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Article: Catholics and Jews in Twentieth Century America.
- Article from:
- American Jewish History
- Article date:
- December 1, 2001
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2001 American Jewish Historical Society. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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By Egal Feldman. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2001. xiii + 323 pp.
Egal Feldman has taken a topic of enormous potential interest and produced a deeply disappointing book. This is partly because he knows very little about the history of American Catholicism. But the problem has more fundamentally to do with Feldman's firm conviction that knowledge of this sort is unnecessary, at least with regard to the history of Catholic-Jewish relations. One truth alone is sufficient: that American Catholics, like Catholics everywhere, suffered from "an incurable theological virus"--the virus of antisemitism (p. 8). Catholics, he asserts, were heirs to a ...