In Speaking of Jews, Lila Corwin Berman pushes the field of American Jewish history in a new and helpful direction by looking seriously at the ways in which Jewish elites in twentieth-century America sought to project a particular image of the essence of Judaism and, more importantly, the nature of Jewish identity in America. Her subjects wanted to influence the ways in which the American public thought about Jews, hoping to mold what the majority population understood as what “being Jewish” meant to their Jewish neighbors and fellow citizens. Recognizing the reality that, as a small minority in a religiously and ethnically complicated society, Jews, or at least an elite among them, believed that they had to devise a deliberate strategy in terms of how they packaged themselves as a community, and how they explained Jewish communal patterns and religious practices to others, namely, the vast bulk of the American people, many of whom had little or no contact with Jews.

Speaking of Jews puts the emergence of this explanatory imperative into the context of the major historical developments of roughly the 1920s through the late 1960s, coinciding with the end of immigration and the emergence of an American-born Jewish majority, the rise of Nazism and the Holocaust, Israel, the Cold War, and the simultaneous postwar decline of antisemitism in America and the opening up of previously closed spaces in American society in the 1950s and into the 1960s. That last-named period, the years after World War II, commands much of Berman's attention.

In this explanatory project, one that involved the projection of a particular image of Jews, rabbis constructed a message that could be put into the analytic category of an “is.” They claimed to be describing accurately what existed on the ground as American Jews lived in their communities and practiced their Judaism. The rabbis employed a trove of facts, figures, images, and references to tell others about the state of Jewish life in America, the essence of Judaism, the nature of the Jewish experience, and the perfect fit between these and American life. Accordingly, Berman has written a book that might rightly fall into the category of the history of public relations, as the books, articles, television shows, speeches, and other sources that she uses all attempted to explain in positive ways the Jews and their traditions to Americans.

At the same time, these individuals, the liberal rabbis of Reform and Conservative affiliation, had another aim in mind in their choice of words. Recognizing that many American Jews engaged with the same texts and dipped into the same sources of information that constituted American public culture, they also hoped to explain something of the nature of Jewish culture to Jews as well. While they may have addressed American Jews by means of the same books, articles, radio broadcasts, and television programs that they beamed to the public as a whole, when they spoke to Jews, the rabbis pitched a different message. Concerned with the future vitality of a Jewry of largely American nativity, a people deeply embedded in American culture and institutions, the rabbis used their rhetorical repertoire to explain what identification with Jewishness ought to constitute for Jews. In that aspect of their presentation, in their in-group speaking, the rabbis articulated words that, by virtue of their intended audience, became more proscriptive. In this, the rabbis constructed a message that fell more squarely into the realm of the “ought.” That is, the cultural elites whom Berman studies here hoped to convince the masses of American Jews that they would be well served if they behaved and thought about their Jewish lives in particular ways.

In both faces of what Berman calls the “public identity” fabricated by the rabbis under consideration here, one theme emerged as particularly salient: the theme of community. The intellectual elites who engaged in this public relations endeavor turned to the field of sociology, newly incorporated into the American academy at the beginning of the twentieth century. From its inception, sociology put a great deal of emphasis on the lived lives of groups. Early on, it focused on entities that it defined as “ethnic groups,” describing how they lived and positing a truth that members of communities derived strength and meaning from the mere fact of living in proximity to each other, sharing institutions, and engaging in common practices. This functionalist approach elevated the group to the level of a social good. Indeed, one of the underlying assumptions of sociology, from its founding days, contended that belonging to a group offered modern people an antidote to the corrosive effects of industrial society. For American sociologists, being part of an ethnic enclave or authentic collectivity functioned as a desideratum for being or becoming American.

That a visible number of practitioners of sociology happened to be Jews, Berman contends, did not play an insignificant role in making sociology, in a distilled and nonscholarly form, enable rabbis to embrace it. The sociological emphasis on the group could both describe to the public as a whole the ways Jews lived and, at the same time, show Jews how much they benefited from having a group to belong to. From the pioneering work of Louis Wirth beginning in the 1920s through the writings of Nathan Glazer, Jewish sociologists provided rabbis with a language through which they could speak to the American public and its Jews.

The “turn to sociology,” a phrase that Berman uses frequently, involved a fundamental shift in rhetoric among liberal rabbis, and especially those from the Reform camp. While, from the last quarter of the nineteenth century onward, they had spoken not so much about Jews, but about Judaism as an ethical system that deserved its place in American civic life, by the 1920s, social patterns supplanted moral ones as the core message delivered by the rabbis. To the Reform, this certainly represented a major departure—in such documents as the Pittsburgh Platform of 1885, among others, the movement specifically had downplayed the salience of the group in favor of the role Judaism could play in the service of humanity.

In this aspect of her work, Berman has produced a book that hovers at the edge of intellectual history, inasmuch as she asserts that the rabbis and academics of the decades under consideration embraced new ideas in which they themselves believed and that they considered to be based on the best and most sophisticated science available to them. They believed in what they wrote, performed, and said because it made sense in terms of both the conditions of Jewish life in America during the mid-twentieth century and because those words fit the scholarly paradigm operative at the time.

Speaking of the Jews offers a fresh way of looking at twentieth-century American Jewish life, as the book takes words seriously and shows how rhetoric played a role in the political work of American Jewry. Just as a range of organizations and communal bodies engaged in other kinds of strategies to advance the goal of securing a comfortable space for Jews in America, so, too, the rabbis and other intellectuals treated here considered—rightly or not—that how they presented Jews to their American neighbors could make a difference. If other Americans came to see Jews not as some alien entity because of Jews' idiosyncratic religious and social patterns, but rather as thoroughly American because of those same particularities, the religious leaders would have performed a crucial service to the Jews. On the other hand, the crafters of the sociological message, when speaking to Jews, could allay any fears that Jews might have that by being different, they would be jeopardizing their claim to a place in America.

This book does have some analytic flaws that mar an otherwise important intervention. First, while Berman analyzes the rhetoric of the rabbis carefully and finds that their words increasingly took on a sociological trope, she offers no explanation as to how or when the rabbis came to be introduced to these ideas. If sociology became so important to the rabbis, why did seminaries not introduce sociology into their curricula? Or if they did, Berman ought to have analyzed this added element to the training of rabbis. She does not find the ties that bound the rabbis and sociologists to each other. Indeed, the chapters on the sociologists, while interesting, are somewhat of a distraction here. While Wirth, Handlin (not a sociologist), and Glazer may have written in words that dovetailed with those of the rabbis studied here, Berman does not demonstrate that they had the same goals in mind as they wrote their scholarly and semischolarly works. An analytic fit between the chapters on the rabbis and those on the sociologists seems missing. In addition, Berman dismisses the importance of the field of anthropology, which could just as easily have been marshaled by the rabbis, who could have used the writings of the large number of Jewish anthropologists for the same purposes as they, according to Berman, turned instead to sociology.