A Unique People in a Unique Land

Have the Jews shaped America, or has America shaped the Jews? With apologies to Ahad Ha'am, this core question animates Edward S. Shapiro's new book, A Unique People in a Unique Land.1 Examining the ever-evolving relationships among Jewish culture, religious observance, and the surrounding American society, and recognizing the complex mesh of Jewish threads in our contemporary American tapestry, Shapiro's essays explore the many contours of Jewishness and Judaism in the United States as a key to understanding American Jewish identity (p. x). The essays vary in their adherence to the norms of Jewish Studies scholarship. While some sections of this book, like those discussing identity and religious affiliation, largely conform to the generally accepted historical narrative, one section boldly attempts to reshape that narrative by placing ultra-wealthy American Jewish business owners and philanthropists at the center of the twentieth-century American story (pp. 276–79, 281, 284–86). Another questions the wisdom of the Jewish community's tendency toward progressive politics and uncomfortably references Milton Himmelfarb's quip that “Jews continued to vote like Puerto Ricans even though they were now living like Episcopalians,” later repeated in still another essay (pp. 321, 358–59). The ages of the essays make this collection all the more fascinating as a historical document itself. Except for one freshly written piece about the impact of World War II on American Jews, the other twenty essays first appeared between 1984 and 2014 and are presented here in their original form without individual introduction or framing, providing a time capsule of sorts that follows the perspectives of Shapiro, other Jewish commentators, and the Jewish academic community over the last four decades (pp. viii, xvi).Echoing his prominent 1995 work A Time for Healing: American Jewry since World War II, Shapiro begins this book's narrative by situating the rapid evolution of American Jews alongside America's Catholic and Protestant communities and recognizing World War II as a transformative moment after which American Jewry had to adapt as it established itself in the American mainstream.2 One essay features Sidney Hook, a Jewish scholar who, though initially a Marxist, eventually centered democracy as a primary value of American Jewish life (p. 22). Shapiro continues by marveling at the flourishing of Orthodox Jewry in “hedonistic” Miami, questioning the sustainability of the Conservative movement's recent inclusion of women and queer Jews, and asserting that due to declining birthrates “Jewish women . . . stand to benefit little personally from the pro-choice movement” (pp. 98–99, 103, 106, 341–42).However, Shapiro's facts run into trouble when he tries to portray the scholarship of contemporary scions of American Jewish history as overwhelmingly hostile to capitalism and to amplify the historical impact of Jewish-owned businesses and wealthy Jewish donors on the community. In his 2013 essay “The Absent American Jewish Business Mogul,” his attempts to portray Jewish historians as anti-business fall flat when wordplay is his primary justification: “Arthur Hertzberg's The Jews in America: Four Centuries of an Uneasy Encounter: A History (1989) examines I. F. Stone, the radical journalist, but not the Stone family of Cleveland” (pp. ix, 281, 289). Hertzberg, prolific though he certainly was, surely could never include in his books every Jew named Stone. Shapiro gets some critical facts wrong: in an attempt to portray one prominent historian as biased, he alleges that her landmark work “ignore[s] the Jewish business titan” because he could not find the word “business” in the index (p. 288). However, that book's index lists “business” three times (“Economy: business partnerships,” “Intermarriage: business partnership,” “Jewish economy: business partnerships”),3 the same number of mentions found in the index of Shapiro's own A Time for Healing (“Business and mobility,” “Syms School of Business,” “Gentiles in business”).4 Indeed, facts matter, especially in academic scholarship. Dr. Shapiro claims to have found bias in 1972’s monumental Encyclopaedia Judaica, contending that amid countless articles on socialism, athletics, musicians, and painters, he could find “not one on business or economics” (p. 290). In reality, however, the multi-volume set features over one hundred articles on business, trade and commerce, and industrialism, from “Business ethics in Jewish law” to “Commandments concerning loans and business,” and “Bronfman family liquor business (Seagram's)” to “Amsterdam: diamond trade and industry,” including nearly forty separate “industrialists” across thirteen countries.5Shapiro could be forgiven these misrepresentations based on an outdated understanding of the field's contemporary scholarship, but his fundamental premise, the exceptionality of both Jews and America, presents a few particularly troubling challenges as well. In a technical sense, one could argue that Jews and the United States are each unique because each is the only ethnic group or country with that name. However, although Jewish and American exceptionalism may lead to a punchy book title, a thoughtful consideration of both groups—and their intersection—reveals that Jews and Americans share plentiful characteristics with neighbors. Moreover, contextualizing a group alongside others allows for richer and deeper insights, revealing the similarities and differences that render each group distinct while acknowledging their commonalities and situating each in conversation with one another. To declare that Jews and Americans are unambiguously unique suppresses critical insights into the nuances of both history and modern culture. While many of the essays contained in A Unique People in a Unique Land show their age and are out of step with contemporary scholarship in the field, they simultaneously provide a lens into a more conservative political perspective on American Judaism, American Jewish history, and the evolution of the American Jew

Archaeology · Genealogy · Judaism · History · Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies · Jewish Identity and Society · Race, History, and American Society

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  Open Access•Motti Inbari, Kirill Bumin•Contemporary Jewry•2025

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