The title of your book is "American Judaism," rather than "American Jews." Can you explain the difference?
There have been quite a few histories of American Jews-that is, the Jewish people in America. But strangely we have not had, in half a century, a serious work on American Judaism, the religion of American Jews. How has it developed? How has it changed? What is its relationship to American religion? How has it been influenced by American Protestantism? Where does it stand today?
People who study American religion really have very little sense of how Judaism fits in to that story. How Jews have been affected by the great turning points-the various awakenings, the Civil War, the women's movement, and so forth. American Judaism is distinctive. It's very different than Judaism is in Israel or Europe.
What are the major differences between Judaism in Europe and here?
The first thing is there's no chief rabbi in America. There was an experiment with one [in the 1840s], but it didn't last. The failure is more significant than the fact that they tried it.
Most chief rabbis are recognized, in some respect, by the government. That's true in England, in France, and certainly in Israel. There's an individual who represents the Jewish religion to the government, someone who stands opposite the cardinal or the archbishop. Indeed, what we have in Judaism here, as we also have in Christianity, is a kind of free market. There's no central authority that says you can only be Jewish this way and not another way.
The whole structure of American Judaism, with different movements or denominations and no central authority, suggests that American Judaism is influenced by Protestantism. Anybody is free, without seeking permission from any chief rabbi or any government office, to open up their own synagogue and to worship God as a Jew in the way that they think best. It is very much a reflection of church-state separation and the way religion developed in the wake of the American Revolution.
This free-market approach to Judaism has often run counter to the idea of Jewish unity, both now and in the past.
Yes, no question about it. The issues we think of as contemporary actually have very deep roots in the American Jewish experience. Some of them are problems that we have been grappling with, literally, for 350 years.
The question is: What holds everybody together? At a certain point in my research I realized that just as what holds Protestants together is basically the fact that they are not Catholic, what holds Jews together is basically the fact that they are not Christian. That's what unites Jews. But on many other issues, they are greatly divided.
