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Article: The Americanization of the Synagogue, 1820-1870: an historiographical appreciation.
- Article from:
- American Jewish History
- Article date:
- March 1, 2002
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2002 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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When Leon Jick set out to write The Americanization of the Synagogue, historical scholarship on American Jewry, and especially on American Judaism, was largely parochial. Important studies of American Judaism had appeared--Marshall Sklare's Conservative Judaism (1955), Nathan Glazer's American Judaism (1957), and Charles Liebman's Ambivalent American Jew (1973) (1)--but these were written by those trained in sociology and political science, not history. As far as the writing of American Jewish history, what then existed was, in Jick's words, mostly "filiopietistic, institutionally biased, and filled with cliches which were repeated over and over." (2)
But 1976 ...