Customer Reviews

A New Promised Land: A History of Jews in America (Religion in American Life)

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I didn't learn much new and encountered a pronounced bias in favor of Orthodox Judaism. I was interested in learning more about Jews in very early America and I did learn a little.

I had heard there was a rabbi at George Washington's inauguration. This book mentions George Washington four times in connection with Jews and even mentions a letter from a Virginia congregation congratulating him on his inauguration but it never mentions a rabbi at the official ceremony. I began to think maybe it was an urban legend, but no, if you research elsewhere, you will find that there was a very prominent American-born rabbi, Gershom Mendes Seixas, at the inauguration, which I think is an important piece of American history in these days when so many people say the U.S. is a Christian country. I think Diner skips over him because he was not traditionally ordained.

Diner says Irving Berlin "ceased to be a Jew." That was news to me and in fact it's not true. It's just that to DINER he ceased to be a Jew because he married a Gentile woman and his children were raised as Christians. While Berlin was not an observant Jew, there is no evidence that he renounced Judaism and it is my understanding that he would be considered Jewish even by Orthodox standards. Berlin received honors from the National Conference of Christians and Jews and the New York YMHA.

Diner tends toward broad generalizations such as saying the only ones who could prevent the Holocaust were American Jews (p. 88). She often makes it sound like all Jews were of a one mind politically/socially/philosophically, other than differences in religious observance. She never ever mentions Palestinians living in the area that Zionists wished to settle, never mentions the refugee problem. For all the depth with which she covers the Civil Rights movement and Jewish involvement and parallels, I think there should have been at least a brief explanation of slavery in America.

This book has some value but I would not give it to a young person because I feel it is very skewed.

What Ms Diner covers, she covers well, but there are some omissions in this book that make it less than scholarly. Any comprehensive history of Jews in America ought to at least touch on Judah P Benjamin, yet he is strangely absent. This book focuses very narrowly on the Northeast, especially New York. While that does cover a lot of the Jewish experience in America, it's not the whole story.