Beginning of article  When Leon Jick set out to write The
Americanization of the Synagogue, historical scholarship on
American Jewry, and especially on American Judaism, was largely
parochial. Important studies of American Judaism had appeared--
Marshall Sklare's Conservative Judaism (1955), Nathan Glazer's
American Judaism (1957), and Charles Liebman's Ambivalent
American Jew (1973) (1)--but these were written by those trained
in sociology and political science, not history. As far as the
writing of American Jewish history, what then existed was, in
Jick's words, mostly "filiopietistic, institutionally biased,
and filled with cliches which were repeated over and over." (2)
But 1976 was a good year for American Jewish history. Irving
Howe's World of Our Fathers won the National Book Award in
History and became a bestseller. The publication of The Jewish
Woman in America revealed American Jewish history engaging the
emerging scholarship in women's studies. And Leon Jick's
Americanization of the Synagogue, 1820