In Making Judaism Safe for America, Jessica Cooperman details the efforts of the Jewish Welfare Board (JWB) both to establish Judaism as an accepted element in the American religious mainstream and to recraft American Judaism to be worthy of that acceptance. In so doing, she argues that the roots of “tri-faith America” (Protestant, Catholic, Jewish) extend back to World War I, when the JWB became an officially recognized agency for welfare work in the suddenly enlarged American military. Thoroughly researched, clearly written, and cogently argued, Making Judaism Safe for America makes a significant contribution to the history of the evolution of American Judaism and American civil religion, and establishes the importance of the World War I era in those developments.
In fact, Cooperman pushes the history even a little further back. During the Progressive Era, some Americans voiced their concern for the survival of what they saw as traditional American “virile fighting virtues” (15) and implicitly Protestant American morality in the face of social and cultural transformation brought about by mass immigration. Additionally, they linked these concerns to worries about a lack of military preparedness, but responded with a typical Progressive faith that institutions could be fashioned to meet these challenges. The US incursion into Mexico in 1916, however, made plain not only the low level of military preparedness, but also the inability of the armed forces to maintain the morals and morale of the troops.
The Progressive response was to initiate programs to improve soldiers’ spiritual and intellectual condition. Unsurprisingly, these efforts were at least implicitly, and often explicitly, Protestant Christian, with the War Department turning to the “nonsectarian” (that is pan-Protestant) YMCA as the logical agency to lead them. Indeed, as Cooperman points out, Protestantism was so woven into the established mainstream American culture that its presence was often both invisible and assumed. (Protestantism's influence on the culture is also hard to define, and it would have been nice to have a little more concrete discussion here of how Protestant values and morality might have differed from their Jewish or Catholic counterparts.) In any case, Catholics and Jews did notice the sectarian nature of war welfare work, and the Knights of Columbus, the YMHA, and the Central Council of American Rabbis also got into the act.
The US entry into World War I opened tremendous opportunities for social uplift, as five million men, many of them immigrants or children of immigrants, were mobilized. The War Department named a Commission on Training Camp Activities (CTCA) to carry out this work, once again under the aegis of the YMCA. But with perhaps a third of the army consisting of Catholics, and another four percent of Jews, these groups fought for official recognition as equal partners. The CTCA and the YMCA resisted, but ultimately incorporated the Knights of Columbus into the official structure.
Full recognition of Judaism came a little more grudgingly, but Jews too were eventually brought on board, if with slightly lesser status. Members of the Jewish communal elite formed the Jewish Welfare Board to include diverse elements in the community. Though it faced early rivalry from other organizations with pretensions to communal leadership, the JWB became the officially recognized Jewish partner of the War Department and the CTCA. Even so, authorities continued to view Jewish work as “sectarian” in a way that Protestant work was not. JWB officials contended with YMCA control, for example, over the spaces where educational, recreational, and spiritual activities were carried out.
As Cooperman argues, the JWB also attempted to redefine American Judaism to make it worthy of official recognition as an American faith. And here it ran into divisions within the Jewish community. The outlook of the leadership was largely Reform, a bias in the JWB work that was reinforced by War Department regulations that chaplains had to have a college education in addition to ordination from a recognized denominational body, and by the JWB's own preference that its representatives project a manly, all-American image. Orthodox leaders pushed back, demanding unsuccessfully that kosher food be made available to soldiers and complaining of lax Sabbath observance by Reform Jewish chaplains. But Reformers also objected, especially to the JWB-issued prayer book that they felt contained too much Hebrew and too many traditional elements. The Yiddish press, further, complained about the de-ethnicized nature of JWB programs. For its part, the JWB sought the middle ground, what it called the “democratic standard” that programs should follow the desires of the majority. But this made no one happy.
Above all, the JWB sought integration and therefore emphasized the compatibility of Judaism with American republican values and cultural norms. It thus refused to make an issue of kashrut, the centrality of which was hard to explain and which threatened to both separate Jewish men from their comrades and impose logistical difficulties on the military. But it took up the cause of separate Jewish “welfare huts” at bases, because the huts—where soldiers met and socialized with each other and with visitors, and especially with women—were meant to emulate the home environment. In justifying the necessity for Jewish distinction on this level, JWB workers retreated from their assertion of Judaism as purely a religion and resorted to essentialist racial language.
After the war, the purview of the JWB shrank, but Cooperman argues convincingly that the legacy of its World War I-era work was lasting and deep. On the one hand, former JWB workers, chaplains, and the men they with whom they came in contact brought the JWB's Americanized Judaism home with them. On the other, even with the rise of antisemitism and nativism in the 1920s and 1930s, the military continued to recognize Judaism as one of the three officially sanctioned faiths. Organizations such as the National Conference of Christians and Jews and the USO also emerged from the World War I experience to further the cause of trifaith America and its “Judeo-Christian” heritage.
