Ford’s outspoken anti-Semitism prompted a response, the Anti-Defamation
League (ADL), a Jewish organization originally formed in 1913 in response to
the Leo Frank Affair. The ADL’s mission was to combat anti-Semitism and
other forms of racism by working within the system, much like the
Centralverein in Germany. Henry Ford was thus its greatest challenge. By
appealing to American liberal values, the ADL mustered support from leading
American politicians and intellectuals, including former president Woodrow
Wilson, and forced Ford to issue a public apology.
The upward mobility and enhanced self-confidence of second-generation
American Jews was paralleled by the Americanization of Judaism in America.
Each of the three major American Jewish religious movements – Orthodox,
Conservative, and Reform Judaism – adapted themselves to the two realities
of American Jewry: that the vast majority of American Jews were of eastern
European and not central European origin, and that they were rapidly enter-
ing the mainstream of American culture. Within the Reform movement, this
process of adaptation was led by Rabbi Stephen Wise. By 1930, more than
half of Reform Jews and most Reform rabbis were of eastern European origin.
Under Wise’s leadership, the Reform movement embraced Zionism, echoing
Brandeis’s notion that Zionism and American patriotism were entirely com-
patible, but also the stronger sense of ethnicity even among the
non-traditional second-generation immigrants from eastern Europe. This
new mentality crystallized in the Columbus Platform of 1937, which stepped
away from some of the radical reforms that had been entrenched by the
Pittsburgh Platform half a century earlier.
Within American Orthodoxy, the 1920s and 1930s witnessed the emer-
gence of Yeshiva College as its leading institution and Bernard Revel as its
leading spokesman. Yeshiva College, an extension of Yeshiva High School
that had been formed in 1915, combined an advanced Jewish education with
a first-rate college education. Revel championed this dual education as a key
element in the survival and expansion of Orthodox Judaism in America.
Until the 1950s, American Orthodoxy was moderate in temperment, evi-
denced by the fact that the boundary between Orthodox and Conservative
Judaism remained decidedly blurred.
Yet the most interesting example of the Americanization of Judaism
emanated from within the Conservative movement in the writings and efforts of
Mordechai Kaplan. A maverick and an innovator, Kaplan flirted with Orthodox
and Conservative Judaism before breaking with the latter and forming a new
Jewish movement: Reconstructionist Judaism. At the heart of this new move-
ment was Kaplan’s conceptualization of Judaism as an evolving civilization that
naturally adapted to context and circumstance. Kaplan believed that the open-
ness of American society presented challenges that Reform and American
Orthodoxy, in particular, were simply incapable of managing. Because Judaism
in America was entirely voluntary, Kaplan argued, the practice of Judaism had
From renewal to devastation, 1914–45 219