Title: The Challenge of America
Description: America confronts Judaism with the challenge and the opportunity of addressing Jews in a free Society. The new politics defined by American freedom has reshaped the circumstances of Judaism and called forth revisions, reforms, and redefinitions of various kinds in response to the shifts in the political conditions under which successive generations of Jews in America formed their Judaism. For the long centuries in which Jews lived as a separate and (usually) protected minority Judaism constructed a way of life and expressed a worldview for a social group whose persistence was seldom called into question and could always be explained by appeal to the myth of exile and redemption, sanctification in the here and now, or salvation at the end of time for the holy people, the 'Israel' of successive Judaisms. From their beginnings Christianity and Islam always recognized the legitimacy (if the inferiority, too,) of Judaism, which Jews took to be self-evident.^

To be sure, Jews found their lives and property threatened. But Judaism could explain that fact and even find reinforcement in it. More important, memories of stress flowed together with the experience of a world in which Jewish found themselves living mainly among other Jews, both by mutual consent and by political constraint. In America, by contrast, the Jews' life together as a distinctive group has to depend mainly on inner assent, produced by decisions of individuals to make something of their origin. As time has passed, 'being Jewish' has less and less resulted from external compulsion, for in the condition of the open and free society constructed by Americans, Jews did not really find themselves much different from others. The distinguishing traits -- whether imposed or voluntary --^

of a Jewish language, Jewish clothing, Jewish occupations and places of residence, which had marked their immediate predecessors in Central and Eastern Europe, were absent from the very beginning for Jews in America. Consequently, Jews found themselves in a new circumstance, and the Judaisms that emerged in successive generations responded to these new social experiences. -- Introduction (p. [vii]).
Subjects: Politics and government, Cultural assimilation, Judaism, Jews, Identity, Jews, united states, Jews, politics and government, Jews, identity
Places: United States