Ambivalent Embrace: Jewish Upward Mobility in Postwar America

by Rachel Kranson

This new cultural history of Jewish life and identity in the United States after World War II focuses on the process of upward mobility. Rachel Kranson challenges the common notion that most American Jews unambivalently celebrated their generally strong growth in economic status and social acceptance during the booming postwar era. In fact, a significant number of Jewish religious, artistic, and intellectual leaders worried about the ascent of large numbers of Jews into the American middle class.

Kranson reveals that many Jews were deeply concerned that their lives—affected by rapidly changing political pressures, gender roles, and religious practices—were becoming dangerously disconnected from authentic Jewish values. She uncovers how Jewish leaders delivered jeremiads that warned affluent Jews of hypocrisy and associated "good" Jews with poverty, even at times romanticizing life in America's immigrant slums and Europe's impoverished shtetls. Jewish leaders, while not trying to hinder economic development, thus cemented an ongoing identification with the Jewish heritage of poverty and marginality as a crucial element in an American Jewish ethos.

Genres: Judaism, Religion, History, Jewish

232 pages, Paperback

Published November 6, 2017

Reviews

[Bruce Grossman · Rating 3 out of 5]

Rang true with me, a Jew born in Ohio in 1957 EXCEPT that I knew of no Jew who romanticized the shtetl. The Jews I knew were ashamed of "the old country" and the people who still had accents. We were never taught Yiddish, more less Jewish folklore. Midcentury Jews were consumed with "making it", assimilation, and above all else material comfort and self-congratulatory complacency. What with intermarriage, it is safe to say that Jews are physically disappearing from America. And a certain liberalism, in my day based on Freud, has replaced any serious practice of religion.

[Mills College Library]

305.892 K897 2017