Inventing Great Neck: Jewish Identity and the American Dream (review)

In Inventing Great Neck: Jewish Identity and the American Dream, Judith Goldstein explores "one of America's most fascinating suburbs" (1), offering a study of ethnic and religious transformation that focuses in particular on the impact of the Jewish community. This entertaining and well-written work examines Great Neck's individual histories and clashes over community identity from the 1920s through the 1960s. It complements recent studies of ethnic experiences of suburbia, including Mary Jane Capozzoli's Three Generations of Italian American Women in Nassau County and Sarah Mahler's Salvadorans in Suburbia.¹

Goldstein selected Great Neck, a Long Island suburb of New York City, for her study, not because she grew up there, but because of the city's varied claims to national recognition. During the 1920s, Great Neck was home to new celebrity writers, journalists, and Broadway and Hollywood stars. Later, in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, the community created one of the most outstanding public school systems in the country. And, beginning in the 1940s and continuing until today, Great Neck has been a significant site of suburban Jewish culture. Throughout this period, Great Neck, like many other suburbs, drew residents away from the city's commotion, noise, and density, while at the same time the city's forces (of work, money, culture, and family) continued to influence the suburb.

In her chronological discussion of Great Neck's struggles with growth, Goldstein lays out the various tensions that arise from the conflicting desires of newcomers and old-timers in the community. She describes how during the 1920s and early 1930s, Great Neck was primarily a Christian community, due in part to restrictive covenants that favored Protestant homogeneity. Although there were strong churches and Christians dominated the school board, some celebrity Jews were welcomed. The town delighted in news of its famous residents, both non-Jewish and Jewish, including businessman Moe Annenberg; Broadway celebrities Oscar Hammerstein and Groucho Marx; and journalist Herbert Bayard Swope. The local newspaper, Great Neck News, tracked the schedules and appearances of these citizen stars, with old-timers viewing the luminosity of the newcomers as beneficial for the community in terms of fame, money, and recognition.

During the Great Depression, the population of Great Neck began to shift. Banks increasingly owned many of the homes, and some sold homes to Jews. Robert Moses, head of the New York State Park Commission, created a public road through the North Shore, thereby making Long Island accessible to millions of people in the city, including noncelebrity Jews. These newcomers were viewed with some skepticism by the more established residents, who feared challenge to the town's social and economic composition, which was based on homes, clubs, and developments. For data about the makeup of this community, Goldstein relies on a 1937 master's thesis for which the author (Pauline Boorstein) interviewed fifty Jews and Gentiles, mostly friends and parents of her children's friends, living in Great Neck. Although Goldstein acknowledges the limitations of this study as representative of the community as a whole, it is an interesting source that provides information about where Gentiles and Jews came from, their education, whether they rented or owned, their income levels, and the number of their offspring.

After World War II, new arrivals included soldiers and their families, many of whom were Jewish. The Jewish parents moving to Great Neck were anxious for their children to succeed, so they made the public school system as strong as possible, using Great Neck High School as their weapon against the old Ivy quota system. Similarly, the community invested in hospitals (building two in this period) where Jewish doctors could serve on staff. By the 1960s, Great Neck had become predominantly Jewish. The growing population of civic-minded residents interested in community resources, such as schools and hospitals, was a unifying force with a mission. Those residents who wanted a less-mixed community moved out, and heirs to old...