Bringing Together Social Histories

Deborah Dash Moore. GI Jews: How World War II Changed a Generation. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004. 352 pp. Illustrations, notes, and index. $25.95.

It was bound to happen eventually. Since the 1960s, social history—including the study of race, class, gender, and ethnicity—has attained prominence as a vibrant field in the American historical profession. As all students of history already know, the widespread influence of social history can be seen at conferences, in the classroom, and in print. The methods and interpretations of social historians often creep into even traditional narratives. Average people and their everyday lives have become an essential part of the story of the past.

What is less widely known throughout the profession is that a parallel transition has occurred within the field of military history. The late 1960s also introduced what would come to be known as the new military history—an attempt to go beyond traditional operational accounts of battles. Sometimes eschewing combat entirely, new military historians embraced a variety of methods to focus on military institutions, military thought, and civil-military relations. At the same time, others turned their attention to the men and women in uniform, and the results have been striking. Over the past thirty years, practitioners of military social history have explored the lives of everyday people in the military, in times of peace and war. This bottom-up approach has added depth to our understanding of the motivations, course, and effects of military service. More importantly, military social history has helped put a human face on war.

What it has not done is make a real and lasting connection to the changes in the larger profession. For all their similarities—and with only a few exceptions, for example, Michael Sherry, In the Shadow of War (1995)—social history and military social history have grown up quite independent of one another. The result of this mutual ignorance is that military and social history often seem to be in opposition—two fields with nothing in common and little to learn from the other. All too often, sometimes even within departments, this opposition manifests itself in hostility or disdain.

This division is what makes Deborah Dash Moore's GI Jews: How World War II Changed a Generation so striking. Moore has spent her career studying the Jewish American experience. Her At Home in America: Second Generation New York Jews (1981) focused on Jewish American middle-class identity among second-generation New York Jews in the first half of the twentieth century. To the Golden Cities: Pursuing the American Jewish Dream in Miami and L.A. (1994) continued the story in looking at the immigration of American Jews to Miami and Los Angeles in the second half of the century. GI Jews is a natural follow-up, because between those two studies, and very much at the center of them, stands the military experience in the Second World War. She argues that Jewish Americans' changing identity both as Americans and as Jews was inextricably tied to their military service. All of a sudden, the social history of Jewish Americans in the twentieth century could not be separated from the military social history of World War II. And so Moore takes an important first step bridging the gap between the fields.

The fact that one of the "GI Jews" is her father, Martin Dash, no doubt aided her in the task. Through interviews with her father and other veterans and the reading of memoirs and diaries, Moore primarily follows the wartime stories of fifteen men who served in various branches and all over the world. Before the war, these and most other Jewish Americans resided predominantly in big cities, especially New York. Their cultural identity grew from their ethnicity and their locality. And they lived their lives by and large isolated from other ethnic and religious groups. As Moore writes, "In their America, while everyone drank from the same water fountain, friendships rarely...