By removing this out-dated hope for a messiah from Judaism and replacing it with spiritual and ethical priorities, Reform Jews saw themselves as creating an ideal theological system for modernity. Sylvan Schwartzman, a rabbi and professor at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in Cincinnati, described his vision of how Reform Judaism had successfully adjusted to modernity in 1955, “That the Reform movement has been so productive is not accidental….Reform had to pioneer in creating that form of Judaism which would be in harmony with the facts of freedom and provide the spiritual means – theological, ceremonial, educational, and organizational – for the enhancement of the Jewish religion in the modern world.”13 Reform made sense for Cohon because it rejected the limits that would prevent Jews from accepting the outreach of mainstream society. If Jews and non-Jews partook of that enlightened unity of society, then the peace of the messianic vision would come on its own without a intervention. Only through embracing unity as the desired goal of ethics and religion could Judaism successfully contribute to a more enlightened understanding of the world. Schwartzman made the same point: Now that Jews were well on the way toward emancipation, they no longer considered themselves exiles and felt these to be anachronistic. Modern Jews, moreover, found it difficult to believe that the appearance of any one individual, even a Messiah,

11 For more on Cohon’s theology, see Dana Evan Kaplan, “Reform Jewish Theology and the Sociology of Liberal Religion in America: The Platforms as Response to the Perception of Socioreligious Crisis,” Modern Judaism 20 (2000), 60-77; Meyer, “Samuel S. Cohon: Reformer of Reform Judaism,” Judaism 15:3 (1966), 319-28. 12 Samuel Cohon, “The Mission of Reform Judaism,” The Journal of Religion 2:1(January 1922), 27-43. 13 Sylvan Schwartzman, Reform Judaism in the Making (New York: The Union of American Hebrew Congregations, 1955), 7.

11 could convert all mankind to moral living or restore the dead to life. Rather, they saw the hope of the future in terms of a in which humanity would become spiritually regenerated and every individual live a righteous life. Then, would the world enjoy everlasting peace, prosperity, and happiness.14

Schwartzman’s account of early Reform argued that the contradiction between practice (prayers and that no longer made sense to some Jews in modernity) and theology led to the need for the Reform movement. His account of Reform’s appeal is centered on the rationality of Reform Jews in thinking out the implications of their theology and translating this into new forms of practice. Due to this rationality, the supernatural became less important and human agency replaced it as the ultimate source of progress in the world. Schwartzman depicted Reform Jews as intentionally taking on the principles of modernity in their religious worldview, but his history is invested in the claim that this approach was the only way for Jews to survive in modernity. Although had sustained Jews during the medieval period of ghettoization, he did not see how it could cultivate national citizens in the context of freedom.15 Rationalism and human agency were established in early histories as important themes in American Reform Judaism, which foreshadowed the significance of the United States in the definition and longevity of American Reform Judaism. An enlightened society became the essential goal of Reform Judaism in Europe and America. The mission of Reform Judaism, rooted in rationalism, is for humans through their own actions to create the ideal world intended by God. The theological theme of progress allowed Reform historians to incorporate their argument for universalism and democracy as the most important values of Jewish and American culture. Schwartzman presented the growing movement of Reform Judaism as the future of American Judaism. Although he recognized the roots of Reform in emancipated Europe, Schwartzman argued that America was the best environment for the force behind Reform to fully expand. The newness and freedom of America allowed Reform to do this as European culture could not. He saw Reform as being similar to the ; as a revolution, the movement could challenge the position of the past.16 Reformers had to work out the tension between updating Jewish religion so that it was relevant in contemporary society and not taking it so far that Reform lost its essential nature as a religious

14 Schwartzman, 59-60. 15 Schwartzman, 19. 16 Schwartzman, 53-4.

12 devotion. It could not become a secular movement, but it had to find a way to fit in with the ideas of society. Popular Embrace of Modernity Reinforcing Schwartzman’s argument that Reform Judaism would be the future of Judaism in America due to the movement’s countenance of change, Philipson’s 1931 history of The Reform Movements in Judaism discussed the importance of the reforming congregation in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1824. Philipson, one of the first four graduates from Hebrew Union College in 1883 and later rabbi at Congregation in Cincinnati and instructor at Hebrew Union College, saw the desire for change from within a congregation, beginning with Charleston, as what was most important about American Reform Judaism, which he connected to similar impulses in Germany. It was not an elite movement, but the opposite. Members of the congregation were dissatisfied with the movement and came together to reject those forms of worship that did not best suit them.17 The congregation therefore embraced the ideas of change and social progress championed by Reform historians as the driving forces of the movement, but the reforming congregation also represented a democratization of Judaism in America. Jews would not tolerate living under laws that did not please them nor would they recite prayers that they did not perceive to be intelligent and acceptable in a modern worldview. Placing a premium value on suiting the institution to the ideas of the people, the Reform movement adopted the American culture to reshape the traditions of Judaism. Philipson saw this as a natural step for Reform Jews to take and predicted that liberal Judaism would continue to rise in popularity and dominance in America.18 The democratization of Reform Judaism is Philipson’s prime example of how the movement exemplified social progress in history. Theological historians of Reform made a similar effort – by proving that social progress was evident in each generation, they believed they could demonstrate the authenticity of the movement. The concept of America was integral in Reform Judaism then because its democratic ideals were taken up by Jewish congregants, and in Response to Modernity (1988), Michael Meyer, professor of Jewish history at Hebrew Union College with a specialization in German- Jewish history, also viewed America as pragmatically critical to the longevity of Reform

17 , The Reform Movement in Judaism (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1931), 331. 18 Philipson, 381.

13 Judaism. Congregations such as the one in Charleston were evidence of the popular support of the Reform movement. While institutional organization was important to the success of the movement, underlying that success was a need not only for elites to establish institutions and theology but popular support for the movement. There was not necessarily less effort for institutionalization in England, France or even Germany than in America, but there was not enough popular support.19 The situation in America was essentially the opposite: there was such widespread popular support that institutionalization and promulgation of Reform came easily when an elite effort was made to organize the movement in America. This is seen in Mayer Wise’s (1819-1900) willingness to compromise on his ideas of theology for the sake of forming the broadest organization possible. Sefton Temkin’s 1998 biography of Wise showed that his greatest contribution to Reform Judaism was not the reforming impetus or particular ideology, since plenty of people were reforming before him and at the same time, and he was willing to change his mind to suit the majority. It was not that theology was unimportant to Wise, he knew it was essential to the movement, but he was willing to let popular theology take over to avoid a stalemate in institutionalization. His persistence in establishing a united institution of American Reform Judaism in order for it to survive as a new denomination rather than a small movement set America apart from German Reform because of the support he was able to gain through compromise while founding the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, the Central Conference of American Rabbis, and the Hebrew Union College.20 The impact of the people on the continued to be an important theme in Leon Jick’s history of later generations of Reform Judaism. Jick was ordained by Hebrew Union College and received his doctorate from Columbia University; he spent time as a rabbi in Boston and Mt. Vernon, NY, before becoming professor of American at , and he was personally involved with the civil-rights movement. In 1987, Jick argued that the synagogue went from being a place where American Reform Jews could return to a familiar European culture and work out their new identity to being a place where they felt secure in their American status. Through the metamorphosis of the synagogue, American Reform Jews went from seeing themselves as marginal immigrants to members of the mainstream. According to Jick, resolving issues and making changes in the synagogue gave way to working out all

19 Meyer, Response to Modernity, 224. 20 Sefton Temkin, Creating American Reform Judaism: The Life and Times of (London: The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 1998).

14 aspects of identity; through the architecture, book, service and activities of the synagogue, Reform Jews defined who they were and had a location, both in space and mentality, from which to interact with other Americans. The history of American Reform Judaism for Jick should be understood as the ways Reform Jews made themselves a base from which they operated in all parts of their lives. Defining Reform Jewish identity was done as much against other Jews as it was against other Americans, so the synagogue, as the symbol of American Reform Judaism, served as the central source of identity in every aspect of identity, not just religion. Jick’s use of the synagogue offered a way to see the interplay of Reform Jewish civil and religious identity.21 In contrast to these later historical analyses of American Reform Judaism, Schwartzman’s ideas about the task of early Reformers seem to have been influenced by his position in the 1950’s, when Reform Jews were beginning to argue that Classical Reform Judaism had gone too far in removing Jewish tradition from Reform theology. Earlier Reformers were focused on a move entirely toward modernity, but Schwartzman and his contemporaries were interested in combining the security of Jews in modernity with the maintenance of a sense of Jewish particularism. Schwartzman read Jewish arguments for their citizenship in society as a sign of their actual inclusion in society, an inaccurate manipulation of Reform history. By 1955, Jews were in a more socially secure position so that Cohon could be concerned about holding onto a Jewish identity that distinguished Jews from mainstream culture, but Reform Jews in the nineteenth century did not think in those terms. The struggle for citizenship and would have given sole emphasis to progress and Reform’s place in a post-Enlightenment society in a way that Schwartzman’s history does not represent. Deborah Dash Moore’s historical view of cultural Judaism in from 1920- 1940 offered a good corrective to Schwartzman. Moore looked at the interwar period (approximately 1920-1940) in her 1981 book At Home in America: Second Generation New York Jews.22 Although her work was not directed toward Reform Jews, by focusing on this time frame and geographic area, Moore assumed a detailed critical investigation of New York Jews would say something representative about how Jews throughout America constructed their identity. The second generation had the task of constructing a new Jewish identity that would

21 Leon Jick, “The Reform Synagogue,” , ed., The American Synagogue: A Sanctuary Transformed (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 85-110. 22 Deborah Dash Moore, At Home in America: Second Generation New York Jews (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981).

15 preserve some aspects of the older European culture while allowing Jews to embrace their desires to ‘fit in’ in America, which early Reform Jews were clearly attempting to do in this historiography. To accomplish this task of finding a place in American society, Moore argued that the second generation relied upon urban culture and acculturation.23 The city, through its geography and civil interactions, shaped the Jewish identity constructed during this time period, so that even if certain Jews had religious affiliations, their religious identity was not formed around Jewish particularity but a larger sense of New York (or American) community. Moore paid attention to Jewish institutions, such as , social clubs, schools, philanthropic associations, and unions, but the synagogues and Jewish centers were studied for their contribution to Jewish culture rather than any kind of theological doctrine which they espoused. Her work was a study of the popular culture as an insight into Jewish identity, suggesting that it is this more public realm of action that matters the most for understanding American Jews rather than the institutional realm. Institutions and private affairs of the Jewish community in this time period could only be understood insofar as they related back to the larger culture according to Moore, which points to the way that theology could be incorporated into her picture of early twentieth century Judaism. She intentionally studied all Jewish groups in New York, but using her conclusions about the trends in Jewish culture during the time period as a guide for understanding theology is useful. By asking how Reform theology fit into the larger context of American Jewish identity, Moore made the interface between religion and culture clearer. Early twentieth-century Reform Jews constructed a theology that endorsed their idea of a universal community, but later Reform Jews such as Schwartzman showed impulses toward a different theology that reflected more particularity. Theology can therefore be integrated into a larger historical study of Judaism in America and the historical social factors of each time period can be shown as having decisive effects on theology. This method would prevent a history of Reform Judaism from being a construction of new theological ideas and would provide a better assessment of how those ideas developed and enabled Jews to participate in American society.

Religion and Nationality as Culture

23 Moore, 11.

16 As the twentieth century progressed, Schwartzman also saw American Reform Judaism changing, continuing the revolution. It is this constant change that he viewed as characteristic of the movement and as the factor that would contribute to Reform’s ongoing success. Each new generation had a say in the principles of Reform Judaism, hence the necessity for the Columbus Platform in 1937 to update the Pittsburgh Platform of 1885 to the needs of contemporary Jews. “World and American Jewish life had changed substantially in the half-century since 1885. Reform was not facing new conditions.”24 American Jewish demographics had changed as new immigrants flowed in from Eastern Europe, antisemitism was on the rise, Zionism had become a more important element of Reform identity, and the overwhelming rationalism had become an unappealing means for spiritual fulfillment and a sense of community.25 His idea of constant change is important for conceiving American Reform Judaism as the future and not just the present because it will prevent the movement from ever becoming obsolete and irrelevant to American Jews. The autonomy of each generation drives the movement forward, making Reform not only compatible with modernity but with any possible social environment. David Philipson depicted Reform Judaism as being located in a long tradition of the ability of Judaism to adapt to new circumstances and reinterpret sacred texts.26 Similarly, Cronbach, a professor at Hebrew Union College, traced reform in Judaism back to the “Deuteronomic Reformation” in Biblical Scripture through the “Hasidic Reformation” shortly before the rise of Reform Judaism in Europe and America in his 1963 work Reform Movements in Judaism.27 In this way, Reform is not seen as so different from other historical versions of Judaism, only perhaps more liberal or enlightened. This fit Reform Judaism into both America and Judaism: the movement was important in America because of its embrace of modern enlightened ideals, but it also fit into Judaism for its ability to remain a relevant culture and worldview for the Jewish people as they adapted to new situations. Cronbach, Schwartzman and Philipson try to show that America is special for Reform Jews because it allows them to fulfill their authentic identity through liberal religion, and their arguments imply that, to be good citizens, Reform Jews must continue to embrace such quintessential American values as freedom and democracy.

24 Schwartzman, 126. 25 Schwartzman, 126-33. 26 Philipson, 1-38. 27 Abraham Cronbach, Reform Movements in Judaism (New York: Bookman Associates, 1963).

17 By placing this impulse to make Judaism American at the center of his 1976 narrative of American Judaism and the development of Reform Judaism, Joseph Blau, a professor of religion at Columbia University, demonstrated that Reform Jews were not alone in that impulse and thereby removed the tendency to view Reform Judaism as special among Jewish identities in America. Blau pointed out that Judaism was always referred to in its geographical context, such as American Judaism or German Judaism. The fact that Judaism was so consistently marked in this way implicated the necessary effect of a region on Judaism; so rather than evaluating the Jewishness of American Judaism, his approach was to evaluate the Americanness.28 Reform was thus seen as part of a scheme of making Judaism American. Even if it was affected by European origins or new immigrations, Blau paid special attention to the way Reform Judaism worked itself out as an explicitly American institution. Taking the framework of Americanization, Howard Sachar used immigration patterns and acculturation to conceptualize American Jewish history, so that Reform Judaism was pictured as part of that effort, perhaps the most explicit but certainly not the lone effort to fuse Judaism with American identity.29 As Blau had indicated, whether secular or religious, Orthodox or Reform, or somewhere in between, Jewish ideology did not make sense for American Jews unless it was at least as American as it was Jewish, so early twentieth-century Reform Jews can be understood to have embraced and molded change and social justice in ways that allowed them to perform their Americanness because their Jewishness was perceived as automatic. This method of evaluating Judaism according to time and place indicates the high level of change and adaptation that should be written into the history of Judaism. Blau and Sachar saw elements of change in all forms of Judaism, so that their historical analysis approached the subject with less bias toward any particular tradition. It is an effort to show that Judaism in modernity is characterized by the very struggle with modernity, so that Reform and Orthodoxy were wrestling with the same problems, although they may have come up with very different answers. Although his own attention to social factors is not as exhaustive as it could be, Schwartzman’s use of a division of Reform Judaism into generations is extremely significant because it forces historians to evaluate the changing social situation of each generation of American Reform Jews. By pointing toward the differences in concerns among different

28 Joseph Blau, Judaism in America, from curiosity to third (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1976), 7. 29 Howard M. Sachar, A History of the Jews in America (New York: Vintage Books, 1992).

18 generations and platforms, Schwartzman’s approach shows the need to evaluate how the changing situation of Jews in American society, from demographics to economic as well as other historical changes nationally and internationally, affected their theological arguments and their vision for Reform Judaism in America. If Reform Jews were concerned with different issues in 1885 than 1937, and if the 1937 platform signaled social progress, then Reform Jews in each time period would not have understood themselves or their place in American society in the same way either. Therefore a close study of each generation and the changes from one generation to the next are important for the purpose of understanding the changes that took place in Reform theology or for giving an accurate historical account of the process of Reform Jewish Americanization and modernization. An understanding of each generation’s culture depends on the historical moment of the generation, so by placing theology under the category of culture, it becomes clear that theology is as dynamic as culture and depends on the changing historical moment as well. American Reform Jews did not continually turn to the same methods to create a space for themselves in American society, but their arguments and practices changed as their social situation changed. Moore’s study of New York Jews showed the ways interwar Jews made themselves ‘at home in America,’ but Eli Lederhendler’s study of third-generation New York Jews from 1950-1970 demonstrated how the next generation of Jews saw themselves in America. Lederhendler argued that the phenomenon of third-generation New York Jews moving out of the city, preferring the securities of suburban life, brought issues of contradictions and instabilities to the surface that had been present all along in city life. Thus, urbanization, which Moore portrayed as the basis of Jewish identity in America, had only appeared to be the source of social stability – Jews could move out of New York City as easily as they had ever moved out of any city in favor of a more attractive living situation or source of stability.30 While he upheld Moore’s method of drawing conclusions from a limited area and time to say something about the broader narrative of Judaism, Lederhendler also showed that such comparisons should be made more tentatively, recognizing more explicitly that there are important differences between, for example, the city and the nation. Furthermore, Lederhendler argued that the tools for identity construction of one generation should not be assumed to be the same as the next, and that by

30 Eli Lederhendler, New York Jews and the Decline of Urban Ethnicity, 1950-1970 (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2001), 34-5.

19 seeking out the differences, historians can actually say more about the shifts in American and American Jewish history. Moore and Lederhendler’s generational studies and Schwartzman’s idea that Reform Judaism’s platforms represented shifts inside the movement point toward the way that the platforms can be used as a framework of how theology changed in American Reform Judaism on a similar pattern as other Jewish thought in America. By taking the generational model and mapping it onto a study of Reform theology, the presence of a theology directed toward the needs of each generation can be ascertained. The following chapters on the 1950’s Race Relations Sabbath Messages will reflect the ideas and needs of one generation of Reform Jews, and the 1960’s messages will exhibit a shift in Reform theology connected to the shifting Reform Jewish culture and status in American society.

Optimism and Constraint Riv-Ellen Prell’s observations about gender roles and feminism in American Reform Judaism can serve as a model for understanding the ways the movement has worked out the tension between its optimistic ideology and the constraints of society.31 In attempting to rid Judaism of its biased laws toward women, Prell argued that Reform Judaism actually made women invisible by taking away those laws that treated them specifically as women. Since the early movement was not yet ready to institute laws that gave women equality, such as admitting them to seminary or counting them in the , they disappeared from any kind of role in the movement. In the focus on logic and ethics, Reformers had to do away with rituals regarding women, but Prell showed that this was an effect and not a cause of Reform ideology, so it took much longer for Reform Judaism to work out a more acceptable treatment and inclusion of women in the movement. Using Prell’s model, emphasis should be placed on the way the movement reconciled the tension between its optimistic ideas of how the most forward-thinking ethical religion should look, as represented by the universalism of the 1950’s Race Relations Sabbath Messages, and how the movement applied and worked out the instabilities of such optimism, such as in the 1960’s messages. Although each generation of American Reform Jews may have constructed a different identity and worldview, the tension between optimism and constraint remained a constant dynamic throughout the generations.

31 Riv-Ellen Prell, “The Vision of Women in Classical Reform Judaism,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 50:4 (December 1982), 575-89.

20 Although Freehof, an extremely influential Reform rabbi best known for his halakhic interpretations in Reform ,32 agreed in 1955 with other historians of Reform Judaism that the integration of into the movement had allowed it to flourish in America, like Schwartzman, Freehof was concerned about the possibility of too much change or freedom undermining the movement. Freehof pointed to controversy as one of the serious problems in the development of American Reform Judaism, and he highlighted the differences between Reform and laity and the importance of both in making the movement successful in the context of religious freedom in America.33 He suggested that the antagonization of Reform and Orthodox Jews points to a polarization that occurred in early Reform Judaism that was bound to swing back toward the center as the movement progressed. Additionally, Freehof argues that while lay Reform Jews wanted a religion that made sense in their modern lives and thereby were focused on practice, the clergy realized the need to reevaluate the theology of Judaism in order for Reform to succeed as an authentic religious movement. A deeper theology in combination with a form of practice that pleased the congregation is what led to the institutionalization of American Reform Judaism according to Freehof, so without it the movement could not be long- lasting and complete. By investing their arguments in the theology of Reform, Freehof and Schwartzman could not make accurate judgments about the ways Reform Jews fit in with other Americans and other Jews. Presenting new forms of theology, Schwartzman and Freehof’s work ignored the non- theological elements that would have expanded the new historical ideas at which they hinted in their work. Blau’s focus on Americanization and Sachar’s method of dividing American history into immigration patterns were moves to incorporate other elements and shift away from privileging Reform Judaism. However, in 2004 Jonathan Sarna argued that even the immigration-wave model was not complicated enough to really get to the bottom of the complexity of American Jewish history; he envisioned the history as more fluid and dynamic. German and Eastern European Jews as well as Reform, Conservative and Orthodox Jews all struggled to reconcile what it meant to be Jewish and American. By taking away the divisions historians had imposed on Jewish history, by either denomination or immigration, Sarna pointed to the similar ways that diverse Jews reflected on

32 For more on Freehof, see Meyer, Response to Modernity, 321-5. 33 , “Reform Judaism in America,” The Jewish Quarterly Review New Series, 45:4 (April 1955), 350-62.

21 and handled their identity; Reform Jews took part of the larger American Jewish experience as they attempted to work out the contradictions between optimism and constraint. Orthodox Jews were typically identified with tradition, Reform Jews with modernity and organizations such as B’nai B’rith with peoplehood. But Sarna’s model described all Jews using all of these ideas, despite the fact that they emphasize different values at different times, which produced their varying narratives within American history.34 Placing B’nai B’rith and other organizations in central places in the quest to understand American Jewish history led to the acknowledgement that all Jews were drawing from tradition, modernity, and particularity to shape their identity, regardless of religious affiliation. Stuart Svonkin’s Jews Against Prejudice: American Jews and the Fight for Civil exclusively examined organizations during the 1940’s and 1950’s. Getting away from denominations and looking at the American Jewish Committee, the Anti- Defamation League, and the , Svonkin concluded that even as American Jews sought acceptance by the American mainstream, they were uncomfortable with the idea of completely merging with the mainstream.35 This effort to maintain Jewishness at the same time as proving themselves to be good American citizens thus becomes a tension that persists throughout American Jewish history. Sarna and Svonkin’s perception of tension that came primarily out of the study of Jewish organizations can be transferred onto denominations to reorient the understanding of each denomination’s dynamic history in America. Reform Judaism constitutes a distinct branch of that history, but it shares this common tension with the larger group of American Jews. Capitalizing on the benefits of viewing Jewish history through organizations instead of denominations, Marc Dollinger sought to understand why later generations of Jews (framed by the years 1933 to 1975), unlike other American minorities, were disproportionately represented in liberal politics even after their acculturation. He argued that Jews were not actually as consistently liberal as they have been stereotyped or assumed to be in scholarship, and that furthermore the changing ideas of what liberalism is affected how Jews participated in American politics and created a space for themselves in American society. Dollinger attempted to combine a perspective of elite and common Jews by focusing on organizations such as the American Jewish Committee, the American Jewish Congress, the Anti-Defamation League, the Jewish

34 Jonathan D. Sarna, American Judaism: A History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 76-90. 35Stuart Svonkin, Jews Against Prejudice: American Jews and the Fight for Civil Liberties (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 8.

22 Community Relations Councils, the American Jewish Conference and the three branches of religious Judaism. Although Dollinger questionably achieved his goal of avoiding an elite history because of the institutional nature of his study, he showed that trends across Jewish groups were observable.36 Michael Staub argued that this kind of intellectual and cultural history of American Jews highlighted the ways different groups of Jews have disputed the definition of authentic Jewish identity.37 By placing such a range of Jewish groups in one narrative along with celebrated incidents, publications and individual Jews, Staub supported the idea that multiple meanings of liberalism existed in America, and that there has not been a unified definition of Jewishness nor a united American-Jewish political front. Staub and Dollinger’s work was slightly unstructured due to jumping around within organizations and various types of Jewish institutions, but they tried to indicate that Jewish politics mirrored the messiness of their scholarship. An account of American Jewish history that does not recognize the tension between gaining security in America and sustaining group identity does not realistically portray that history. Staub argued that even though some scholars see American politics and Enlightenment ideals as the true influence on Jewish liberalism (whatever that may be), it is the fact that American Jews saw their values as rooted in their religion that means both the religious and cultural identity of Jews must be viewed together to create a synthetic picture of Jewish self- understanding and status in America.

The Role of Race in Jewish Identity The 1960’s saw a significant rise in particularist articulations of Reform Jewish identity, which Reform historians tried to reconcile with the previously universalist theology and worldview that had characterized Reform Judaism. In American Judaism, published in 1971, John Hardon wanted to search the varying Jewish religious movements in America for something that connected them all together in some transcendent way, though his work was motivated out of a desire not to let ethnicity be the only way to understand Jews in America. He admitted that ethnicity was one way to view Jews, but he wanted to move beyond the category of peoplehood in his conceptualization of American Jews. While recognizing that there was a

36 Marc Dollinger, Quest for Inclusion: Jews and Liberalism in Modern America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000). 37 Michael Staub, Torn at the Roots: The Crisis of Jewish Liberalism in Postwar America (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 5.

23 Jewish culture and ethnicity, he wanted to emphasize the religiosity of Jewish history. He viewed Reform Judaism as focused on ethical action but still part of the Jewish tradition because it retained its basis in that tradition even while sacrificing other parts of it. 38 His desire to return Jewish attention to its religious definition followed the trend of Jews in America who were concerned that Judaism could lose its particularity in America and become too assimilated into the mainstream. The tendency of historians such as Hardon to minimize the importance of race and ethnicity in American Jewish history grossly distorts the American Jewish experience and the methods of acculturation. Michael Alexander observes that Sarna’s paradigm of history allowed him “to describe American religion as something occurring within a broader social context of economy, culture, politics and even psychology.”39 However, the issue of race was still not incorporated into Sarna’s narrative, leaving these earlier problems of unresolved. Taking direction from American studies rather than American religious history, Hasia Diner, in her 2004 book The Jews of The United States, 1654-2000, pointed out how important race was for Jews in negotiating their American identity.40 The institutionalization of religious as well as secular Jewish organizations exhibited the desire for order among American Jews as a group, but Jews intentionally tried to construct those organizations around an identity that made them appear more like their white neighbors.41 The story of Reform Judaism is woven into the larger story of how all American Jews struggled to work out the ways they fit in with American society. The Jewish women and men of America tested the boundaries of Judaism as they understood it, searching for ways to render the traditional system acceptable to their American sensibilities. In matters of religious practice, American Jews looked less often either to canonical works or to authoritative leaders. Rather they fashioned their religious lives in their own image.42

Diner emphasized the ways that Jewish theology was molded to suit the ways Jews saw themselves fitting into American society. This reiterated the earlier idea in Reform historiography that it was popular culture, the way the masses performed their religiosity, that

38 John A. Hardon, American Judaism (Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1971). 39 Michael Alexander, “The Meaning of American Jewish History,” Jewish Quarterly Review 96:3 (Summer 2006), 424. 40 Alexander, 424. 41 Hasia Diner, The Jews of the United States, 1654-2000 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006). 42 Diner, 2.

24 directed the history of Judaism, and not an elite conception of theology. For her, Jewish theology should be primarily understood through the constraints placed on Jews by non-Jewish society, either in the ways Jews were forced to understand themselves in terms of race or in the physical resources they had for performing rituals. Diner argued that “much of what they did reflected the circumstances in which they found themselves and not deep ideological speculation.”43 However, her attention to culture subjugated the importance of theology. Like Diner, in 2006 Eric Goldstein argued that Jews ‘whitened’ their culture during the early twentieth century as a means to gain social stability.44 Goldstein stated that because the issue of race had played such a prominent role in American history, American Jewish history could not be an exception to the rule of understanding the role of race in identity. In the 1960’s, African Americans saw Jews as white, which did not seem to have been a mistaken identity, so this phenomenon of grouping Jews with other whites had to be analyzed to explain African Americans’ perception of Jews, and Jews’ identity according to themselves and other whites Americans. As Diner had also argued, Jews were not white when the twentieth-century began. They were the target of racist jokes, and whites were uncertain as to how Jews fit into American society. The first quarter of the twentieth century saw a rise in whites questioning the potentially harmful effects of Jews on American society, so that Jews took on an unclear status where they did not appear to fit in with either blacks or whites in the American social structure,. This “mix of identification and repulsion” with Jews undid the social structure that had provided clear categories and social stability for white Americans, so Jews had to find ways to deal with the problems their existence in America created.45 They made themselves appear as unthreatening as possible to white Americans, but at the same time tried to push American politics out of the racial classification that had divided blacks and whites for so long. According to Goldstein, “American Jews often relied on diversionary tactics. By trying to change the topic from race to religion, they aimed to protect their status as white Americans without having to directly deny their cherished ‘racial affinities.’”46 As Jews dealt with the issue of ‘peoplehood’ within their own theology, this idea was affected by Jews’ political and social efforts in America, so that Jews’ racial conceptions of themselves and others are essential to explaining the development of

43 Diner, 132. 44 Goldstein, 189. 45 Goldstein, 41. 46 Goldstein, 108.

25 Jewish theology throughout the twentieth century. For the first half of the twentieth century, Jews shaped their theology around universalist ideas to create an image of Judaism that would not offend other Americans and would offer Jews stability in American society.

Conclusion In his conception of Reform Jewish history, Michael Meyer stated that “the Reform movement was not an internal Jewish development. It came into existence out of confrontations with a changed political and cultural environment. Only after it began to elaborate its response to the new status of Jewry and attempt to reconcile the Jewish heritage with shifting religious sensibilities and values internalized from the modern world did the Reform movement set out to legitimate its novelty in terms of venerated tradition.”47 Issues of Zionism, connected to race and national identity through the conception of peoplehood, were not merely theological problems for Reform Jews in America, but they were also important obstacles for Reform Jews to overcome in establishing their Americanness and negotiating their national identity. Per Meyer, the issue of American citizenship had primary concern for Reform Jews before theology. Statements about Zionism remained vague in Reform theology through the middle of the twentieth century in order to avoid the potential conflicts Jews perceived between their Jewish identity and American identity.48 However, the use of Scripture in the Race Relations Sabbath Messages will show that although Zionism and particularity were not present in universalist Reform identity, Reform Jews still constructed a theology to support their worldview. The theology made use of the parts of Jewish tradition that focused on universalism in the 1950’s, so the 1960’s were a shift in emphasis in theology and not the first appearance of theology. By incorporating African Americans into the story of Jewish political and social interaction in America, Eric Sundquist showed how Zionism and Jewish identity cannot be understood without also analyzing African-American politics.49 Relying on a discourse analysis of a variety of forms of African-American and Jewish rhetoric since 1945, Sundquist looked at the ways African Americans and Jews imagined each other and how the American majority viewed the two groups, separately and in relation to each other. He concluded that especially in

47 Meyer, Response to Modernity, 9. 48 Meyer, Response to Modernity, 326. 49 Eric Sundquist, Strangers in the Land: Blacks, Jews, Post-Holocaust America (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Press, 2005).

26 their conceptions of “Holocaust” and “Exodus” that African Americans and Jews constructed identities that seemingly overlapped, but the disputed uses of these terms inevitably could not hold the two groups in alliance. The two groups had many similar experiences in American society, but their disagreement in how they should envision these terms and therefore each meant they could never come to a social or political consensus. Taking the shifts in the historiography of Reform Judaism in the last thirty-give years into account shows that the rise in Zionism in 1960’s and 1970’s Reform Judaism has to be viewed in its social racial significance and in its theological context, which will incorporate themes from Dana Evan Kaplan’s work but link them to broader issues of Jewish culture and the interplay between Reform Judaism and the rest of society. Jews struggled with the issue within their own traditions as well as in their interactions with American society. The following chapters on the Race Relations Sabbath Messages will show how Reform Jews worked out their identity through theology, which empowered them to negotiate their place in American culture. The dynamic of Jewish experience played out in theology simultaneously with the quotidian social struggles of American Jews. By looking at the ways Jews deemphasized the importance of race in society in the 1950’s theology and then embraced Zionism and particularity in 1960’s theology, we can see how Reform Jews negotiated the idea of their own peoplehood and heritage with their desire to also be a part of American society.

27 CHAPTER 2 – AMERICANIZATION, CIVIL RELIGION AND UNIVERSALISM Introduction An inclusive conception of , Catholicism, and Judaism as American civil religion characterized the Reform Jewish argument for equality during the 1950’s. Robert Bellah argued that even with the separation of church and state, Americans are not prevented from making appeals to religion in the political realm. Bellah suggested that through these appeals, Americans make authentic statements about public politics as well as their personal religious commitments even if overt references to particularist doctrine are not possible, This public religious dimension is expressed in a set of beliefs, symbols, and rituals that I am calling American civil religion. The inauguration of a president is an important ceremonial event in this religion. It reaffirms, among other things, the religious legitimation of the highest political authority.1

While there is no official religious institution endorsed by the American government, Bellah argued that vague statements connecting God and American politics show that the majority of Americans still connect the authority and purpose of the government to their individual religious commitments. By participating in this national civil religion, Americans find a means to identify themselves as part of a unified public group while preserving their differences in their private identities. In contrast, Will Herberg was critical of civil religion as theologically shallow; he did not perceive it to be an authentic expression of any deep personal religious commitment. Although Americans in the 1950’s said they believed in God, prayer, afterlife, religious institutions and clergy, and the , Herberg countered that “these indications are after all relatively superficial; they tell us about what Americans say (and no doubt believe) about themselves and their religious views; they do not tell us what in actuality these religious views are..”2 Herberg saw Americans manipulating religious rhetoric for the purpose of performing national unity. Where Bellah would have argued that this was an authentic religious exercise, Herberg argued that the vagueness of public religious statements extends into particular religious institutions as well, and the sophisticated theology necessary for maintaining the identities of the different

1 Robert Bellah, “Civil Religion in America,” Dædalus, Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 96:1 (Winter 1967), 1-21. Reprinted at http://hirr.hartsem.edu/Bellah/articles_5.htm Accessed online February 21, 2007. 2 Will Herberg, Protestant – Catholic – : An Essay in American Religious Sociology (Garden City: Anchor Books, 1955), 72.

28 religious traditions was never developed. All believed in , and Herberg suggested that beyond this basic of in God, religion had little to say about the morals and values of Americans. Instead, secularization had led to one over-arching “American way of life.”3 Herberg was not at all saying that Americans were no longer religious. He chose the phrase “way of life” specifically because he viewed it as containing a “religious essence, for one’s ultimate, over-all way of life is one’s religion,”4 similar to the Tillichian “ultimate concern.” This said as much about Herberg’s definition of religion as it did about the American religious situation. Religion for Herberg was a value system. Although he insisted that God was at the center of American faith, this was not what made a system a religion. The general consensus of values and morals constituted religion because it dictated how people lived their lives and made day to day choices. What mattered was that the general population had basically agreed to come together under the three headings of Protestant, Catholic, and Jew. Reference to God was not really reference to God, but an employment of the supreme values of the American way of life.5 The greatest American value in Herberg’s narration was not any specific or even God, but “faith in faith” or rather “faith in anything.”6 Essentially, America was a nation where religious views were adapted and watered-down; this experience of the “melting pot” – or as Herberg prefers, the “transmuting pot” – allowed Protestants, Catholics, and Jews to come together in their religious beliefs because most had lost awareness of the tenets that mark the three as different. Thus claims of Reform Judaism participating in this national religion as well as maintaining a separate Jewish identity were characterized as inauthentic because Herberg argued that there was only superficial national religion. However, a narrow focus on theological rhetoric prevented Herberg from understanding the more complicated function of Jewish religious rhetoric in the 1950’s. By broadening the analysis of Jewish culture to include organizations as well as religious institutions, Stuart Svonkin could argue that insecurity underlies American Jewish identity, so “even as Jews were increasingly ‘at home in America,’ they still felt ‘uneasy at home.’”8 American-Jewish history became a story of maintaining the tension between security and questioning that security so that

3 Herberg, p. 75. 4 Herberg, p. 75. 5 Herberg, p. 82. 6 Herberg, p. 89. 8 Svonkin, 8; citing Moore, At Home in America and Leonard Dinnerstein, Uneasy at Home: Antisemitism and the American Jewish Experience (New York: Columbia Press, 1987).

29 Jews were safe enough to avoid a repeat of the Holocaust and yet nervous enough that they held onto their perception of themselves as distinct from society. In the first half of the twentieth century when Jews did not have security in America, they could articulate a universalist identity such as in civil religion because it provided no threat to their group unity and their sense of distinctiveness. Though Herberg assumed a complete acculturation on the part of American Jews by the 1950’s, their social status was more tenuous. Karen Brodkin argued that this inclusion of Jews in the American mainstream was not yet complete because it was during the 1950’s that legislation such as the GI Bill and FHA and VA mortgages had widespread effects, allowing Jews to participate in the growing white suburban American culture.9 Since it was not until the end of the decade that Jews could consider their social status equal to whites, Jewish religious rhetoric in the 1950’s should not be taken at face value as evidence of national unity and Jewish security in American society, but rather as an argument for a unified society. A shift in the conception of race in America helps explain the function and significance of Reform Jewish universalist religious arguments. Brodkin asserted that there was a racial binary in America – that race was divided into ‘black’ and ‘white’ and Jews went from being ‘black’ to ‘white’ during the twentieth century,10 but this over-simplified the racial reality in early twentieth-century America. Jews certainly experienced discrimination, especially in housing, but the extent of the discrimination does not seem equal, and there was never the same physical threat to life and well-being for Jews as there was for blacks. There was something like an in-between status of race – though Jews were not white at the start of the century, they were not black either. According to Eric Goldstein, Americans were uncertain as to how to classify Jews racially and wavered back and forth between stereotypes that grouped them with blacks or whites.11 The Reform Jewish argument for universalism in mid-twentieth-century America was so important because it downplayed the black-white racial dichotomy. Jews did not fit neatly into either category of black or white,12 so by defining identity in religious terms, Jews protected themselves from being compared negatively to blacks without having to take on the overt racism that often came along with whiteness.13 American Jews not only became white by the end of the

9 Karen Brodkin, How Jews became White Folks & What that says about Race in America (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2004), 50-1. 10 Brodkin, 175. 11 Goldstein, 41-50. 12 Goldstein, 125-37. 13 Goldstein, 108.

30 1950’s, they changed what it meant to be white. It became less powerful as a means to assert one’s power as a member of the superior American majority, empowering the arguments for equality in the civil-rights movement. By focusing on the category of religion as a basis for their identity, Jews contributed to the acceptance of pluralism in America. The WASP mainstream had tended to rely on black- white categories to decide who was an acceptable American citizen, but religious universalism prevented whites from controlling the definition of American identity. Jews could show what they had in common with Americans without the total assimilation previously expected. In racial terms, Jews were portrayed visually and rhetorically as too different to assimilate,14 and it goes without saying that African Americans could undergo no transformation that would have made them racially white. Religion offered an alternative to the problems associated with racial identity because it allowed various cultures to show how their underlying values meshed with American ideals. Jews, other white minorities, and African Americans no longer had to fit into hard and fast terms in order to join American society. The obsession with race was obscured by religious arguments; Jews and non-Jews had understood group identity in racial terms in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,15 but a more ambiguous conception of identity was crucial for the successful integration of minorities into American society. Jews, probably more than any other group, epitomized an ambiguity between religious and racial definitions. The increased nativism and antisemitism in the early twentieth century showed Jews the ways race could be used against them in America. Group identity remained an important part of Jewish self-understanding, but religious rhetoric allowed Jewishness to be less clearly defined by the dangerous American category of race and therefore become more fluid. Fluidity among all groups and cultures was the ultimate goal of Reform Jewish religious universalism. By turning to religion, group identity was made intentionally ambiguous as a way to prevent discrimination and social segregation. If ethnicity and race were ignored in favor of moral values, Jews, African Americans and other minorities would have more room to negotiate their place in society.

14 Goldstein, 36-50. 15 Goldstein, 35-50.

31 Common Values in Reform Judaism and American Politics Using religious categories to group Americans, Reform Jews argued that their heritage and moral system were parallel to that of other Americans. By showing the common ideas in and the Constitution, Reform Jews argued for their place in American society. Embracing the connection between religion and the success of America, the 1955 Race Relations Sabbath Message downplayed any distinction between the Biblical ideas that defined Reform Judaism and the political ideas that defined America. The American people have always sought to recognize the inherent dignity and innate worthwhileness of the individual. All men were deemed of intrinsic merit by virtue of being children of God. This Biblical doctrine of the essential brotherhood of man – so basic to our own heritage of faith – was woven into the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, into the very fabric of our society. We may have fallen short from time to time of attaining the goal, yet we have never slackened in our pursuit of that since the conclusion of World War II, from the monumental survey by President Truman’s Committee on Civil Rights16 through the recent historic Supreme Court decision ruling segregation in the public schools unconstitutional, great progress has been made.

The Bible was portrayed as a source of the values of equality and human dignity, but these values were made relevant to the lives of American Reform Jews through their inclusion in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. These political documents are presented as the equivalent of American Torah. Reform Jews located equality and human dignity in their heritage of Scripture, but this served the purpose of showing how their culture meshed with American culture more than it provided an impetus to act out those values. The same values in American politics and Jewish Scripture showed the way Jewish heritage paralleled American heritage. By pointing to the inclusive values of American political documents, Reform Jews constructed a space in American tradition for a society that would allow Jews and other minorities to exist in harmony with the mainstream culture. Not only did the similarities between Jewish Torah and American Torah show how easily Reform Jews could fit into America, but the values located in both sources emphasized universalism which would also require the acceptance of African Americans and Jews into American society. By continuing to uphold Biblical heritage, then, Reform Jews could demonstrate themselves to be suitable American citizens because of their ties to the same values as the political leaders and therefore

16 In December 1946, Truman created a committee to advise him on civil-rights policy, and in 1947 the committee released a report calling for a variety of radical civil-rights legislation. See James T. Patterson, Grand Expectations: The United States, 1954-1974 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 149.

32 their ability to participate in American society and assist in its continuing improvement. The inclusive rhetoric of human dignity and the importance of the individual in Jewish and American documents meant that for groups, universalism was the means to embody their worldview and values. It was necessary to incorporate African Americans and Jews into mainstream society because only by including them could Americans authentically fulfill the commitments of American democracy to social justice. Alongside the expanding economy, social change, and , these shared values are presented as the four forces driving American life and the civil-rights movement in the 1957 message. The government and Scripture are again presented as the same force. Four forces are now operating in such a way as to influence the character of American life. The first is that of the Federal Government, through its courts, commissions and legislative processes. The dreams of the founding fathers of this nation are being realized. It could not have been otherwise. The Bible, sacred both to Christian and Jew, deeply influenced the writers of the Constitution of the United States. That influence is at work today. Today, law demands integration in educational opportunity and institutions. Today, law demands that public vehicles in interstate commerce, or in public transit within the state, shall meet their responsibility to all citizens without reference to color. Today, government contracts under Executive Order 1055 require non-discrimination in employment. Today, the courts will not take cognizance of restrictive covenants in property deeds. The courts have invalidated discrimination in public housing. Certainly, not all areas comply with the law or with the provisions of executive or legislative decree, but the norm has been set.

The values of the Bible are firmly located in the ideas represented by the Constitution; indeed, the Bible and the Constitution are grouped together as one and the same force. This passage implied that the Constitution and Scripture were not complete without each other: the Constitution could not have been written without the influence of the Bible, but the values of Scripture could not take hold in American society without their inclusion in American politics. All of these other laws are then presented as the fusion and fulfillment of Jewish, Christian and American values. Reform Jews argued through this message that no difference could be distinguished between Christian and Jewish values, so their goals for society came together. To implement those common goals, Reform Jews showed that all religious Americans utilized legislation. Universalism in the 1950’s led to the notion that American religion was civil and not liturgical. Although Scripture was important to Reform Jews because of the universalism it evoked and the common ground it created between Reform Jews and other Americans, it was not in the prayer schedule or synagogue service that these values were to be practiced. Despite the

33 theme of social justice in the , Reform Jews, and the majority of Americans in the 1950’s, looked to the civil arena for the embodiment of their religious worldview. Civil-rights legislation was justified by religious rhetoric, and it was also the means to practice religious values. Social progress was at the heart of Reform Judaism and the goal of civil religion. Even though Reform Jews recognized that these laws were not being perfectly observed or enforced, this passage represented an optimism and trust that universalism was establishing the laws and values that would lead to the success of the civil-rights movement. The legislation was a step in the right direction, and the perfection of American society would inevitably arise out of civil- rights law because “the norm has been set.” The 1956 message also admitted that American society was not yet perfect, but still suggested that society was improving and eventually would live up to the aspirations of universalism. Mindful of …advances, we cannot, however, close our eyes to the realities of a new and belligerent obstructionism, nor to the considerable areas of discrimination which still remain. Such incidents as were reported from the schools of Milford, Delaware; the defamation of Tchula Cooperative; the shootings at Belzoni; the travesty of justice in the case of Emmitt Till17 – these are potent reminders that the law is not encased in courts or documents, but is a force which is tested in the fires of life. We cannot stand idly by when justice is perverted, when laws are broken, when lives are threatened. We call upon the Department of Justice to seek out ways and means which will enable it to guarantee law and order in communities where lawlessness and vigilantism have once again become prevalent. We call upon the Congress of the United States to pass legislation which will bring to each citizen the higher right of legal protection, of employment opportunities, of free movement and of adequate education.

The message indicated a confidence and trust in legislation and that the government would eventually work out the problem of continuing violence despite civil-rights legislation. The

17 White protest and boycotting in Milford when eleven African-American students were admitted to the local high school caused the school board to have to shut down local schools. See June Shugaloff, “Desegregation of Public Schools in Delaware,” The Journal of Negro Education, 24: 3 (Summer 1955), 195-201. An integrated cooperative farm near Tchula, Mississippi, was shut down when town members accused the residents and staff of having a negative influence on African Americans and the town in general after a white girl accused African-American boys from the farm of whistling at her. See Fred Smith, “Cooperative Farms in Mississippi,” Mississippi History Now: An Online Publication of the Mississippi Historical Society, http://mshistory.k12.ms.us/features/feature58/coopfarming.htm. Accessed online March 5, 2007. Whites from Belzoni, Mississippi, frequently fired into the homes of African Americans living in the city. See “MLK Hall of Fame Honoree Atty. Malcolm Farmer III: ‘The Human Capacity for Greatness is not Limited,’” Providence City News, January 18, 2007, reprinted at http://www.providenceri.com/CityNews/CityNews.php?id=44. Accessed online March 5, 2007. Till was a fourteen-year-old African American boy who was found tied to a cotton gin fan in the Tallahatchie River in Mississippi. Till had been shot and mutilated after he had whistled at a white woman in a grocery store. See Patterson, 395.

34 importance of political documents necessitated this optimism and belief that legislation could bring social justice. As long as Reform Jews were treating the Constitution as the equivalent of American Torah, the laws derived from the Constitution had to succeed. If legislation could not fulfill the goals of civil religion, then universalism would be a useless worldview because legislation was the only way to practice the values of civil religion. This message had to explain why violent incidents such as Emmitt Till’s lynching were not indicators that universalism was failing – social justice was a process, and if Reform Jews could convince more Americans to participate more fully in civil religion and the perfection of civil-rights legislation, then the violence, discrimination and social problems in America would disappear by default. Fair legislation was the first step in the progress toward equality and security, and as more Americans were convinced by its power, they would participate in the civil religious values system. In order to convince Americans that universalist values were the key to social progress, the Race Relations Sabbath Messages relied on the above arguments about the lack of differences among religions and groups and the ability of all groups to come together under the Constitution. By making the Constitution such a universalist document, Reform Jews opened American society up to minorities. To be good citizens, Americans had to equally trust legislation and the Constitution. That unity would contribute to greater social equality. Disputes among sections of American society would only lead to violence and set-backs for the American goal of progress; if Americans recognized that they were not different in any significant way, regardless of race or religion, legislation would serve its purpose and the universal goals of equality and human dignity would be achieved. The four forces in America discussed in the 1957 message – government, expanding economy, social change, and spirituality – reinforced the ultimate goal of universalism: community. Universalism was tied to urbanization in the 1950’s because of the underlying importance of unifying all Americans as one community. Spirituality as the fourth force epitomized the goal of community, “It is manifest in the conscience of the American people. It causes our people to seek methods of living together.” The neighborhood was where the effects of universalism and legislation were played out. By connecting to a singular spirituality through civil religion, Jewish communities could unite with African American communities and white communities. The divisions among neighborhoods were downplayed in importance through the idea that something more important connected all Americans, an over-arching spirituality that

35 could be supported through the Federal Government. By coming together spiritually, Americans harnessed the power necessary to improve the government, pushing the country forward in social progress. Even while political doctrine is portrayed as the more relevant influence on modern society, religion was depicted as pervading common American culture. American politics and religion were tied together in Reform rhetoric: through politics, Americans found a way to preserve the importance of religious values, and an individual’s participation in American society would not make sense without some grounds in Judeo-Christian religion. The content of that religion was left intentionally vague by the Race Relation Sabbath Messages; the 1955 message discussed the beliefs of “the American people” and “our own heritage of faith,” which could function as either Jewish particularism or American universalism. By participating in the ambiguous religious practice characteristic of the 1950’s, Reform Jews found a successful way to implant themselves in the American mainstream. Even though the Race Relations Sabbath Messages were documents written by Reform Jews for Reform Jews, they did not address any specific Reform doctrine that would distinguish the movement from other American religious groups. However, this is not due to the lack of particularism that Herberg’s argument located in this universalist rhetoric. Because of the continued social distinction between Jews and other Americans, Reform Jews did not need to articulate their particularism. Instead the differences between Jews and other Americans were viewed as an obstacle to Reform religion and Jewish security, so universalism and the merging of Jewish culture and heritage with the American mainstream were the means to overcome those problems. The lack of exclusive Jewish language is evidence that Reform Jews did not yet feel secure in American society and were still struggling to create a place for themselves.

Civil Religion as a Sign of Success Reform Jews included universalist religious language in the Race Relations Sabbath Messages as well as explicitly made the argument that the unity created by such language would lead to social progress. The 1959 message stated, “Where the three faith groups have spoken and acted in concert the results have been real and rewarding.” Civil religion was portrayed as the answer to racism and other problems of inequality plaguing American democracy, so Reform Jews avoided any particularist references in order to better emphasize the shared culture and

36 values of Protestants, Catholics, and Jews. In so doing, their own security was solidified, but the opportunity for more successful social action was also opened to them. Given that Reform Jews were only a small percentage of the population, the ability to reinforce and encourage social action as not only a Jewish practice but universal to all American religion provided a much larger outlet for their message. By referencing Biblical heritage, Jews made themselves more like other Americans while calling for their own particular mission, social action. Universalism in the 1950’s functioned as the most successful means to participate in Jewish values. The universalism of the 1950’s represents the height of American Reform Jewish civic participation.18 If these universalist arguments for social action were successful, then Jewish rights would have been established by default in society alongside other minority rights, and Jews would have also achieved legitimate status as Americans because their conception of society would have been in harmony with popular culture. American Reform Jews did not need to defend themselves or their own rights any more or less zealously than they did the rights of others. This led to the emphasis on the civil-rights movement and fight for African-American rights as a manifestation of an effort of Reform social action. Eli Lederhendler argued that “Judaic culture or Jewish ethnicity per se (understood as a rooted tradition brought over from Europe) has little to do with American Jewish civic behavior,” including claims of Jewish dedication to social action, “despite the poetic appeal of the idea, in the Books of Prophets, which, after all, highlight the failures of social conscience among the .”19 Lederhendler was essentially warning scholars and their audiences that the use of Scripture should not be taken as an indication of Jewish particularity. This is reflected by the quotation of the Reform prayer book in the 1954 message, The words of our prayer book must serve as a challenge to all who would call themselves religious: “O may all created in Thine image recognize that they are brethren, so that, one in spirit and one in fellowship they may be forever united before Thee. Then shall Thy Kingdom be established on earth and the word of Thine ancient seer be fulfilled: The Lord will reign forever and ever.” “On that day the Lord shall be One and His name shall be One.”

18 The 1885 Pittsburgh Platform articulated at least as broad a sense of universalism as Reform Judaism in the 1950’s, but the civic participation reached its height in the 1950’s because of the combination of universalist ideology and increased incorporation of Jews into society. 1950’s society was the most integrated society that Jews had ever experienced, allowing more civic participation than in the past. 19 Lederhendler, New York Jews, 157.

37 The use of the prayer book and Scripture in this text was not designed to enforce a particularist sense of Jewishness, but to show that Jews should not be distinguished from other Americans. The liturgy was opened up as useful for anyone who is religious, and the content of the prayer was focused on reinforcing the importance of a society based on equality and a singular community. Reform Jews had to join with other Americans to create an inclusive society in the present so that, in the future, God’s kingdom could be fulfilled. Though this use of the prayer book proves that Reform Jews in the 1950’s were constructing a theology as part of their participation in civil religion, one can see that, contrary to Herberg’s argument, the function of the liturgy served the purpose of giving humans the responsibility for society and downplaying differences among humans. Civil religion and 1950’s theology purposely did not cultivate particularist Jewish identity because it would have been contrary to the goal of that theology. As opposed to relying on various isolated religious systems, Americans must come together to achieve social progress. Agency was given to unified humanity to establish the religious ideal of a perfect society, as echoed by the 1957 message, As America slowly resolves its racial tensions, we can see emerging the design which God had in mind for this nation. …Jew and Christian alike must stand up to be counted either as partners or as opponents of God’s will to create His Kingdom on Earth, speedily and in our time.

America was not just a secular political entity, but it was a religious idea itself. Reform Jews suggested that the nation could not successfully fulfill its destiny if the values of civil religion were not embraced. By establishing racial equality, Jews and Christians could come closer together and therefore harness the power of the unified group to move America down the road of social progress. Despite the establishment clause’s implication that the discourses of religion and politics should separate, Reform Jews and other participants in civil religion envisioned a religious purpose for America. Participation in that religion was then portrayed as absolutely necessary for true patriotism. To best contribute to American progress, citizens had to accept the demands of civil religion, especially equality and universalism, so that the country could anticipate God’s Kingdom. The United States could be the promised land if Americans were correctly oriented toward religion and politics, and Reform Jews argued that a fusion of the two would fulfill that goal.

38 Universal Humanity and Racial Equality The 1955 message cited the in its epigraph as evidence of the necessity for racial harmony, “‘Why was man created a solitary human being without a companion? So that it might not be said that some races are better than others.’ 37a” This functioned as a sign of how Jewish sources could be used to point toward a sense of universalism; the sugya (portion of the Talmud) is a humanistic text that affirms the equality of all races. This passage from the Talmud allowed Reform Jews to portray their Jewish heritage as something that would not seem weird or inaccessible to other aspects of American culture, but rather as in line with those ideas. In order to facilitate Jewish inclusion in society, it was implied that the segregation of Jews from other cultures resulted only from the discrimination on the part of the majority culture and not out of a tendency of Jews to see themselves as different or special in comparison to those cultures. The lack of defined religion and the vagueness of any religious references support Lederhendler’s argument that religion did not define civic behavior for American Reform Jews. Jewish culture and ethnicity did not contribute to Reform arguments for social action because this would have been counter-active to the goal of an inclusive society. However, social action was still derived from Reform Judaism’s directives. Reform Jews’ goal since the 1885 platform had been to harmonize their religion with modernity. Therefore it made sense that Reform Jews in the 1950’s drew the category of social action from Judaism but defined its practice based on American values. They wanted to portray themselves as fully American, so they used social action to define their identity as Jews, but the form of that action was logically dictated by American politics and specifically American issues in order to achieve both the universalist goal of social justice and the particularist goal of inclusion in mainstream society. By combining Jewish and American directives, Reform Jews were able to be American and Jewish at the same time. Instead of maintaining a dual identity, Jewish in the synagogue and home and American in the streets and voting booths, the two identities were synthesized. The religious and political interests of Reform Jews could not be sectioned off from each other, but American Reform Jewish culture encompassed all realms, public and private, religious and secular. This perspective shows that although Reform Jews may have acted partially out of a desire to attain their own security in America, there was also a genuine element of philanthropy. The 1956 Race Relation Sabbath Message stated, “It is equally true that the Jew will never be

39 secure until all men, and especially his neighbors, are secure in their human condition.” Reform Jews only felt authentic in their mainstream status of power so long as it also cultivated the security and happiness of others. While the intentional ambiguity of religious and scriptural references was used to promote Reform Judaism as a legitimate and valuable form of American religion, the fusion of religious and civic life of American Reform Jews, as evident in the 1954 message’s call for equality as “the essence of our religious faith as it is the essence of democracy itself” must be given due recognition. Americanness and Jewishness were not mutually exclusive, and the best conception of Reform identity in the 1950’s might be to state that Reform Jews understood themselves to be largely responsible to the American public due to obligations of social justice; therefore, they defined themselves in broad terms of national loyalty. In the 1937 American Reform Jewish platform, social action stood out as the central tenet of Reform Judaism, and the Reform universalism of the 1950’s shows that American Reform Jews sought to make platform statements a reality. Later generations of Jews may have decided that this universalism did not provide enough separation of Jewish identity from other Americans, but universalism was the most authentic way for 1950’s Reform Jews to embody their ethical priorities. They needed to be able to fully participate in American religion, culture and politics in order to manifest their vision for an enlightened society. Finally, as the 1955 message valued the dignity of the individual, the 1950’s Race Relations Sabbath Messages were not oriented toward group distinctions, or what would now be called group rights. Although they sought to implement their particular value of social action, which was shared by other Americans’ religious ideas, Reform Jews did not seek to privilege any group or set of values over another, as indicated by the characterization of universalism. Individual rights were the primary concern. The 1956 message asserted, But stronger even than the motivations of true American patriotism, or of Jewish self- preservation, must be the demands of our conscience. The concern of Jews and Judaism with race relations is based not merely on self-interest, but on religious principles which touch the foundations of our faith. The prophet Amos long ago interpreted God’s will in this respect: “‘Are ye not as the children of the Ethiopians unto me, oh children of Israel?’ saith the Lord.” The Ethiopians are black, the Jew is like them – for all are children of God. In His sight there are no racial exclusions, and those who call themselves by His name must also bear the burden of His law, however difficult, however onerous, however dangerous at times.

40 The prophetic voice did not call upon Jews to act because of their special status or chosenness, but equality was espoused as a fulfillment of God’s creation of the human race. Human conscience established each individual’s natural rights. This Scriptural reference emphasizes the universal qualities of humanity; since classification of valid human principles came from conscience, ethnic or religious particularity was impossible to impose as a valid reason to discriminate against any group. Sylvester Johnson showed that although the ‘myth of Ham’ was the primary association of Scripture with blacks, the Ethiopians in the Bible were also long understood by American Christians to have been black. The previous theological concern was whether or not Ethiopians were humans like the descendants of Adam and Noah, 20 so Reform Jews attempt to resolve that question by going back to the Bible. Whereas American Christians had questioned the status of Ethiopians in the Bible, Reform Jews quote Scripture to point to the ways that blacks or Ethiopians are not at all distinguished from other humans. The Israelites were definitely created in God’s image, and if the Ethiopians are like the Israelites, Americans would have to conclude that all members of white and black races should be equally respected.21 By arguing that there were no real differences between groups, Reform Jews could point to humans’ responsibility to defend each other’s natural rights. Although differences in culture and status may have existed, the message argued that such superficial issues of particularity were ultimately unimportant. Humans did not deserve rights and equality because of belonging to any particular group, but due to their status as humans before belonging to any group. Particular groups existed, as blacks and Jews were distinguishable, but this did not inform their role in society. Through universalism, Reform Judaism aspired to a society where all groups and individuals were protected and the benefits of society were available without the stipulation that an individual perform their identity in any particular way. To this end, they articulate a willingness to submit American ideals and Jewish identity as lesser priorities compared to the establishment of a society that meets the demands of universal human conscience.

20 Sylvester Johnson, The Myth of Ham in Nineteenth-Century American Christianity: Race, Heathens and the People of God (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 54-6. 21 The 1956 rhetoric of Ethiopians as representative of blacks makes this point most clearly, but similar rhetoric is present in the 1959 message, which states that universal values are supported by “the opening chapters of Genesis with its inspiring and provocative thought that the image of God is present in Man – not black man, or white man or yellow man – but generic Man and the children of Man. This view of man is of one piece with the prophetic insistence that the Ethiopians and the Aramaeans can claim God’s protection and God’s loving concern equally with the Israelites, and it receives its clearest delineation in the epochal injunction of the nineteenth chapter of Leviticus: ‘The stranger that sojourneth with you shall be unto you as the home-born among you, and thou shalt love him as thyself; for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt.’”

41 Though Reform Jews offered their own point of view through the Race Relations Sabbath Messages, they did not use this to characterize themselves as special compared to other Americans in the 1950’s. Each individual had rights by default as an American citizen, not as a privilege of belonging to any subgroup of society. Regardless of any particularist beliefs or practices, Reform Jews believed all Americans deserved the same rights by virtue of the instruction of American political heritage and Biblical heritage. The 1954 message indicated that these two heritages had to come together for either to be successful, “We who believe that all men – not some, but all – were created in God’s own image, must not countenance the blasphemy of prejudice.” For Americans to claim belief in the Judeo-Christian creation story, they also had to accept real social equality in politics and social interaction. If legislation differentiated between groups of humans, it would have contradicted the idea that all humans were essentially the same because they were created in God’s image. The purpose of the Race Relations Sabbath Messages was to show that through implementing legislation, religious values could be practiced in American society. The use of Brown v. Board of Education in the 1955 message is emblematic of the time period, so it is useful to return to it. We may have fallen short from time to time of attaining the goal, yet we have never slackened in our pursuit of that since the conclusion of World War II, from the monumental survey by President Truman’s Committee on Civil Rights through the recent historic Supreme Court decision ruling segregation in the public schools unconstitutional, great progress has been made.

Recognizing the rights of the individual for the purpose of social equality is the goal at the bottom of Reform ideology in the 1950’s. The notion of religious practice in the 1950’s was civil and not liturgical, emphasizing the importance of the political realm for fulfilling Reform theology. President Truman’s Committee on Civil Rights, as well as the Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education, is upheld as evidence of the success of universalism and the ability of Reform Jews to continue to shape society for the better alongside other Americans. Progress in the political realm was the means for Reform Jews to measure their own success; it was the arena in which 1950’s Reform Jews had decided to fight for the social justice which they believed legitimated their own status as both Jews and Americans at the same time because politics provided the most necessary change in the American social situation, namely the improvement of African-American status.

42 The urbanization that characterized mid-twentieth-century America deeply influenced Americans’ understanding of race relations and civil religion. Reform Jews credited the forced interaction of modernity and the urbanization linked with it for forcing social progress upon the American people; the 1957 message entitled “America Rises to the Challenge” described history as such. It is not surprising, therefore, that out of the destruction and tragedy of the Second World War, irreversible processes in the pattern of our race relations were set in motion. On the battlefield, segregation was not only impractical, it was dangerous. The need for men transcended any desire for racial separation. The movement of population answering the call of industry for man-power accelerated a shift from rural to urban living. In the second half of the 20th century, the social structure of the United States has become so fluid that it can never return to the patterns with which the century began.

The legacy of the Second World War for American Reform Jews is not related to Jewish history and the Holocaust, but to the effects the war had on Americans and American culture. Jews are not viewed as distinct or part of a separate history, but Reform Jews identified with a common American history. Reform Jews depicted the pragmatic interest of the nation as valued over the concerns of any group, proving their loyal citizenship, but this glosses over the actual history of unease with the integration of the military, which did not occur until the Korean War. Although African-American troops served in World War II, the problem of segregation and discrimination hardly disappeared. This romantic and inaccurate recollection of American history proves that Reform Jews were striving to argue that a fluid society was the goal for America, not the reality. The changes in social structure in America may have been real, but they were much more so for Jews than African Americans. The instability of the assumption that social progress in favor of all races would inevitably result from universalism is underscored by this representation of history. A framework of universalism required Reform Jews to be slightly dishonest about their own insecurities in American society and suggest that they felt totally integrated, and it also meant that the African-American situation was misunderstood or mischaracterized. Reform Jews overstated social fluidity in such a way that set universalism up for failure as the identity best suited to produce continual social progress. Although integration in schools and some jobs was a result of urbanization, urbanization actually perpetuated division among groups in neighborhoods. Moore showed the way that Jews drew their sense of Jewishness from

43 their separate Jewish neighborhoods, 22 which led to their argument for universalism. Because Jews and other minorities still lived in divided neighborhoods, Reform Jews would have felt the need to appeal for the establishment of a universal society. 1950’s urbanization and universalism, therefore, are evidence of segregation and not integration. As I will show in the next chapter, the Race Relations Sabbath Messages in the following decade attest to the misrepresentation of the American social reality in universalism. Lederhendler argues that Jews did not completely recognize the extent of discrimination against African Americans in housing or education, which led to Jewish frustration that African Americans were not rising through the social ranks. By the 1960’s, Jews could not understand why race relations were not improving and why African Americans were not integrating themselves as Jews had, and this issue can be traced back to the unrealistic optimism that went hand in hand with 1950’s universalism.

22 Moore, 61-87.

44 CHAPTER 3 – SUBURBANIZATION, SECURITY AND PARTICULARISM Introduction Eric Goldstein suggested that universalism was only a temporary solution for American Jews because even while it allowed Jews to find a place in American society, they were displeased with that place. Universalism was essential for aiding American Jews to come into a sense of power that would allow them to argue for humanistic causes, but in the 1960’s Jews found particularism to be a more fulfilling means to support African-American interests and negotiate their own group identity.1 In the 1960’s, when Jews had been incorporated into mainstream America, they had to shift toward a model of particularism that indicated they were somehow threatened by mainstream society, otherwise they would lose their ‘Jewishness.’ Jewishness had been made intentionally ambiguous as to whether it indicated race or religion in the 1950’s to facilitate an expansion of pluralism and social equality, but in the 1960’s this porous definition of Jewishness translated into a concern for group unity and a rise in particularism as a response. Similarly, Eli Lederhendler argued that the phenomenon of third-generation New York Jews moving out of the city, preferring the securities of suburban life and isolated community, brought issues of contradictions and instabilities to the surface that had seemingly been present all along in city life. Thus the urbanization that Deborah Dash Moore portrayed as the basis of Jewish security and being “at home” in America2 had only appeared to be the source of social stability – Jews could move out of New York City as easily as they had ever moved out of any city in favor of a more attractive living situation or source of stability.3 It was not that Jews were permanently at home in urban city life, but that a generation of Jews had found a home there. The changing rhetoric in the 1960’s Race Relations Sabbath Messages can therefore be analyzed as evidence of the shift from universalism and urbanization to particularism and suburbanization. Suburbanization signaled the integration of American Jews into the white mainstream. American Jews in the interwar period had sustained their Jewish identity because they had lived in Jewish neighborhoods, marked off from other Americans by the culture they shared with those neighbors.4 But in the second half of the twentieth century, as Jews were accepted into suburban

1 Goldstein, 190, 207-8. 2 Moore, At Home in America: Second Generation New York Jews (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981). 3 Lederhendler, New York Jews, 34-5. 4 Moore, 61-87.

45 neighborhoods where they were interspersed among other white ethnic groups which did not allow them to so automatically identify their Jewishness, a more conscious construction of Jewish particularity had to take place. Jewish uneasiness in America shifted from being the result of discrimination to a question of how to perform Jewishness in the absence of antisemitism and social limits. Michael Alexander argued that American Jews as early as the twenties began to experience this discomfort as they were slowly gaining acceptance in America. Jews had always understood themselves as defined by their differences from society, so they had to search for ways to distinguish themselves “by cultivating economic, political, and cultural models of ‘self-conscious distinctiveness.’”5 Even while they were allowed to enter into mainstream society, American Reform Jews identified with those who were still excluded from the society, what Alexander called “outsider identification,”6 and they turned to their own successful integration as an example of how African Americans could overcome discrimination. Alexander saw this phenomenon arise as early as the 1920’s when Jews began to be integrated into white society. Because that integration was not complete until the end of the 1950’s, Jews developed the outsider identification that Alexander observed, but they also simultaneously relied on universalism to lobby for their own security. After the 1920’s, America saw a rise in antisemitism that defined Jews as outsiders in America and minimized the need for Jews to construct their own particularist identity through outsider identification because mainstream society delineated whites and Jews. Universalism persisted in Jewish rhetoric until the 1960’s when Jews were completely included in mainstream society. Participation in the civil-rights movement helped Jews maintain the balance between seeking their place in American society and seeing themselves distinct from the society by identifying with African Americans, outsiders who were not incorporated into society. However, Jews were accepted into the American mainstream to such an extent in the 1960’s that outsider identification was no longer enough to uphold a sense of Jewish distinctiveness, so Jewishness had to be cultivated more through particularism and a sense of Jewish history that separated Jews from other Americans.

5 Michael Alexander, Jazz Age Jews (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 4; citing Katz, Exclusiveness and Tolerance: Studies in Jewish- Relations in Medieval and Modern Times (West Orange: Behrman House, 1961), 13, 22. 6 Alexander, 1.

46 Beginning in 1960, Reform Jews incorporated more particularistic language into the Race Relations Sabbath Messages alongside the goal of the 1950’s to create a universal society. The 1960’s messages admitted that the universalism of the 1950’s had not been as successful as had been expected in perfecting American society and leading to social progress. By pointing to Judaism and Scripture as a source separate from American government and its values, Reform Jews attempted to use their identity as a particular group within the larger American society as a way to guide Americans toward social equality. Less optimistic about and less interested in erasing differences among different groups within American society, Reform Jews envisioned themselves showing African Americans the way toward an Exodus out of discrimination and into the promised land of equality in America. In the 1950’s, Reform Jewish universalism had changed social acceptance in America not to be defined by race. Then, even in the 1960’s when Jews espoused greater particularity, it was not in the same terms as it had been in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Whiteness was no longer a stipulation for security in America. Even if there were distinctions among groups in the 1960’s, all groups deserved equal rights and respect, as individuals in the 1950’s had according to Reform arguments. Particularism in the 1960’s was much less dangerous as a result of the ways Reform Jews reconceptualized identity and rights in the 1950’s and 1960’s. Being proud of one’s own identity and cultural history did not have to lead to discrimination, but it could be the means to eradicate racism by showing that all groups played different yet equally important roles in American society.

Problems with Universalism In 1960, the first sign of frustration with the productiveness of universalism and civil religion appeared in the Race Relations Sabbath Messages. 1950’s universalism was characterized by optimism for the success of the civil-rights movement and the contributions of civil religion to political progress, but in the 1960’s that optimism was not a part of Reform thought any more. We may be witnessing, as some contend, a revival of religion. Our church and synagogue rolls swell with new members. Identification with religious institutions has reached a numerical high, but may we not justly conclude, in light of the Mack Charles

47 Parker10 incident, that our connection with religion is as yet somewhat tenuous? If formal identity be all that there is to our religious reformation, of what avail is it? Much more is required. Our religious renaissance will shrivel and die if it lacks the life-giving force of consecration to the principles which we profess.

By 1960, racial violence was still continuing and the implementation of desegregation had stalled so that these kinds of problems led to the questions present in this passage. The specific reference to the Mack Charles Parker lynching was given as evidence that universalism was not working in 1960; it falsifies the power of the optimism of the 1950’s messages. Although the 1956 message had mentioned lynchings and continued violence, that message had expressed a belief that legislation and greater commitment to civil religion would put an end to racial discrimination. However, this passage did not express that kind of hope and suggested that universalism would not be the answer to America’s social injustices.11 While Reform Jews were still committed to the idea that the right legislation would end African-American suffering, they were less hopeful that the “revival of religion” associated with civil religion was yielding the kind of action necessary to support such legislation and end social discrimination. The skepticism of 1960’s Reform Jews regarding universalism was then a result not of opposition in general to a universalist identity for Reform Judaism but rather out of practical concern that universalism was no longer effective. Reform Jews were not alone in their frustration, and they recognized that lack of progress in the civil-rights movement was far worse for African Americans, “We appreciate that there are limits to the patience and restraint of any people, especially of a people which has suffered so

10 Parker was accused of raping a white woman, and while he was in jail, nine men removed him from his cell in Poplarville, Mississippi, and shot him twice in the chest before dumping his body into a river. Although many local people probably knew who had committed the crime, no one informed the authorities. Even the involvement of the FBI did not lead to solving the case, so Parker’s murder went unpunished. See Patterson, 412. 11 Discrimination and violence were repeatedly used to show the problems with universalism. The 1965 message stated, “We look to the Federal government to take more forthright measures to prevent the appointment of racist judges in the South. We urge the Attorney General to initiate stronger and more persistent action in those communities where Negroes are prevented from exercising their right to register and vote. We are shocked and indignant that justice has not been meted out to the murderers of Andrew Goodman, James Chaney, Michael Schwerner, Medgar Evers and the scores of civil rights workers who have been martyred because of their devotion to the principles of democracy.” Goodman and Schwerner were white civil-rights activists who, along with Chaney, a black activist, were found shot and buried near , Mississippi in 1964. Not until three years later were the county sheriff and six others convicted of the murder. See Patterson, 553. Evers was an NAACP field secretary who was shot in the back in front of his home in Mississippi after Kennedy indicated support for a civil-rights bill in June 1963. See Patterson, 481. The 1966 message similarly noted, “The Watts rioting in dramatically proclaimed that the failure of communication means not only injustice and inequity, but injury, destruction, and – ultimately – death as well.” African Americans in the Watts section of Los Angeles rioted only days after the 1965 Civil Rights Act was passed, showing that legislation would not necessarily solve America’s problems. See Patterson, 448.

48 long and so grievously, a people which has been promised so much and gained so little.” The 1960 message, through reference to racist violence, and the 1963 message, describing the inability of anyone to patiently suffer the effects of that violence, indicated that universalism would only be fulfilling for African Americans as long as it continued to cause real improvement. African Americans would not logically be willing to remain non-violent and put their trust in universalism or American society if lynchings were perpetuating suffering and fear. The frustrations that led Reform Jews to turn inward for motivation would also cause African Americans to turn inward, though this would lead to even greater problems for the ability of the civil-rights movement to establish cooperation and harmony in society as more and more groups, especially African Americans, lost hope that civil rights could be accomplished through inter- group cooperation and civil religion.12 Furthermore, this would have caused a problem for Reform Jewish particularism; particularism was a solution to the shortcomings of universalism insofar as it created a new path that led to an integrated society. If African Americans or Reform Jews turned inward as a move to stop trying to achieve racial harmony or to completely cut themselves off from American society, that kind of particularism would be inauthentic. It would not add to social justice because it would suggest that all humans could never trust each other or function together as one body despite differences, which would contradict Reform theology and American political universalism that claimed all humans were created in God’s image and were equal. If particularism meant inequality, Jewish and American society would have failed.

Theocentric Theology As Reform Jews turned inward toward their tradition as separate from other American religions, the theological emphasis shifted from being civil to being theocentric. As I showed in the previous chapter, in 1954, Reform theology had used the prayer book’s citation of the liturgical prayer known as the (“‘O may all created in Thine image recognize that they are brethren, so that, one in spirit and one in fellowship they may be forever united before Thee. Then shall Thy Kingdom be established on earth and the word of Thine ancient seer be fulfilled: The Lord will reign forever and ever.’ ‘On that day the Lord shall be One and His name shall be

12 This frustration was also present in the 1963 Race Relations Sabbath Message: “Accepting, teaching and preaching the prophetic concept of the Fatherhood of God and the Brotherhood of Man, we confess the limited impact we have thus far made upon the lives of men in its implementation. … We cannot honestly rejoice over what has been accomplished or remain content with continued ‘tokenism’ and ‘gradualism’ when discrimination persists throughout the country in every area of human need.”

49 One.’”) to argue for human agency in the present and the fulfillment of God’s will in the future. In 1964, the same verse was reframed in a theocentric argument, God is fragmented when society is riven. Our Jewish liturgy underlines this: After our prayer for the Messianic time, when ‘all men shall recognize that they are brethren,’ we conclude, “On that day the Lord shall be one, and His name shall be one,” as though to say, “Not until that day.”

A just society was not up to humans entirely; Reform Jews had to give attention to God’s expectations of society and orient their actions toward God’s needs. Human action remained significant, then, but it was not solely directing society toward God’s Kingdom. God played a much more important role for Reform Jews in the 1960’s, so racial and social disharmony had negative effects not only on human interactions with each other but also on God. Jewish history was also more important: the goal of social harmony was necessary for Reform Jews as a completion of Jewish religious expectations through Messianic expectations, as opposed to being an aspiration strictly for American politics. Instead of seeing Jews within the history of America, Reform Jews shifted to seeing their role in America as ultimately more important for Jewish history, a recurring theme throughout the 1960’s Race Relations Sabbath Messages and a major change from the rhetoric of the 1950’s. Although universalism was not written out of the Race Relations Sabbath Messages during the 1960’s, more particularism seeped into the language of the messages alongside universalism as a supplement and an attempt to continue moving race relations forward instead of allowing a religious or civil stalemate. Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One, the watchword of Judaism, rings clear, proclaiming “liberty throughout the land and unto all the inhabitants thereof.” The pledge of allegiance to our flag, promising a nation under God “with liberty and justice for all” should haunt our every conscious hour. When we utter these noble sentiments, they should stir us to a more consecrated life, urging us on to provide the means, the conditions, and the love which will establish forever the dignity of every man in the sight of his brother and in the sight of God.

The inclusion of the opening of the liturgical Shema prayer (“Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One”) gave the 1960 message a more particularist sense than the messages of the 1950’s. Although Deuteronomy 6:4 is sacred scripture in both the Christian and Jewish traditions, Reform Jews would have recognized this reference as a unique symbol of the schedule. As with the citation of the Aleinu in the 1964 message, the theocentrism of the

50 Shema made the 1960 message less universalist because it shifted the function of the use of the prayer book from showing how groups should work together to anticipate God’s kingdom in the future, to how Judaism should appear in 1960. Next, the 1960 message moves from citing the Shema to citing Leviticus 25:10, “proclaim liberty throughout the land and unto all the inhabitants thereof,” – the inscription on the Liberty Bell. The use of the Shema as a way to proclaim the words of Leviticus and the Liberty Bell shows that Reform Jews believed they could be good American citizens through a distinct Jewish identity. In a certain sense, this is what I argued in the previous chapter, but in the 1950’s, Reform Judaism and American politics were presented as parallel systems, having the same values and drawing from each other to form a robust identity for Jews. However, the 1960 message used the inscription on the Liberty Bell as evidence that Judaism was the original source of the values of American politics. The inscription was first a scriptural verse from , and only then did Americans take this on as part of their identity. Reform Jews now saw Judaism as having something to say to America. Torah was the source of the liberty championed by Americans, not merely a compatible source next to American values. Whereas the 1957 message merged American government and Scripture as the same force, in 1960, religion and government were different forces. Religion could be used to direct government, so Judaism was envisioned as having something to offer America that neither other religions nor the government on its own could provide. Even so, a society with freedom and equality for all its citizens was still the 1960’s message’s goal for America; so although Reform Jews drew from a more particularist identity, a universal society was their ultimate ambition. In 1960 and the following Race Relations Sabbath Messages, universal society was not described as the present situation, but the goal toward which society should aspire. The present was a plurality of particular groups working toward a perfected society, a more realistic recognition of the perpetuating social problems and differences among groups. The 1965 message reminded Reform Jews that Judaism still shared the goal of social unity with other Americans, “Our tradition as Jews and as Americans evokes from us prophetic restlessness in the face of inequity and impels us to pursue justice.” Reform Jews were trying to create a more particularist identity for themselves and to present that identity as a valuable guide for the civil-rights movement, but they did this in the context of continuing to seek inclusion for all groups in the American mainstream. The language in the early 1960’s messages was not a dramatic change from the 1950’s, but it was a different approach that

51 portrayed more Jewish sources as at least equally as persuasive as civil religion. The 1965 message connected theology to social justice, We, the spiritual descendants of the , lawgivers and prophets are being asked the question that was asked of Joseph, ‘What seekest thou?’ His answer must be our answer: ‘I seek my brethren.’ And we who seek our brethren must do it not only through resolutions, pronouncements and messages, but through dedicated deeds and courageous social action.”

Theocentrism moved Reform Jews away from civil religion because the practice of Judaism was more focused on liturgical worship in the present, but participation in a universal society was seen as an important fulfillment of the values expressed in the Jewish prayer book.

Jewish Insight and American Society The discussion of Jewish sources in the 1960’s changed from being focused on Judaism as part of essentially the same religious institution as Protestantism and Catholicism to being a more separate entity that could contribute equally. Though the 1960’s messages did not suggest that Jews necessarily believed something different from Protestants or Catholics, Judaism was portrayed as giving Jews a special insight into how to appropriately execute social action. The 1961 message discussed the role of Jews and other religious Americans, We believe that all men, realizing the urgency of the challenge, will enlist in the war upon inequality. We believe that our own tradition makes this especially incumbent upon Jews, but we also believe that religious institutions of all denominations, their ministers and their lay leaders, should be in the forefront.

Jews still had an important role in the universal American community, but that community was not necessarily the dominant source of inspiration and authority that it was in the 1950’s. Jews were a little different from other Americans with a more intense duty to and knowledge about the fight for equality. The language was initially vague but seems to have been intentionally so in order that continuing advocates of universalism would not be offended by the growing sense of particularism of the rising generation of Reform Jews. This exemplifies the tendency of American Reform Judaism to make as broad of statements as possible to allow a wide range of viewpoints to function inside the group. As 1960’s messages began to distinguish between what Reform Judaism could offer to America from the contributions of non-Jews, examples of what Judaism could provide were given as evidence of the benefits of group identity. In the 1962 message, the connection of

52 Reform Judaism to the State of Israel for the benefit of American Jews, which would later appear in the 1976 platform, showed that Jews could use their identification with separate nationhood as an example for strong relations among different groups. In recent years, with the encouragement of America and the approval of the United Nations, many new countries on African soil have declared their sovereign independence. With pride we note that little Israel, herself a fledgling democracy, has set up its own Marshall Plan, to encourage with technical aid and resources, these newly-developed governments.

The message approved of the way Africans were recognized as worthy of sovereignty of their own countries, and by presenting this alongside a discussion of Israel’s positive participation in nationhood as well, both African countries and the State of Israel were presented as inspiration for race relations in America. Israel was treated as a good role model for the international community, and the idea that Jewish nationalism could serve as a prototype for other groups became part of the Reform argument for civil rights. As Reform Jews could use their particularity and the State of Israel to construct an identity that grounded their participation in American society, so African Americans could look to nations in Africa for motivation. These countries could offer the same kind of particular identity and culture to African Americans that the State of Israel offered to Jews. The success of nationalism of all different ethnic groups throughout the world was meant as a model for the possible harmony of the diversity of Americans, so Jewish particularism became the model for black-white relations. If Africans were worthy of sovereignty and supported them, African Americans deserved American citizenship and Reform Jews could bolster that cause. By including Israel as a source for American Jews, the tension between universalism and particularism rose because the Reform Jewish argument was no longer solely a fusion between Jewish religious and American political ideas. While loyalty to Israel did not preclude loyalty to America, identifying with Israel did make Jews all the more distinctly part of a separate group from other Americans and their position in American society more complicated. The argument for equality shifted away from the right of all individuals to participate in one American group despite possible individual differences, and individuals were defined through their identity as part of a group. The distinctiveness of a group was envisioned as a possible means for instituting rights because each group had something particular to offer to the overall society. Jews, through loyalty to their own religion and ethnicity, which included support for the State of Israel, would

53 be able to offer something to American politics that other groups could not, although other groups would have their own particular strengths that would benefit American society. This introduced the idea that by developing a distinct Jewish theology and identity separate from other Americans, Reform Jews could better contribute to American success and progress because only by cultivating their particular traits could Reform Jews offer something new to other Americans. This argument allowed Jews to protect their own identity as a group, and it meant that assimilation was not required of any group. The turn toward meant African Americans could be incorporated into American society without having to mimic white society. Reform Jews also began to envision the Jewish experience of persecution and then emancipation to be a useful example for African Americans. Their history of suffering as a group allowed Reform Jews to commiserate with African Americans as other ethnic groups could not. According to the 1962 message, “Motivated, therefore, by our Jewish background and teaching, and ever mindful of Israel’s persecution and disability throughout the ages, we Jews are sensitive to the suffering of all victims of injustice and exploitation.” Jews could draw on their history, from ancient Egypt through twentieth-century America, to realize the grave injustice of American racial segregation. Jewish experience in ancient Egypt and the scripture recounting their Exodus became an especially important symbol during the civil-rights movement. The Exodus was a story that had resonated with African Americans since blacks had begun to convert to Christianity during slavery, and African Americans in the 1960’s upheld the story of the Exodus as a metaphor for how they would achieve freedom in America. As Jews heard African Americans using this Jewish story to motivate blacks to join in the civil-rights movement and escape their suffering, they picked up on the trend of using the Jewish experience and ultimate success in America as inspiration for the civil-rights movement.13 The language of the 1964 message showed that through their own experience of persecution and liberation as a group, Jews had a unique appreciation for the African-American situation. Reform Jews argued more strongly than ever that their particularism would be useful for expanding civil rights. We applaud those among our colleagues who have given of themselves to the struggle and have followed words with deeds in their communities. … But what else could have been expected from the people of Moses than to cry out, “Let God’s children go free.”

13 Sundquist, 95-169.

54 Today, the Exodus is not yet accomplished. The opponents of desegregation still harass, still delay, bomb churches, but a people is on the march. The seas have been split, and the road to the Promised Land lies open.

This passage wrote the civil-rights movement into Jewish history. Earlier Race Relations Sabbath Messages worked hard to incorporate Jews into a universal history, but this message envisioned Jews as having their own history of struggling in the world, of which the American civil-rights movement is only one chapter. This constitutes a reversal of the 1950’s understanding of the relationship between Judaism and America: instead of America being the larger context for Judaism, Judaism is the larger context for America. American Reform Jewish identity is hinged on a particular history that is separate from American history, though Jewish life in America and the civil-rights movement became part of Jewish history. It framed the civil- rights movement in particularist Jewish terms and imagery, so that Reform Jews fighting for black freedom were really fighting for their own freedom. Although Jewish and black freedom had been linked in the previous decade, it was not through this kind of particularist Jewish language. In the 1950’s, Reform Jews’ participation in the civil-rights movement benefited them because it helped attain and protect rights for their own group as well as African Americans. That kind of political self-interest did not motivate Jews in the 1960’s. Though Reform Jews had accomplished their personal goal of inclusion in society, they had to continue struggling for African Americans or their universalist rhetoric would have been proven inauthentic, a means to manipulate American society in their favor instead of a legitimate effort to establish equality. The 1962 message also articulated this idea; if desegregation could not be accomplished, Reform Jews “face[d] the danger of ignoring those ethical principles which are the very basis upon which our democracy is founded.” Reform Jews had to support African American rights to authenticate their identity as Jews and as Americans. They joined American society based on the ethical precepts of Judaism, and segregation violated the tenets of Jewish doctrine and American universalism, as in the words of the 1966 message, “In the struggle for negro rights, we test our adherence to the great command of Leviticus, ‘Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.’” Even though they had shifted toward a particularist model, they could not negate the universalist rhetoric that had espoused the ways that Jews and African Americans were all part of a single human race. This argument lay at the base of Reform ideas of social action and ethical monotheism, and it had justified Reform Jews as good American

55 citizens to the rest of American society. There was no way to relinquish an ultimate universalist goal of equality and humanism without undoing Reform Jewish security. So Reform Jews had to continue to argue that all humans were created in God’s image at the same time that they protected their identity as a distinct group. By arguing that each group could contribute to society, Jews could envision themselves as different and argue for African American integration at the same time. For Reform Jews to use particularist language for the sake of a universalist goal meant that Jews could not authentically celebrate their own freedom and Exodus without accomplishing African-American freedom through desegregation and inclusion in society. Although Reform Judaism had shifted away from a universalist model of social action, social action was still the basis of the authenticity of the movement, as the 1966 message argued that the decision to participate in the cultivation of justice for African Americans was “a decision that tests not only Jews but Judaism.” Reform Jews had to support African Americans’ efforts in the public realm, but they could best do so by simultaneously supporting Jewish identity in the private realm. Because they had shifted to a toward an understanding of their group’s history as an example for African Americans, Reform Jews had to develop that particularist identity to mark off their history from other groups. By nurturing both the public and private realms, Jews could help African Americans achieve their own African-American Exodus through continuing to participate in Jewish life in the promised land of American society. Sylvester Johnson argued that the story of the Exodus and of the Israelites as God’s had been important for Americans in understanding their own nation ever since John Winthrop envisioned the Puritan community as a ‘city upon a hill.’14 Therefore it made sense that as African Americans used the story of the Exodus to envision themselves that Jews would respond to the use of their own story. However, as Jews saw themselves as instructors, the issues and instabilities of their arguments for racial equality became more problematic. Though Jews recognized themselves in African American rhetoric, their particularist arguments in the 1960’s took on a paternalistic tone that also was unrealistic about the obstacles that African Americans faced. When African Americans used the Exodus story, it created the unity and power they desired because it mobilized the African American community to fight for civil rights. But when Reform Jews did the same, their tendency to see themselves as leaders and a

14 Johnson, 1.

56 shining example for African Americans caused the practical problem of too closely paralleling the Jewish experience in America to the African American experience. As suggested by Brodkin and Lederhendler’s work and the overwhelming optimism of the 1950’s, Reform Jews did not express a grasp of reality when they expected African Americans to be able to follow their example. During the 1960’s, Reform Jews assumed African Americans could achieve equality by following Jews’ example because Jews believed they had already worked their way through American society on a meritocracy system; they saw no reason why African Americans could do the same. However, although the legislation that allowed Jews to succeed was in theory open to blacks, Brodkin argued that blacks never actually received benefits from it due to racial discrimination in awarding the assistance provided by the GI bill and FHA and VA mortgages.15 Lederhendler stated that he and other Jews were naïve to have thought that jobs and education would have solved the racial problems, but perhaps not.16 The naïveté of Jews regarding African Americans’ ability to follow in their footsteps meant that as Jews turned toward particularism to set an example for African Americans, the instabilities of 1950’s universalism were perpetuated and even augmented. If Reform Jews expected African Americans to copy them step by step, then they were not approaching the civil-rights movement in the same way as African Americans, or, for that matter, realistically. African Americans were looking to receive rights in housing, jobs, and occupations, but Jews were operating on an assumption that African Americans already had the opportunity to seize those rights. By making themselves a model for African Americans, Reform Jews suggested they knew what African Americans needed to do to be incorporated into American society, but this misunderstanding suggests that part of the breakdown in race relations between Jews and African Americans came out of the fact that they had no such knowledge. Even as Jewish sources were incorporated into the movement, Reform Judaism in 1962 also continued to recognize the usefulness of the American political and social heritage in negotiating the civil-rights movement. We commend those students who place life and limb in jeopardy for the sake of their convictions. Their objectives and methods – sit-in, kneel-in, read-in, stand-in, wade-in – are consistent with our heritage, in keeping with rights granted them by our Federal

15 Brodkin, 50. 16 Lederhendler, New York Jews, 129.

57 Constitution. Even when they practice civil disobedience at the risk of community discord, so long as they are non-violent, with “built-in” controls, they emulate the leadership of Dr. Martin Luther King, who proclaims: “I will obey the law only if the law is right and just, consistent with the moral law of the universe.”

The civil-rights movement of the 1950’s was primarily acted out in the courtroom, while in the 1960’s direct action, such as protests and sit-ins, became the method of calling attention to African-American rights.17 This passage connected Reform Jews to the universalist goals of the civil-rights movement by showing that Reform Jews continued to draw inspiration from civil figures such as Martin Luther King and that the American Constitution remained essential to dictating Jewish political priorities. The 1966 message expanded that connection, “Race Relations Sabbath reminds us that racial equality is not only a dream which men such as Martin Luther King have dreamed. It is the dream of America. It is the dream of the Jew.” The movement had begun to draw inward toward Jewish sources, but this did not change Reform Jews’ ultimate understanding of themselves as patriotic Americans. The movement saw no conflict between increasingly endorsing the State of Israel and maintaining the strong American nationalism that had historically characterized American Reform Judaism.

Radical Particularism By the end of the 1960’s, Reform Jews had turned to Jewish particularism as a means to create a space for themselves in American society. They maintained inclusive goals of equality for all races and religions, but they did not want the distinctiveness of Jews to dissolve as a result of integration. Reform Jews presented the best form of democracy to be one that gave

17 This passage established that Reform Jews were not opposed to direct action as a means for the civil-rights movement. Historians have argued that as African Americans became frustrated with the failure of the courtroom to fulfill their needs and the civil-rights movement entered the direct action phase, Jews were opposed to this change on principle and therefore ceased to participate in the civil-rights movement. Reform Jews showed their support in the 1962 message for these non-violent protest methods, and in the 1964 Race Relations Sabbath Message, their statements of frustration were pointed specifically toward the inability of legislation to meet the needs of African Americans, “We are mindful of the fact that legal right to opportunity does not carry automatic opportunity with it.” The end of Jewish participation in the civil-rights movement was not due to a blanket opposition to these tactics, since clearly they were sympathetic to and supportive of the changing dynamic of the civil-rights movement. This is not to say that by backing direct action either Reform Jews or African Americans abandoned legislation as important, but both groups became more skeptical during the 1960’s and expressed the sentiment that the courtroom would not be enough to enact real change in American society. See also Cheryl Greenberg, “Negotiating Coalition: Black and Jewish Civil Rights Agencies in the Twentieth Centuries,” Jack Salzman and Cornel West, eds., Struggles in the Promised Land: Toward a History of Black-Jewish Relations in the United States (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 153-75; Deborah Dash Moore, “Separate Paths: Blacks and Jews in the Twentieth-Century South.” Jack Salzman and Cornel West, eds., Struggles in the Promised Land: Toward a History of Black-Jewish Relations in the United States (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 277.

58 citizenship and rights to all people while still allowing them to maintain their distinct culture and identities. It was not any particular culture that warranted rights, but human dignity stipulated that all people deserved equal protection because all cultures could contribute to and expand American social progress. In that case, the best way for Reform Jews to exhibit their patriotism was to embrace their religious freedom and develop particularity; otherwise, the particular traits of Judaism could not provide maximum benefit to American society. The 1969 Race Relations Sabbath Message called on Maimonides for religious inspiration, “‘Ani-Ma-amin’ – ‘I believe with perfect faith…’” in the context of remembering what it claimed was persistent optimism of Jews in the Holocaust. American sources had failed to sustain Reform Jews’ optimism about the civil-rights movement; even the Civil Rights Acts of the mid-1960’s had not resolved the issues of discrimination and social division. Looking inward, Reform Jews used Jewish history instead of American history for inspiration when the situation at hand offered no foreseeable positive resolution. Jewish sources became acceptable because these were a part of Jewish roots and heritage that could offer a different perspective to the problems of American society that any other group could not give. If Jews and other groups offered all of their particular experiences, Americans could come together and learn from each group in a way that perfected society for all groups. Even though the 1969 message agreed with Theodore Herzl that Zionism was a necessary cause for the safety of European Jews, the situation in America was portrayed differently: In retrospect, the classical Zionist analysis of Europe was essentially correct. Europe was incurably sick with anti-Semitic racism. Such an analysis has proven incorrect regarding America. The Jew has succeeded in integrating. Unlike many of the black separatists who have already concluded that America is incurably sick with black racism, we cannot and must not despair about America. We must enormously increase our efforts to make the American dream of “liberty and justice for all” – the dream not only of Martin Luther King, but also of Jefferson, Lincoln, Roosevelt and Kennedy – come true.

Jewish freedom and authenticity were linked as strongly as ever to the fight for African- American civil rights. While Reform Jews were optimistic that blacks could succeed in America because Jews already had, they also recognized that if blacks did not succeed in America, Jewish status in American society would be inauthentic. America was the only country where Jews had successfully integrated into the mainstream, so if blacks could not do so in America, there was no other possibility for blacks to live harmoniously among a diverse ethnic population. This would mean no model of universalism or human cooperation could realistically function, and

59 Jews would be grouped into a class of society that prospered at the cost of others. This kind of permanent inequality would mar the model of ethical monotheism as an authentic identity for Reform Jews, whether it was drawn from universalism or particularism. Either orientation claimed a universal society was the ultimate aspiration for society, though universalism portrayed it in the present and particularism expected it in the future. To settle for inequality in the present, however, would prevent a universal society from ever being established and contradict both universalism and particularism. Therefore the success of Jewish particularism was tied to African-American particularism and American universalism at the same time. Neither blacks nor Jews as distinct groups could live happily in the world unless the American dream of equality was a possibility. This passage indicated that America was the only hope left for an ideal society to be achieved, and Reform Jews were turned to particularist sources to reinvigorate their hope for that society. By the end of the decade, the 1970 message more boldly expressed the same idea of Jews having a unique duty to teach Americans moral values as had been presented tentatively in the early 1960’s, “As Jews, we have a vital role to play. Our tradition teaches us: ‘Whoever can do something about the sins of his household, his city or his world and does not, is held guilty for these sins.’” Reform Jews in 1970 did not evoke the same connection to other religious groups in order to understand their duty to seek civil-rights for African Americans. Identity as Jews and not as members of the American civil religious community directed their duties. In the 1961 message, Reform Jews tried to maintain a balance between seeing themselves as a separate group and seeing their religion as having common values with other Americans. However, by 1970, that balance was tipped in favor of drawing from particularity for Jewish directives. Reform Jews became less concerned with difference as a category that threatened their security in America, and became more committed to articulating the ways Judaism could lead Americans toward a more ethical society. The 1970 message repeatedly emphasized that Jewish sources and Jewish experience gave Reform Judaism particular insight into the significance of the civil- rights movement for African Americans and white Americans. Reform Jews understood the civil-rights movement because their tradition endowed them with a sharpened sense of ethical monotheism, but this also combined with Jewish sympathy for the suffering of African Americans to increase the awareness Reform Jews had of African Americans’ problems in an oppressive society.

60 We Jews, so long brutalized and confined to ghettos, ought to be in the forefront of those who fight to open suburbs and build homes for low and middle income families, regardless of color or creed. … We Jews, who have for so long felt the sting of oppressed minority status, should now stand together with our black brothers in those civil rights organizations on the firing line for freedom, justice and equality. They need our generous support financially and spiritually. We Jews, who have suffered time and again as scapegoats, have the duty to inform our elected representatives that we will no longer tolerate gradualism for the sake of political expediency. Human lives and the future of our nation are at stake.

The rhetorical repetition of Reform Jews’ duty specifically as Jews throughout this message showed that it was not through conscience or mere human status that these insights came to Jews or other Americans, but that only through their connection with Jewish identity and history could Reform Jews offer these ideas to Americans and therefore help move the civil-rights movement forward. Reform Jews had been accepted into the American mainstream, but that acceptance was only authentic if Reform Jews used that position of power to benefit African Americans who continued to struggle. The 1970 message described explicitly how Reform Jews could provide assistance to African Americans. By helping African Americans participate in suburbanization, the key to Reform Jews’ security in America and group identity by 1970, Reform Jews could give African Americans the social advantages that had led to Jewish integration in American society. Until then, Reform Jews had to emphasize their view of African Americans as equal citizens and balance out the poverty of the African-American situation by using the money Reform Jews had made as a result of their integration to help them achieve equality. Financial and spiritual support are specifically mentioned because these are the two kinds of powers that Reform Jews were developing throughout the 1960’s. By supporting African Americans financially, Reform Jews’ comfort and security in American society did not serve only their self- interest, but that of African Americans. And by cultivating Jewish spiritual power, Reform Jews added to their ability to draw from their religion’s ethical teachings and to serve as an example for all Americans in the civil-rights movement. Promoting those strengths, Reform Jews linked their own freedom to African American freedom in two ways; if African Americans did not achieve freedom in America, Jews’ security would be inauthentic, but Jews’ security was essential to African Americans’ freedom because it was through the lessons Jews had learned and the power they had gained that African Americans would eventually achieve social integration in America.

61 The frustrations expressed throughout the 1960’s with violence and the lack of social progress were evidence of the fact that not all humans must have access to the knowledge articulated by Reform Jews in the Race Relations Sabbath Messages, so universalism would not work because it would not allow Jews to draw from their particular insight. 1970 forcefully reminded Reform Jews of the failures of the civil-rights movement up to that point. The ill winds of racial bigotry and degradation still rage in our land. The causes have been studied but not solved. Report after report have detailed the grave challenge facing our nation. Nearly sixteen years have passed since the United States Supreme Court ruled against segregation, and today we are more segregated than before. States the Urban Coalition’s most recent report, ‘we are a year closer to being two separate societies, Black and White, increasingly separate and scarcely less unequal.

Not only did the message point out shortcomings in universalism, but it indicated that placing any faith in the ability of legislation, as was central to civil religion, was futile. This all the more emphasized the need for Reform Jews to stop seeking for universalism or American heritage to solve the problems of racism and discrimination. The American tradition had led to segregation and violence, and the best that the government could do was to point out its faults. Reform Jews would have to rely on themselves as a group to overcome the inadequacy of American civil culture. Hence the message’s call for Jews to point out deficiencies of the government and lead the way toward solving America’s race problems. We Jews should be among the first who question the sanity of a national budget which spends over 80 billion dollars on military and defense, and a pathetic pittance by comparison on social and urban reconstruction. … We Jews, who are forbidden to stand idly by while our fellow man is in danger, must do all we can to provide job opportunities, aid in the creation of better educational facilities, and support the expansion of self-help and welfare programs.

Setting concrete goals for American society remained the primary concern of Reform social action in 1970, but the particularist rhetoric of the message demonstrated that Reform Jews no longer had any trust that those goals could come out of civil religion or universalist sources. If poverty, education and job opportunities were going to be reformed in American society, group identity would have to be cultivated so that new sources outside of the failing American political rhetoric could be introduced and initiate the real social progress Reform Jews and African Americans sought from the civil-rights movement.

62

CONCLUSIONS By embracing their particularity as a group, American Reform Jews in the 1960’s attempted to show African Americans the way to success. The lessons learned from Jewish history inform American Reform Jews’ insight into the African-American dilemma. Calling on Jewish specificity to direct Reform Jews’ sensibility of how to bolster social action, Reform Jews increased the importance of Jewish religious practice as opposed to national civil religion. By transposing their religiosity into a more particularist key, Reform Jews acted out their connection to those historical memories. David Waldstreicher argued that Americans have participated in public festivals in order to continuously construct the importance of national history and its relevance. Nationalism in America hasn’t been a great idea that has waxed and waned, something that people truly had or did not have. It has been a set of practices that empowered Americans to fight over the legacy of their national Revolution and to protest their exclusion from that Revolution’s fruits. It is not inherently reactionary or progressive; like other , its political meanings are multiple, even contradictory, and can be shown to have changed radically over time.1

Nationalism has not meant any one ideology or practice in America, but it has remained a consistent debate among Americans. The legacy of the and political documents such as the Declaration of Independence, Constitution and Bill of Rights has been uncertain, so as Americans have claimed to participate in nationalism, they have also presented their vision for what that nationalism should be.50 By holding the Race Relations Sabbath on Presidents’ Day each year, Reform Jews created a that celebrated their Americanness. In the Race Relations Sabbath Messages, Reform Jews drew from the American political past to argue for their interpretation of the ideas of equality and society in the Constitution and other documents. In the 1950’s, Reform Jews presented those documents in the light of universalism, which they used to show their commitment to American nationalism. By paralleling American political documents with Torah, Reform Jews argued that they were good citizens and that the universalist values present in both American and Jewish heritages were the best vision for American society.

1 David Waldstreicher, In the Midst of Perpetual Fêtes: The Making of American Nationalism, 1776-1820 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 3. 50 Waldstreicher, 352.

63 As Jewish racial and social status changed in America, so did the argument for nationalism. In the 1960’s, Reform Jews instead turned to Jewish history to support their own identity and still participate in national society. They believed they could espouse an identity distinct from other Americans and still be good citizens; it was through the unique insights of Jews as a group that Reform Jews in the 1960’s thought they would best realize their duties as citizens. Their turn to theological particularism allowed Reform Jews to articulate a national conception of America as a pluralist society, where each group was valued. Waldstreicher’s paradigm shows that Reform Jews, like other subgroups of American society, articulated their identity to argue for their authenticity as a form of American nationalism. Even in the turn toward particularism, the Race Relations Sabbath Messages used language that located Reform Jews and Jewish history in connection to the American context. In each period, these ideologies were played out in the public behaviors of Reform Jews. The 1950’s saw Reform Jews actively practicing civil religion to work out and sustain their political ideas, and at the same time shaping a theology that connected the universalism of American civil religion to Jewish heritage. Through those practices, Reform Jews exhibited how their conception of nationalism embraced the values of the Revolution; civil religion and universalism claimed that the legacy of the American Revolution and the founding fathers was one of equality for all citizens. For Reform Jews to call on Jewish history as relevant to their contemporary political situation in the 1960’s, they had to turn toward a Jewish particularism with its own set of rituals to serve as the practices that would embody the Reform Jewish conception of American nationalism. The only way for Jews to petition for the usefulness of Jewish history was to act out that history through Jewish culture. Waldstreicher’s idea of “nationalism as partisan antipartisanship”51 points to the argument each group constructs for what American society should be. Though Reform Jews claimed to be a part of national society, their rhetoric in the Race Relations Sabbath Messages, including “the productive tensions, the negotiations, the active politicking, and the simultaneous denial of partisanship”52 served to offer a specific idea of the ‘right’ way to perform American nationalism. It made religious and political conservatives, those who did not support the action and legislation that would lead to African-American equality, into the ‘other,’ the inauthentic performance of American

51 Waldstreicher, 201. 52 Waldstreicher, 202.

64 citizenship. Reform Jews in the 1960’s argued that the best articulation of the humanitarian values would come from the particular contributions of the plurality of groups in America, and they suggested that especially Jews, with their history of an Exodus from suffering into success and loyal citizenship, could direct America toward becoming the most enlightened society. According to Lederhendler, the rising generation at the end of the 1960’s and beginning of the 1970’s realized how detached most New York Jews were from any kind of unique Jewish identity, which led many of them to desire a rise in religious participation and self-definition.2 The desire for Jewish particularism made space for the arguments of a group Lederhendler calls the Religious Intelligentsia (figures such as , Marie Syrkin, Will Herberg, Horace M. Kallen, Louis Finkelstein, , Arthur Cohen, , and Joseph Soloveitchik).3 In the 1950’s, the distinction between Jews and non-Jews that was present in these theologians’ ideas would not have been productive for Jews who were trying to show their commonalities with other Americans. Society’s permanent brand of ‘other’ on the Jewish people, evidenced by antisemitism and the Holocaust, gave way to a religious effort led by the Religious Intelligentsia to grapple with the pervading pessimism about the ability of Jews to ever be secure in non-Jewish society, which in turn led to a more optimistic rendering of Jewish group identity for the purpose of defending Jewish status in society.4 Entering the 1950’s, Jews apparently still felt so ‘other’ compared to mainstream Americans that they had to protect themselves from potential antisemitic impulses. However, once ideas of negative differences between Jews and Americans were essentially dispelled, Jews could further expand on the useful benefits of Jewish culture. Lederhendler exhibits the religious rhetoric of such popular writers as Cynthia Ozick and Elie Wiesel as evidence of the influence of the Religious Intelligentsia and the impulse toward a Jewish identity based on religion.5 The overt religious particularism of American Jews popular culture in the 1960’s was a conscious display of the ways Jews had seen themselves separate from society even throughout the universalism of the 1950’s. The neighborhood isolation of 1950’s urbanization had circumvented a need to articulate the differences represented by 1960’s particularity and suburbanization; Jews were forced to be separate in the 1950’s. When they were no longer forced to be separate in the

2 Lederhendler, New York Jews, 64. 3 Lederhendler, New York Jews, 30-1, citing Carole S. Kessner, ed., The “Other” New York Jewish Intellectuals (New York, New York University Press, 1994); Lederhendler, New York Jews, 116. 4 Lederhendler, New York Jews, 125-6. 5 Lederhendler, New York Jews, 122-5.

65 1960’s, Jews used particularism to maintain their distinctiveness, although the distinctiveness intentionally espoused was portrayed as a positive contribution to society, unlike the segregation of the 1950’s which had been an obstacle in the progress toward an enlightened society. This same pessimism about the success of universalism for Jews in America is mirrored in the 1960’s Race Relations Sabbath Messages in their articulation of the Reform vision for how Jews could support social progress in American society. The 1950’s messages had described American society in terms of universalism, though I have argued that due to the continuing discrimination and segregation in American society, this should be taken as evidence that a universal society did not yet exist. Because universalism was optimistic about the potential of American society and therefore dishonest about society’s actual status in the 1950’s, Reform Jews in the 1960’s had to rearticulate their goals for society because universalism was not so quickly established in America as Reform Jews in the 1950’s had hoped. Jews had gained rights and were integrated into suburban neighborhoods, but African Americans continued to suffer exclusion and violence. Through particularism, Reform Jews came to terms with the presence of discrimination in American society, and constructed a theology that recognized such social constraint at the same time that it envisioned a possibility for Reform Jews to participate in social action that could improve America. Lederhendler suggested that Jews entered the civil-rights movement with libertarian attitudes of , but the realization that such an outlook threatened Jewish distinctiveness led Jews to seek to participate in the struggle for African-American rights in the 1960’s in a different way that would not be detrimental to their desired perceptions of themselves as a cohesive group.6 Arthur Hertzberg argued that the libertarian model was bad for Jews and African Americans, since both groups wanted integration but did not feel it should come at the cost of their particular cultural identity.7 In the 1960’s, the particular needs of each group, whether civil rights and affirmative action for African Americans or religious affiliation and Zionism for Jews, amounted to the same goal of respect and inclusion in society for all people through accepting and embracing their differences. The Race Relations Sabbath Messages used religious arguments to eliminate the dangerous distinctions made among races in America prior

6 Lederhendler, New York Jews, 129. 7 Lederhendler, New York Jews, 130; citing Arthur Hertzberg, “Changing Race Relations and Jewish Communal Service,” presented at a symposium on “Jewish-Negro Relations,” New York, February 1964; published in Journal of Jewish Communal Service 41: 4 (Summer 1965), 324-33.

66 to the 1950’s, which allowed the 1960’s messages to present a sense of particularity that did not threaten American society. This new group identity created a space for a conception of pluralism that would allow groups such as Jews or African Americans to espouse a particularist identity without a danger of discrimination due to that particularity. Group distinctions in this new pluralism were no longer a threat, but were understood to be the unique contributions each group could make to society. According to this model of pluralism, then, only by retaining their group identity could African Americans or Jews be fairly integrated into American society; otherwise WASP hegemony would continue to assert itself over minorities by demanding that they alter their identities in order to enjoy the benefits of American freedom. The later generation of Reform Jews rejected the assimilationist Americanization of the second-generation of Jews in America for group rights and multiculturalism, and in large part the practice of Reform Judaism shifted from the American community in the 1950’s to the synagogue by the end of the 1960’s. This shift allowed Reform Jews to draw out their specificity and emphasize the vision of equality toward which they could lead other Americans. Reform Jews turned to such particularist Jewish sources as were present in the 1960’s Race Relations Sabbath Messages due to the realization that the optimism tied up with universalism might never be fulfilled. Realistically, if Reform Jews wanted to sustain their identity on sources that would not inevitably fail, they could not claim to define themselves exclusively through a perpetually improving society. Negative experiences in Jewish history, such as the Six-Day War and the memories it conjured of the Holocaust, and in African American history, such as continuing discrimination and violence, showed that society was not on a clearly progressive path. The failure of the civil-rights movement to revolutionize American society and easily incorporate African Americans into the mainstream structure indicated to Reform Jews in the late 1960’s and 1970’s that their efforts to participate in a universalist worldview that expected no discrimination simply could not be fulfilled. Reform Jews of the 1950’s had been able to authentically stake their identities on that vision because of the success of court cases and the partial integration of minorities into mainstream American society. However, what had worked in the 1950’s would not continue to function during the violence and pessimism of the 1960’s. In order to rework their religious identity back to a position of optimism about the possibility of any social improvement, Reform Jews had to turn inward to more traditional religious texts and even ethnic Jewish texts to create an entirely new

67 identity that approached the American social situation from a new point of view that would not lead only to frustration and empty promises. African Americans were not alone in facing violent set-backs that impeded their trust in the possibility for successful integration in society during the 1960’s. The Six-Day War in the Middle East created at least temporary concerns for American Jews about the safety and status of world Jewry. Clayborne Carson stated, “For both African Americans and Jews, the 1967 Arab- Israeli war signaled a shift from the universalistic values that had once prevailed in the civil rights movement toward an emphasis on political action based on more narrowly conceived group identities.”8 Per Carson’s use of the Six-Day War as the watershed in American Jewish identity, American social trends had essentially no significant affect on Jewish identity and politics. However, the Six-Day War does not so distinctly divide American Jewish culture into the “before” and “after” that historians such as Carson locate in an assessment of recent Jewish history.9 Detailed analysis of the Race Relations Sabbath Messages indicates that American Reform Jews did not simply abandon the cause of the civil-rights movement to focus on issues of particularity and preserving Jewish culture after the Six-Day War. Particularism had appealed to Reform Jews as a useful, authentic theological and political orientation prior to the war, as evidenced by the appearance of such rhetoric as early as 1960. The location of a rise in particularism with suburbanization indicates that Jewish particularism was not a backlash against antisemitism, black or white, following the Six-Day War or a reaction to the rise of Black Power and African-American particularism. According to Svonkin, the use of particularism was more dramatic following 1967, but American Jews had shifted “from liberal universalism to ethnoreligious self-assertion” by the early 1960’s.7 As a rejection of Carson’s divide of history at 1967, Joshua Zeitz attempted to move the divide back to the mid-1970’s, after the War and the prominence of affirmative action, “The rift between these groups [African Americans and Jews] occurred only after the civil rights agenda shifted to grounds less conducive to principled agreement between Jewish and

8 Clayborne Carson, “Black-Jewish Universalism in the Era of Identity Politics,” Jack Salzman and Cornel West, ed. Struggles in the Promised Land: Toward a History of Black-Jewish Relations in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 192. 9 Eli Lederhendler, ed., The Six-Day War and World Jewry (Bethesda: University Press of Maryland, 2000), ix. 7 Svonkin, 180.

68 black leaders, and this division emerged in full thrust several years after the Six Day War.”10 Though Zeitz’s periodization recognized the importance of American social factors in affecting Jewish identity in a way that Carson’s division had not, it was still not the best understanding of American Jewish culture, as illustrated by the rhetoric of the Race Relations Sabbath Messages. The shift in Jewish culture and ideology had taken place before either the Six-Day War or the Yom Kippur, and it predated the rise in Black Power and Affirmative Action, which came in the mid-1960’s. Jewish particularism initially manifested as a result of earlier social forces and was later only solidified by other events; Lederhendler argued, That Jewish life was affected positively in some countries and negatively in others by the same event is the tip-off that conditions other than the event were itself determinative. … It will not come as too much of a surprise, therefore, to see it argued...that only modest change took place in the internal workings of the Jewish community as a result of the Six-Day War (for example, in the United States, Canada, and Argentina).11

The shift toward particularism took place early in the 1960’s when Jews had securely achieved integration into American culture and suburban neighborhoods. The Six-Day War pushed American Jews further into the particularist framework, but it did not initiate that shift. The success of American Reform Jews in utilizing their form of Jewish identity in the aftermath of the Six-Day War indicates that the war was ultimately as important for them because of the victorious outcome for Israel as for the perceived threat to Jewish peoplehood. Though the war certainly heightened concern for Jews in America and throughout the world for their safety and served as a catalyst for increased particularism, a turn to exclusive Jewish sources had begun in the early 1960’s due to the changing nature of the civil-rights movement and the altered status of Jews in America. Reform Jews embraced the particularist ideas that had been stirring throughout the 1960’s to handle the problem posed by the Six-Day War, relying on the Reform Jewish identity that had been developing during the 1960’s of Jews as a group whose power was to be desired and emulated by others. The Race Relations Sabbath Messages show that Reform Jews had shifted toward particularism as a result of defining their role in the civil-rights movement. The frustrations regarding a lack of progress toward African-American rights and the need to protect minorities’ distinct identities while incorporating them into society had proven Reform Jewish particularism

10 Joshua Michael Zeitz, “‘If I am not for myself…’: The American Jewish Establishment in the Aftermath of the Six Day War,” American Jewish History 88 (2000), 282. 11 Lederhendler, The Six-Day War, 7.

69 to be an authentic venture in changing their approach to the civil-rights movement to remain relevant to the contemporary issues. The explicit particularity of the 1969 and 1970 messages was not merely the result of the Six-Day War or a Reform Jewish backlash toward international, American, and African-American cultures, but it was a trend in Jewish thought that had been developing throughout the decade. Jewish authenticity in the late 1960’s was staked on the ability of particularity to direct society toward social progress. The Six-Day War in the Middle East and the rise of radical black separatism in America were incorporated into the problems Reform Jews recognized with the status quo of society, alongside discrimination against African Americans in America. The theology and identity Jews had constructed to allow them to deal with the concerns presented by racism in America was the same identity used to tackle other issues that arose in society, such as the war and Black Power. Reform Jews had constructed a universalist worldview in the 1950’s to resolve injustices in society, but when particularity gave Reform Jews a better ability to link themselves to freedom for all groups, they turned toward particularity in the 1960’s to anchor their theology and to perform social action. It is not clear why the Race Relations Sabbath Messages ended after 1970. The Six-Day War, Black Power, and new goals for the civil-rights movement may all have contributed to the discontinuation of the messages, but the changing rhetoric in the messages since 1960 shows that it was not merely those causes that led to Reform Jewish particularism and an altered view of the civil-rights movement. The idea that Reform Jewish particularism would help African Americans attain civil rights may also have affected the decision to end the publication of the Race Relations Sabbath Messages; by turning further inward and focusing on Jewish concerns, Reform Jews could continue to make a place in American pluralism for groups to petition their own unique needs and sustain their own identity while also being considered good American citizens and benefiting from all the advantages of full integration in society.

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74 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Jessica received her undergraduate degree from Florida State University in Religion in 2005, and she will be completing her Master’s degree in American Religious History from Florida State University in 2007. Then she and her cat Annie will be living in Bloomington, IN, when she enters Indiana University’s Ph. D. program in Jewish studies.

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