As the two most highly visible religious minorities in American society since colonial days, Catholicism and Judaism have both received extensive attention from historians and others. Those histories have generally treated their subjects internally, in relation to the group's own history and struggles, or externally, in relation to the dominant Protestant and, more recently, secular components of American culture. Only seldom, however, has the mutual relationship of Catholics and Jews themselves been examined and compared.

Given the rich material available, such an historical study would be both intrinsically provocative and capable of shedding light on larger themes of American religious history and modern American society. It is thus with high expectations that one approaches a book entitled Catholics and Jews in Twentieth Century America, anticipating a comparison of these two ancient, universal religious traditions within a United States that is, by Catholic and Jewish standards, a mere historical toddler. The subject is ripe for shedding light on such quintessential American phenomena as New York Governor Al Smith and his Jewish advisor Belle Moskowitz, or Catholic movie censor Joseph Breen and the Jewish Hollywood film moguls who accommodated him, or Abraham Ribicoff and Richard J. Daley (whose obscenities directed at the Jewish Connecticut senator provided one of the more uncensored, revealing moments of the 1968 Democratic convention). Or, perhaps, a more religious-sociological approach, such as the comparison of Catholic and Jewish neighborhoods' differential responses to black urban migration that historian John McGreevy traced in Parish Boundaries (1996). Or Catholic-Jewish convergence in the modern neoconservative movement. Or any of dozens of other lively topics involving American Catholic-Jewish collaboration, conflict, and religious-ethnic culture.

Feldman's book largely disappoints these expectations. Rather than the kind of wide-ranging history suggested by its title, it is instead a quite limited and monotone narrative that might more accurately be titled, “How Vatican II and Jewish Critique Altered Catholicism's Theological Anti-Semitism and How That Played Out in America.” In other words, rather than examining the broader intellectual culture or lived experience of American Catholics and Jews, this book offers a quite old-fashioned account of American Catholics' religiously grounded views of Jews, and of official or quasi-official Catholic-Jewish dialogues — based almost entirely on the pronouncements of establishment religious leaders and theologians.

The primary lens through which Feldman views this relationship is what he declares, at the outset, to be a definitive and unchanging Catholic “teaching of contempt” toward the Jews, based upon the Catholic doctrine, Scriptures, and history from the very beginning of Christianity's founding, or at least since the Middle Ages (there's some confusion about this in the book). “Catholic thinking about Jews remained relatively constant throughout the centuries,” he declares (22), and for all practical purposes, in Feldman's account, it also remained essentially unchanged — in America and elsewhere — until the 1950s and the eve of Vatican II. Only then, under the (reluctant) prodding of Holocaust memories, Zionism, and the impetus of a few progressive Catholic theologians was the theology of contempt eroded by the Vatican II document Nostra Aetate, No. 4, which declared that “Jews should not be spoken of as rejected or accursed,” and that “God does not take back the choice He made” (109). While Nostra Aetate was incomplete and did not end American Catholic anti-Semitism at once, it turned the tide and opened the doors to mutual toleration and a new era of theological conversation, especially among those engaged in Jewish-Catholic dialogue and scholarship.

The book is thus a straightforward, progressive narrative with clear heroes (those Jews and Catholics who promoted revised Catholic attitudes toward the Jews), villains (Catholic anti-Semites), and a single scale on which to measure the progress of the former and the resistance of the latter. Much of this account is competent and accurate as far as it goes, although there are a few howlers, such as labeling the globe-trotting journalist Vincent Sheean — who probably never darkened the door of a church after childhood — a prominent “Catholic writer” and using him to reveal Catholic views. There is also a tendency to trace all forces acting contrary to Jewish interests to Catholics and their teaching of contempt. Thus Arab resistance to Zionism, for example, was “inspired by the support they received from the Vatican” (42).

Without diminishing the importance of either Nostra Aetate or the valuable growth in mutual understanding and toleration between American Jews and Catholics in the mid-twentieth century that it represents, then, the work largely falls flat. It is rather wooden in its assignment of praise and blame, and leaves out vast dimensions of the story of “Catholics and Jews in America” that might not fit its pre-determined grid. Specialists in theological history may find the detailed accounts of behind-the-scenes maneuvering at Vatican II useful, and it is certainly important to underscore, as Feldman does, the importance of essential religious issues in the two groups' relationship — and not simply reduce religion to a mere cultural epiphenomenon. But the rich, colorful, imaginative, and often ironic relationship of these two American communities and their traditions — especially in the great American urban centers where they each largely made their way up from the threadbare working class to phenomenal affluence and influence — ends up being turned into a cardboard cutout, without much of the sparkle or flavor of real American life and thought.

Even the book's Conclusion, which seems poised to offer some broader insights into the state of American Catholic-Jewish relations in global context, or to ponder the concerns both communities now share with the weakening of serious religious identity in American mass culture, is devoted instead to extending the same narrative: deploring episodes of apparent Vatican backsliding on Jewish issues (the Auschwitz convent episode and the canonization of Edith Stein), while applauding signs of continued Vatican II-inspired progress (John Paul II's recognition of Israel and Cardinal John O'Connor's commencement address at Hebrew Union College).

While there is certainly a place for this kind of monitoring of the two religions' official or unofficial communal relations, the entire enterprise seems to derive from an earlier era of Catholic and Jewish history. It certainly misses much of what is most fascinating about American Jews, American Catholics, and the extraordinary culture and society in which they have both struggled and thrived.