SOURCE: "David Levinsky's Fall: A Note on the Liebman Thesis," in American Quarterly, Vol. 19, No. 4, Winter, 1967, pp. 696-706.

In the following essay, Singer examines The Rise of David Levinsky in light of Charles Liebman's thesis that most Jews who emigrated to the United States were shaped more by cultural and social mores than by religious orthodoxy.

The notion that the overwhelming majority of East European Jews who came to the United States between 1880 and 1915 were Orthodox has assumed a central position in the popular mythology of American-Jewish life. On a more scholarly level, this same idea has established itself in the canon of American-Jewish historiography. The standard works on American Jewry have, in varying degrees, accepted this premise, and their interpretations have been fashioned accordingly. Even Moses Rischin, whose The Promised City is perhaps the most sophisticated achievement to date in the reconstruction of the American-Jewish experience, seems...