The children of Jewish immigrants were committed to creating identities in which their Jewishness, their membership in the middle class, and their Americanness were closely braided together. 

- Riv-Ellen Prell

When Bernard Manischewitz delivered his keynote address in 1956, he did not attribute the endurance of the Jewish family and home to ritualistic texts or to practices, but rather, to the potential of packaged Jewish foods: “The development of packaged Jewish foods has had a marked sociological effect on the pattern of family life in the American Jewish home— a very measureable effect on the balance of family relationships. 

- Kerri Steinberg

The price of Jewish assimilation was Jewish authenticity. The faces of this kind of assimilation were many: secularization, the feminization of Jewish life, and the decline of radical politics were all perceived, at various moments, as gauges of assimilationist tendencies. Middle-classness and suburbanization, however, emerged as two of the clearest signals of assimilation.

– Lila Corwin Berman

This chapter examines Jewish American class and racial identities and how they evolved postwar alongside galleries of commercial cookbooks and advertisements that reflect and reinforce middle-class, white Jewishness.