America is a long way from the ancestral homes of the Jews, but this does not in any way mean that it is not been a welcoming place for the Jewish people who have, in many ways, thrived in the New World. But the story of the Jews in America is not entirely a successful one, or at least not a traditionally successful one, for much of the sense of Jewish identity has been lost in our semi-Melting Pot, and if Jews have not had in this nation to face the terrible persecutions that they have met in other nations then they have also intermarried at high rates and left the teachings and communities of their ancestors. This paper examines the history of Judaism in America and the mixed results that it has produced.
The movie "The Chosen" addresses many of the complexities that have been faced by Jews in the United States as they have had to come to terms with a sense of identity that is very much divided among their ancestral faith, their loyalty to the secular American state that gave them refuge and their own type of Jewish faith - whether Reformed, Conservative or Orthodox. This movie tells the story of two young Jewish Americans during the time of the second World War who find that a shared faith can both unify and divide them as they search to reconcile the reformed Judaism and the Orthodox Judaism of their families.
The history of these particular fictitious characters - like the history of real Jews in America - cannot be told in isolated terms, for the history of different peoples and different religions are mixed together in this nation. The history of the Jews in this country thus in many ways begins with a better known story, the history of the Pilgrims or Puritans when they came to America in the 17th century.
One of the stories that most American children are taught about our country as they are growing up is that the Pilgrims came to the New World for religious freedom. While this statement is in some sense true, it is a...