Abstract
How did the religious backgrounds of the United States Supreme Court’s first Jewish Justices affect their outlook in religious liberty cases? The ascension of Jews to the United States Supreme Court has typically been seen as a turning point in American Jewish history. However, in the area of religious liberty, I argue that this moment anomalously marked a continuity in American history and instead serves as a historiographical case study in Jewish assimilation in America and the construction of an American identity. Putting sparsely examined primary sources in conversation with existing scholarship, I map out a seldom discussed history of the efforts of American Jews to place themselves within the cultural history of the United States through the use of the Supreme Court and its constitutional legacies. In doing so, I constructed a distinct chapter in the history of American Jewry. Concurrently, I map out an underestimated jurisprudential trend that dominated the early part of the twentieth century.