Presenting Jews: Jewishness and America, 1920--1960.

In America, Jews had to learn how to explain and present themselves to non-Jews in order to survive and thrive. This dissertation argues that Jewish acts of self-presentation from the 1920s through the early 1960s sculpted the way that Jews thought about being Jewish and being American. Jewish leaders, intellectuals, and institutions remodeled, often self-consciously, Jewishness and Americanness when they articulated what made a Jew a Jew, and what Judaism's relationship was to Christianity, democracy, and America. The people I examine---who traveled under the sponsorship of the Jewish Chautauqua Society to universities with little or no Jewish student body to deliver lectures about Jewish beliefs, history and culture, who engaged in missionary experiments, who used the tools of social science to make Jews, Judaism, and America knowable, and who wrestled with the ban on intermarriage---transformed what it meant to be a Jew and what it meant to be an American in relation to their historical moment, personal proclivities, and ideological positions. Theirs was not only a struggle toward assimilating into American life, a story now well rehearsed in the historiography of American Jews; it was also an effort to assimilate American life into a Jewish framework.Jewishness could not be explained without taking a stake in the core debates of American political life---most importantly the competing values of American unity and American diversity or pluralism. At different moments and in different circumstances, Jewish Chautauqua Society rabbis and leaders, the Reform rabbis who advocated a Jewish mission, Jewish social researchers, and Jewish commentators, including rabbis and sociologists, on intermarriage imagined their destiny merging into America's destiny, and imagined it as somehow distinct. Whether Jewishness would strengthen the unity of America or its diversity, Jewish leaders believed Jewishness itself could represent something essential about American national identity.In the eyes of the Jewish leaders I examine, Jewishness could serve as both a model of America and a model for America. As Jews presented themselves to America, they helped shape the emerging contours of American political and cultural life.Thesis (Ph.D.)--Yale University, 2004.School code: 0265