Naomi Wiener Cohen

"The life of Jacob Schiff (1847-1920), banker, financier, and leader of the American Jewish community from 1880 to 1920, is in many ways the quintessential story of an immigrant's success in America. Born in Frankfurt in 1847, Schiff worked in several financial firms in Germany and the United States before accepting a position at the New York banking firm of Kuhn, Loeb & Company in 1875 and settling for good in America. Part of a wealthy and powerful German Jewish circle that included the Warburgs and Rothschilds, Schiff played a central role in shaping American and European Jewish history. From his base on Wall Street, he was the foremost Jewish leader in what became known as the "Schiff era," grappling with all the major issues and problems of the day, including the plight of Russian Jews under the czar, American and international anti-Semitism, care of needy Jewish immigrants, and the rise of Zionism. Based on a broad range of primary sources, Naomi W. Cohen's study emphasizes the role Schiff played as the preeminent leader of American Jewry at the turn of the century."--BOOK JACKET.

In August, 1929, Arabs in Palestine rose up in bloody riots against Jews. More than 130 Jews were killed, among them eight young American students. The immediate cause of the riots appeared simple -- a dispute over Jewish religious observances at the Western Wall. More than violence over a small piece of ground considered holy by both Judaism and Islam, however, the riots signaled the growing sophistication of postwar Arab nationalism and also laid bare the contradictory pledges made by England to both Arabs and Jews. American responses to the riots were characterized by actions all too familiar in twentieth-century Jewish history. - Jacket flap.

A driving force in the history of American Jews has been the pursuit of religious equality under law. Jews reasoned that state and federal legislation or public practices which sanctioned religious, specifically Christian, usages blocked their path to full integration within society. Always a small minority and ever fearful of the outspoken proponents of the Christian state, nineteenth-century Jews became ardent defenders of church-state separation. In the twentieth century, Jewish defense organizations took a prominent role in landmark court cases on religion in the schools, Sunday laws, and public displays of Christian symbols. Over the last two centuries, Jews shifted from support of a neutral-to-all-religions government to a divorced-from-religion government, and from defense of their own interests to the defense of other religious minorities. Jews in Christian America traces in historical context the response of American Jews to the issues presented by a Christian-flavored public religion. Discussing the contributions of each major wave of Jewish immigrants to the reinforcement of a separationist stand, Cohen shows how Jewish communal priorities, pressures from the larger society, and Jewish-Christian relationships fashioned that response. She also makes clear that the Jewish community was never totally united on the goals and tactics of a separationist posture; despite the continued predominance of the strict separationists, others argued the adverse effects of that position on communal well-being and on the very survival of Judaism.