Liberalism

Abstract This chapter traces how American Jewish intellectuals, leaders, and lay individuals have defined liberalism at different moments in time and explains why the task of claiming, reshaping, and sometimes rejecting liberalism has preoccupied American Jews. Liberalism appeared to promise Jews inclusion as individuals into modern nation-states, yet the gap between its formal political meaning and its uses has been wide and varied. Throughout the twentieth century, tensions among American Jews and between Jews and other groups emerged in the unsettled space between liberalism’s theory and practices. The uncertain status of liberalism—its instrumentalism and yet its claim to serve as the ideological spine of modernity—accounts for its attractiveness to so many different individuals, groups, and countries, but has also meant that the exclusions and forms of coercion perpetrated by liberals and sometimes in the name of liberalism cannot be separated from the ideology itself.