Henry Feingold is a distinguished historian of American Jewry who has contributed much to the understanding of American Jewish politics, particularly in the era of the Holocaust. In his latest book, American Jewish Political Culture and the Liberal Persuasion, he searches “for the sources of … [American Jewish political] engagement in the political culture of American Jewry,” arguing that it was a particular political stance—namely liberalism—that gave American Jews their “distinct place in national politics” (ix). Feingold posits three major concerns at the heart of American Jewish liberalism: the belief that the “role of government is to improve the lot of its citizenry” (x); Zionism and Israel; and the Holocaust. These concerns relate to each other in complex and sometimes contradictory ways as they influence Jewish political belief and behavior. He presents his analysis in a series of interlocking essayistic chapters on each of these elements of political culture.

As Feingold astutely notes, having a common political culture means that even an individualistic Jewish voter who casts her ballot based on careful consideration of the issues and candidates will often end up voting similarly to the majority of other Jewish voters, despite having no intention to do so or even consciousness of group affiliation. And more often than not, the inclination of that voter is toward positions and politicians that can be defined as liberal. The sources of that liberalism, according to Feingold, are various, reaching back at least to the American colonial seventeenth century, and combining elements drawn from the Enlightenment, Jeffersonian democracy, immigrant socialism, and elsewhere. While for the most part Feingold grounds American Jewish liberalism in modern historical experience, he sometimes extends its roots even further back in “exilic history” (x), in Halakhah, or in a transhistorical religious impulse toward “tikkun olam” (17).

Whether drawing from a traditional interest in Tzedakah and communal responsibility for social welfare, or from an experience of proletarianization, early twentieth-century Jewish political culture had a strong social democratic component. According to Feingold, Jewish social democracy was brought into the orbit of the liberal wing of the Democratic Party first by New York governor Al Smith, and then by Franklin Roosevelt. Indeed, the New Deal—with its emphasis on “government as enabler, as justice seeker, as arbiter between conflicting interests, and, when necessary, as provider” (118)—resonated deeply with Jewish political culture. This, combined with FDR's internationalism and openness to Jewish participation in government, wedded the Jews to the New Deal and by extension to the Democratic Party. Over time, the definition of liberalism changed, as did the class status of most members of the Jewish community. Working-class social democracy gave way to middle-class cosmopolitanism and rights-based social liberalism based in a high level of education.

Feingold argues that support for Israel is the “fingerprint” of American Jewish political culture. He dates the rise of Zionism to near hegemony in the American Jewish community to the 1930s and the response to Hitlerism. But he also credits Louis Brandeis with Americanizing Zionism a decade and a half earlier. He posits a tension between the universalistic values of liberalism and the particularistic ones of Zionism, but points out that the Labor Zionist movement and the social democratic nature of the State of Israel for its first three decades made it possible for American Jews to reconcile the two. But there have sometimes been tensions between Israel and the American Jewish community over the allocation of resources and such issues as the freedom of Russian Jewish émigrés to move to whatever country they pleased. And since 1977, the “blood and soil” nationalism of many Israeli leaders has put off American Jews, for whom liberal universalism is the bottom line. Still, when Israel finds itself in an existential crisis, American Jews rally to its support.

The Holocaust, Feingold argues, is the “obsession” of American Jewish political culture, though it is more a communal issue than an overtly political one. More resources and time are devoted to Holocaust commemoration than to anything else on all levels of Jewish life. Part of the issue for American Jews is a sense of shame, perhaps not entirely justified, that they and their parents did not do enough to save European Jewry. But, the author contends, “politically the trauma of the Holocaust seemed to have little impact on the liberal core of Jewish political culture” (238). Despite the failure of the American government under Roosevelt to take measures to prevent or stop the Holocaust, American Jews remained loyal to FDR and to his brand of liberalism. Indeed, the Holocaust can and has been used for progressive and conservative political ends. It thus confirms American Jews in their Zionism, but also in their liberalism. Perhaps, Feingold suggests, widespread American (not just Jewish) Holocaust consciousness has been mainly expressed through efforts to intervene in foreign conflicts that threaten genocide, efforts often pushed for by Jews. Feingold notes examples of genocidal conflict in which the United States refused to intervene, but does not explain what differentiated them from those cases in which it did.

Feingold writes that American Jewish Political Culture and the Liberal Persuasion is a synthesis of secondary sources and “personal notes gleaned from prior writings and lectures” (xiii). But the book sometimes has a slapdash quality about it, as if he wrote it more from the top of his head than from notes. Chronological confusion and inconsistent assertions make the argument hard to follow. Occasionally, the author himself seems to get lost in the chronology, as when he argues that the relatively high level of Jewish support for Ronald Reagan in 1980 and 1984 came despite Reagan's trip to the German military cemetery at Bitburg in 1985, a year after his second election. Moreover, there are dozens of errors of fact, mostly in the form of misspelled or garbled names, incorrect dates, and mistakes in attribution of party affiliation. Some of these are surely mere typographical errors, but others are repeated and were apparently original. A few are significant for the author's narrative or argument. The sloppiness extends to the copyediting as well. Plural nouns are attached to singular verbs and vice versa, “then” is used for “than,” and so on.

Feingold's main goal is to demonstrate and explain the abiding American Jewish inclination toward liberalism, however defined. But he does note that there are pressures pushing American Jews to the right. The growing number of Orthodox Jews are conservative, as are most of the recent Russian immigrants. When liberalism has seemed to contradict communal self-interest, as in the case of affirmative action, or when there has been a contradiction between one sort of liberalism and another, as in the clash between labor and minority rights in the Ocean Hill-Brownsville conflict of 1968, Jews sometimes desert liberal orthodoxy. That the American Jewish liberal political culture has lasted as long as it has is remarkable. How long it will continue is an open question.