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xi “[O]f all the big cities,” Sergeant Milton Lehman of the Stars and Stripes affirmed in 1945, “New York is still the promised land.”1 As a returning Jewish GI, Lehman compared New York with European cities. Other Jews also knew what New York offered that made it so desirable, even if they had not served overseas. First and foremost, security: Jews could live without fear in New York. Yes, they faced discrimination, but in this city of almost eight million residents, many members of its ethnic and religious groups encountered prejudice. Jews contended with anti-Semitism in the twentieth century more than German Protestants or Irish Catholics dealt with bias, perhaps; but the Irish had endured a lot in the nineteenth century, and Jews suffered less than African Americans, Latinos, and Asian New Yorkers. And New York provided more than security: Jews could live freely as Jews. The presence of a diverse population of close to two million New York Jews contributed to their sense that “everyone was Jewish.”2 New York Jews understood that there were many ways to be Jewish. The city welcomed Jews in all their variety. New York Jews saw the city as a place where they, too, could flourish and express themselves. As a result, they came to identify with the city, absorbing its ethos even as they helped to shape its urban characteristics. When World War II ended in Europe with victory over Nazi Germany, New York’s promises glowed more brightly still. New York’s multiethnic diversity, shaped in vital dimensions by its large Jewish population, shimmered as a showplace of American democratic distinctiveness , especially vis-à-vis Europe. In contrast to a continent that had become a vast slaughterhouse, where millions of European Jews had been ruthlessly murdered with industrial efficiency, New York glistened as a city Jews could and did call their home in America. The famous skyline had defined urban cosmopolitanism in the years after World War I. Now the city’s thriving ethnic neighborhoods—Jewish and Catholic, African American and Puerto Rican, Italian and Irish—came to represent modern urban culture. New York’s economy responded robustly to demands of war production. By the end of hostilities, its per capita income exceeded the national average by 14 percent. F O R E W O R D xii ■ Foreword But as a poster city for immigration, with a majority population composed of immigrants and their children, the city had to contend with negative perceptions . Considered undesirable by many Americans, Jews and other foreigners in the city contributed to impressions that New York seemed less American than other cities with large percentages of native-born residents.3 As the city flourished during and after the war, it maintained its political commitments to generous social welfare benefits to help its poorest residents. Jews advocated for these policies, supporting efforts to establish a liberal urban legacy. In modeling a progressive and prosperous multiethnic twentiethcentury American city, New York demonstrated what its Jews valued. Versions of Jewish urbanism played not just on the political stage but also on the streets of the city’s neighborhoods. Its expressions could be found as well in New York’s centers of cultural production. By the middle of the twentieth century, no city offered Jews more than New York. It nourished both celebration and critique. New York gave Jews visibility as individuals and as a group. It provided employment and education, inspiration and freedom, fellowship and community. Jews reciprocated by falling in love with the city, its buildings’ hard angles and perspectives, its grimy streets and harried pace. But by the 1960s and ’70s, Jews’ love affair with the city soured. For many of the second generation who grew up on New York’s sidewalks , immersed in its babel of languages and cultural syncretism, prosperity dimmed their affection for the working-class urban world of their youth. Many of them aspired to suburban pleasures of home ownership, grass and trees that did not have to be shared with others in public parks. Yet New York City remained the wellspring of Jewish American culture for much of the century , a resource of Jewishness even for those living thousands of miles west of the Hudson River. Jews had not always felt free to imagine the city as their special place. Indeed , not until mass immigration from Europe piled up their numbers, from the tens of thousands to the hundreds of thousands, had Jews laid claim to New York and...

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