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

Rachel Kranson’s engaging cultural history of Jewish life in postwar America complements revisionist histories of the postwar years that interrogate the notion that the 1950s was an idyllic time characterized by an easy conformity and uncritical ideological consensus. She carefully explores the underlying tensions within the upwardly mobile Jewish community, which eventually contributed to the emergence of a Jewish counterculture in the late 1960s and 1970s. In a search for authenticity, when an increasing number of Jews were joining the ranks of the suburban middle class, postwar Jewish thought leaders romanticized a Jewish cultural life shaped by social isolation and economic vulnerability. Jews coming of age in the 1960s, empowered and inspired by wider critiques of conformity promulgated by social movements, especially from within the New Left, were similarly eager to construct an authentic Jewish identity. Just as historians of African Americans, gays and lesbians, and women have discovered preconditions to the activism of the 1960s and 1970s in nascent critiques of the white supremacy, heteronormative dominance, and oppressive gender ideals in postwar America, Kranson sees continuity from critiques of upward mobility in the 1950s to Jewish countercultural impulses in the 1970s.

Relying on the works and actions of Jewish leaders, Kranson examines how the process of upward mobility, manifested in a migration from cities to suburbs, raised concerns about the direction of Jewish identity. Employing statistical measures for upward mobility in categories such as educational attainment, entrance to the professions, income, and migration to the suburbs, Kranson implies that Jewish life in postwar America was a profound change that inspired romantic visions of a Jewish identity forged in the past. While “newly prosperous Jews used their growing resources to transform Jewish culture and practice, creating new modes of ritual and socialization that harmonized with their middle-class standing,” Jewish leaders attempted to forge a more legitimate Jewish identity that evoked the isolation and poverty experienced in the shtetl and immigrant slums in the U.S. as well as in the creation of a separate state of Israel as a homeland for Holocaust survivors (3). The idealization of these distinctive historical moments in Jewish history changed the way Jewish culture was understood and taught in America during the postwar years. A plethora of scholarly works of Jewish history explored life in Eastern Europe and America’s immigrant communities. Leaders contrasted the intense spirituality of shtetl life, the labor activism of immigrants, and the nation-building in Israel with the banality of suburban culture.

Separate chapters consider how anxieties around Jewish life in America were displayed within several aspects of identity formation: religious practices, political affiliations, and conceptions of gender. Kranson uses one congregation as a case study to illustrate the ambivalence surrounding the suburban synagogue building boom. Congregation Solel took several steps to avoid undermining its longstanding spiritual mission in urban Chicago. But Kranson acknowledges that most synagogues did not go to such lengths to retain ties to the immigrant past, which begs the question of just how much angst suburban Jews felt about the purpose of their congregations. She similarly focuses on the criticism of a select group of pundits who feared that suburbanization would lead to the ascendancy of conservative politics, even though opinion polls revealed that suburban Jews did not renounce liberalism. Due in part to the evisceration of the Jewish Left after World War II, leaders sought to ensure that Jews continued to espouse and support progressive ideas, which, apparently, many did. They also feared that the postwar expectation that Jewish men must become successful breadwinners would undermine historical commitments to education and spirituality. The role of Jewish women was especially contested; women’s fervent civic engagement in the suburbs raised apprehensions about the future of the Jewish family.

Jews coming of age in the 1960s, influenced by leaders’ uneasiness over the process of suburbanization and inspired by social protests and countercultural behaviors, shared their elders’ romantic conceptions of the past...