Securing Rights by Action, Securing Rights by Default
American Jews in Historical Perspective
hasia r. diner
The history of Jews as individuals and Judaism as a religious body in America cannot be disentangled from the history of rights.
In every era, from the arrival of the first Jews in New Amsterdam in 1654 through the end of the twentieth century, Jewish life in the United States has been deeply influenced by the particular set of rights that Jews enjoyed or to which they considered themselves entitled.Much of what came to be distinctively American in the lives of American Jews historically flowed from the existence of those rights, which far outstripped those of other Jews in other places. Although it is hardly notable that Jews in the United States expected and received more rights than Jews in Russia or Poland, for example, their benefits as American citizens outstripped those of Jews in most other Western liberal democracies. If nothing else, Jews in the United States did not have memÂories of a conflicted and tense process of emancipation, such as the Jews of England, France, and especially Germany endured. With some minor exceptions, no state legislature and certainly not the U.S. Congress ever debated the merits or demerits of Jews or their worthiness for inclusion in the polity. English, French, and German Jews did have such memories.
Even the basic nature of American Jewish communal patterns derived from those rights. Because of the nonestablishment clause of the U.S. ConÂstitution’s First Amendment, possibly derived from the American reality of religious heterogeneity, the state, broadly defined, did not interfere with the internal affairs of the Jewish community. Individual Jews had a broad range of options in creating the kinds of Jewish institutions they wanted. Although elements within the world of Jewish traditionalism decried the anarchy and chaos of American Jewish life, and bemoaned the lack of respect for the traditional Jewish authority structure, American Jewish history witnessed the formation of an elaborate communal institutional landscape that was highly responsive to the wishes of individuals and parÂticularistic groups.
The state had no interest in what went on within the Jewish world. It did not collect taxes for the community, nor did it disÂburse funds, decide who was a Jew or who was a rabbi, or decide which institutions should receive the benefits of state support. Individual Jews in America had the right to make those determinations.1Jewish economic mobility and access to education can also be attribÂuted to the rights that they both “found” in America and helped to shape. The history of American higher education and employment, particularly on the professional level, included discrimination and exclusion, but those practices by and large did not impede Jews. For example, the developÂment of state schools of higher education after the 1860s and the absence of discrimination in that sector made it possible for Jews to circumvent the restrictive practices of private institutions.[148] [149] By a fortuitous coincidence, New York City, home to America’s largest Jewish community at the end of the nineteenth century, also boasted the most elaborate public and free higher educational system. By 1917 Jews, primarily young men but many women as well, made up 73 percent of the students in that system.[150] Similarly, the movement of Jews, primarily the children of immigrants, into white-collar and professional positions coincided with the expansion of public-sector employment. On the municipal, state, and federal levels Jews seized job opportunities that they often found unavailable in private concerns.[151] The fact that the state did not discriminate while individual Christians did had tremendous implications for the Jewish political stance in twentieth-century America. First, Jews had an economic interest in the constant expansion of state services. Historians and political scientists have argued over the sources of Jewish liberalism. The fact that government in America had been the patron of the Jews ought to figure into the analyÂsis. Whether as immigrants or as their descendants, Jews carved out for themselves an economic niche in the United States that fueled their passionate embrace of America. Although the history of that economic engagement is more complicated than a simple “rags to riches” story, it does provide dramatic evidence of the beneficence of American life. Tales of peddlers who in their own lifetimes became shopkeepers, of garment workers whose daughters became schoolteachers and whose sons became doctors, peppered the more prosaic narratives of hard work and struggle. The relative openness of the American system, its tremendous expansion in the years of Jewish migration, its veneration of commerce, its rigid racial structure benefiting those considered white, and the opening up of new fields with no entrenched elite to keep Jews out - all proclaimed to the Jews in America and to those still in Europe that “America is different.”[153] It is noteworthy that in most places where Jews lived, for centuries before their migration to America, they had found ways to identify with and understand themselves in relation to their nations, principalities, states, and the like. They prayed for the rulers on whom they depended and hoped for the welfare of their host societies. Not so in America. American Jews debated whether America should even be considered part of the galut, the diaspora. Their very migration to America took its impetus, in large measure, from the knowledge of American particularism when it came to Jewish rights. Although much of that migration, which began in large numbers in the 1820s and conÂtinued for a century, was driven by a negative force, the urgency to leave Bavaria, Hungary, Lithuania, Posen, Romania, and a score of other European settings, it also focused positively on the rights that they would enjoy in America. They chose America for both its economic opportuniÂties and its political freedoms. Importantly, political rights and economic opportunities were intertwined. Economic opportunities for Jews thrived within the context of political rights. The patterns of Jewish migration testify to the lure of America and its benefits for Jews. From the middle of the nineteenth century onward, German, Lithuanian, Polish, and Russian Jews who migrated to England, for example, viewed the British Isles, despite their liberalism and economic opportunities, as a way station for the more coveted goal, the move to America. After the 1920s, when U.S. immigration restrictions went into effect, Jews still regarded migraÂtion to Latin America and even Canada, as either temporary stopovers or consolation prizes.[154] As immigrants from European countries or as native-born Americans who recognized the absence of rights in those countries, American Jews almost universally understood their rights in America, not just in an abstract sense but also in relation to historical experience. Until the end of World War II most American Jews still had family members in Europe and comparison between countries could be understood in very concrete terms. In voluminous writings on this subject, in behavior as ordinary women and men operating in the “neutral” realm of the public, and in the formal activities of their organizations whose representatives claimed to speak for Judaism - a particular religion with a complicated and tortured history vis-a-vis the dominant religious tradition in the United States, ChristianÂity - American Jews vacillated between two interpretive poles.[155] More often than not, Jews recognized that America differed dramatiÂcally from Europe and that by any measure its Jews and its Judaism at any moment in time basked in the benevolent light of freedom and equality, the freedom to express Jewishness as Jews chose and to enjoy equal access to citizenship with other (white) Americans, the vast majority of whom were Christian. Anti-Semitism and the related phenomenon of antiÂJudaism hovered on the periphery of American life. It spawned no politÂical parties. Indeed, the one anti-immigrant party that issued a powerful challenge to the American political status quo, the Know-Nothings, ignored Jews and Jewish immigration from Central Europe. Likewise, anti-Judaism as a forceful element in the political culture existed only in the colonial era, when some colonies forbade the practice of the Jewish religion. But early on such restrictions faded and played no role in the establishment of Jewish institutions in America. Within a few decades of the establishment of the United States, Jews could claim that nowhere in America did their religion affect the ways in which they experienced the rights of American citizenship. After the 1820s and the passage of the “Jew Bill” in Maryland, no state that had a Jewish population disfranchised Jews in public life. North Carolina and New Hampshire were the last states to remove anti-Jewish laws from their books, but because virtually no Jews lived there they merited little attenÂtion in the Jewish world of public opinion.[156] In the postconstitutional era, no new laws went into effect that disadvantaged the Jewish people as individuals. Jews in America could and did take comfort in the reality that in the federal constitution and most of the state constitutions no one drew attenÂtion to the Jews or their situation, past or present. Even in the colonies, most of which maintained established churches, Jews suffered relatively little and shared in whatever rights others of their class (and obviously race and sex) enjoyed. For one, they were for the first time in their history not the only group of religious outsiders. Depending on where they resided, they shared this marginal status with Catholics, Lutherans, Men- nonites, Presbyterians, and Quakers.11 Where religious restraints had made their way into colonial policies, Jews had not been the sole or most hated targets.[159] As a point of historic irony, the real victim of religious disÂcrimination in the colonies was the Jews’ long-time nemesis, the Roman Catholic Church. Militantly Protestant or skeptically deist, early Americans considered Catholicism to be the great enemy of American freedom, whereas the Jews served as relatively benign reminders of the glories of the Old Testament tradition. In addition, Jews had much that the colonial governments wanted. Mainly traders, some of whom mainÂtained good business connections to Amsterdam, London, and elsewhere in Europe, and in the Caribbean, Jews were welcomed for the economic bounty it was thought they could bestow on mercantile outposts on the far side of the Atlantic.[160] This was obviously a far cry from their situation in Europe, where Jews had to undergo the process of emancipation. Legislators, heads of state, judges, lawyers, and government representatives at all levels argued the pros and cons of granting citizenship to Jews. In various European jurisÂdictions, Prussia for example, only those Jews who spoke German, who had enough capital, and who could prove that they had successfully undergone the process of Bildung (humanistic education) achieved emanÂcipation. The vast majority of Jewish men in Prussia and in other states had to wait decades until issues of “character” and rights were decouÂpled.[161] The U.S. Constitution’s silence on religion and both the disestabÂlishment and free exercise clauses of the First Amendment made Jewish rights central to the American political creed. This reality drew praise and thanks from Jews. It should hardly surprise us that they articulated a view of America as a benign place where indiÂviduals could expect the protection of their beliefs and a fair chance in public life. They waxed eloquent about the rights they enjoyed, even when they challenged the political culture on its flaws, such as the denial of rights to others, and when they recognized that the wall of separation between church and state had been partially and occasionally breached. Indeed, running throughout their rhetoric and manifested in much of their behavior we can discern a countercurrent. America, for all its difÂferences, still functioned as a Christian nation. Part of the Jewish anxiety over what equality of rights in America really meant grew out of a recogÂnition that anti-Semitism existed. It regularly bubbled over into ugly rhetoric and at times manifested itself in acts of public violence or instiÂtutional discrimination.[162] How far, Jews asked in their publications, sermons, and in the memoranda and reports of their organizations, did the anti-Semitism at the margins stand from the center of policy making? How secure were rights in a society where some elements of the polity considered Jews to be less than fully American and in which ChristianÂity was hailed as the essential faith of the nation? In some measure this concern with how secure Jews ought rightly to feel in the United States stemmed from a basic distrust of the legacy of Christian doctrine, with its emphasis on the culpability of Jews in the crucifixion, and the strong evangelical, proselytizing zeal of American Protestantism in the nineteenth century.[163] American Jews of today can plainly see that throughout much of the nearly 350 years of Jewish life in America, Christianity enjoyed the status of the dominant faith, and its adherents could claim a greater share of rights by virtue of belonging to the majority tradition. Throughout this lengthy span of time Jews had to contend with the reality that as individuals they enjoyed, from the second decade of the nineteenth century onward, full access to most - if not all - forms of public participation, yet Judaism did not. Examples abound: Mandatory Sunday closings (blue laws), school prayer, Bible readings, public invocaÂtion of Jesus by government officials, and presentations of Christian symbols in public spaces - all constituted the enshrining of Christianity as inherently and seamlessly “American.”[164] Jewish reaction to the Christianity of American society can be divided into two unequal eras. From the earliest years of Jewish participation in the debate over the character of American public life until roughly World War II, Jews shied away from advocating a religiously neutral civic culture. After World War II, emboldened by their increasingly middle-class, professional profile, by the harrowing experience of the war, and by the growing secularization of American society, they joined, and indeed led, an assault on the vestiges of Christian privilege in the trappings of public culture. They sought to strip American public - that is, state-endorsed and supported - culture of anything that celebrated religion, no matter whose. In the earlier period, from the 1820s through the 1940s, Jews recogÂnized their numerical minority and the intensity of evangelical ProtesÂtantism in society, and adopted a stance that asked merely for the same benefits and privileges as enjoyed by Christians.They wanted to be equal but accepted the reality that equality would have to be embedded in a religiously charged political culture. Two examples from the nineteenth century should put this in bolder relief. In 1844 Congress, who governed the District of Columbia, passed a law allowing trustees of Christian congregations there to assume the conveyance of real estate. The law clearly specified the religion of those congregations: Christian. Yet Jews were living in the federal district and formed a congregation there in 1855. To do that they had to enlist a politically well-connected Jew, Jonas Levy, who happened to live in Washington, to intercede on their behalf and to negotiate the law that was limited to Christians. So, whereas the Washington Hebrew CongreÂgation may have the distinction of being the only congressionally charÂtered synagogue in America, it achieved this distinction because Congress assumed that only one religious institution of this kind would ever develop along the shores of the Potomac. Because Jews were so few in number in the entire United States it may be assumed that Congress’s specific reference to “Christian” congreÂgations involved not so much a desire to snub Jews as a worldview that non-Christians just did not exist or did not count. More notable than congressional motivation, however, was the way in which the handful of members of the Washington Hebrew Congregation tackled their seeming lack of rights. From the point of view of the Jews - the two dozen men and their families who made up the membership of this congregation - the clause limiting this privilege to “Christian” congregations posed a problem that had to be negotiated. It is no wonder that by and large when it came to Jews publicly asserting their rights in America, they tended to opt for quiet strategies that drew little attention to themselves and their “otherness.” Rather than enunciate a principle of the rights to which they were entitled, they chose instead to negotiate, through a powÂerful intermediary, on this particular case, as in others.[165] The second example, from a decade later during the U.S. Civil War, shows the Christian evangelical character of American public life in even bolder relief and demonstrates again the disjunction between the rights of Jews and those of the dominant religious tradition. One of the few areas in American official life where the clergy has received formal, govÂernmental status involves the commissioning of military chaplains. During the Civil War the members of Union regiments voted for their own chapÂlains. It happened that Jews constituted a majority of the Sixty-fifth RegÂiment of the Fifth Pennsylvania Cavalry, under the command of Colonel Max Friedman. The men elected Sergeant Michael Allen, a Philadelphia Hebrew teacher, as their chaplain and spiritual guide. The Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) had been given the responsibility of overÂseeing the chaplaincy program, and when a YMCA field worker discovÂered this, controversy flared. The field worker declared that Allen did not fit the Christian notion of a “chaplain,” and demanded that he not only be removed from his chaplaincy but that he be dishonorably discharged. Allen resigned. The regiment, however, defiantly voted in another Jew, Arnold Fischel, an ordained rabbi from New York’s Shearith Israel conÂgregation. Fischel applied directly to the War Department for his comÂmission. The War Department turned him down.[166] The Board of Delegates of American Israelites, founded in 1858 as the first proto-defense organization for Jews in America, rushed to Fischel’s aid in the name of religious freedom. According to Rabbi Isidor Kalisch, who drafted the letter of protest to Congress, Jewish soldiers “have the same rights, according to the Constitution of the U.S. which they endeavor to preserve and defend with all their might.” He implored ConÂgress to “make provisions that Jewish Divines shall be allowed to serve as chaplains in the army and hospitals of the U.S.” It is important to note that Kalisch and others writing to Congress on Fischel’s behalf claimed the rights of Jews as a religious community. If the government was going to appoint and support chaplains, then chaplains representing Judaism should have the same rights as those representing any of the Christian denominations. They did not raise questions about this particular admixÂture of church and state but rather staked out a position that basically said that if some could elect their own, they should be able to, too.[167] In the long period before World War II Jews maintained a public stance that asked just for the right of Judaism to enjoy the same benefits as any other religious denomination. They seemed to accept the notion that the state did have the right to behave in a religiously specific manner. They did so in a voice that from the vantage point of the late twentieth century sounds celebratory, casual, and a bit obsequious, a minority group expressing pleasure at the occasional crumb offered by a government dominated by a majority.This should not, however, be taken as the underÂlying Jewish view or to mean that Jews accepted with equanimity the clear intermingling of American public life and Christian, particularly Protestant, culture. In their own institutions and publications they expressed tremendous alarm over the Christian character of America. Almost a century and a half ago, in 1869, the evangelical publication The Christian Statesman called for a national convention that would legally declare America a Christian nation, informed by the notion that “ChrisÂtian law” would be binding on all. Jewish leaders reacted nervously, underÂstanding that this constituted a real threat. Isaac Leeser (1806-68), a rabbi, journalist, and organizer of many communal agencies, saw this as a form of rishus, a Hebrew word for evil, used to denote anti-Semitism.[168] In The Occident and American Jewish Advocate, one of the most widely circulated Jewish publications in America, Leeser lambasted the proposed convenÂtion as an “intended inquisition,” a loaded term for Jews. Leeser’s alarm over the proposal dovetailed with his fear of Christian missionaries, Sunday closing laws, mandatory prayers in public schools, and other state- supported manifestations of Christianity.[169] The tone of the rhetoric of American Jews, written for private, Jewish- only consumption, was anything but sanguine. In 1892 the U.S. Supreme Court declared in its ruling on Church of the Holy Trinity v. United States that “this is a Christian nation.” Jews, who experienced relatively untramÂmeled freedom in their political and economic lives, found themselves surrounded by more than the trappings of Christianity. Their children who more likely than not attended public schools read from the King James version of the Bible, sang Christian hymns, and mumbled prayers invokÂing Jesus. By law, they had to close their businesses on Sunday, and if they labored as employees, they had to be at work on Saturday. Yet Jewish migration to America continued at the turn of the twentiÂeth century, and indeed quickened, despite the increasing Christianization of American public life. There was no question that among the range of choices open to them as Jews, no place in the world appeared as attracÂtive as the United States. It was the single most sought-after destination, and although not all European Jews migrated to the United States - not even a majority - the rights and opportunities in America fundamentally transformed Jewish culture in Europe. The language they used within the community resonated with anger and fear, anger at the reality of Christian hegemony in a land where they believed themselves entitled to all rights and fear that the status quo could actually deteriorate. Isaac Mayer Wise (1819-1900), the founder of Reform Judaism in America, wrote in his American Israelite that Sunday closing laws were not just unfair but “unjust, despotic, and damnable.”[170] But Jews did little to organize politically around these issues or to draw attention to their “otherness” or to the disjunction between themselves as Jews and the Christian character of American political life. Until nearly the middle of the twentieth century Jews and their multiple organizations tended to react rather than act. They did not search out test cases nor did they challenge existing practices. Where they needed to, as individuals, they sought exemptions from odious legal practices, such as the Sunday closing laws. They avoided forging any kind of political strategy around the issue of the Christian content of public life. Rather, individually or episodically, they engaged with specific, immediate problems. They accepted a kind of status quo, a fixed American framework that assumed Christian predominance. They rallied their resources quietly and behind the scenes when some act of outrage or some policy upset the agreed-on order. By and large their words intended for the consumption of others resounded with conciliatory calm and consistently invoked the “American creed” as a justification for their requests. Jews demanded relÂatively little, and what political clout they had tended to be used in defense of Jewish rights or the denial thereof abroad rather than in their own name. That clearly would have implied a degree of ingratitude for the rights they had.[171] Their public quietude should not be taken as evidence of passive accepÂtance of the status quo. Rather, Jews made a series of political decisions to enhance their rights and prevent jeopardizing the ones they had. How did they behave politically and legally as they continuously faced chalÂlenges to their rights? When Jews decided that they needed to engage in more assertive behavior, they tended to do so in nonpublic, behind-the-doors negotiaÂtions. They basically sought to lay low. Communal political engagement with problems on the outside fell into a category defined as “sha-sha,” the Yiddish term for “quietly, quietly.” Demanding too much, too loudly, they believed, could bring more bad than good. It could trigger a decline in Jewish rights and could, in an America where anti-Semitism did indeed rear its head, inspire hatred of the Jews where it might previously have been dormant.[172] Critics of this approach both at the time and in retroÂspect have faulted it for not being a palpable, noisy, and demonstrative American Jewish response to the exigencies of the 1930s and 1940s. Most American Jews, ordinary people and leaders, recognized that Hitler and Nazism were a real danger. They came to know early on that the fate of European Jewry hung in the balance. But the political posture of American Jews never took on a mass, demanding stance. They particiÂpated in rescue efforts, engaged in philanthropic and charitable work, and supported the war effort, but did nothing to indicate to the American public that there really was a Jewish agenda in all this.[173] Jews never sought allies in other marginal groups in an effort to enhance their rights or in their quest to make the United States less overtly a “Christian nation.” In the middle and late nineteenth century the Catholic Church took up the cause of ending the reading of the King James Bible in public schools and the provision of state funds to basically Protestant schools and societies. These were causes that Jews actually shared, but never did they overtly and organizationally join with Catholics to promote them. The Jewish-Catholic comparison bears some examination here. Catholics, too, found their religion deficient in status and themselves stripped of some rights by virtue of their Catholicism. The Catholics, so many more in number, adopted a very different strategy from that of the Jews. For one, they created for themselves a vast alternative system of eduÂcation where they could be free to pursue their own agenda - without the King James Bible, the Protestant hymns, and what they saw as the Protestant values that underlay the public school system. Because their numbers were so much greater than those of the Jews and their history vis-a-vis American Protestantism so much more resonant with memories of persecutions, violence, and exclusion, they adopted a more confrontaÂtional rhetoric. Although this is not intended to indicate that Catholics did not assimilate, demonstrate patriotism and loyalty, or acknowledge the positive qualities of the American creed, they did, however, develop and elaborate on a fundamental critique of American modernity and the American idea of individual progress.[174] IfJews did not go out of their way to find common ground with other religious minorities - a problematic term given the size of some of those other groups - such as Catholics, Seventh-Day Adventists, and Mormons in the pre-World War II era, they did couch their calls for fair play, equity, and the extension of rights to all in universalistic rather than particularÂistic terms. When they asserted that a particular practice was wrong or unfair they made the assertion in terms of a broad range of out-groups rather than in their own name alone. They argued against ChristianizaÂtion in the name of liberal Americanism, not in terms of the impact it would have on Jews. No place was this clearer than in the advocacy of greater rights for African Americans by Jewish individuals and periodicals, and some orgaÂnizations. From the beginning of the twentieth century, with the foundÂing of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909, individual Jews were overrepresented among the white activists for black rights. Jewish newspapers and magazines, representing the entire spectrum of opinion and discourse, adamantly argued in favor of an end to segregation and violence, toward the creation of a society in which color had no implications, negative or positive, for political or civic participation.[175] The Jewish advocacy for enhancing and indeed equalizing the rights of African Americans involved not just passionate rhetoric and organizaÂtional activities. It involved calls on Congress to pass legislation and calls on the courts to adjudicate in favor of greater rights. Obviously, Jews themselves were not the objects of these demands for the state to do something to protect individuals against lynching or to ensure equal disÂtribution of state resources. Rather, they were articulating a deep disapÂpointment with an essential element in American culture on someone else’s behalf.[176] What is particularly noteworthy is that the passion, the vehemence, and the fiery rhetoric that Jewish publications used to attack segregation and discrimination against African Americans far outstripped the rhetoric that they used to describe and decry their own situation, fraught as it was with some level of anti-Semitism. It is entirely possible that this was so because the plight of black Americans was so much worse. This disparity in attack deserves further analysis, particularly when set in the context of a disÂcussion of Jews and Jewish rights in America. Many of the institutions and practices that oppressed African Americans could be understood by Jews in the context of their own experiences. For example, J ews faced discrimination in the housing market, albeit in a dramatically more limited scope than that endured by black Americans. Jewish entry into private universities and colleges was limited by anti-Semitic practices, although never to the degree that black people were excluded. In the area of employment Jews complained - among themselves - of discrimination against Jewish doctors in securing hospital privileges, against Jewish lawyers in prestigious private firms, and against Jews with training in engineering, accounting, and the like. Jewish academics faced an uphill battle in obtaining university-level positions. Jews thus had a solid core of complaints that they could publicly have lodged in the 1910s, 1920s, and beyond. But they did not. Instead, they chose to engage in quiet, alternative means to circumvent such discrimÂination when dealing with their own situation, reserving their passionate rhetoric to decry the vastly greater discrimination suffered by African Americans. Elsewhere, I have labeled this a “vicarious attack.” This was not intended to demolish the sincerity of the Jewish outrage at racism in America or to undervalue their accomplishments in the NAACP and elseÂwhere, but was intended to put their efforts into some kind of context. Jews were aware of the limitations of their rights. They felt outrage at them, but the stakes were too high to draw too much attention to their disappointment in the American “promise.” They chose to attack through someone else’s issues and in someone else’s name. Thus, before the cataclysm of World War II, if Jews had an agenda in the matter of their rights and the state, it was to ensure that the state be neutral on matters of religion. The state, they believed and wrote in such newspapers as Leeser’s The Occident or the ideologically very different American Israelite, edited by Wise, should privilege no religion above any other. The quest for that kind of neutrality almost by definition lent itself to more proactive, quiet, and nonassertive behavior than did the later Jewish goal, that of stripping the state of as much of its religious reperÂtoire as possible. World War II proved to be a turning point in the Jews’ relationship to their rights in America.[177] Essentially they not only redefined what “rights” meant, but they renegotiated how they would achieve them. They moved away from calls for parity between all religions in America to advocating a truly religiously neutral state. That neutrality was to be so total that it would lead to a secular state in which religions of all kinds received no sanction from the government. Why did this change occur? The answer to this question can be posited in both negative and positive terms. From the negative side, the postÂWorld War II era saw a precipitous decline of anti-Semitism in America.[178] Every year, from the end of the war onward, opinion polls reported lower levels of anti-Semitism. Under the optimistic glow of such an environÂment Jewish agencies took more aggressive steps to restructure American life. They sensed a new, never before felt comfort, a degree of acceptance that allowed them to shed their previously timid outer shell.[179] This is not to imply that the post-World War II era did not have tense moments for American Jews. But, on balance, in the general prosperity, the heady progress of the era of suburbanization, in the public culture symbolized by the “brotherhood weeks” of the 1950s and beyond, American Jews developed a political culture of comfort. In such a world they could push for the real neutrality that they had long desired. It is notable that in the world of the late 1940s and 1950s, when the Jewish public stance changed so dramatically toward a call for the state to strip itself of its religious vestments, religion also came to be redefined as a highly private matter of positive value no matter what it might be. In these years Judaism, which at most (and statistics on the number of Jews in the United States are relatively difficult to ascertain) encompassed four percent of the American population, came to be included among the notable American faiths.The phrase “Catholic, Protestant, and Jew” - also the title of Will Herberg’s classic work of 1955 - rang in the statements of civic culture as America’s spokesmen sought to describe the nature of the American polity.[180] President Dwight D. Eisenhower bore witness to the shift of American sensibilities toward religion and Christianity in parÂticular when he commented in 1952, “Our government makes no sense unless it is founded in deeply felt religious faith, and I don’t care what it is.”[181] Such rhetoric, found throughout American culture of the 1950s and beyond, clearly represented a tectonic shift away from the 1890s statement that America is a Christian nation. In addition, after 1945, as a result of demographic shifts, the leadership of communal agencies came into the hands of younger Jews, American- born and -educated, who did not share in the legacy of timidity that had accompanied the migration from Europe. For all the snubs that they might have met, unlike their parents they had experienced the integrative capacÂity of American public institutions, schools, popular culture, and the armed forces. They learned a range of lessons in those places about the high levels of acceptance of Jews and also about the need for Jews to defend themÂselves and not quiver in fear lest they offend the non-Jews around them. Post-World War II America was no ordinary time for American Jews. The two most dramatic events of nearly two millennia of their history had just transpired: the Holocaust, with its destruction of European Jewry, and the rise of an independent, sovereign Jewish state in Israel. These two meta-events deeply affected the American Jewish narrative and the ways in which American Jews acted politically and publicly. The first event transformed the American Jewish community into the largest center of Jewish life in the world. What had a half-century earlier been seen as a derivative, New World outpost of European culture now stood as the most numerous, most powerful, and wealthiest Jewish comÂmunity on the globe. An awesome responsibility, this recognition galvaÂnized the Jewish organizational world into a new kind of boldness. One lesson that American Jewry learned from the behavior and fate of the Jews of Germany was that timidity and cooperation did not pay. European Jews, thinking that they could count on the goodwill of their neighbors, ended up destroyed. American Jewry came to understand that flexing political muscle might be a better strategy. They may have derived that lesson from the image of the Israeli solÂdiers and pioneers who, in the romance of Zionism, seized the moment, rather than sitting back and waiting. Although the majority of American Jews were not affiliated with Zionist organizations, the vast majority idenÂtified with the triumph of the assertive halutzim, the pioneers who in the rhetorical flurry of the mid-twentieth century “made the desert bloom.” Small in number and poorly armed, according to the imagery, the Israeli army subdued the British and the Arabs, and achieved the goal of indeÂpendence. This was heady stuff for American Jews whose organizations had long believed that not “rocking the boat” might be preferable to annoying the non-Jewish majority around them. Thus, in the immediate aftermath ofWorld War II, Jews adopted a more assertive, proactive posture. The American Jewish Congress organized the Commission on Law and Social Action in 1945, and its published guideÂlines, Full Equality in a Free Society, spelled out a vision of an America nothing less than totally egalitarian and pluralistic.[182] Jewish defense organizations actively joined in the legal actions that characterized the postwar civil rights movement. Through the “big three” defense organizations, the American Jewish Committee, the American Jewish Congress, and the Anti-Defamation League of the B’nai B’rith, organized American Jewry launched a two-pronged attack on the status quo. They vigorously participated with the NAACP and other civil rights organizations in the assault on the legalized, invidious distinctions between individuals that had long been American practice. These three organizaÂtions, for example, played a key role in the passage of the New York State Civil Rights Act of 1945, which banned discrimination in employment, public accommodations, and housing on the basis of race and religion. Notably, Jews directly benefited from this legislation earlier than did black residents of the Empire State.[183] It was in this climate that Jewish organizations mounted a drive to create an avowedly secular state. No longer willing to accept a Christian framework for America, they now vigorously asserted the need to restrucÂture the nature of public culture.[184] They defined their goal as nothing less than finalizing the drive for total Jewish equality in rights by ferreting out all vestiges of Christian-inspired public symbols. They monitored the behavior of state and local governments, particularly in the realm of any public school practice that smacked of religiosity. With the American Civil Liberties Union and some religious denominations with whom they made common cause, they argued that any religious displays by the state vioÂlated the separation clause of the First Amendment and, as such, were unconstitutional. For example, Jewish communal agencies joined with the Seventh-Day Adventists to challenge Sunday closing laws, statutes that deprived their members of the right to earn a livelihood and observe their own day of rest.[185] In this chapter generalities rather than specifics have predominated. By and large, American Jews venerated America for the rights that were ipso facto theirs, that did not have to be earned. They understood, however, that those rights could be compromised if the sensibilities of the ChrisÂtian majority turned against them. They negotiated cautiously at first, and then, as they became more secure, more vigorously to ensure that the bundle of rights that they, their traditions, and their community enjoy remain secured, and indeed strengthened.[186] Walls offer me an apt device for constructing my conclusion. In Pirke Avot, the Sayings of the Elders, a collection of ethical maxims attributed to sixty-five of the compilers of the Mishnah, the following principle is offered: “Build a wall around the Torah.” Like any Talmudic text it can be taken in multiple ways. Most commonly it has been understood to compel Jews to foster the observance of halacha, Jewish law, by institutÂing practices that do not have the force of law but that make the puncÂtilious observance of the laws possible. The metaphoric “wall” buffers Jews from creeping violations of the law, usually unknowingly. In a way, the Jewish stance on rights in America may best be understood in relationÂship to another wall (again a metaphoric one) that made religion a matter of no concern to the state. The existence of that wall shaped the inner patterns of American Jewish life and much of the relationship between Jews and the public. It also fostered an American Jewish consciousness about itself, American society, and the rights that Jews enjoy.