1. Michels, Tony, “Is America ‘Different?’ A Critique of American Jewish Exceptionalism,” Journal of American Jewish History 96, no. 3 (September 2010): 201–24Google Scholar; Sorkin, David, “Is American Jewry Exceptional? Comparing Jewish Emancipation in Europe and America,” Journal of American Jewish History 96, no. 3 (September 2010): 175–200Google Scholar.

2. Devin Naar's study of the interwar experience of Jews in Greek Salonica provides another example that poses a challenge to American Jewish exceptionalism as Sorkin describes it. Devin Naar, Jewish Salonica: Between the Ottoman Empire and Modern Greece (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2016).

3. Michels, “Is America ‘Different?,’” 201.

4. Ibid.

5. Ibid., 224.

6. On Jewish “quietness” in other countries see Jonathan Sarna, American Judaism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004); Sarna explains that in New Amsterdam in the seventeenth century, “the operative British principle, for Jews as for other social and religious deviants from the mainstream was ‘quietness,’ akin to being ‘out of sight, out of mind’” (Ibid., 11). On Jews and religious freedom discourse and its relationship to affirming America's post–World War II color line, see Tisa Wenger, Religious Freedom: The Contested History of an American Ideal (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017), 179.

7. Michels, “Is America ‘Different?,’” 202.

8. Donald Pease, The New American Exceptionalism (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 7.

9. Michels seems to allow for weak exceptionalism: in describing the post–World War II years: “In the aftermath of Nazi devastation and amid the expansion of Soviet totalitarianism…. Nobody could doubt that the United States proved hospitable to Jews to an unprecedented degree” (“Is America ‘Different?,’” 220).

10. David Sorkin, Jewish Emancipation: A History across Five Centuries (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019).

11. Ibid., 1–2.

12. Pierre Birnbaum and Ira Katznelson's study of emancipation is a prominent example of the way the United States has traditionally been excluded from the conceptions of “Jewish emancipation.” Although their book includes a chapter on Jews in America, that essay points out that in the United States, “Jews could secure legal and political emancipation merely by entering…. The United States was attractive to Jews as the western nation that gave the most sustained expression to the universal and instrumental values of the Enlightenment.” Ira Katznelson, “Between Separation and Disappearance: Jews on the Margin of American Liberalism,” in Paths of Emancipation: Jews, States, and Citizenship, ed. Pierre Birnbaum and Ira Katznelson (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), 158.

13. Sorkin, Jewish Emancipation, chapter 27.

14. Ibid., 346.

15. Historian Udi Greenberg's research on post–World War II (late 1940s and 1950s) European religious pluralism shows that “in stark contrast to parallel developments in the United States, Jews were almost universally absent from the European Catholic-Protestant dialogue. Questioning antisemitism or building communal ties with the continent's remaining Jews was confined to vanishingly small circles, and not a single prominent European ecumenist published systematically on the topic at the time.” Greenberg, “Catholics, Protestants, and the Violent Birth of European Religious Pluralism,” American Historical Review 124, no. 2 (April 2019): 524. In keeping with the midcentury US embrace of Jews and Judaism as part of the postwar mainstream, Shaul Magid explains the Judeo-Christian tradition as “one way the theo-political-territorial notion of American exceptionalism can also include the Jews.” Shaul Magid, “The Judeo-Christian Tradition,” in Theologies of American Exceptionalism, ed. Winnifred Fallers Sullivan and Elizabeth Shakman Hurd (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2020). On the creation and transformation of Judeo-Christianity, see K. Healan Gaston, Imagining Judeo-Christian America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019).

16. Pease, New American Exceptionalism, 8.

17. Jacqueline Rose, States of Fantasy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 4.

18. Pease, New American Exceptionalism, 10.

19. Ibid.

20. “Jews in America,” Fortune Magazine, February 1, 1936, 85.

21. Mordecai Kaplan, Judaism as a Civilization (New York: Thomas Yoseleff, 1934), 3–4.

22. Ibid., 4.

23. Edna Ferber, Fanny, Herself (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1917), 121.

24. Milton Steinberg, A Partisan Guide to the Jewish Problem (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1945), 115.

25. Milton Steinberg, “To Be or Not to Be a Jew,” Common Ground (Spring 1941): 5–6.

26. The Reconstructionist Platform (New York: The Jewish Reconstructionist Foundation, 1942), 4.

27. Michael Beschloss, The Conquerors: Roosevelt, Truman and the Destruction of Hitler's Germany, 1941–1945 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2002), 46.

28. Andrew Solomon, Far from the Tree: Parents, Children and the Search for Identity (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2012), 5.

29. British theorist Raymond Williams uses this concept in his 1954 Preface to Film and in his 1977 Marxism and Literature. Williams explains that he uses the word “feeling” to distinguish these attitudes and emotions from the more formal “worldview” or “ideology”: “It is thus a specific structure of particular linkages, particular emphases and suppressions, and, in what are often its most recognizable forms, particular deep starting-points and conclusions.” Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 134.

30. Louis Finkelstein, forward to The Jews: Their History, Culture, and Religion (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1949), xxii.

31. As Michels has shown, American Jewish exceptionalist thinking has been prevalent in both scholarly and popular writing and discussion since at least the nineteenth century, when American Jewish communal leaders began declaring that Jews were uniquely suited to the blessings of the United States. Tony Michels, “Is America Different? Antisemitism and the Belief in American Exceptionalism” (Paper presented at University of Florida, March 12, 2020).

32. Michels cites midcentury publications such as Oscar Handlin, Adventure in Freedom: Three Hundred Years of Jewish Life in America (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1954), and Ben Halpern, “America Is Different,” Midstream 1, Autumn 1955, 39–52.

33. Laura Z. Hobson, Gentleman's Agreement (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1947), 34.

34. Will Herberg, Protestant-Catholic-Jew: An Essay in American Religious Sociology (New York: Doubleday, 1955), 278, 274.

35. Arthur A. Cohen, “Why I Choose to Be a Jew,” Harper's, April 1959, 61–66.

36. Louis Finkelstein to Arthur A. Cohen, March 30, 1959, MSS 496, box 24, folder “Why I Choose to Be a Jew,” Harper’s Magazine, April 1959, Arthur A. Cohen Papers, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

37. Cohen, “Why I Choose to Be a Jew,” 61.

38. Arthur Cohen, “The Myth of the Judeo-Christian Tradition,” Commentary, November 1, 1969, 77. On Cohen's essay see Emmanuel Nathan and Anya Topolski, “The Myth of a Judeo-Christian Tradition: Introducing a European Perspective,” in Is There a Judeo-Christian Tradition? A European Perspective, ed. Emmanual Nathan and Anya Topolski (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2016), 1. Cohen's critique of the Judeo-Christian tradition was based on his view that this era of supposed comity between religions was in fact an era lacking in religious substance.

39. Cohen, “Myth of the Judeo-Christian Tradition,” 73–77

40. Although the post–World War II years (roughly 1945–1965) mark a high point in American Jewish exceptionalist thinking, this discourse certainly did not end after 1965. Kenneth Wald's study of American Jewish political behavior traces parts of the genealogy of American Jewish exceptionalist thinking, both before and after the midcentury moment. Kenneth Wald, The Foundations of American Jewish Liberalism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2019). Marc Dollinger, in Black Power, Jewish Politics, explains the evolution of exceptionalist discourse in the post-1965 years as it shifted to a focus on Jewish liberal politics and activism in the latter third of the twentieth century. Marc Dollinger, Black Power, Jewish Politics: Reinventing the Alliance in the 1960s (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2018); Dollinger, , “American Jewish Liberalism Revisited: Two Perspectives: Exceptionalism and Jewish Liberalism,” Journal of American Jewish History 90, no. 2 (June 2002): 161Google Scholar.

41. Cohen, “Why I Choose to be a Jew,” 63.

42. Ibid., 61.

43. Ibid., 61–62.

44. Ibid., 62. Paul Mendes-Flohr, forward to Franz Rosenzweig: His Life and Thought, by Nahum Glatzer, ed. Paul Mendes-Flohr, 3^rd ed. (New York: Hackett, 1998), xli.

45. Cohen, “Why I Choose to Be a Jew,” 62.

46. On religion as a Protestant category and its relationship to Jews and Judaism, see Leora Batnitzky, How Judaism Became a Religion: An Introduction to Modern Jewish Thought (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011).

47. Robert B. Silvers to Arthur A. Cohen, June 4, 1958, Arthur A. Cohen Papers, Yale Collection of American Literature.

48. Arthur A. Cohen to Robert Silvers, “An Outline Discussion on Why I Am a Jew,” Arthur A. Cohen Papers, Yale Collection of American Literature.

49. “Isidore M. Cohen, 93, A Clothing Executive,” New York Times, July 15, 1991, D10. By 1967, a cover story on Joseph H. Cohen & Sons in Clothes magazine reported that the company had become “the largest volume men's clothing manufacturing operation in the country, a business which this year will do $45 million.” “Joseph H. Cohen & Sons: Where Volume Equals Profits,” Clothes, February 1, 1967, 20.

50. Cohen wrote of his parents’ response to his teenage angst over the question of whether to remain a Jew, or convert to Christianity: “I was rushed, not to a psychoanalyst, but to a Rabbi—the late Milton Steinberg, one of the most gifted and profound Jewish thinkers of recent years.” Cohen, “Why I Choose to be a Jew,” 62.

51. See MSS 496, box 42, folder, Correspondence 1940s, Arthur A. Cohen Papers, Yale Collection of American Literature.

52. Arthur A, Cohen to Mother and Dad, September 27, 1949, folder, Correspondence 1940s, Arthur A. Cohen Papers, Yale Collection of American Literature.

53. Arthur A. Cohen to Mom, Pop, and Sis, undated, MSS 496, box 42, folder, AAC. 1940, Arthur Allen Cohen Correspondence, 1928–1950, folder 1, Arthur A. Cohen Papers, Yale Collection of American Literature.

54. Isidore M. Cohen to Arthur A. Cohen, November 2, 1945, folder, Correspondence 1940s, Arthur A. Cohen Papers, Yale Collection of American Literature.

55. For explanations of this postwar American Jewish vision, see Joyce Antler, The Journey Home: Jewish Women and the American Century (New York: The Free Press, 1997), chapter 9; Marc Dollinger, Quest for Inclusion: Jews and Liberalism in Modern America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000); Dollinger, Black Power, Jewish Politics; Rachel Kranson, Ambivalent Embrace: Jewish Upward Mobility in Postwar American (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017), chapter 2; Stuart Svonkin, Jews against Prejudice: American Jews and the Fight for Civil Liberties (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997).

56. On Glazer's view of postwar American Judaism, see Gordan, Rachel, “Nathan Glazer's American Judaism,” The Jewish Quarterly Review 105, no. 4 (Fall 2015): 482–506Google Scholar.

57. Nathan Glazer, American Judaism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957), 108.

58. Evidence of this midcentury prominence and respectability of Judaism as an American religion are found in events from the sadness of the Dorchester disaster to the celebration of presidential inaugurations. In their widely memorialized death aboard the SS Dorchester in January 1943, four chaplains, two Protestants, a Catholic, and Jew, came to symbolize America's Judeo-Christian tradition; they were honored with a 1948 commemorative US postal stamp. And, the mid-twentieth century was the first time since Rabbi Gershom Seixas had participated in President George Washington's 1789 inauguration that rabbis offered prayers at the inaugurations, beginning with Reform rabbi Samuel Thurman's benediction at Harry Truman's 1949 inauguration and continuing through four midcentury inaugurations, with Reform rabbi Nelson Glueck offering the benediction at President Kennedy's 1961 inauguration.

59. Herberg, Protestant-Catholic-Jew.

60. Glazer, American Judaism, 108.

61. Ibid., 1. Glazer's statement marks the entry point for my own scholarship on post–World War II American Judaism. How and why American Jews and Judaism came to assume a higher status in the post–World War II era is a major question I seek to answer through my research of mid-twentieth-century middlebrow American Jewish culture. See my forthcoming article in the Journal of Religion and American Culture.

62. For examples of how these critiques of American Jewish exceptionalism have influenced Jewish studies, see Frankel, Richard, “One Crisis Behind? Rethinking Antisemitic Exceptionalism in the United States and Germany,” Journal of American Jewish History 97, no. 3 (July 2013): 235–58Google Scholar; Kranson, Rachel, “To Be a Jew on America's Terms Is Not to Be a Jew at All”: The Jewish Counterculture's Critique of Middle-Class Affluence,” Journal of Jewish Identities 8, no. 2 (July 2015): 59–84CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Loeffler, James, “Nationalism without a Nation? On the Invisibility of American Jewish Politics,” The Jewish Quarterly Review 105, no. 3 (Summer 2015): 367–98Google Scholar.

63. Michael Kramer and Hana Wirth-Nesher, The Cambridge Companion to American Jewish Literature (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 2.

64. Hollinger, David, “Rich, Powerful, and Smart,” Jewish Quarterly Review, 94, no. 4 (Fall 2004): 596CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

65. David Hollinger, Jews, Science, and Secular Culture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 7.

66. Wenger, Religious Freedom, 13.

67. Two exceptional, recent books within the field of American Jewish studies include this foregrounding of ambivalence: Rachel Kranson's Ambivalent Embrace and Eric Goldstein's, The Price of Whiteness: Jews, Race, and American Identity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006). Through their use of ambivalence as a key category, Goldstein and Kranson expand our understandings of the affective experience of Jews; ambivalence allows us to understand a spectrum of emotions and experiences of Jews, and distances us from less nuanced, more black-and-white categories such as “assimilation” that were employed more frequently by historians in the past. Ambivalence featured prominently in earlier works, such as Charles Liebman, The Ambivalent American Jew: Politics, Religion, and Family in American Jewish Life (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1973), in which Liebman argued that American Jewry's ambivalence was characterized by the competing desires between integration into gentile society and survival of Jewish particularism. In 2000, Michael Kramer published a review essay titled, “Beyond Ambivalence: (Re)imagining Jewish American Culture; or, ‘Isn't That the Way the Old Assimilated Story Goes?,’” American Jewish History 88, no. 3 (2000): 407–15. In his analysis of recent work by Stephen Whitfield and Sylvia Barack Fishman, Kramer argued that American Jews had moved beyond their former ambivalence of integration and survival, and expected to have both desires fulfilled.

68. Kranson, Ambivalent Embrace, 14.

69. Ibid., 16

70. Sherman, C. Bezalel, The Jew within American Society (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1960), 227Google Scholar. Sherman is a reminder of the range of midcentury exceptionalist voices. Unlike Herberg, Sherman believed that Jews would remain a distinctive ethnic group, but he saw Jews as exceptional among European immigrants in their ability to retain their ethnic particularity.

71. Brian Urquhart, “What You Can Learn from Reinhold Niebuhr,” The New York Review of Books, March 26, 2009.

72. Andrew Bacevich, introduction to The Irony of American History, by Reinhold Niebuhr (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), x.

73. Bacevich, introduction to Irony of American History, x.

74. Niebuhr, Irony of American History, 174.

75. Ibid.

76. A few of the many examples of the Jews, whiteness, and privilege conversation having entered the mainstream: Yavilah McCoy, “Trayvon Martin: Reflections on the Black and Jewish Struggle for Justice,” Tikkun, January 10, 2014; Gil Steinlauf, “Jews Struggled for Decades to Become White. Now We Must Give Up White Privilege to Fight Racism,” Washington Post, September 22, 2015; Emma Green, “Are Jews White?,” The Atlantic, December 5, 2016.

77. In a similar vein, Shaul Magid describes how the popularity of the midcentury Judeo-Christian tradition, which was a component of midcentury American Jewish exceptionalism, “invit[ed] the Jew to have a hand in wielding the hammer of power against the non-Judeo-Christian.” Magid, “Judeo-Christian Tradition.”