Overview:
To summarize, the story of American Jewry is the story of both a people and a systematized religion. In three waves of immigration, the Jewish people brought to this country a religious identity forged by common history, mutual suffering, and a sense of chosenness. The biblical religion that was fundamental to this religious identity stressed historical tradition more than nature and organized its cultus around belief in a God who revealed himself and acted in relationship to the community of Israel. Bound to its God by a covenant, Israel consecrated time through regular remembrance and through ethical action, both of them the ways in which observant Jews fulfilled the requirements of the Law, or Torah.
In America differences over how the commandments of the Torah should be observed resulted in the growth of three major forms of Judaism. Reform Jews, who tended to separate Judaism as an organized religion from Jewishness as an ethnic identity, were the most liberal. They loosened social boundaries as they encountered the pluralism of the United States. Orthodox Jews, by contrast, drew the boundaries tightly and tried to preserve as much of European Jewish culture as possible, blending organized religion and peoplehood. Conservative Jews, who occupied the middle position, also blended organized religion and peoplehood but strived to find a path to fulfillment of the Torah that was more pracitcal in light of modern lifestyles. In the twentieth century, Jewishness as the bond of peoplehood became more important throughout American Judaisn, but Jews also experienced the results of assimilation and intermarriage in diminishing their separateness from other Americans.
Jews lived in the tension between self-conscious religion and peoplehood, between the extraordinary and the ordinary, and between manyness and oneness. If they had found a promised land in the United States even as they looked to Zion in a different land, another group of Americans also lived between two Zions. Roman Catholics came over the sea to reap American promises. At the same time, they, too, kept one eye elsewhere--on the domes of St. Peter's in Rome.