American Judaism, Jewish Piety, and the Great War

This article places the war-time piety of Jewish American soldiers and civilians in the religious and political context of Great-War-era America. It describes the many ways that Jewish leaders in the U.S. engaged the crisis of war and some of the religious responses that Jewish soldiers developed in a context that could be unsympathetic to their distinctive piety. Though Jewish soldiers and citizens demonstrated in spectacular ways their devotion to the nation and to the divine, American anti-Semitism persisted throughout the inter-war period.