At Religion in American History, Kevin Schultz reviews Lila Corwin Berman’s new book, Speaking of Jews: Rabbis, Intellectuals, and the Creation of a Public Identity:
The tizzy provoked by the [conversions of Marilyn Monroe and Sammy Davis, Jr.] emerged in force because—and this is the central argument of Berman’s book—between the 1920s and the early 1960s, Jewish intellectuals consciously crafted an image of American Jews as a sociological category, just like any other American minority group. They created, in Berman’s nifty phrase, “Sociological Jewishness.” In the 1910s and ’20s, these intellectuals had been afraid to be castigated as a separate race, which sounded too pejorative, and too close to black people anyway. Meanwhile, they had seen millions of their co-religionists lose their faith, making a religious identity somewhat troublesome. The answer came in the form of sociology. What bound Jews together—how they defined themselves to themselves and to others—was as just another American ethnic group. They had their own social habits and webs of meaning. Judaism as a Civilization was more than just the title of Mordecai Kaplan’s famous 1934 book. It was a statement about Jews and the Jewish “ethnic pattern.” Monroe and Davis’s conversion threw Jewish intellectuals into such a tizzy because these superstars didn’t look like what Jews were supposed to look like. They didn’t fit that pattern. They sat outside the sociological parameters that had sustained American Jewry since the 1920s. (To this day, Monroe is excluded from the encyclopedic Jewish Women in America.)
It was, of course, fear that drove “sociological Jewishness” into being. Jewish intellectuals were afraid of intermarriage, afraid about Jewish survival in a secular world, afraid of assimilating, all topics Berman covers gracefully. But, as ever with Jews in America (and, evidently, with the historians who write about them), Jews wanted to protect their group’s unique endogamy while not being punished for their differences. They wanted their “adventure in freedom” (Oscar Handlin) to be more than just a “quest for inclusion” (Marc Dollinger), which might mandate they pay “the price of whiteness” (Eric Goldstein), despite the twentieth century being a time “when Jews became white folks” (Karen Brodkin). When “speaking of Jews” (Lila Corwin Berman), they wanted to ensure Jewish survival while eliminating antisemitism. It was a tricky balance, and, for a time, defining Jews as a sociological category seemed to work.
Read the full review here.