Americas Jews

3. The Acculturation of the Second Generation

3. The Acculturation of the Second Generation Having achieved some economic security during the course of the first-the immigrant-generation, the second generation set out to take full advantage of the opportunities that American society presented to them. If their parents had not already done so, they moved out of the immigrant neighborhoods to the more modern, middle-class neighborhoods of the large cities in which they lived. In New York City, for example, there was a mass movement of Jews from Manhattan to these neighborhoods in Brooklyn and the Bronx during the 1920s and 1930s (Moore, 1981a). They went to particular areas, such as Eastern Parkway and Flatbush in Brooklyn and Pelham Parkway and the Grand Concourse in the Bronx, to some extent in response to appeals to prospective Jewish tenants from Jews who had established a foothold in the construction and real-estate industries and who specifically catered to the middle-class and ethnic desires of their fellow mobile Jews (ibid., pp. 19-58). A similar pattern developed during the 1940s when, in the rush to suburbia, Jewish builders of suburban communities encouraged fellow Jews to move to these new communities (Gans, 1958, p. 210). In his study of the residential patterns of Jews in Chicago during the 1920s, Louis Wirth analyzed the migration from the immigrant neighborhood, the "ghetto," to the area of second settlement and its effects upon the Jewish community. As he saw it, the first to leave the ghetto were those who were most successful economically and usually least tied to 62 Jewish tradition, The "all-rightnick," the Jew who "in his The A((uiluralion of Ihe Sf[ond Generation 63 opportunism, has thrown overboard most of the cultural baggage of his group" and who "represents the type of business man to whom success is everything" (Wirth, 1928, pp. 248-49) is the major figure in the initial development of the second area. The social organization of the second area comes to reflect the secularization and assimilation of the new generation of economically mobile Jews. Distinctive 'social types' emerge in the new area, such as "the Lodgenik, or joiner; the Radikalke, or the emancipated woman; the society lady or the philanthropic woman who goes back to the ghetto 'to do something for these poor people,' of whom she was recently one; and the 010101, or the almost emancipated person who clings to a little beard" (ibid., p. 250). The plain, small synagogue of the immigrant neighborhood was replaced by the beautiful, magnificent, and "pretentious " synagogue structures of the new neighborhood. In place of the Orthodoxy of the ghetto synagogue, Conservative Judaism became increasingly important in the second area. * Initially founded by moderate traditionalists as a bulwark against Reform, this uniquely"American religious movement" (Sklare, 1972), responded to the changing needs and values of American Jewry and reshaped Judaism accordingly . Second-generation Jews, who found Orthodoxy to be too confining and inhibiting in their drive for economic and social mobility, but who strongly wished nevertheless to retain their Jewish ethnic and religious identity, embraced Conservative Judaism as being the ideal alternative between the "too religious" Orthodox and the "non religious" Reform. The Conservative synagogue became the central institution of the new Jewish community, and the religious and secular ethnic activities of the community both were centered within it. The conception of the synagogue as such a center was most clearly articulated in the work of Mordecai M. Kaplan, one of the most influential thinkers of Conservative Judaism and the 'Wirth exaggerated the significance of Conservative Judaism in Lawndale, Chicago. Marshall Sklare provides data showing that Orthodox Judaism remained prominent in this second-generation area of settlement (Sklare, 1972, p. 292, n. 11). 64 America's Jews in Transition founder of a later fourth branch of American Judaism, Reconstructionism (Liebman, 1970), As Kaplan argued, "to fulfill the comprehensive purpose called for by present-day conditions, a synagogue must not be monopolized by a particular congregation . It must belong to the entire Jewish community. It should be a neighborhood center to which all Jews to whom it is accessible should resort for all religious, culturaL social and recreational purposes" (Kaplan, 1934, p, 425). While the Conservative synagogue never quite became the neighborhood center that Kaplan hoped it would become, in the second-generation community it came to encompass both religious and secular functions for its members. If one looks at the listing of synagogues...