Since the publication of her landmark 1981 book, At Home in America: Second Generation New York Jews, Deborah Dash Moore has documented the urban dimensions of American Jewish life. In Urban Origins of American Judaism, based on a series of lectures she delivered at Stetson University in Florida, Moore crafts a phenomenological study to illuminate the intersections of American urbanism and Judaism. The result is a provocative reinterpretation of modern Judaism.

In the book's preface, Moore write, “[W]hat we know today as American Judaism emerged out of Jewish encounters with American cities” (xv). A century ago, when predominantly Christian religious leaders meditated on the rising urbanism of American life and noted the demographic shifts of American population centers away from rural areas and toward cities, they worried mightily that religious faith would not survive the move. Theses about secularization as the inevitable outgrowth of the modern condition often took the city as their starting point. Progressive-era social gospel figures sought to bring faith into the squalor, iniquity, and depravity of cities because they assumed its survival would be hard fought. That religion could not only endure, but even spring anew from the streets of American cities contradicts a long and vaunted tradition of saying precisely the opposite.

Owing a debt to scholars, such as Robert Orsi, who have sought to define “lived religion” and “religion of the streets,” Moore contends that synagogues, streets, and photographs provide ample evidence for the urban nature of American Judaism. In using this variety of sources, Moore upends distinctions between formal and informal religion and pays no heed to whether religious authorities would sanction a particular behavior. To the contrary, one learns that American cities fostered innovation more than they guarded tradition, in part because the very spaces of cities—from where people lived to where they worked, played, and prayed—were in constant motion, constructed, destroyed, and reconstructed by the agents of industrialization and capitalism that depended on cities and their masses for sustenance.

Moore examines urban spaces in a variety of American cities, including southern and western ones, and she also explores how these spaces changed from the earliest Jewish settlements in the American colonies to the present. Yet the heart of her argument rests in twentieth-century New York City. Moore explains, “As New York became the unofficial capital of American Jews, Jewish history in the United States acquired a powerful focal point. What happened in New York often reverberated far beyond the Hudson River” (23). Undoubtedly, Moore has numbers on her side, and she provides clear statistical evidence documenting the city's booming Jewish population starting in the late nineteenth century. She does not enter into debates about the typicality or exceptionalism of New York City, as an American city or a Jewish city, though her efforts to connect patterns in New York to patterns in other cities suggest that she sees far more continuity than rupture among American cities.

Implicit in Moore's analysis, however, are two ruptures, made all the more visible by her efforts to generalize about the Jewish American urban experience: ruptures between American cities and European cities; and ruptures between cities and nonurban American spaces. Indeed, European cities and nonurban (whether rural or suburban) locales operate as tacit foils throughout the book, but especially in the sections that discuss streets and photographs.

For Moore, the city street, more than the built edifice of the synagogue, is the defining element of distinctively American Judaism. She writes, “Going public on the streets invited all urban residents to observe and consider Jews” (72). On American streets, Jews performed their Jewishness and offered it up as part of the public culture of urban life. These performances, whether funeral parades, protest marches, holiday shopping days, or Sabbath walks, all made Judaism visible to Jews and non-Jews. Streets were the space of lived religion and operated, in postwar photojournalist Arthur Leipzig's words, “as an extension of the home” (97). American Judaism, in other words, emerged in the very process of allowing its folkways and rituals to be witnessed and performed in public, on streets. Furthermore, its connection to street life enabled it to shed self-consciousness; that is, “Jewishness came naturally on the streets” (111).

That one could be Jewish on the streets may appear as the apotheosis of Jewish Enlightenment dreams, yet in Moore's rendering this public freedom draws from a wholly American urban context. Throughout the book, she defines the public, street-based nature of American Judaism as indicative of its distinctiveness. Even when Moore mentions anti-Semitic incidents, she interprets them as part of the public performance of Jewishness that often included a measure of vulnerability. Such incidents did not drive Jewishness off the city streets but rather came to mark the public face of American Judaism.

Underlying Moore's claims of the urban origins of American Judaism, then, is her contention that the United States offered very different public opportunities for Jews than Europe did. However, equally implicit in her argument is that even within the United States, only urban locales were definitive of American Judaism. Here is the second rupture on which the book pivots: the break between the nonurban and urban within the United States. Moore is in good company in depicting this tension as formative of late nineteenth- and twentieth-century American life. Historians of American political culture have argued that rural and, later, suburban America served as the bedrock for movements, legal policies, and economic modes that rejected the terms of urban life. Moore turns to photography as a vivid evidentiary base for illustrating what was so distinctly urban about American Jewish life. Documentary photography expanded during the New Deal era, often serving as a state-sponsored effort to explore American poverty, especially rural poverty, and to justify the expansion of the regulatory state. Yet the photographs that Moore examines focus their reformatory and aesthetic lens on urban space.

In intimate prose, Moore works alongside the reader to interpret the seventeen photographs she has reprinted in the book. These photos, all with human subjects, stand as a visual record of the ways that Jews created and documented their Judaism in American cities. Moore teaches the reader to look beyond the frame of the photograph and understand what concerns informed the photographer and what may have happened before or after the camera flashed. She argues that the photos have become the icons of American Judaism, saturated with urban experience and viewed as the common heritage of American Jews. Not so different from the photographers hired by the New Deal's Works Progress Administration to go deep into the American countryside, non-Jewish and, especially, Jewish photographers sought to capture an authentic Jewish landscape and people, removed from Europe and decidedly urban. Despite recent scholarship that has argued that American Judaism was fashioned on the American frontier, where peddlers and small-town Jews sought to create Jewish life in unlikely spaces, Moore holds fast to the urban iconicity of American Judaism.

Origins do not predict outcomes, of course. Moore is convincing in her origin story of American Judaism, so much so that the reader may join her in puzzling over the possible fate of nonurban Judaism. We know that Jews left cities with alacrity after World War II and created new settlements in suburbs. In Moore's assessment, Judaism endured in suburbs insofar as they created “substitutions for the simultaneously intimate and anonymous interactions of public urban culture” (153). Suburban Judaism, in this formulation, is a simulacrum of urban Judaism. Yet, as historians are increasingly embracing a metropolitan framework to understand the deep interconnection between American cities and suburbs, one may find a new point of origin for American Judaism in the cultural, political, economic, and spiritual forces that drew suburbs and cities—and the United States and Europe—closer together than once imagined.