Even the non‐specialist – and people are usually more informed than we believe – knows that American culture has been deeply shaped by Jewish immigrants and their descendants. This encyclopedia looks at what it calls “three and a half centuries of immigration, assimilation, and achievement”, telling the story of the Jewish experience in the USA, and of Jewish contributions to politics, popular culture, and professional life. It is another distinctive reference work from publishers ABC‐Clio who have a gift, I believe, of identifying gaps in reference works and of producing cross‐over works to fill such gaps. This is an impressive example of one of these. Strongly bound and printed on good paper with a clear two‐column text (with black‐and‐white illustrations), each volume containing the 30‐page index, this work will provide an attractive and (for what it is) reasonably priced addition to the school, college, academic and specialist library.
Editors Norwood (University of Oklahoma) and Pollack (University of North Texas) have coordinated the work of over a hundred US scholars. In their preface, they say they have tried to analyse the American Jewish experience from its beginnings in the mid‐seventeenth century to the present. Immigration figures high on the scale of things and includes the Sephardim and Ashkenazim as well as Holocaust survivors and others. American Jews are rightly seen as both a religious and ethnic group and probably the archetype. Woven into the social, demographic and political fabric are different styles of Judaism from Hasidic to Reform. The claim that the Jewish experience has been marginalized by historians is a contestable issue and is, again rightly, examined in the book. Indeed, to read the book (as this reviewer has been doing on and off for some weeks now, at each visit testing how it might work in different situations) is to open your eyes to the range and wealth of the contribution of American Jews to American life.
Of particular value – and this was clearly a major early decision by the editors and publishers – is the thematic arrangement of the material. This makes the encyclopaedia transparent for all types of reader from beginner to expert. The themes or categories are clearly and logically chosen, are comprehensive yet mutually exclusive, and specific topics can readily be pursued by using the effective index. Several typical sections will give you the idea: a section on Judaism in America, for instance, covers the Orthodox and Reform, Conservative and Hasidic styles of Judaism, as well as women in Judaism and two key personalities, Isaac Leeser and David Einhorn. Another section on American Jews in entertainment and popular culture looks at Yiddish theatre, Broadway and Hollywood, comics and television, comedians like the Marx Brothers and Woody Allen, other entertainers like Houdini and Jolson, Sammy Davis and Isaac Asimov. Other sections examine Jews in science, in music, in art, in sport, literary critics, in law, in political and social movements, and in war.
The two volumes are complementary in that volume one provides the historical and cultural framework within which some of the more specific topics (like Jews in sport and Jewish novelists) (which appear in volume two) can be set. This means that the encyclopaedia has been thought‐through coherently and can be used by different people and/or for different purposes – like a student investigation early settlement by Jews in America or past and present Jewish communities in America, a more advanced dissertation on anti‐Semitism or Zionism or the Holocaust, or as a quick reference book to, say, George Gershwin or department store retailers or Jews who play(ed) an important part in the labour movement.
In fact this thematic approach demonstrates how versatile the use of this reference book can and could be – inter‐group relations opens up Jews and black rights and Jewish‐Muslim relations, for example, Zionism in America will be of use to anyone exploring Israel as well as figures like Golda Meir, and the book sets otherwise‐familiar figures (like Albert Einstein, Hannah Arendt, Man Ray, Arthur Miller, and Benny Goodman) in a coherently American Jewish context. This is a particularly interest slant on personalities we often tend to recognize in other ways – we think of Henry Kissinger for his role in politics, Lionel Trilling for his status as a literary critic, and justices (some of whom were Jewish) on the Supreme Court as lawyers. For exclusively US readers, especially those studying history (say, of the labour movement or demographic and economic change), there is a level of detail (on general issues as well as individuals) unlikely to be of major interest to readers elsewhere unless they themselves are investigating the topic.
Further into the content, the style and tone and information have all been presented clearly, at a consistent level of complexity and length, and this adds to the usability of the book. This is a book, too, that does not draw away coyly from the numerous hard issues that surface in the field – like Henry Ford's prejudicial view of the Jews (influenced by that strident anti‐semitic document The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and its claims on behalf of international Jewry), like an attempt to reflect the opposition that Zionism provoked and continues to provoke, the extent to which myth grows up around Jewish communities like those on the Lower East Side (of Manhattan), the ways in which Jewish gangsters provided funds for the creation of the state of Israel, and how educational institutions like Brandeis University were set up as non‐sectarian bodies because founders were Jews interested in social justice. On other critical levels, too, entries show more than a merely facile acceptance of the interestingness of their subject – something critical of anthropologist Frank Boas, for instance, the political importance of Leonard Bernstein's music, the atonement symbolism of sculptor George Segal, and David Mamet's recurrent critique of cultural hypocrisy.
All the entries are provided with reading to follow up and have clearly been chosen with a realistic eye on whether the books are still in print. Anyone coming to such a book as this is bound to wonder whether the case has been over‐stated or whether special pleading can be found. To answer that, you look to the factuality of the entries, as well as to sources outside this encyclopaedia (say on black people in sport) in order to contextualize entries like American Jewish Men in Sports. Some of the information is plain speaking, like the anti‐Semitic taunts such sportsmen and women attracted during their careers (from fellow sportspeople as well as from fans).
Elsewhere, the challenge rests with the reader to diversify an already wide‐ranging context further, as with American Jews and the ideology of science, where, from Moses Mendelssohn to Carl Sagan and Stephen Jay Gould, issues like rationalism and secularism, objectivity and prejudice emerge (and would prevail if American Jews took no part at all in it), and sit there as a problematic for readers to investigate even further. Levels of knowledge, then, for which the entries are departure points. In science and art, literature and social life as a whole, they did, in a most distinctive way, and this encyclopaedia celebrates this without obsequiousness and examines it with a real eye on what different constituencies of readers really want to know.
