Lila Corwin Berman asks why, over the course of the twentieth century, American Jews became increasingly fascinated, even obsessed, with explaining themselves to their non-Jewish neighbors. What she discovers is that language itself became a crucial tool for Jewish group survival and integration into American life. Berman investigates a wide range of sources—radio and television broadcasts, bestselling books, sociological studies, debates about Jewish marriage and intermarriage, Jewish missionary work, and more—to reveal how rabbis, intellectuals, and others created a seemingly endless array of explanations about why Jews were indispensable to American life. Even as the content of these explanations developed and shifted over time, the very project of self-explanation would become a core element of Jewishness in the twentieth century.

CONTENTS:

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments

Introduction: Presenting Jews to America
1. Spiritual Missions after the Great War: The Reform Movement and the Jewish Chautauqua Society
2. The Ghetto and Beyond: The Rising Authority of American Jewish Social Science in Interwar America
3. The Sacred and Sociological Dilemma of Jewish Intermarriage
4. Serving the Public Good and Serving God in 1940s America
5. Constructing an Ethnic America: Oscar Handlin, Nathan Glazer, and Post-World War II Social Research
6. What Is a Jew? Missionaries, Outreach, and the Cold War Ethnic Challenge
7. A Jewish Marilyn Monroe and the Civil-Rights-Era Crisis in Jewish Self-Presentation
Conclusion: Speaking of Jews

Notes

AUTHOR:

Lila Corwin Berman is Associate Professor of History, the Murray Friedman Chair of American Jewish History, and the Director of the Feinstein Center for American Jewish History at Temple University.