ASSIMILATING ASSIMILATION
When Lila Corwin Berman was a senior at Amherst College, she went to Jerusalem to do research for her senior thesis. There, she found a large group of married American women who'd given up their very comfortable secular lives back home to practice not only religious Judaism, but the type of traditional orthodoxy that stringently delineates gender roles. These women believed their prime duties were to make their husbands happy and to have as many children as possible.
“These were women versed in feminist discourse. 
One of them graduated from Columbia University with a major in women's studies. She'd marched in pro-choice rallies and was a member of the National Organization of Women and gave it all up for a lifestyle that was radically opposite,” Berman, the Lea and Malvin Bank Early Career Professor in Jewish Studies, recalls. “It was completely fascinating to me and really sparked my curiosity in Jewish American history.”
Berman's curiosity led to a doctorate in religious studies at Yale University in 2004, with a focus on American religious history. Recently, Berman, along with eleven other beginning professors from around the country, was selected as one of this year's Young Scholars in America, a program sponsored by the Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture at Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis. The Young Scholars Program is designed to bring together leading young scholars for discussions on teaching, research, and the role of public intellectuals in current society. The Center is a research and public outreach institution devoted to the promotion of the understanding of the relation between religion and American culture.
Berman's research focuses on contextualizing twentieth century Jewish history in an American historical framework, particularly during the time period from the 1920s to the late 1960s.
“I'm interested in how Jews presented and explained themselves to non-Jews and how their differences fit into or challenged a Protestant model of religion and sociological models of immigrant group adjustment,” she explains. “In many ways, this country was a perfect place for Jews due to the nature of American democracy and the nature of liberalism, especially compared to places they had left.”
But the history of Jews in America was a two-way street, she contends.
“A lot of historians have seen assimilation as a linear path—how immigrants, including Jews, adapted to America. But at the same time, there is also a parallel history of how America adapted to Jews and other immigrant groups.”
One of the reasons that this historical dynamic is so striking for Jews, says Berman, who is currently writing a book on her research, was that Jews had some major and, often, quite visible differences from other non-Jewish Americans. They weren't Christian—and that fact alone made them stand out and compelled them to explain themselves.
Jews' efforts to explain themselves certainly bore fruit. For example, after World War II, the notion of America as Judeo-Christian society took a firm hold within public life.
“At any public religious event, you now had to include a rabbi,” says Berman. “So the Jews, who comprised just two or three percent of the total American population, suddenly wielded a disproportionate influence.”
However, the issue of how Jews explained themselves to non-Jews is not one that she encounters solely in her academic work. Berman says that although her family attended an orthodox synagogue, they were not rigidly religious.
“As a child who kept Kosher and observed Jewish holidays, I spent quite a bit of time trying to explain to friends, their parents, and my teachers why I couldn't eat certain things or why I had to miss school,” she recalls. “I realize now that part of my own sense of being Jewish was formed during those times and that this, in part, probably drew me to study the history of Jews in America. ”