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Peace of Mind (1946): Judaism and the Therapeutic Polemics of Postwar America

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 June 2018

Andrew R. Heinze
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Extract

A full-page ad in the September 30, 1946, issue of Life magazine shows a picture of a book called Peace of Mind being handed down from above by a male hand. “This New Best Seller,” the caption reads, “will help you find the happiness you have always sought.” Life readers may have wondered if the hand was supposed to be the author's, the publisher's, or the Lord's, but, in any case, it would have been Jewish. The author was a rabbi, the publisher was Simon and Schuster, and the God in question was the God of Moses rather than Jesus. The mysterious hand might have belonged to yet another Jew, as the book was the first religious best-seller to endorse Freud. In the advertisement, Harvard psychologist Gordon Allport testified that author Joshua Loth Liebman “shatters the long-standing myth that religion and psychology are necessary antagonists [and] proves that they converge upon a single goal—the enhancement of man's peace of mind.”

Type
Research Article
Information
Religion and American Culture , Volume 12 , Issue 1 , Winter 2002 , pp. 31 - 58
Copyright
Copyright © Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture 2002

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References

Notes

The author gratefully acknowledges the Lucius N. Littauer Foundation for its generous support of the initial research on which this article is based.

1. Life, September 30, 1946, 17.

2. Liebman, Joshua Loth, “The Art of Happiness,” Cosmopolitan, September 1948, 38, 98–99 Google Scholar.

3. See Hutchens, John K.'s column, “On the Books,” in the New York Herald Tribune, March 20, 1949 Google Scholar, and the article “Religious Books Currently Best Sellers—But Why?” in the Boston Traveler, March 22, 1949.

4. A valuable study for gauging the relative significance of Peace of Mind and inspirational books in general is Schneider, Louis and Dornbusch, Sanford M., Popular Religion: Inspirational Books in America (Chicago:University of Chicago Press, 1958)Google Scholar. Page 162 presents a list of sales figures for sixteen inspirational best-sellers, which places Peace of Mind ahead of every book published between 1900 and 1955 except The Power of Positive Thinking and Catherine Marshall's biography of her husband, A Man Called Peter. The sales figure given for Peace of Mind, however, seems lower than that suggested by other sources in the publishing trade. Nevertheless, the comparisons reveal that Liebman's book far outsold those of America's most famous inspirational writers, such as Emmet Fox, Bruce Barton, Harry Emerson Fosdick, Fulton Sheen, and, if we except The Power of Positive Thinking from his corpus, even Norman Vincent Peale. Of the thirty authors covered by Schneider and Dornbusch, representing the biggest-selling inspirational writers in the United States between 1875 and 1955, Liebman is the only Jewish author.

5. Rieff, Philip, The Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of Faith after Freud (New York: Harper and Row, 1966), 241-42Google Scholar.

6. For recent studies of the Jewish role in “de-Christianizing” public culture and the role of gender in the emerging psychotherapeutic arena, see Hollinger, David A., Science, Jews, and Secular Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996)Google Scholar, and Lunbeck, Elizabeth, The Psychiatrie Persuasion: Knowledge, Gender, and Power in Modern America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994)Google Scholar. See also Simonds, Wendy, Women and Self-Help Culture: Reading between the Lines (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1992)Google Scholar, a feminist sociology that gives an understanding ear to consumers of therapeutic books today.

7. Herberg, Will, Protestant-Catholic-Jew (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1955), 103, 111, 283-84Google Scholar. The power of Herberg's analysis was such that a scholar who studied Liebman closely nonetheless made the mistake of identifying Peace of Mind with Peale's positive thinking—see Alpert, Rebecca T., “Joshua Loth Liebman: The Peace of Mind Rabbi,” in Faith and Freedom: A Tribute to Franklin H. Littell, ed. Libowitz, Richard (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 190 Google Scholar.

8. Paul Johnson, “God and the Americans,” Commentary 99 (January 1995): 39. In this superficial treatment, Johnson also miscategorizes the traditionalist Catholic book Peace of Soul as one of the “variations of harmonial and gnostic themes which had long flourished in the United States.”

9. Meyer, Donald, The Positive Thinkers: A Study of the American Quest for Health, Wealth and Personal Power from Mary Baker Eddy to Norman Vincent Peale (New York: Doubleday, 1965), 325-30Google Scholar; Ahlstrom, Sydney E., A Religious History of the American People (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972), 955 Google Scholar; Gaustad, Edwin S., ed., A Documentary History of Religion in America since 1865 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1990), 516 Google Scholar. See also Heinze, Andrew R., “The First Mass Market Rabbi,” Midstream: A Monthly Jewish Review 42 (June/July 1996): 14–17 Google Scholar; the chapter “Joshua Loth Liebman: Religio-Psychiatric Thinker,” in Growth and Achievement: Temple Israel, 1854-1954, ed. Arthur Mann (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1954), 100-116; and the chapter by Alpert cited in note 3.

10. Graebner, William, The Age of Doubt: American Thought and Culture in the 1940s (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1991), 61 Google Scholar. A very similar view appears in Shapiro, Edward S., A Time for Healing: American Jewry since World War II (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 163 Google Scholar: “Few Jews read weighty books in Jewish theology, philosophy, or history. They preferred instead the pop religious psychology of Harold Kushner and Joshua Loth Liebman, simplistic guides to instant Judaism, second-rate novels with Jewish themes and Jewish characters, and coffee-table books on Jewish history.”

11. All citations of Peace of Mind are from Liebman, Joshua Loth, Peace of Mind (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1968)Google Scholar, the forty-third printing of the book, which is the one most often found in used-book stores. The quotation is from page 163. The Carol Publishing Group reissued Peace of Mind in the mid-1990s as part of a series of American inspirational classics.

12. Ibid., 11.

13. See especially the book's final chapter, “Where Religion and Psychology Part—And Meet,” ibid., 163-86.

14. Ibid., 33, 171.

15. Far from being antagonistic toward Christianity, Liebman was a foremost spokesman for interfaith engagement, and he routinely praised Christianity for its contributions to civilization. For examples, see his sermon, circa 1943, “A Jewish Tribute to American Christianity,” in which he said: “American Christianity has given four and a half million Jews in this country, at least, renewed confidence in man, in human nature and in Godliness.” Joshua Loth Liebman Papers, Boston University (hereafter JLLPBU), Box 5x. In a sermon of December 27, 1940, “ A Jew Looks at Christmas,” instead of the chronic harangue about fighting the effects of Christmas, Liebman preached, “it will not be the small Jewish people that either seeks to or could succeed in converting the hundreds of milllions of men. It is Christianity alone which can convert the pagans and heathens of our day—Christianity which has the organization and the means and the proselytizing missionary spirit which may indeed create a world Christian community in which Judaism will have its place as creative partner, equal, and comrade” (9). JLLPBU, Box 44.

16. Liebman, , Peace of Mind, 58, 61–62 Google Scholar.

17. See the chapter “The Religion of Healthy-Mindedness,” in James, William, The Varieties of Religious Experience (New York: Macmillan, 1961), 79–113 Google Scholar. This book, first published in 1902, makes scant reference to Judaism. It focuses on Christian experience but does refer fairly often to Eastern religion, especially Buddhism, and occasionally to Islam.

18. Liebman, Peace of Mind, 134.

19. Author's telephone interview with Dr. Leila Liebman, February 23, 1993.

20. William G. Braude, “Recollections of a Septuagenarian,” reprinted from Rhode Island Jewish Historical Notes 8 (November 1981) for the multimedia exhibit “Remembering Joshua Loth Liebman” at Temple Israel, Boston. Joshua Loth Liebman Papers, American Jewish Archives, Cincinnati, Ohio (hereafter JLLPAJA).

21. JLL letter to Rabbi Jacob K. Shankman, undated, but written from “The Fowler” hotel in Lafayette, Indiana, in several installments after Yom Kippur 1931 or 1932. JLLPAJA.

22. JLL letter to Rabbi Jacob K. Shankman, undated, probably 1932 or 1933, written from “The Fowler” hotel in Lafayette, Indiana. JLLPAJA.

23. Ibid.; JLL letter to Rabbi Jacob K. Shankman, undated, probably 1934, on K[ehillat].A[nshe].M[aarab]. letterhead, Chicago. JLLPAJA.

24. Joshua Loth Liebman, “First Address to Brotherhood of Temple Israel,” October 18, 1939. JLLPBU, Box 46.

25. Mann, Growth and Achievement: Temple Israel, 45-100. On the innovation of Sunday services in Reform congregations, see Meyer, Michael A., Response to Modernity: A History ofthe Reform Movement in Judaism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 290-91Google Scholar.

26. For an intensive examination of this subject, see Holifield, E. Brooks, A History of Pastoral Care in America: From Salvation to Self-Realization (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1983)Google Scholar, and Meyer, Positive Thinkers.

27. Jastrow, Joseph, Piloting Your Life: The Psychologist as Helmsman (New York: Greenberg, 1930), xiv Google Scholar; Jastrow, Joseph, Keeping Mentally Fit (Garden City, N.Y.: Garden City Publishing, 1928), vii Google Scholar.

28. For a fine analysis of Fosdick and Peale vis-à-vis psychology, see Meyer, Positive Thinkers, 211-19, 259-89.

29. Meyer, Response to Modernity, 314-15; Heinze, Andrew R., “Judaism and the Therapeutic,” Reconstructionist 61 (Spring 1996): 27–28 Google Scholar.

30. Pamela Nadell begins her history of women's ordination with the Cohen episode—see Women Who Would Be Rabbis: A History of Women's Ordination, 1889-1985 (Boston: Beacon Press, 1998), 1-23.

31. Turk, Diana B., “College Students,” in Jewish Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia, 2 vols., ed. Hyman, Paula E. and Moore, Deborah Dash (New York: Routledge, 1997), 1:258, 261 Google Scholar. In New York City high schools during the 1930s and 1940s, Jewish women showed a disportionate interest in literary activities. See Fass, Paula S., Outside In: Minorities and the Transformation of American Education (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 82–83 Google Scholar.

32. Rosenfeld, Alvin H., “Inventing the Jew: Notes on Jewish Autobiography,” Midstream 21 (April 1975): 57, 66–67 Google Scholar. Joyce Antler incorporates Rosenfeld's analysis in her discussion of Antin; see The Journey Home: Jewish Women and the American Century (New York: Free Press, 1997), 37.

33. On this tradition, see Weiss, Richard, The American Myth of Success: From Horatio Alger to Norman Vincent Peale (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1969)Google Scholar. Weiss writes, “The metamorphosis of the self-help ideology from 'rags to riches’ to ‘think your way to success’ was, as we have noted, a response to the crisis of individualism that accompanied America's emergence as a modern industrial state. As men became cogs in complex organizational structures, their sense of personal significance diminished. The increasing concern for individual power reflected anxiety over the loss of it” (230).

34. For Journalist Andrew Kopkind, who grew up in New Haven in the 1940s, Greenberg and Myerson were “secular saints” because they were Jews who had “successfully crossed over from ethnic favorites to national heroes without being isolated or absorbed: they had arrived without being assimilated or stereotyped.” Quoted in Shapiro, A Time for Healing, 15. The original source is Andrew Kopkind, “Bess Bets,” Village Voice, November 1979, 19-20.

35. Letters from Eleanor N. Neidetz to parents, April 14 and 21, 1947, in author's possession with thanks to Eleanor Caplan (nee Neidetz).

36. Clifford R. Adams, “Making Marriage Work,” Ladies’ Home Journal, January 1948, 26; letter from Elsie Stokes to Simon and Schuster (with carbon copy to Joshua Liebman), February 15, 1946, JLLPBU, Box 5x.

37. Cawelti, John G., Adventure, Mystery, and Romance: Formula Stories as Art and Popular Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977), 21 Google Scholar.

38. Reader's Digest, October 1947, 88, 89. In her study of late-twentieth-century readers, Wendy Simonds gives a good sense of how women may respond to literature of consolation. One respondent said: “The grief books … most of them say the same things, but I get a lot of comfort from seeing it in print. … [It's] more comforting than having other people tell it to me verbally. It seems more real.” Simonds, Women and Self-Help Culture, 27.

39. Harold B. Clemenko, “The Man behind ‘Peace of Mind,” Look, January 6, 1948, 15-18.

40. Liebman, Peace of Mind, 116-18.

41. Quoted in Pickard, John B., Emily Dickinson: An Introduction and Interpretation (New York: Holt, Rinehartand Winston, 1967), 36 Google Scholar; see 127-28 for a selected list of Dickinson volumes appearing between 1930 and 1960.

42. David Davidson and Hilde Abel, “How America Lives: Meet an American Rabbi and His Family,” Ladies’ Home Journal, January 1948, 123-31.

43. Joshua Loth Liebman, “Where Jew and Christian Meet,” broadcast typescript, “Message of Israel,” November 16, 1940, JLLPAJA; untitled speech delivered to Boston Chamber of Commerce, March 27, 1940, 11-12, JLLPBU, Box 46.

44. Davidson and Abel, “How America Lives,” 126; “No Peace for Liebman,” Newsweek, March 22, 1948, 84.

45. Joshua Loth Liebman, “Hope for Human Brotherhood,” Ladies' Home Journal, January 1948, 132. In a 1944 sermon delivered on WBZ radio, Liebman said, “The people who are hated whether they be Catholics or Jews or Negroes do not experience the two prerequisites for growth: namely, approval and affection. Their personalities tend to shrink and to contract rather than to expand and the whole progress of a country is impeded when any fragment of a population loses confidence and courage…. The panic of the persecuted and the phobia of the persecutor together are the architects of chaos.” See the manuscript sermon “Brotherhood or Chaos,” in commemoration of the Eleventh Annual Brotherhood Week, February 20,1944, in JLLPBU, Box 5x.

46. On this point, see Joseph Adelson, “Freud in America: Some Observations,” American Psychologist 11 (September 1956): 468-69. See also F. H. Matthews, “The Americanization of Sigmund Freud: Adaptations of Psycho-analysis before 1917,” Journal of American Studies 1 (April 1967): 39-62; Hale, Nathan G. Jr., Freud and the Americans: The Beginnings of Psychoanalysis in the United States, 1876-1917 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971)Google Scholar; and Hale, Nathan G. Jr., Freud and the Americans: The Rise and Crisis of Psychoanalysis in the United States, 1917-1985 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995)Google Scholar.

47. Liebman, “Hope for Human Brotherhood,” 132-33.

48. Ibid., 134; Joshua Loth Liebman, “The Mystery of the Lost Hatred,” broadcast typescript, “Message of Israel,” October 30, 1943, JLLPBU, Box 1; Liebman, Peace of Mind, 68-69.

49. Chicago Tribune, August 7, 1966. Hope for Man (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1966), which was constructed by Liebman's wife, Fan, and a number of assistants from Liebman's unpublished papers and an outline for a book with that title, argues that “subjectivism and alienation and existentialism are grandiose lies, for we human beings inevitably live not isolated but in contexts…. The truth of life is found in the principle of contextualism or relatedness” (99-100).

50. Joshua Loth Liebman, “Why Wars Come,” broadcast typescript, “Message of Israel,” November 9, 1940, JLLPAJA; Joshua Loth Liebman, “The Meaning of Life,” 7, address given at the Hebrew Union College Institute of Religion and Psychiatry, March 1948, JLLPAJA.

51. Liebman, Peace of Mind, 63-64, 62.

52. On the relationship between the ideas of Kaplan and Dewey, see Lazaroff, Allan, “Kaplan and John Dewey,” in The American Judaism of Mordecai Kaplan, ed. Goldsmith, Emanuel S., Scult, Mel, and Seltzer, Robert M. (New York: New York University Press, 1990), 173-96Google Scholar.

53. Liebman, Peace of Mind, 157, 156-59.

54. See the “Acknowledgements” of Peace of Mind; see also Alpert, “Joshua Loth Liebman,” 177-92, who notes the influence of Kaplan on Liebman's deemphasis of the revelation at Sinai, his reference to God as “the Power for salvation revealing himself in nature,” and his stress on the need for a new concept of God appropriate for a democracy like America (190).

55. Liebman here recites words from Kaplan's major theological work, The Meaning of God in Modern Jewish Religion (1937; New York: Reconstructionist Press, 1962), 40ff; see Liebman, Peace of Mind, 159. The essence of this phraseology originates in Matthew Arnold's language of God as “the Power that makes for righteousness,” which Kaplan borrowed. See the definitive biography by Scult, Mel, Judaism Faces the Twentieth Century: A Biography of Mordecai M. Kaplan (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1994), 83–84 Google Scholar.

56. Kaplan, The Meaning of God in Modern Jewish Religion, 53-54. For an overview placing this idea of Kaplan's into a larger context, see Heinze, “Judaism and the Therapeutic,” 27-35; see also Harold M. Schulweis, “A Critical Assessment of Kaplan's Ideas of Salvation,” in American Judaism of Mordecai Kaplan, ed. Goldsmith, Scult, and Seltzer, 260-61.

57. Liebman, Peace of Mind, 159-62.

58. Herberg, Will, Judaism and Modern Man (New York: Farrar, Straus and Young, 1951), 66 Google Scholar. Here, Herberg creates a false dichotomy. Judaism accommodates and promotes both the theme of human dependence and that of human partnership with God. See Heinze, “Judaism and the Therapeutic,” 32.

59. Irving Kristol, “God and the Psychoanalysts,” Commentary, November 1949, 434.

60. Fourteen years after Liebman's death, Peale persuaded Reader's Digest to rerun its original abridgment of Peace of Mind. See Readers’ Digest, November 1962, 107-10.

61. Graham, Billy, The Secret of Happiness: Jesus’ Teaching on Happiness as Expressed in the Beatitudes (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1955), 3 Google Scholar; Graham, Billy, Peace with God (Garden City, N.Y: Doubleday, 1953)Google Scholar.

62. Sheen, Fulton, Peace of Soul (New York: Whittlesey House, 1949), 84, 87Google Scholar; “Microphone Missionary,” Time, April 14, 1952, 73. The same “parable” as that told on television is recorded in Peace of Soul (53) and is echoed in many passages throughout the book.

63. In “Monsignor Sheen and Mrs. Luce,” American Scholar 17 (January 1948): 35-44, Fanny Sedgwick Colby argues that Catholics are hurt by the strident antipsychoanalysis views recently expressed by Sheen and Clare Boothe Luce, a recent convert to Catholicism. Colby also detects a current of anti-Semitism in Luce's writings on the subject, which appeared in McCall's Magazine in 1947. However, after researching the Clare Boothe Luce papers at the Library of Congress, I did not find evidence of anti-Semitism in her adult writings. Luce conveyed the passion and triumphalism of an eloquent convert, and I suspect this was sometimes interpreted as anti-Jewish. In fact, on several occasions, she spoke passionately on behalf of Jews. See Andrew R. Heinz, “Clare Boothe Luce and the Jews: A Chapter from the Catholic-Jewish Disputation of Postwar America,” American Jewish History 88 (September 2000): 361-76. For an illuminating essay on Sheen, see chap. 4 of Mark S. Massa, Catholics and American Culture: Fulton Sheen, Dorothy Day, and the Notre Dame Football Team (New York: Crossroad, 1999).

64. A fascinating example of the psychology craze's impact on the finest of scholars is the 1954 book People of Plenty by historian David Potter. See especially the discussion of the psychology of American child-rearing, a subject far from Potter's field of pre-Civil War American history. Potter, David M., People of Plenty: Economic Abundance and the American Character (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1954), 194-99CrossRefGoogle Scholar.