Politics & Power Quote by Louis Finkelstein

Anxiety is doing a lot of work here, and it’s strategically calibrated. Finkelstein isn’t making a generic plea for piety; he’s arguing that for American Jews, religion functions as infrastructure - not only for Jewish continuity, but for the civic conditions that let minorities breathe. The line “as Jews” is both a qualifier and a warning flare: he’s marking Jewish vulnerability inside a majority culture that can decide, quickly, what counts as “American.” That makes the “problem” feel “urgent and vital” not because Jews are uniquely devout, but because they’re uniquely exposed.

The key move is the phrase “religious training of freedom.” He’s threading a needle between two mid-century pressures: secular modernity (which can flatten moral language into private preference) and a Christian-nationalist politics (which can weaponize “religion” as cultural ownership). By insisting freedom is “trained,” he frames liberty as a learned habit - sustained by communal institutions, moral formation, and accountability - rather than a self-renewing entitlement. That’s a subtle rebuke to the idea that rights survive on constitutional text alone.

Context matters: as a prominent rabbi in a century bracketed by the Holocaust abroad and Red Scares at home, Finkelstein is writing in the shadow of what happens when civic life is stripped of ethical guardrails or captured by a single identity. His subtext is pragmatic: if public culture loses the religious (and plural religious) foundations that teach restraint, dignity, and minority rights, “civil liberties” won’t just erode; they’ll be reinterpreted out of existence.