Vol. 49
American Jewish Year Book. Volume 49 (5708) 1947-1948. Prepared By The American Jewish Committee: Harry Schneiderman, Morris Fine, Maurice Spector, Maurice Basseches. Philadelphia, Jewish Publication Society of America, 1947. 844 pp. $4.00.
The forty-ninth annual edition of the American Jewish Year Book appears in much its usual form. For almost a half-century, this useful handbook has kept a record of developments in the Jewish communities of the United States and of the world. By now, it includes not much less than a thousand pages of data. Presented in a compact and attractive form, it makes an immediate reference tool of great utility for librarians, for public officials, and for all those who deal with Jewish problems; and ultimately it will serve historians as a welcome guide to scattered and inaccessible materials.
The work embodies some of the aspects of the traditional almanac. It contains a calendar of the Jewish year, a mélange of statistics, a directory of Jewish national organizations and of federations and welfare funds, and various lists of special events, honors, and offices held by prominent Jews.
There are, in addition, six special articles. Four of these, memorial biographies of notable individuals who died in the past year, are not much more informative than newspaper obituaries. This should not surprise us; such occasional biographies, written with no matter how much restraint, inevitably partake more of the nature of eulogy than of appraisal. Their inclusion is traditional with the Year Book; but one wonders whether this is not an institutional tradition that the Year Book has outgrown—as, to its benefit and ours, it has outgrown so many others.
Nathan Schachner’s essay, “Church, State and Education,” on the other hand, is an enlightening summary of the historical background of a problem that daily becomes more difficult in the United States.
The heart of the volume, however, is a five hundred-page review of the year, a careful resumé of the significant occurrences in Jewish life in the United States and, country by country, abroad. As Salo Baron’s summary indicates, the dominant problems this year everywhere were still those left in the aftermath of war: Zionism, relief, and resettlement. The magnitude of the tasks and the extent of the achievements in each field are impressively set forth in the thirty-seven articles of this section. Particularly noteworthy are the discussions, for the United States, of communal welfare by H. L. Lurie, of cultural activities by Moshe Starkman, and of overseas aid by Nathan Reich; and the accounts of England by Joseph Leftwich, of the Netherlands by David L. Schorr, and of Germany by Boris Sapir.
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I would make two suggestions for the improvement of this generally admirable section. To begin with, more rigorous editing and more frequent cross references would eliminate a needless degree of repetition. There is, for example, a good deal of overlapping in the three discussions of Palestine, under the headings of “Zionist Activities in the United States,” “Palestine,” and “The Palestine Problem.” Similarly, the attitude of Jewish groups toward released time for religious education in the public schools is handled in four different places. In this connection, too, an index, at least to the review of the year section, would be very helpful.
The other criticism is more fundamental. There is a tendency to treat as Jewish activities only those that are confined to specifically Jewish circles and that deal with narrowly Jewish subjects. At certain points, this bias limits the discussion entirely to the pathological aspects of Jewish life; the article on Latin America, for instance, gives the impression that the Jews of that part of the world have no interest but anti-Semitism and no activity but resisting anti-Semitism.
More generally, the same inclination distorts the perspective of the total picture of Jewish life in the United States. Moshe Starkman’s review of cultural activities is excellent as far as it goes; but the reader would not know from it that American Jews were engaged in significant writing in English as well as in Hebrew and in Yiddish. And those familiar with the part of Jews in the American theater will find it a little disconcerting to discover at the end of the section on the theater, which deals entirely with Yiddish and Hebrew performances, the comment that “there is no organized Anglo-Jewish theater.”
This deficiency strikes me as important because it gives a one-sided view of the role of the Jews in American development. For better or for worse, many—perhaps most—Jewish achievements in this country have not come within a specifically Jewish context. And the record that neglects this aspect of Jewish life cannot be complete.
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