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In a 1790 letter to the Touro Synagogue in Rhode Island, President George Washington promised that America’s Jews might consistently benefit from the complete rights, privileges, and protections of U.S. citizenship. considering that auspicious starting, Jews have flourished in the United States as they've got nowhere else within the smooth global. The final half-century particularly has been one of those “Golden Age” for American Jews, within which they've got completed exceptional degrees of social attractiveness, expert luck, and political and cultural influence.

But has all that come on the price of Jewish forte? Many Jewish leaders at the present time could solution certain. They aspect to declining non secular observance and emerging charges of intermarriage as proof that Jewish american citizens are wasting a feeling of themselves as Jews, and they aren't any longer passing on a feeling of Jewish id to their young children and grandchildren.

But in Jewish in the USA: residing George Washington’s Promise, Richard L. Rubin deals a much less pessimistic view. even though it really is precise, he writes, that most of Jews in our state were in a few feel “Americanized,” they remain formed through Jewish background, tradition, and faith in ways in which impact every thing from their social attitudes to their child-rearing tips on how to their balloting styles. in addition, as items of a “fusion” among uniquely American values and ordinarily Jewish ones, they're targeted not just from non-Jewish americans yet from Jews in different lands. it really is this “hybrid” Jewish identification that they need to proceed to domesticate, and bequeath to destiny generations.

Delving deep into Jewish heritage and drawing at the most up-to-date social-science learn, Rubin offers solutions to many exciting questions. for example: Why have Jews absolutely embraced, as few Gentiles have, the Protestant beliefs of pluralism and tolerance woven into our structure? How did the Jewish adventure of oppression, persecution and genocide result in the disproportionate involvement of yankee Jews within the civil rights flow and different socially liberal factors? What bills for Jewish prominence in academia, enterprise, the scientific and criminal professions, the humanities, and different fields—and what can this train non-Jewish americans, particularly these from traditionally marginalized groups?

But Jewish in the US doesn’t forget about the location of Jews in different places within the world—such as in France, the place anti-Semitic terrorism is at the upward thrust, and in ceaselessly embattled Israel. What accountability, Rubin asks, do American Jews undergo towards their brethren in a foreign country? Is it time for Jews to depart Europe? and eventually, does the USA have a declare equivalent to Israel’s as a Jewish “promised land” and position of refuge?

Insightful and unique, Jewish in the US will problem readers to determine Jewish american citizens as distinctively Jewish and distinctively American, owning an id that displays either their historic history and their adoptive nation.