Jewish Social Studies

Abstract:

Much of what we know about Jewish–Catholic relations in postwar America comes from the scholarship on litigation over school prayer, released time for children's worship, and clashes over public expressions of religion. This article uses the Hildy McCoy adoption case—the most controversial and mass-mediated adoption struggle of the 1950s—as a lens for exploring another divisive issue that has received almost no attention in the literature on postwar religious conflict in the United States: the permanent transfer of children from one religious group to another. The Hildy McCoy case, which has largely been ignored by historians, reveals how debates between Jews and Catholics about the preservation of children's religious heritage that had been raging across the Atlantic in post-Holocaust Europe were transplanted to American soil in the 1950s and how those debates could also take decidedly different trajectories in the turbulent religious environment of the United States.