Jews and the American Soul: Human Nature in the Twentieth Century
480
Jews and the American Soul: Human Nature in the Twentieth Century
480eBook
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Overview
What do Joyce Brothers and Sigmund Freud, Rabbi Harold Kushner and philosopher Martin Buber have in common? They belong to a group of pivotal and highly influential Jewish thinkers who altered the face of modern America in ways few people recognize.
So argues Andrew Heinze, who reveals in rich and unprecedented detail the extent to which Jewish values, often in tense interaction with an established Christian consensus, shaped the country's psychological and spiritual vocabulary.
Jews and the American Soul is the first book to recognize the central role Jews and Jewish values have played in shaping American ideas of the inner life. It overturns the widely shared assumption that modern ideas of human nature derived simply from the nation's Protestant heritage.
Heinze marshals a rich array of evidence to show how individuals ranging from Erich Fromm to Ann Landers changed the way Americans think about mind and soul. The book shows us the many ways that Jewish thinkers influenced everything from the human potential movement and pop psychology to secular spirituality. It also provides fascinating new interpretations of Sigmund Freud, Alfred Adler, and Western views of the psyche; the clash among Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish moral sensibilities in America; the origins and evolution of America's psychological and therapeutic culture; the role of Jewish women as American public moralists, and more. A must-read for anyone interested in the contribution of Jews and Jewish culture to modern America.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780691227917 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 03/09/2021 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 480 |
| File size: | 15 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Jews and the American Soul
Human Nature in the Twentieth CenturyBy Andrew R. Heinze
Princeton University Press
Princeton University PressAll right reserved.
ISBN: 0-691-12775-1
Introduction
JEWS AND THE AMERICAN SOULWHEN THOMAS JEFFERSON drafted the Declaration of Independence, he took "life, liberty, and property"-the standard trio of rights assumed by British citizens-and, for reasons unknown, replaced "property" with an elusive psychological ideal: the pursuit of happiness. In doing so, he anticipated what would become a national passion for achieving peace of mind.
Though often described as the most religious of modern societies, America is certainly the most "psychological," for it has been a tireless host to new ideas about the psyche. Since the late 1800s, when psychology began to vie with religion for the right to determine how we understand ourselves, Americans have developed an extraordinarily large and dynamic market for psychological, as well as religious, advice. However, if we are curious about the history of American ideas of human nature in the twentieth century, we quickly encounter a problem.
That problem might be called the myth of Protestant origins, if we understand myth to mean not a false story but one that, for all its richness, remains radically incomplete and therefore misleading. According to this myth, modern American views of human nature are aftereffects, mutations, orextenuations of Protestant modes of thought, starting with the Puritans and moving up in time through such seminal thinkers as John Dewey and William James, who were raised as Protestants and ended up as great post-Protestant thinkers of the twentieth century.
If American history had stopped at 1900, this account would be sound enough. But standing on the other side of 2000, we must dismiss it as outmoded. Where are the Catholics, who became a more and more significant presence in the United States after 1900? And perhaps even more urgently, we must ask, where are the Jews, whose numbers include some of the most eminent commentators on human nature to be embraced by Americans in the twentieth century? (By the opening of the twenty-first century, we should note, a new wave of non-Christian newcomers from Asia and the Islamic world had formed a foundation for further additions to American thought about the human condition.)
Because thinkers of Jewish origin were so important in this domain of American life, they pose an especially blunt challenge to the old Protestant story. It is well known that Jews authored many of the terms Americans use to describe their pursuit of happiness-the search for identity, the desire for self-actualization, the wish to avoid an inferiority complex and to stop compensating for inner weaknesses, rationalizing powerful drives and projecting them on to others, and the quest for an I-Thou relationship-to name a few. Nevertheless, historians have been content to treat Jewish thinkers as isolated individuals inexplicably dotting a post-Protestant landscape. About a thinker like Freud, whose impact on America was simply too conspicuous to be ignored, we are told that his ideas lost whatever Jewish aspect they may have possessed once Americans adapted them to meet the needs of a Protestant public.
This book explores a new hypothesis: that modern American ideas about human nature have Jewish as well as Christian origins. Only by looking at the interaction between Jews and Christians (both Protestants and Catholics) will we arrive at a more complete picture of popular thought in the twentieth century.
The story to be told here uncovers ethnic and religious elements of American thought that have lingered in the shadows of history. We will bring together parts of the national past that are usually studied in isolation: the history of immigration, ethnic identity and race, popular psychology and religious inspiration, and the moral traditions of both Jews and Christians. Because the United States is an ethnically and religiously complex society with a buoyant consumer demand for psychological and spiritual advice, we will see how new ideas about the mind and soul have ricocheted back and forth between natives and newcomers, Christians and Jews, intellectuals and the mass media.
Jews and the American Soul focuses on psychological and religious thinkers whose ideas attracted a mass audience. The book highlights a variety of psychologists and psychiatrists, rabbis, philosophers, intellectuals, journalists, and creative writers. My goal is straightforward: to uncover and track the flow of Jewish values, attitudes, and arguments into the mainstream of American thought.
A word should be said here about the term "Jewish values." Since Jews first arrived in North America, they have lived not in a segregated world of their own but alongside other Americans in a society of ever-shifting values and complicated involvements between people of various faiths and backgrounds. And even in other times and places, "Jewish values" have never existed in a vacuum, subsisting unchanged from generation to generation, immune to the winds of history. Instead, the ways in which Jewish people have chosen to live constantly changed, for the simple reason that the conditions and surroundings in which Jews found themselves constantly changed. The very definition of "Jewish" has been unstable since ancient times. And yet, Jewish values exist as a real, identifiable, and consequential force in the history of Western civilization and, as we shall see in the pages that follow, in the history of modern American culture.
Over the years our histories of colonial New England have produced profound observations about the transformation of a Puritan mentality into a distinctive American culture. From them we have learned that certain cultural tendencies and myths-about the wilderness, about an American sacred destiny, about the possibility of a morally self-regenerating society-grew in the ideologically rich soil of New England Puritanism.
The story to be told in these pages runs parallel in some respects to the Protestant narrative of spiritual pilgrimage, dissarray, and quest for redemption. The extensive Jewish engagement with modern psychologies happened not by accident but as a result of the religious and moral transformation of Jewish life in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Jews in the Western world embarked on an errand not in the wilderness, like that of the American Puritans, but into modern culture. Their errand was not to create a City on a Hill, a moral place from which to regenerate the world; it was to create a moral space within European and American culture, from which to secure themselves as citizens and to purge the evils they associated with Christian civilization.
Before we begin, I want to explain the meaning of my title, Jews and the American Soul. "Jews" does not refer to all or even most Jews but to a select group whose ideas entered into the mainstream of American thought. The Jewish background of the people I discuss was significant; it made a tangible difference in their values. In what follows, I avoid the parochial assumption that the mere fact of being a Jew automatically makes one's ideas or values Jewish. That might have been true for shtetl Jews living a fairly cloistered life in communities that operated on the basis of Jewish law, but it is certainly not true of Jewish men and women living in modern societies. Imagine an American of Jewish parentage who has had no contact with Judaism or Jewish culture and whose social life does not differ from that of other Americans. Unless we indulge in a kind of genetic mysticism, we would have no reason to describe that person's ideas or values as Jewish.
By the same token, neither should we be so cautious as to assume that a Jewish perspective will be found only among those who are immersed in Judaism or Yiddishkeyt ("Jewishness," Jewish culture). Half a century ago Albert Einstein gave a vivid, though not definitive, answer to the question of what makes a person a Jew. In an attempt to explain the apparent paradox of people, like him, who had abandoned Judaism but still considered themselves thoroughly Jewish, he rejected as insufficient the definition, "A Jew is a person professing the Jewish faith":
The superficial character of this answer is easily recognized by means of a simple parallel. Let us ask the question: What is a snail? An answer similar in kind to the one given above might be: A snail is an animal inhabiting a snail shell. This answer is not altogether incorrect; nor, to be sure, is it exhaustive; for the snail shell happens to be but one of the material products of the snail. Similarly, the Jewish faith is but one of the characteristic products of the Jewish community. It is, furthermore, known that a snail can shed its shell without thereby ceasing to be a snail. The Jew who abandons his faith (in the formal sense of the word) is in a similar position. He remains a Jew.
In short, the integrity of our story depends not on quick assumptions about whether someone is capable of speaking from a Jewish point of view, but on solid evidence and plausible suggestions that a particular statement, attitude, or idea comes out of a clearly identifiable Jewish context. In order to say that a point of view is Jewish we must make the case that it either derives from Judaism or Jewish culture or reflects a state of mind shared by Jews in response to bigotry or social ostracism.
The other phrase in my title, "The American Soul," must be understood figuratively. I do not mean to imply that a nation has a soul, or that the people of the United States are so fundamentally similar as to have one common mentality that we refer to as a soul. I use the phrase "American Soul" as a metaphor for public ideas about the psyche and human nature ("psyche" being Greek for "soul").
This leads to the question, which public? Americans have always encompassed a variety of "publics" based on racial, religious, ethnic, gender, regional, and socioeconomic differences among others. There are also "taste" publics: groups of people who share a passion for a certain kind of music, art, recreation, or hobby. The public with which this book is most concerned cannot be profiled precisely, but it includes that great multitude of Americans who have taken an interest in mass-marketed inspirational literature and have been eager to know (via books, newspapers, magazines, radio, and television) what psychologists and psychiatrists, as well as spiritual leaders, think about human nature. Those who make up this public have often belonged to religious communities but, rather than restricting themselves to religious doctrine, have remained open to the mass market of ideas.
Our story opens with the era of the great mass immigration that brought two million Jews from Europe. That era, from the 1880s to the 1920s, also witnessed the rise of modern psychology as a force in American society. New ideas about the divisibility of the psyche appeared simultaneously with new ideas about the ethnic divisibility of the nation, and Jews played an important symbolic and intellectual role in that transformation of popular attitudes.
In order to fully understand why psychological ideas became so important so quickly in America, and why Jewish psychological thinkers were disproportionately involved in the dissemination of those ideas, we will travel back in time to examine the rise of new concepts of the psyche, especially in the nineteenth century, to see how closely interwoven they were with varieties of Christian thought and to identify some of the Jewish religious innovations that made Judaism more attentive to the psychic condition of the individual.
As a point of departure, we will look at an unusual, and quite early, interaction of American and Jewish values of individual development-the adaptation of Benjamin Franklin's famous self-improvement plan into the Hebrew ethical literature of eastern Europe, a genre known as musar-in the early 1800s. The intellectual and moral restlessness that led Jews to adapt new techniques of self-improvement also led to the psychoanalytic moralism of Sigmund Freud and Alfred Adler, the first major approach to the psyche to emerge out of a Jewish moral environment.
Once we have viewed the trajectory of Western and Jewish conceptions of the psyche, we will return to America and examine the reasons why popular psychology became a booming cultural industry, outstripping theology and philosophy as a guide for a literate mass audience seeking advice about how to live. We then turn to Jewish thinkers in the field of psychological advice between the 1890s and 1940s. Through them, Jewish concerns and values first entered into American popular thought.
As popularizers of psychology, a number of men conveyed a Jewish moral perspective into American conversations about the nature of intelligence, personality, race, the subconscious mind, mass behavior, and evil. Jewish interpreters of the psyche, no less than Protestants, hoped to move public values in a direction that would produce the kind of society they wanted to inhabit. Sensitive to both overt and implicit Christian biases in popular thought, they campaigned against them and counterpoised Jewish moral reference points, which had previously been rare in public forums. For them psychology was a potent instrument with which to combat pernicious stereotypes about ethnic minorities in general and Jews in particular. It also gave them a means of reaffirming a rationalist code of emotional restraint that, in America, had become outmoded by more spectacular views of the psyche as a source of divine power or a machine that could be programmed for perfection.
As they went about the business of issuing prescriptions for the psychological and moral improvement of America, they encouraged greater public appreciation for the sensitive and intellectually intense individual and greater vigilance about the evil people produced when they formed a mob. According to their moral critique of society, the proverbial neurotic Jew, whose credentials for assimilation had been challenged by nativists, possessed certain characteristics that were ideally suited to a fast-paced urban America. By the same standards, the bigot was redefined as a psychopath and as the primary obstacle blocking the road to a more democratic future.
After World War II, Jewish interpreters of the psyche increased in both numbers and variety. The most popular inspirational book to appear since 1900, Peace of Mind (1946), was written by a rabbi, Joshua Loth Liebman, who became not only the first rabbi with an interfaith audience of national dimensions but also the clergyman most closely associated with the problem of psychic pain, mental readjustment, and the Freudian vogue after the war. Liebman was the first American clergyman of national stature to have undergone psychoanalysis, and his Peace of Mind heralded a postwar romance with the psychological and therapeutic values that had been growing steadily since the 1890s. Religion needed the insights of depth psychology, Liebman argued; without them it could not guide Americans toward spiritual maturity.
Liebman's career marked a turning point in American culture. Jewish psychological thinkers had written popular books before, but his was the first best-seller by a religious Jew. For the first time Judaism, and an explicit Jewish theology, had to be taken seriously in the arena of public opinion about the human condition. Peace of Mind contained a strong polemic beneath its appealing message about the healing of American psychic pain. Liebman defined Judaism as a religion of love, not the legalistic faith Christianity had traditionally deemed it, and unflinchingly asserted Judaism's unique ability to lead Americans toward the ideal of loving the neighbor as oneself. He called for a new democratic "God-idea for America" rooted in Jewish values.
(Continues...)
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Table of Contents
List of Illustrations xi
Acknowledgments xiii
INTRODUCTION: Jews and the American Soul 1
PART I. One Nation under Stress, Divisible: Jewish Immigrants and the National Psyche
CHAPTER 1: Jews and the Psychodynamics of American Life 11
PART II. The Moral Universe of the Jews
CHAPTER 2: Benjamin Franklin in Hebrew: The Musar Sage of Philadelphia 39
CHAPTER 3: Jews and the Crisis of the Psyche 50
CHAPTER 4: Freud and Adler: The Rise of Jewish Psychoanalytic Moralism 64
PART III. Jewish Morality and the Psychological Shift of American Culture ,1890-1945
CHAPTER 5: Popular Psychology: The Great American Synthesis of Religion and Science 87
CHAPTER 6: Jewish Psychological Evangelism: A Collective Biography of the First Generation 103
CHAPTER 7: The Moronic Immigrant and the Neurotic Jew: Jews and American Perceptions of Intelligence, Personality, and Race 140
CHAPTER 8: The Specter of the Mob: Jews and the Battle for the American Unconscious 165
PART IV. Peace of Mind: Judaism and the Therapeutic Polemics of Postwar America
CHAPTER 9: Rabbi Liebman and the Psychic Pain of the World War II Generation 195
CHAPTER 10: Peace of Mind :A New Jewish Gospel of Love 217
CHAPTER 11: Clare Boothe Luce and the Catholic-Jewish Clash over Freud in America 241
PART V. Jews and the American Search for Meaning, 1950-2000
CHAPTER 12: Jews and the Creation of American Humanism 261
CHAPTER 13: Joyce Brothers: The Jewish Woman as Psychologist of Suburban America 295
CHAPTER 14: Holocaust, Hasidism, Suffering, Redemption 321
Conclusion 349
Notes 353
Index 419
What People are Saying About This
Andrew Heinze's Jews and the American Soul is a shrewd and unsettling account of the influence of some surprising Jewish figures upon contemporary popular culture in the United States.
— Harold Bloom, author of "The Western Canon" and "The American Religion: The Emergence of the Post-Christian Nation"
Jews and the American Soul is the most forthright, probing, nuanced, and carefully documented book yet addressed to the ways in which modern American culture has been influenced by Jews. A truly distinctive work of American history.
— David Hollinger, University of California, Berkeley
I do not know any books like this one. Heinze concludes that Jewish ways of thinking about human personality and the meaning of human life have spread to millions of Americans. The implications of this conclusion are startling. A wonderful, compelling book, a major accomplishment. It has changed the way I think about the 'American soul.'
— Deborah Dash Moore, Vassar College
"Why do Americans worry so about their souls? Andrew Heinze's amazing book offers an amazing answer—an extraordinary and unexpected dialogue among modern American Jewish writers and figures about the essence of humanity, the soul. Ranging across American Jewish writing on psychology, neurosis, self-help, humanism, and the Holocaust, Heinze explains how Jewish intellectuals uncovered and explicated the marrow of American identity even as, or precisely because, they sought to secure their place in an America that did not always want them. Heinze uplifts an unexpected, enlightening story with insight, grace, and not infrequent irony—a simply fascinating read."—Jon Butler, Yale University"This telling of the American story gives a clarifying resonance to a heretofore muted theme. The nation's culture, politics, and civic religion have been powerfully influenced by Jewish contributions. But it has taken this vigorous work by Andrew Heinze to make them plain. This book will surely change the way America understands itself."—James Carroll, author of the bestselling Constantine's Sword"Jews and the American Soul is the most forthright, probing, nuanced, and carefully documented book yet addressed to the ways in which modern American culture has been influenced by Jews. A truly distinctive work of American history."—David Hollinger, University of California, Berkeley"I do not know any books like this one. Heinze concludes that Jewish ways of thinking about human personality and the meaning of human life have spread to millions of Americans. The implications of this conclusion are startling. A wonderful, compelling book, a major accomplishment. It has changed the way I think about the 'American soul.'"—Deborah Dash Moore, Vassar College"Andrew Heinze's Jews and the American Soul is a shrewd and unsettling account of the influence of some surprising Jewish figures upon contemporary popular culture in the United States."—Harold Bloom, author of The Western Canon and The American Religion: The Emergence of the Post-Christian Nation
Why do Americans worry so about their souls? Andrew Heinze's amazing book offers an amazing answer—an extraordinary and unexpected dialogue among modern American Jewish writers and figures about the essence of humanity, the soul. Ranging across American Jewish writing on psychology, neurosis, self-help, humanism, and the Holocaust, Heinze explains how Jewish intellectuals uncovered and explicated the marrow of American identity even as, or precisely because, they sought to secure their place in an America that did not always want them. Heinze uplifts an unexpected, enlightening story with insight, grace, and not infrequent irony—a simply fascinating read.
— Jon Butler, Yale University
This telling of the American story gives a clarifying resonance to a heretofore muted theme. The nation's culture, politics, and civic religion have been powerfully influenced by Jewish contributions. But it has taken this vigorous work by Andrew Heinze to make them plain. This book will surely change the way America understands itself.
— James Carroll, author of the bestselling "Constantine's Sword"