At Home in America: Through the Lens of Metropolitan and Political History

It is both a challenging and an enlightening task to revisit a book with the benefit of more than three decades of historiographic hindsight. As a scholar of twentieth-century metropolitan and political history, particularly liberalism, I was struck by the ways the book stood at the vanguard of many key trends in these fields. Deborah Dash Moore’s At Home in America: Second Generation New York Jews addresses the relationship among space, identity, and class formation that has come to define these fields and, in particular, emphasizes the development of middle-class consciousness and politics. Moore raises many key questions about the nature of liberalism that have continued to preoccupy and perplex scholars. While Moore does not downplay the New Deal, her book reveals the value of pushing the timeline backward and examining the 1920s as a watershed moment in the formulation not only of urban space, but also of modern liberalism. She also gestures to a metropolitan perspective and to the importance of the suburbs to the enterprise of exposing the continued relationship between Jewish identity and liberalism.

Returning to At Home in America illuminated for me just how sidelined the topics of religion and Jewish identity have become in the fields of metropolitan and political history. At the same time, some parts of this 1981 book would have benefited from some of the insights that have emerged from these subfields over the last three decades. Ultimately, fusing the new paradigms of metropolitan and political history with the insights of At Home In America provides an important means for deepening our understanding of the spatial roots and the nature of liberalism and Jewish identity, both in the city and beyond it.

Space, Class, and Identity Formation

Like much of the work that has emerged in metropolitan history, At Home in America highlights the importance of residency in shaping identity, politics, and other facets of individual and collective consciousness. The book is, at its core, an investigation of space and the role of place in shaping ethnic, social, and political identity. Moore documents how Jewish identity did not emerge in a vacuum, but rather in the specific spatial and lived experiences of urban life in New York City. She highlights the importance of the neighborhood as the main force in shaping American Jewish ethnicity and identity as it fostered spatial patterns, personal relationships, and shared values.

At Home in America provides an important example for any scholar seeking to understand how communities spread across several different neighborhoods or municipalities in the same geographic region. Moore’s meticulous mapping of the process of dispersal and neighborhood formation in New York is also a model of how to use the methodology of social history to address larger questions of class identity. She shows how a sense of Jewish identity emerged from the lived experience and the specific history of second-generation Jews in New York during the interwar years. Moore highlights the ways in which New York Jews saw themselves in geographic terms. She observes, “New York’s Jewish geography always implied an inner social reality.”¹ Yet she underscores how the second-generation Jews’ selection of a particular neighborhood and apartment also provided a means to demonstrate a more overt class standing and to signal membership in the middle class. This analysis anticipates Matthew Lassiter’s important claim that “class identity... took on a powerful spatial orientation in the postwar metropolis” as “the physical location of homes and schools became the primary markers of a family’s socioeconomic status.”² Moore shows how this spatialization of class identity also strengthened a sense of Jewish ethnicity, “binding it to the neighborhood by ligaments both manifest and invisible.”³

The second-generation Jews’ shared professional experiences and associations, often forged at the neighborhood level, enhanced their group identity and middle-class consciousness. The second generation experienced “relatively rapid” entrance into the larger American middle class, a move that carried the potential to threaten their religious and cultural ties.⁴ However, as Moore points out, many second-generation Jews were the children of union members...