This essay tracks the rise to preeminence of the quest for social justice within American Reform Judaism across the late 19th and early 20th century. Although generally following their German progenitors on matters of theology and religious practice, the U. S. rabbinate, on whom this treatment concentrates, soon split with its more conservative Old World counterparts on matters of civic engagement. Beginning with David Einhorn’s full-throated challenge to slavery (for which he lost his first pulpit) in the 1860s, by the turn of the twentieth century, leading Reform synagogues regularly lined up with the advance guard of ‘social gospel’ Progressives when it came to the key issues of labor and immigrant rights, poverty, women’s equality, and government regulation of the capitalist marketplace. By the time of the Great Depression, the largely middle-class ranks of Reform Jewry had extended themselves into a reliably social-democratic constituency of President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, albeit a constituency less united about emergent Zionist plans to solve the crisis of Jews in Europe.
