Inventing Great Neck: Jewish Identity and the American Dream (review)

In this popular history, Judith Goldstein traces the development of Great Neck, New York, through an intimate look at the personalities and problems that shaped this suburban enclave. She pays particular attention to the evolution of Jewish and non-Jewish relations, the limits of tolerance and liberalism, and the effects of Jewish migration on suburbanization.

Goldstein begins her study in the 1920s, when Great Neck first gained attention on the national scene. However, its renown stemmed not from its Jewish population, which then only numbered around two hundred families, but from its image as an affluent haven for New York City’s businessmen and artistic elite, with such notables as Pulitzer’s World editor Herbert Bayard Swope, Groucho Marx, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, who memorialized the area in his famous novel, The Great Gatsby. With the exception of an “old guard” Protestant elite, as labeled by Goldstein, who maintained their own small social network, the wealthy and notable Jewish and non-Jewish inhabitants of Great Neck mingled socially with relative ease. This, according to Goldstein, set Great Neck apart from other suburbs, as it conducted a new “social experiment,” which tried to “push aside the traditional barriers built on social separation” (p. 22). Since most of the Jewish and non-Jewish residents of Great Neck had only recently moved into the area, few traditional social barriers for mixing stood in their way. Indeed, many of the guests frequenting parties such as those at the Swope residence knew one another from business ventures in New York City, only sixteen miles west, or through the introduction of a friend acquainted with those attending. Here, however, not much mention is made of the local Jewish and non-Jewish residents who would not have been issued an invitation to these upscale gatherings.

Focus on the general population of the suburb appeared when Great Neck’s reputation as a celebrity playground and tolerant environment towards minorities encouraged other Jews to settle in the area. Many Jews had attained a higher level of social mobility by the 1920s and 1930s, and this brought them to the hospitable suburban environment. They saw their chance to move to Great Neck and settle there as proof of their “arrival” into the middle class. While not all non-Jewish residents welcomed the influx of Jews into the neighborhood, the lack of formal residential restriction encouraged further growth. Proving the extent of their acculturation provided Jews the best answer for how to maintain positive relations with Great Neck’s non-Jewish population, which still constituted the majority of the town’s inhabitants. Those Jews who moved to Great Neck during this period successfully immersed themselves in the civic activities of the larger population while simultaneously creating new venues for Jewish communal life in a place where none previously existed. In 1930, at the beginning of the Depression, Temple Beth-El, a Reform congregation and the first synagogue in the area, opened its doors, displaying architectural details which “blended perfectly with the tone of much of Great Neck’s public architecture” (p. 69).

Goldstein views the conclusion of World War II as the catalyst for great change in Great Neck’s Jewish community and also in relations between the suburb’s Jewish and non-Jewish residents. A large-scale influx of Jews brought new demands upon the city. Temple Israel, the small Conservative synagogue, flourished in numbers under the leadership of Rabbi Mordecai Waxman and his wife, Ruth. In the larger community, Jewish residents played a pivotal role in pressing the city to make possible a first-rate public school system, which was realized with the support of local non-Jewish educators such as the school superintendent, Dr. John Lewis Mills. Goldstein cites this commitment to public education both as representative of the changes in communal makeup as a result of increased Jewish presence in the suburb, and also as the high point of cooperation and joint participation...