The Jews in America

the long version

A wondrous tale of American Judaism as the world's greatest success story, by the flamboyantly upbeat author of Jews, God and History (1964) and The Indestructible Jews (1971). According to Dimont, the first Jews to arrive--in search of safety and opportunity, not a haven for orthodoxy--had it made before they landed, thanks to the Old Testament hold on Colonial life (the Mosaic commandments, the Promised Land, the Puritan ethic); and thereafter, unhampered either by prejudice or by tyrannical rabbis, they dispersed along the frontier, instituted secular reforms (anticipating the German Reform movement), and prospered as merchants and bankers. This German-Jewish ""crowd"" also, says Dimont, ""'invented' modern philanthropy"" and, to tame their unruly Russian co-religionists, sponsored Conservative Judaism, more American than orthodoxy, more traditional than Reform. Subsequently, ""all the dissident elements of American Jewish society. . . coalesced to give birth to the first 'American Jews.'"" None of this--told with an emphasis on commanding personalities--is either wholly unfounded or totally novel, but it is so highly colored, so feeble as social history, and so full of holes that one can't treat it seriously. American Jewish socialism and American Yiddish culture are disposed of in two pages; the one time American anti-Semitism rears its ugly head (apropos of the 1862 Grant affair), it's explained away; and American Zionism--without even a psychological stake in Israel--can then be altogether ""altruistic."" Neither do American Jews have an identity problem: a strong organizational life compensates for a weak religious life. Dimont, as he's demonstrated before, has no use for the ghetto image of the Jew or for Jewish history as a ""dirge of oppression,"" and those who share his antipathies will find here the American dream come true.