To be anything else, he contended, “is somehow not to be an American.” To be an American, according to Herberg, meant defining oneself according to the new “tripartite scheme” of American religion: to be, in other words, a Protestant, a Catholic, or a Jew. Written by Will Herberg, a Jewish ex-Marxist intellectual, the book argued that America had become a “‘triple melting pot,’ restructured in three great communities with religious labels, defining three great ‘communions’ or ‘faiths.'” In the midst of these transformations, Judaism’s status as an accepted American faith won striking confirmation in a 1955 bestseller entitled, memorably, Protestant-Catholic-Jew. Their memories, commitments, and collective sense of obligation to those who had not survived set the stage for developments that would transform all of American Judaism, Orthodoxy in particular, for decades to come. Less noticeably but no less significantly, Holocaust-era immigrants began to affect American Judaism during these years. Judaism also began to adapt to new environmental conditions, accompanying Jews out to the suburbs and then to sunbelt cities like Miami and Los Angeles. Whatever the case, religion became the major vehicle for Jewish identity, while secular Judaism as an ideology largely collapsed. Popular interest in Judaism burgeoned as Americans sought to learn more about this “unknown religion of our time.”įueled by postwar prosperity, Judaism strengthened institutionally through the building of synagogues and religious schools and the development of new communal institutions, though whether Jews actually became more religious or only affiliated at a higher rate has long been disputed. Judaism played a prominent part in this conspicuous “new-time religion.” As anti-Semitism declined during the postwar decades, the religion of American Jews gained widespread recognition as America’s “third faith” alongside Protestantism and Catholicism. “Never has churchgoing been so acceptable, so much ‘the thing to do.'” “Never has religion been so institutionalized, so conspicuous, so public,” journalist Claire Cox concluded in a 1961 book depicting the “new-time religion” that had taken shape in America since World War II. In 1954, Congress added the words “under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance, and in 1956 it made the phrase “In God We Trust,” found on coins since the Civil War, the official national motto. It predicted that “if the present tendency continues, the mid-century years may go down in history as the years of conversion and return.” Religion All Around “One of the most significant tendencies of our time has been the turn to religion among intellectuals and the growing disfavor with which secular attitudes and perspectives are now regarded in not a few circles that lay claim to the leadership of culture,” the left-wing Partisan Review reported in 1950. Now with the war over, the nation as a whole turned increasingly toward religion - a response, some believed, to wartime horrors and to the postwar threat from “godless” Communism. My Jewish Learning is a not-for-profit and relies on your help DonateĪmerican Judaism had actually been gaining strength since the late 1930s, partly as a form of spiritual resistance to Nazism and anti-Semitism.
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