Jewish Geography

“The palm trees especially made a great impression on me,” confessed the Nobel-prize winning author I. B. Singer in 1948, delighting the Yiddish readers of the Jewish Daily Forward with his botanical observations of Miami Beach. “I had discovered the palm tree... how they are like trees and not like trees, how different they are. They created a mood in me, and maybe in other people, too.” ¹ Singer’s fascination with palm trees, which he expanded upon in a collection of essays entitled My Love Affair with Miami Beach, was as much collective as idiosyncratic. In the years following World War II, thousands of Singer’s Yiddish readers and an even larger number of their English-speaking counterparts shared his delight in tropical foliage. “Palm trees, the weather, the lifestyle, I thought it was casual, it was the type of lifestyle I’ve always dreamed I’d like to live in,” related Benjamin Leftgoff, explaining his decision to pick up stakes in the 1940s and 1950s and move southward to Florida and the “gay, metropolitan playground” of Miami where palm trees abounded (pp. 278, 3).

Meanwhile, a continent away, the sunny skies, balmy weather, and flora and fauna of Los Angeles also beckoned to the former Jewish inhabitants of Chicago, New York, Philadelphia and Detroit. Arriving at an astonishing rate of over two thousand people a month in the mid-1940s, these newcomers transformed the City of Angels into America’s second largest Jewish community.

A phenomenon of profound demographic and cultural implications, the reconfiguring of American Jewry in the postwar era figured more in the popular imagination than in the scholarly literature — that is, until now. In her incisive and exhaustively researched new book, To the Golden Cities, Deborah Dash Moore, one of this generation’s foremost historians of America’s Jews, turns her considerable interpretive skills to the postwar Jewish experience in the two “pacemaker” cities of Miami and Los Angeles. Expanding on the notion of America as the golden land, the so-called goldene medina, Moore explores the remapping of the American Jewish landscape in the years following World War II as the children and grandchildren of immigrants headed south and west.

For those of us accustomed to thinking of American Jewish history exclusively in terms of the “great ghettos” of the immigrant experience or what turn-of-the-century social reformer Minnie Louis called the “three D’s — dirt, discomfort and disease,” Moore’s emphasis on the “three A’s — the army, airplanes and air conditioning” — of the postwar era will come as a surprise. ² As she vividly makes clear, there’s much more to the American Jewish experience than the standard iconic narratives would have us believe.

Picking up where her previous book, At Home in America: Second Generation New York Jews (1981), leaves off, Moore’s new work follows the trajectory of her subjects as they continue their wanderings from place to place. As is so often the case in Jewish history, mobility, once again, takes center stage. But this time it’s not a matter of moving from Egypt to Canaan or from the Lower East Side to Borough Park but of moving from the crowded northeast to the spacious, sun-drenched South and West. Twenty years after their parents had crossed the Williamsburg Bridge, their children crossed the Blue Ridge and Sierra Nevada mountains in search of a new life for themselves, far away from the traditional centers of Jewish residential concentration. In the once inhospitable wilderness of Miami and Los Angeles, postwar Jews like Bella Lehrman and Eddie Zwern, much like their parents and grandparents before them, squarely confronted the limits and possibilities of America — but with one critical difference. Unlike their predecessors, Bella and Eddie felt very much at home in America for they were “Americans by birth and instinct, not by nationality and gratitude” (p. 62).

The Bellas, Eddies, Lillians, and Seymours of this new...