Still Strangers -
[Cached Version]
Published on: 11/1/1993
Last Visited: 8/22/2009
By Naomi W. Cohen.
Oxford University Press.
300 pp. $39.95.
In her meticulously researched new study, Professor Naomi W. Cohen of the Jewish Theological Seminary provides a comprehensive historical analysis of the Jewish quest for religious equality within Christian America, and of the many church-state issues of concern to American Jews from colonial times through the mid-1960s.
...
As Professor Cohen aptly notes, Story's opinion, which was shared by other prominent American lawyers and jurists who similarly viewed Christianity as a recognized part of the common law, was often cited by nineteenth-century Protestant proponents of a Christian commonwealth, who successfully championed legislation to protect the Christian Sabbath and who (unsuccessfully) proposed "Christian Amendments" to write "the Lord Jesus Christ" and the Christian basis of public life into the text of the Constitution.
Nineteenth-century Jewish leaders viewed the laws requiring observance of the Christian Sabbath, in particular, which were sanctioned by the common law and which were so central to the Protestant vision of a Christian America, to be part of a religiously coercive effort to "establish" Christianity as the national religion, while forcing Jews to either desecrate the Jewish Sabbath or endure monetary losses because of their faith.
Thus the widespread enactment of Sunday "blue" laws- which required that all businesses close down on the Christian Sabbath and imposed a harsh economic burden on religious Jews who observed their Sabbath on Saturday- became one of the church-state issues that most agitated Jews in the nineteenth century, and remained a central church- state issue well into the twentieth.
Professor Cohen's illuminating discussion of the evolving Jewish communal debate on how to most effectively oppose Sunday legislation offers new historical insight and analysis not found in previous studies of the subject.
...
Professor Cohen has provided the most thorough analysis yet available of the American Jewish response to the "Christian nation" movement, particularly in her discussion of the resurgent church-state debate within the Central Conference of American Rabbis (CCAR), the national organization of the American Reform Rabbinate.
...
Throughout the second half of her book, Cohen devotes considerable (if, at times, uncritical) attention to the legal assumptions, strategy, and tactics of the American Jewish Congress' Commission on Social Action, which in the years between 1945 and 1965 under Pfeffer's direction did so much to shape and further the legal doctrine of strict separationism.
...
And yet, as Professor Cohen observes, the separationist position did not go entirely unchallenged, even in its heyday.
...
Indeed, one of the great virtues of Professor Cohen's book is the manner in which she documents in much detail the existence of a "counter-tradition" to the prevailing liberal separationist orthodoxy within the American Jewish community.
She is in fact the first historian to have provided us with so thoroughly documented an analysis of the emergence, in the 1950s and early 1960s, of this new party of dissenters from the separationist consensus.
Professor Cohen's discussion of the debate over the Engel and Schempp Supreme Court rulings is particularly enlightening.
...
But, as Professor Cohen tells us, Jewish opposition to Schempp and Engel was also, and unanticipatedly, voiced by some more liberal sectors of the Jewish community as well.
...
Professor Cohen has uncovered several other prominent (but, until now, ignored or forgotten) voices of dissent from the prevailing liberal Jewish orthodoxy as well.
As she points out, the prayer and Bible reading decisions of the early 1960s "marked the first time that many prominent Jews argued publicly against their own secular organizations and, equally, against separationist rabbis.
The first time, but not, of course, the last.
The Jewish critique of strict separationism would increase and intensify in the decades that followed, significantly transforming the church-state debate within the American Jewish community.
It is regrettable, therefore, that Professor Cohen concludes her narrative in 1965 and, except for an all-too-brief six-page "afterword," does not continue her detailed discussion and analysis up to the present.
Thus, for example, while she does note that Jewish organizational consensus in support of separationism "broke down" further during the 1970s over the issue of public support for parochial schools, the growth of Jewish Day Schools and its implications for the debate over state aid to parochial schools are left almost completely unexamined.
Prior to the 1960s, government support for private religious schools had been generally seen as a Catholic issue.
...
COLPA receives but two brief references from Professor Cohen, and no critical discussion or analysis.
Organized during the late 1960s to serve as a counterweight to the American Jewish Congress and other separationist agencies, COLPA has appeared as amicus curia in numerous church-state cases on behalf of the "free exercise" claims of religiously observant Jews and other religious believers.
When the post- 1965 sequel to Professor Cohen's study is written, one hopes it will contain a detailed discussion and analysis of the seminal contribution of COLPA to the development of a growing body of law relating to the accommodation of religious practices in America, as well as to a new and exciting chapter in the evolving Jewish debate on the relationship between American Jews, Judaism, and American public life.
11 online sources [ view sources ]
Profile is not claimed [ claim profile ]
