Lila Corwin Berman’s Who Is American? Belonging and the Question of Jewish Citizenship traces legal and public debates that treated Jewish identity alternately as race, religion, and nationality — and shows how those debates shaped access to U.S. citizenship and civil rights.
19th- and 20th-century U.S. institutions repeatedly re-litigated whether Jews fit legal categories such as 'white,' 'race,' or 'nationality,' affecting naturalization and civil status.
Court battles over religious accommodations (for example, Sunday-closing laws) and public-school prayer revealed how laws grounded in Christian norms produced civic frictions for Orthodox Jews.
The rise of Zionism and the foundation of Israel intensified suspicions about Jewish political loyalty and influenced legal and legislative definitions of citizenship.
Who Is American? Belonging and the Question of Jewish Citizenship, by Lila Corwin Berman (a historian of American Jewish history at NYU), challenges the common assumption that Jews in the U.S. were simply and uncontroversially admitted to citizenship. The book frames citizenship as a legal and political category that required repeated adjudication when applied to Jews.
Berman shows that judges, legislators, and litigants did not accept a stable definition of Jewish identity. Courts and officials at different times labeled Jews as a race, a nationality, or a religion — each label carried different legal consequences for naturalization, immigration statistics, and rights.
Between 1924 and 1965 the U.S. used nationality quotas to control immigration and naturalization. These quotas intersected with political debates about Jewish nationalism and Zionism. Lawmakers and judges worried that Jewish immigrants retained allegiances to the countries they left or to Jewish national projects, and some laws were enacted to define acts that could cause loss of U.S. citizenship — for example, lengthy residence abroad, foreign military service, or voting in a foreign election.
Religious practice also shaped claims about citizenship. Orthodox Jews were among those challenging Sunday-closing laws that reflected Christian norms. Those laws forced business-owners to choose between revenue and observance of Shabbat. The Supreme Court upheld Sunday-closing statutes in 1961, and public reactions sometimes dismissed religious objections as financially motivated, fueling antagonism.
The creation of the State of Israel altered debates over Jewish belonging. The emergence of Jewish nationalism heightened fears among some officials and lawmakers that Jews might have divided loyalties. These concerns affected both public attitudes and legal approaches to citizenship and dual nationality.
Berman's book reads as a reminder: legal definitions of citizenship are contested and can change in response to immigration politics, international developments, and cultural conflicts. The history she surveys shows how ordinary legal categories — race, religion, nationality — were applied unevenly and could produce vulnerability for Jewish immigrants and citizens.
If you want a documented history of how U.S. law and public debate repeatedly questioned whether Jews belonged fully within American citizenship, Berman's study provides case studies across immigration law, court decisions, and social controversies that made citizenship a site of recurring contest.
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