Jews in Suburbia
In 1959, sociologist and practicing Rabbi Albert Gordon wrote that "The Jew is not only a member of a religious minority, but also part of the majority of Americans known as the middle class.”
Hints of Jewish assimilation into the majority start to emerge circa the Great Depression: once-Yiddish circulators printed in English, synagogue services conducted in just English and Hebrew, photographs of Jewish youth in visibly trendy American clothes, summer camps and resorts popping up through the Poconos and Catskills. By the time Gordon recognized this phenomenon in 1959, Jews had rapidly accumulated wealth and social capital and demonstrated their new status with moves to the suburbs. Throughout the 1950s, the Jewish suburban population doubled – four times the rate of non-Jewish Americans. (Prell) We can attribute some of this socioeconomic mobility to a cultural commitment to achievement, historical success in commercial endeavors, and left-wing, working-class rooted ideology born from life in urban centers. But the stronger push toward middle-class identity came through lifted restrictions on Jewish settlement and affluence.
Like many other immigrant groups, Ashkenazi Jewish immigrants first settled in city enclaves, such as the Lower East Side of Manhattan or Kinsman in Cleveland. As Corwin-Berman writes, “Jewishness in America had been formed in tandem with industrial American urbanism: its street life and lack of privacy, working class culture, and political activism.” They worked factory jobs and lived in multifamily, multigenerational apartments. They read Yiddish street signs and shopped at kosher butchers. They exercised frugality and deference and made extra income from housing boarders. They joined socialist collectives and organized for better working and living conditions.
These communities were American shtetls: their Jewishness was defined not by Jewish institutions, of which there were many, or by the practice of Judaism, of which varied household-to-household, but rather by the sheer preponderance of Jews. These neighborhoods were so palpably Jewish that by 1940, official government documentation decried such areas for experiencing a "Jewish infiltration" that led to "poor maintenance and rapid depreciation of poverty." ("Mapping Inequality”) But it was structural circumstance that caused poverty: as a racialized other, Jews couldn’t access home mortgage loans and faced hiring discrimination in non-industrial roles. Force of xenophobia and antisemitism kept them in these stateside shtetls, isolated from white middle-class America. While Jews were racialized by society, however, Prell posits that Jews considered themselves “spatialized.” Despite external forces keeping American shtetls alive, so did urban centers keep Jewishness alive.
What changed? How did Jews go from living in American ghettos to moving to the suburbs in affluent, fundamentally American droves?
World War II.
Wartime unification was a reality, and racializing Jews as "Hebrew," "Yiddish," or “Jewish” came to a slow and near-stop after the Holocaust. Additionally, Americans started to consider ethnicity and nationality as removed from the country's white supremacist racial hierarchy, especially as the immigration status of one's parents stopped needing to be reported federally. And Jews significantly benefitted from post-war economic posterity. (See Baskin, Brodkin, Kranson, Prell, Sarna, Sklare, Vincent) This reduction of state-imposed xenophobia and public sensitivity to anti-Semitism combined with Jews’ slowly-but-surely increasing economic capital and fortification within urban centers meant that they were able to enter the middle class and become white. But entering the middle class meant negotiating newfound resources and gentile spaces while preserving Jewishness. As such, ambivalence and anxiety characterized the foray into middle class identity. (Corwin-Berman)
Hints of Jewish assimilation into the majority start to emerge circa the Great Depression: once-Yiddish circulators printed in English, synagogue services conducted in just English and Hebrew, photographs of Jewish youth in visibly trendy American clothes, summer camps and resorts popping up through the Poconos and Catskills. By the time Gordon recognized this phenomenon in 1959, Jews had rapidly accumulated wealth and social capital and demonstrated their new status with moves to the suburbs. Throughout the 1950s, the Jewish suburban population doubled – four times the rate of non-Jewish Americans. (Prell) We can attribute some of this socioeconomic mobility to a cultural commitment to achievement, historical success in commercial endeavors, and left-wing, working-class rooted ideology born from life in urban centers. But the stronger push toward middle-class identity came through lifted restrictions on Jewish settlement and affluence.
Like many other immigrant groups, Ashkenazi Jewish immigrants first settled in city enclaves, such as the Lower East Side of Manhattan or Kinsman in Cleveland. As Corwin-Berman writes, “Jewishness in America had been formed in tandem with industrial American urbanism: its street life and lack of privacy, working class culture, and political activism.” They worked factory jobs and lived in multifamily, multigenerational apartments. They read Yiddish street signs and shopped at kosher butchers. They exercised frugality and deference and made extra income from housing boarders. They joined socialist collectives and organized for better working and living conditions.
These communities were American shtetls: their Jewishness was defined not by Jewish institutions, of which there were many, or by the practice of Judaism, of which varied household-to-household, but rather by the sheer preponderance of Jews. These neighborhoods were so palpably Jewish that by 1940, official government documentation decried such areas for experiencing a "Jewish infiltration" that led to "poor maintenance and rapid depreciation of poverty." ("Mapping Inequality”) But it was structural circumstance that caused poverty: as a racialized other, Jews couldn’t access home mortgage loans and faced hiring discrimination in non-industrial roles. Force of xenophobia and antisemitism kept them in these stateside shtetls, isolated from white middle-class America. While Jews were racialized by society, however, Prell posits that Jews considered themselves “spatialized.” Despite external forces keeping American shtetls alive, so did urban centers keep Jewishness alive.
What changed? How did Jews go from living in American ghettos to moving to the suburbs in affluent, fundamentally American droves?
World War II.
Wartime unification was a reality, and racializing Jews as "Hebrew," "Yiddish," or “Jewish” came to a slow and near-stop after the Holocaust. Additionally, Americans started to consider ethnicity and nationality as removed from the country's white supremacist racial hierarchy, especially as the immigration status of one's parents stopped needing to be reported federally. And Jews significantly benefitted from post-war economic posterity. (See Baskin, Brodkin, Kranson, Prell, Sarna, Sklare, Vincent) This reduction of state-imposed xenophobia and public sensitivity to anti-Semitism combined with Jews’ slowly-but-surely increasing economic capital and fortification within urban centers meant that they were able to enter the middle class and become white. But entering the middle class meant negotiating newfound resources and gentile spaces while preserving Jewishness. As such, ambivalence and anxiety characterized the foray into middle class identity. (Corwin-Berman)
Postwar government action yielded de-facto affirmative action programs for the Ashkenazi Jewish community, which had been excluded from government programs and education systems for decades. Some of that comes through the G.I. Bill, which afforded families enough support to buy single-family homes, but it also comes through the FHA redistricting maps and starting to grant loans to Jewish Americans. They could move outside of the city, could afford to have land – even William L. Levitt of planned community infamy was Jewish. Wariness marked Jewish wealth, though; anti-Semitism and its driven losses remained at the forefront of memory, so some Jews were reluctant to hold obvious power and capital.
Beyond the appeal of houses and lawns and space was another driving force of suburbanization: better schools. Sklare explains that "to Jewish parents suburban schools, whatever their faults, seemed to offer the promise of better educational opportunities than did the city schools." This focus on parenting and providing better opportunities for children translates to what Corwin-Berman refers to as the infantilization of Jewishness: focusing religious effort on children while abandoning observance as adults. A hallmark of Jewish middle class suburban life was sending kids to Hebrew school but not maintaining significant practice at home. Fittingly, Bardis, a prominent Jewish sociologist in the 1950s, found an inverse relationship between Jews' gentile education and their connection with their culture: the more suburban, the less Jewish.
We can use spatial assimilation as way of understanding Jewish residential and community patterns. (Phillips) The pattern that emerged during the 1950s, then, was that Jews found themselves living middle class American lives at expense of their Jewishness. Moving to suburbs meant the loss of everyday Judaism. Kosher butchers were replaced by supermarkets, Yiddish newspapers by local dailies, walking to Shabbat dinners with driving to community parks and pools. Jewishness no longer coded the spaces and places Jews engaged with. As such, questions of Jewish life itself defined the suburban shift (Prell). Emerging middle-class Jews had to consciously define and practice their Judaism and Jewishness: “In the compacted Jewish neighborhoods of the cities, Jewish identity was absorbed through osmosis,” Shapiro writes. “In suburbia, it had to be nurtured.”
That nurturing largely fell to Jewish women, who assumed responsibility for creating Jewish homes that still fit mainstream American standards. Kosher-style observance upticked, relying on mass-produced goods; elaborate B’nai Mitzvot became typical for teenagers, playing into the social expectations of those with expendable income; synagogue memberships boomed, mimicking churchgoing masses. Affiliation, not place, became a major social organizer for middle class suburban Jews. Organizations like Hadassah and BBYO alongside synagogue memberships fed Judaic practice and provided spaces for Jews to congregate together once more.