Ambivalent Embrace: Jewish Upward Mobility in Postwar America by Rachel Kranson (review)

Jewish upward economic mobility in the postwar United States is the stuff of legends. It is the story of a how a demographic group once largely immigrant, working class, and socialist, became over the course of a few decades mostly upper middle-class, professional, and liberal. Familiar as this historical narrative is, Rachel Kranson's Ambivalent Embrace does not expend much energy in retelling it, exactly; instead this sharp, readable book chronicles and analyzes the discomfort American Jews, both individuals and authority figures, felt about that transformation as it happened.

Sympathetically, Kranson reads a variety of familiar phenomena through the specific lens of Jews' adjustment to a new economic situation in the postwar United States. Her first chapter, for example, notes that the three sites onto which American Jews projected the Jewish authenticity they felt was missing from their lives in the 1950s and 1960s—namely, the shtetl, the Lower East Side, and the nascent State of Israel—were all sites of extreme poverty; in ascribing value to these places, American Jews demonstrated discomfort with their community's growing wealth. Similarly, Kranson's fourth and fifth chapters understand the complexities of postwar Jewish gender politics—the disdain of male intellectuals and rabbis for "the pressures on American Jewish men to choose high-income careers" (112) and "the vilification of affluent Jewish housewives" (119), among other phenomena—as reflecting anxiety about the economic transformation of the community as a whole.

One of the book's most compelling chapters, the third, presents a case study of an Illinois Reform congregation, Solel, that in the late 1950s and early 1960s struggled against the trends in American Jewish religious life. Deftly weaving between Solel and the national story—it was a period that set the high-water mark for American Jews' synagogue membership, at 60 percent, and during which more than a thousand synagogue buildings were constructed or remodeled—Kranson draws on the congregation's archives to detail how its founders swam against the current. Ambivalent about building anything at all—the congregation's rabbi remarked that "beautiful buildings mark the end of a group's authenticity" (83)—they finally gave in, but insisted on foregoing "frills" typical of peer institutions, like "a spacious lobby area, a social hall, or air conditioning" (81). In 1959, the congregation also abolished its bar mitzvah program to avoid the "ostentatious displays of wealth and bad taste" that had become (and still remain) de rigueur. The congregation's misgivings evoke the discomfort that many Jews must have felt as new practices, like synagogue building funds and bar mitzvah candle-lighting rituals, became mainstays of American Jewish life, but the chapter also reflects the undeniable allure of luxuries. Kranson notes, concluding the chapter, that while Solel remains a "dynamic institution" today, its founders and members could not "for the long term … resist the norms of middle-class Jewish life." (96) Solel now regularly hosts bar and bat mitzvahs and has an air-conditioned social hall.

Though the book's second chapter "traces and analyzes the widespread fear, often expressed by the liberal and left-wing leaders of American Jewry, that American Jews would adopt conservative values as a result of their economic rise," (45) the book as a whole places somewhat less of an emphasis than one might expect on politics, McCarthyism, and the evisceration of a wide range of leftist institutions. The book leaves mostly unasked and unanswered the question of whether many of the people who expressed ambivalence about American Jews' rising wealth were nervous, most of all, about unchecked capitalism and the erasure of political possibilities that had been crucial in an early period of American Jewish life. In focusing on ambivalence, the book also knowingly sidelines all those Jews who, as it rightly notes in passing, gloried in their economic opportunities.

The book's key intervention, in its sixth chapter, is to...