Sixty years ago, a Jewish intellectual named Will Herberg published a book that jolted the way Americans thought about their religious landscape. The title of his book, if not his musty thesis, could describe a new American religious alignment that presents serious challenges for progressive Jews and Judaism today.
“Protestant-Catholic-Jew: An Essay in American Religious Sociology” boldly asserted that the three Abrahamic religious denominations — Islam wasn’t really considered in midcentury academia — served as seminal and separate markers of national identity. Reviewing the book in The New York Times Book Review, Reinhold Niebuhr wrote that “most telling is [Herberg’s] thesis that America is not so much a melting pot as three fairly separate melting pots.” While ethnic and class identities had fallen away, Herberg argued, religious divisions among Protestants, Catholics and Jews had not, and these three camps shaped nearly every facet of midcentury American society.
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