to be recast as voluntary. Thus, he replaced the notion of commandments with
what he called folkways, ritual and religious behavior that Jews embraced vol-
untarily. He also believed that Jewish communal institutions had to adapt to
American society. Hence, he advocated transforming the synagogue into a syn-
agogue-center, where Jews would not only pray and study but engage together
in all forms of activity, religious and non-religious. In effect, he invented the
now ubiquitous institutions of the Jewish community center.
Kaplan also believed that Jewish education had to expand the decrepit
Jewish schoolhouse to less formal surroundings such as summer camps and
college campuses. He also advocated an egalitarian relationship between men
and women, advocating the introduction of a bat mitzvah ceremony for girls
that was comparable to the bar mitzvah, mixed seating in synagogues, and
the admission of women to the rabbinate. Finally, he believed, like Brandeis,
that Zionism was integral to the survival of Judaism in America. Ultimately,
the movement that Kaplan founded never attracted very many members.
More important, though, many of the changes he advocated – notably Jewish
summer camping and the synagogue center – would eventually be embraced
across the spectrum of Jewish religious practice.
By the end of the 1930s, Judaism in America had been transformed across
the board to suit the changing religious needs of second-generation American
Jews. The Americanization of Judaism paralleled a growing sense of confi-
dence on the part of American Jews, even in the face of economic depression
and the rising anti-Semitism of the 1930s.
Hitler and the Final Solution
The rise of Hitler and the destruction of European Jewry was the single
watershed event for world Jewry during the twentieth century, with the
exception of the founding of the State of Israel. Given the importance of
this event, it is not surprising that there is considerable debate as to its ori-
gins and to the relationship between Nazism, German nationalism, and
anti-Semitism. There are two schools of thought regarding the role of
Hitler and Nazi ideology in the Holocaust. Intentionalist historians
believed that the annihilation of the Jews was the primary aim of Hitler and
Nazism as early as the 1920s. Representative of this point of view is Lucy
Davidowicz’s War against the Jews. In contrast, functionalist historians
believe that Nazi policy, including the Final Solution, was a function of cir-
cumstance and of competing bureaucracies and government officials, whose
primary concern often lay elsewhere. An extreme example of this point of
view is Arno Mayer’s Why Did the Heavens Not Darken?, in which he claims
that the war against the Jews was a by-product of the primary concern of
Nazi policy: the defeat of Bolshevism. Recently, historians Christopher
Browning argued for a modified functionalist position that wove together
the strengths of both positions.
220 From renewal to devastation, 1914–45