American Jewish History

This volume of six strong essays challenges the conventional paradigm governing American Jewish studies. It sheds light not only on Jewish "difference," or particularity, but also on something truly unique in American (and European) Jewish history—Jews' confident, if not emphatic, declaration of their difference. Jews, or at least more Jews than before the 1930s, wanted to be different, mainly from an intolerant white elite. Oddly, all six writers attribute ascendant Jewish self-affirmation to external influences, such as Johnson's Great Society programs or black nationalism, virtually ignoring internal, Jewish dynamics.

Eric L. Goldstein sets the tone in the introductory essay by situating American Jews historically in an ambiguous middle ground between accommodation to white America's demands and attentiveness to the distinctiveness of Jewish culture. Like Seymour Martin Lipset and other scholars, Goldstein notes the irony of post-World War II American Jews who defined themselves as outsiders when Jews were finally becoming insiders. But Goldstein understates the significance of that irony: Far more than "not ready" (p. 4) to surrender their self-definition as outsiders (Lipset dismisses this self-definition as an "atavism"), Jews, as the subsequent essays make clear, readily manufactured and consumed a culture of Jewish particularity.

Marc Dollinger takes this argument to extremes. In spite of the affinity he sees with American political culture, postwar Jewish culture was actually a turning inward, "a communal retreat from the universalist ideals of classical liberalism" (p. 20). With the collapse of civil rights coalitions and the growth of ethnic activism—inspired in part by black activists and the Johnson administration's group-based liberalism—Jews focused on Jewish-specific causes, mainly the state of Israel, Soviet Jewry, [End Page 88] and religious egalitarianism. Dollinger, however, elides the important Jewish renegotiation with American culture. Surely the Jewish coalitions with Christians to defeat Soviet human rights abuses, and with Blacks to end segregation, weren't merely self-serving or even a matter of enlightened self-interest.

Matthew Frye Jacobson makes this point with considerable deft. Even though Jews created, in the sixties, seventies, and eighties, what he calls a heritage industry of books and films springing from "an unmeltable sense of commonly held peoplehood" (p. 33), ethnicity amounted to "a new syntax of nationality and belonging" (p. 27). "Difference," it turns out, provided a new strategy to achieve its putative opposite, accommodationism. To make his case, Jacobson explores Jews' fascination with their immigrant roots. The Lower East Side craze, reprinting of immigrant ghetto fiction, the Jewish-ethnic saga in such films as Avalon, Fiddler on the Roof, and An American Tail: as inward-looking as they were, these epic depictions of the Jewish immigrant experience achieved something much broader—a link with other white, European immigrant experiences.

Jacobson argues that Jews joined other European white "ethnics" in celebrating a "generic" immigrant past. Immigrant stories were fundamentally interchangeable, each showing Italian or Greek or Irish or Jewish rugged individualism and a romance of self-reliance. Together the immigrant saga formed an "Ellis Island" in-group that included Jews. (Conversely and importantly, it excluded a complacent, privileged, and morally compromised "Plymouth Rock whiteness" as well as Blacks who, by suggestion, didn't benefit from the mythic immigrant experience of self-propelled triumph over adversity.)

Rachel Rubin draws a similar conclusion in her creative study of Jewish gangsters, or rather, historical representations of Jewish gangsters. From the 1930s on, Jews periodically re-imagined Jewish-gangster stories to help define their relationships with America. Jewish crime wasn't always a source of shame, an unpleasant reminder that Jews could be dangerous and unfit for American citizenship. In the forties, films began to show that Jewish crime pays, such as in Force of Evil (1942) where the illegal numbers racket could lift Jews out of the ghetto. Against the background of Jewish-ethnic revivalism, Rubin shows how...