| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.1

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Jonathon D. Sarna. American Judaism: A History. New Haven: Yale University Press. 2004. Pp. xx, 490. $35.00.
The field of American Jewish history has long needed an up-to-date and comprehensive one-volume treatment of that group's religious experience in America, and Jonathan D. Sarna is uncommonly qualified to compose such a work. Sarna's engaging book replaces Nathan Glazer's often-revised American Judaism (1957) as the first stop for scholars and students interested in exploring the religious dimensions of Jewish life in America.	1
Sarna is able to achieve his goal of telling a story of Jewish religious confrontation, change, and, ultimately, survival under the conditions of American freedom with a calm authority because he is among the few American Jewish historians working today who possess a keen understanding of both the trends in American religious history and the dynamics of modern Judaism. So, for example, Jewish attempts at communal unity in the 1840s–1850s are intelligently linked to general societal and Christian denominational debates of that era over Union. Equally important, Sarna has a strong handle on the history of tensions over religious hegemony within mid-nineteenth-century Central Europe. This perspective permits him to relate what was argued in Germany to Jewish attitudes on this side of the Atlantic. This synthetic work also appropriately acknowledges and effectively utilizes the growing wealth of monographic treatments of American Jewish religious history that have appeared over the last two decades. Sarna himself has contributed some of the most important work to this body and bounty of literature.	. . .

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