The Jews in America: Four Centuries of an Uneasy Encounter

Among the topics covered are attitudes toward Jews during the colonial period; the adoption of equality of religions by the Federal Constitution (only later by state constitutions); the appointment of the first Jews to public office, not without opposition; Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise's battle in the 1850s against religion in the public schools; rising antisemitism and exclusion of Jews from social life after the Civil War; agitation, beginning in the 1890s, against immigration of "unhealthy elements" which led to the imposition of quotas in 1924; association of Jews with Bolshevism in the 1920s; the antisemitism of the 1920s-40s; the realization, especially by the American Jewish Congress and its president, Stephen S. Wise, that only power would win Jews acceptance, sharpened by the government's rejection of pleas to take in more refugees or intervene in other ways in the Holocaust; the role of Jews in the Black civil rights movement, and the growth of Black resentment of Jews. Concludes, nevertheless, that Jews now feel secure as never before in pluralistic, "post-Christian" America.