Why American Jewish History Matters: The Orthodox Experience

As America prepared to celebrate its Bicentennial back in 1975, a quiet debate was unfolding within Orthodox Jewish circles: Was the United States a providential haven for Jewish flourishing—or a subtle engine of assimilation?

In December of that year, the National Conference of Yeshiva Principals convened to mark the upcoming anniversary, but the conversation quickly became something larger than a history lesson. Rabbi Jason Jacobowitz painted a sweeping portrait of Jewish life in colonial New York, Newport and Philadelphia. With a touch of patriotic flourish, he argued that Jews had both contributed to and benefited from the American experiment. The United States, he maintained, had offered unprecedented religious freedoms. “Jews have contributed much to this country and, in return, have found a haven for religious freedom.”¹ His message reached beyond educators and students; it was a call for the Orthodox community to recognize the unique opportunities America offered for Jewish life—freedom of religion, civic participation and cultural integration—without compromising religious ideals.

Rabbi Shmuel Singer offered a starkly different reading of the same past. Focusing on religious observance, he pointed to instances of intermarriage and religious laxity and emphasized the lack of rigorous Jewish schools and yeshivahs to stymie assimilation. He felt that America’s “culture took a terrible toll on their Yiddishkeit.”² If Orthodox Judaism had planted a foothold in the United States, suggested Rabbi Singer, it was despite the environment, not because of it—a testament to resolute leaders who had resisted powerful currents of assimilation. His address was less celebration than caution, urging vigilance about the terms of integration between American society and Jewish life.

No doubt, the American Jewish experience is complex. The impact of American culture is variegated—and learning that history, especially for the Orthodox, a tradition-bound faith community, is complicated. Is America the great guarantor of Orthodox continuity, or its greatest test?

A half-century later, and owing to the present Semiquincentennial, it seems prudent to rethink the value of studying the American Jewish experience. Put simply, what does the Orthodox Jewish community hope to gain from teaching and learning about American Jewish history?

The Historical Record

Rabbi Jacobowitz’s and Rabbi Singer’s positions were reasonable interpretations of the historical record. Since 1954, the Tercentenary of American Jewish life, the Jewish community had become very acquainted with the colonial period. In September 1654, twenty-three Jewish refugees arrived in New Amsterdam. These were women and men who were eager to find a new home after the Portuguese had invaded Brazil and brought the Inquisition to the Western Hemisphere.³ This band of Jews—with the exception of Asser Levy, they were the first to settle in North America—faced miserable hostility from Peter Stuyvesant, who the West India Company had placed in control of New Amsterdam. In the end, Amsterdam’s influential Jews prevailed on the Dutch to intercede, and their coreligionists were granted permission to remain in the New World, albeit with some social limitations. American Jews, Rabbi Jacobowitz included, were very taken by the tale and its lessons about Jewish agency and courage to stand up to evil. The episode was particularly important after the Holocaust and Israel’s Independence.

Rabbi Singer didn’t counter the importance of the beginnings of American Jewish life. His point was that most of the “original” American Jews had soon after relocated to the Netherlands and that subsequent Jewish migration to the New World had faced steep challenges to establish religious footing.

Orthodox Jews continued to debate how to view the American Jewish experience and the value of studying it. For instance, before the development of a more robust literature, day school educators had been rather unsure how to incorporate American Jewish history into their classrooms. Earlier textbooks had been deemed by some sorely insufficient.⁴ The most that Orthodox teachers could glean from these books, so went the prevailing wisdom, was what they had detected as the evident Divine handiwork to ensure Jewish survival. There was no other explanation, they figured, for the persistence of traditional Jewish life in the United States.⁵

Things eventually got more nuanced. The Bicentennial celebration occurred in concert with a rise in Orthodox triumphalism: self-confidence in this community’s thriving institutions to support all streams of Orthodox Judaism. Historians paid increased attention to American Orthodoxy and the primary sources required to research this group.⁶

Was the United States a providential haven for Jewish flourishing—or a subtle engine of assimilation?

In turn, countless Orthodox Jews began to turn to American Jewish history for the guiding values it offered. The ways that Orthodox Judaism developed within its American environment could teach something important about Orthodox community building. The “interest in Orthodox Judaism,” noticed one observer, “has increased geometrically.”⁷ The staying power of American Orthodoxy was no longer seen as an unexplainable miracle. Sociologists such as Charles Liebman and historians like Jeffrey Gurock demonstrated that the most successful branches of Orthodox Judaism, from the modern exponents to the champions of the Yeshivah World, understood how to negotiate with the forces of American life.⁸ The history of the Orthodox Union, for example, shows how Torah-committed Jews met uniquely American challenges with vision and creativity. OU leaders partnered with food manufacturers and government agencies to make kosher food widely accessible. In line with concurrent social movements, the OU tapped into the energy of young people through NCSY, its successful youth group which grew exponentially in the 1960s. And when Church-State issues came to the forefront in the following decade, they turned the moment into an opportunity to strengthen Orthodox institutions.⁹

By the 1980s, American Jewish history—taught by itself or as part of the general US history curriculum—was a mainstay in day schools, although it “remain[ed] a minor subject in comparison with other Judaic studies subjects.”¹⁰

The State of the Field

What about today? We don’t have the data to determine how frequently and vigorously schools currently teach American Jewish history.¹¹ But as for the present state of academic scholarship, the field has never been stronger. American Jewish history is one of the largest fields in Jewish studies. Furthermore, Orthodox Judaism—starting, in earnest, with the wave of European migration in the 1880s—is one of the most written-about areas in the discipline.¹²The myriad ways that this group has adapted to American life have fascinated historians.

Much of the concentration is on the post–World War II period. We know much about the ebbs and flows of Orthodoxy’s various subgroups, their leaders, and the demographics and behaviors of the “Chassidic,” “Modern Orthodox,” and “Yeshivish” communities, as categorized by the Pew Research Forum. We are attuned to how changes in American politics, education and the broader ecosystem of religion have shaped the decisions of Orthodox Jews.¹³

Recent research informs us how Orthodox Jews participate in American consumerism and what moves them to dine at kosher restaurants.¹⁴ Within the past five years, the National Book Council has awarded its top prize in American Jewish studies to a pair of books that respectfully and sophisticatedly showed the growth of Satmar in the context of New York urban history and American legal history.¹⁵ Often thought of as existing apart from American life, Satmar has shrewdly considered when to operate within or without the rhythm of American society.

There’s more work to be done on Orthodox Jewish life in the earlier periods of American Jewish history. As the present issue of Jewish Action demonstrates, there’s a lot we can learn from the lives and legacies of Moses Seixas, Rebecca Gratz and Isaac Leeser.

The Goals of American Jewish History

Then and now, what are the goals for the study of American Jewish history?

Curriculum experts in Orthodox day schools have offered their take. Some suggest zeroing in on the link between knowledge of American Jewish history and the cultivation of Jewish identity. A Boston educator concluded that an appreciation of the American Jewish experience “provides students with some desperately needed historical perspectives on matters which affect them as Jews both today as well as in the future.”¹⁶

With a certain pride in the postwar resurgence of American Orthodoxy, another teacher suggested that American Jewish history, likely with a focus on the Orthodox community, can impart a “loyalty to tradition.”¹⁷ No longer a heavenly godsend or told with an emphasis on the crushing challenges of tradition-bound faith in modern life, American Orthodox history was perceived by this educator as a story of communal determination to preserve “Torah life” in a hospitable American climate. Others, focused more on civics than religious dimensions, hoped that improved literacy in American Jewish history could help students better integrate their Jewish and American experiences.¹⁸ A more recent incarnation of this goes so far as to claim that Jewish ideas were at the very heart of America’s founding.

My view aligns with my teacher, Jonathan Sarna, professor emeritus of American Jewish history at Brandeis University. Reflecting on the broader sweep of the American Jewish experience, Sarna suggested that the lessons of this history ought to center on the “ability of American Jews—young and old, men and women alike—to change the course of history and transform a piece of the world.”

Orthodox Judaism, in particular, exemplifies this. The daring changemakers who founded synagogues, schools and countless other institutions ensured that the community would thrive despite real concerns about secularism and assimilation.

Perhaps no better example is the American history of Bais Yaakov. My friend and colleague, Leslie Klein, has studied the migration of the Bais Yaakov movement to the United States and demonstrated how it has adapted to changing attitudes about American childhood and the varied indigenous women’s movements.¹⁹ With thoroughness and thoughtfulness, those who study American Jewish history can grapple with the challenges that their coreligionists faced when their faith and cultural sensibilities engaged with the realities of American life.

Sometimes these two worlds coalesce. On other occasions, they don’t. And that is perhaps the most valuable lesson American Jewish history—Orthodox or otherwise—can teach. The relationship between Judaism and America has never been seamless, nor entirely antagonistic. The most discerning among us see history as a “story of how people shaped events—establishing and maintaining communities, responding to challenges, working for change.”²⁰ This offers a prudent path forward: a middle ground between uncritical devotion to American Jewish exceptionalism and fears of a culture at odds with a tradition-bound faith.

Notes

1. Jason Jacobowitz, “Judaism in Colonial America,” Jewish Parent 28 (April 1976): 23.

2. Shmuel Singer, “The Bicentennial: A History of Religious Jewry in America,” Jewish Parent 28 (April 1976): 14.

3. See, for example, Leo Hershkowitz, “New Amsterdam’s Twenty-Three Jews—Myth or Reality,” in Hebrew and the Bible in America, ed. Shalom Goldman (Hanover: Brandeis University Press, 1993), 171–83.

4. See, for example, Joseph Elias, “Past and Present in the Teaching of Jewish History,” Jewish Observer 4 (November 1967): 23.

5. See Abraham A. Kellner, “Towards a Philosophy of Jewish History,” Young Israel Viewpoint 38 (May-June 1950): 13–15.

6. See Zev Eleff, “In Search of American Orthodox Jewish History,” Jewish Action 73 (Fall 2012): 42–47.

7. Reuven P. Bulka, “General Introduction,” in Dimensions of Orthodox Judaism, ed. Reuven P. Bulka (New York: Ktav, 1983), xv.

8. See, for example, Charles S. Liebman, “Orthodox Judaism Today,” Midstream 25 (August/September 1979): 19–26; and Jeffrey S. Gurock, “Resisters and Accommodators: Varieties of Orthodox Rabbis in America, 1886–1983,” American Jewish Archives Journal 35 (November 1983): 100–187.

9. See, for example, Timothy D. Lytton, Kosher: Private Regulation in the Age of Industrial Food (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013); Zev Eleff, Living from Convention to Convention: A History of the NCSY (Jersey City: Ktav, 2009); and Lawrence Grossman, Living in Both Worlds: Modern Orthodox Judaism in the United States, 1945–2025 (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2025),155–59.

10. David I. Bernstein, “A Study of the Teaching of Jewish History in Modern Orthodox Yeshivah High Schools,” Jewish Education 54 (Winter 1986): 30.

11. On the pedagogical approaches to teaching history in Jewish school, see Benjamin M. Jacobs, “Where the Personal and Pedagogical Meet: A Portrait of a Master Teacher of Jewish History,” Jewish Education 68 (2002): 73–86.

12. For the most complete survey of American Orthodoxy, see Jeffrey S. Gurock, Orthodox Jews in America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009).

13. For a contemporary analysis and breakdown of the Pew Research Forum’s studies, see Zev Eleff, “Orthodox Judaism in the United States,” in The State of American Jewry: New Insights and Scholarship, ed. Frederick E. Greenspahn (New York: NYU Press, 2025), 210–41.

14. See Zev Eleff, Authentically Orthodox: A Tradition-Bound Faith in American Life (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2020), 104–23; and Jody Myers, Eating at G-d’s Table: How Foodways Create and Sustain Orthodox Jewish Communities (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2023).

15. See Nathaniel Deutsch and Michael Casper, A Fortress in Brooklyn: Race, Real Estate, and the Making of Hasidic Williamsburg (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2021); and Nomi M. Stolzenberg and David N. Myers, American Shtetl: The Making of Kiryas Joel, a Hasidic Village in Upstate New York (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2022).

16. Jon Bloomberger, “The Study of Jewish History in the Jewish Day School,” Ten Da’at 6 (Spring 1992): 31.

17. Bernstein, “A Study of the Teaching of Jewish History,” 34.

18. See Sondra Leiman, “Practical Techniques and Methods in Teaching American Jewish History,” in Moving Beyond Haym Solomon: The Teaching of American Jewish History to 20th Century Jews (Philadelphia: Temple University, 1995), 14–25.

19. See Leslie Ginsparg Klein, Bais Yaakov Girls: Agency, Identity, and Education in Jewish Orthodox Girlhood (Waltham: Brandeis University Press, forthcoming).

20. Jonathan D. Sarna, “Why Study American Jewish History,” HaYidion (Spring 2014): 52.

Rabbi Dr. Zev Eleff is president of Gratz College and professor of American Jewish history.