Jews Dreaming of Acceptance: From the Brill Building to Suburbia with Love

The Brill Building sound refers to the music produced in the late 1950s and early 1960s by composers of popular music associated with 1619 and 1650 Broadway. The vast majority of these writers were Jewish. I argue that the romance in the lyrics of these songs can be understood in terms of the whitening and suburbanization of American Jews—that these songs of love express a Jewish utopian fantasy. As Jews, and whites, became disillusioned with suburban life, so the Brill Building sound lost its popularity. I argue that the songs recorded by the Shangri-Las, a Jewish girl group singing songs of familial death and destruction mostly written by Brill Building writers, are an expression of this disillusionment.