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Honorable Mention, 2019 Saul Viener Book Prize, given by the
American Jewish Historical Society A compelling story of how
Judaism became integrated into mainstream American religion In
1956, the sociologist Will Herberg described the United States as a
"triple-melting pot," a country in which "three religious
communities - Protestant, Catholic, Jewish - are America." This
description of an American society in which Judaism and Catholicism
stood as equal partners to Protestantism begs explanation, as
Protestantism had long been the dominant religious force in the
U.S. How did Americans come to embrace Protestantism, Catholicism,
and Judaism as "the three facets of American religion?"Historians
have often turned to the experiences of World War II in order to
explain this transformation. However, World War I's impact on
changing conceptions of American religion is too often overlooked.
This book argues that World War I programs designed to protect the
moral welfare of American servicemen brought new ideas about
religious pluralism into structures of the military. Jessica
Cooperman shines a light on how Jewish organizations were able to
convince both military and civilian leaders that Jewish
organizations, alongside Christian ones, played a necessary role in
the moral and spiritual welfare of America's fighting forces. This
alone was significant, because acceptance within the military was
useful in modeling acceptance in the larger society. The leaders of
the newly formed Jewish Welfare Board, which became the military's
exclusive Jewish partner in the effort to maintain moral welfare
among soldiers, used the opportunities created by war to negotiate
a new place for Judaism in American society. Using the previously
unexplored archival collections of the JWB, as well as soldiers'
letters, memoirs and War Department correspondence, Jessica
Cooperman shows that the Board was able to exert strong control
over expressions of Judaism within the military. By introducing
young soldiers to what it saw as appropriately Americanized forms
of Judaism and Jewish identity, the JWB hoped to prepare a
generation of American Jewish men to assume positions of Jewish
leadership while fitting comfortably into American society. This
volume shows how, at this crucial turning point in world history,
the JWB managed to use the policies and power of the U.S.
government to advance its own agenda: to shape the future of
American Judaism and to assert its place as a truly American
religion.
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