JUDAICA - Wisdom In Torah

family, american jewish
eration families attenuated the Orthodox rituals, which were
the only form of religious Judaism their parents and grandparents
had known in Eastern Europe, even if these had not been
consistently observed. Kramer and Leventman note that upon
becoming adults, the children of immigrants “acquired a middle-class
inclination to make distinctions between the sacred
and the secular unknown in the ghetto … What the second
generation required were religious institutions adapted to the
norms of its new status” (ibid., p. 11). Sklare (1972) thus attributes
the success of Conservative Judaism during the period
1920–1950 to “its appeal to young marrieds who were in the
process of establishing independent households and developing
a pattern of Jewish living that would be distinctive to their
generation.…Younger Jews who wished to retain continuity
with their past and at the same time integrate into American
middle-class culture found Conservative Judaism to be the
perfect solution to their dilemma” (Sklare, ibid.). Both Conservative
and Reform Judaism represented a restructuring of
European Orthodox religious patterns that appealed more to
American Jewish sensibilities. In particular, they sanctioned
shorter, mixed-pew Sabbath worship services with greater
decorum. For families of both movements, the weekly synagogue
service became the main, and for many the only, even
if infrequent, family religious activity, with the exception of
the Passover seder, Hanukkah candles, or celebrating a family
life cycle event, such as a bar or bat mitzvah. The synagogue
was used for life cycle events: birth and bar-mitzvah, marriage
and death, times of crisis and illness as well as on the High
Holidays. One observer spoke of it as a Judaism of “hatch em,
match em, patch em and dispatch em.”
To be sure, many family traditions brought from Europe
endured and were passed on to the first American-born
generation. “Certain deeply felt attitudes, well adapted to the
conditions of the shtetl, were brought … by East European
immigrants and transplanted in American soil. If this soil
had been completely uncongenial to them, they would be
dead and forgotten by now; but the soil was partly congenial,
partly inimical” (Yaffe, p. 278). Jewish families saw in the pluralistic
nature of American society a tolerance for non-native
customs that did not exist in the more highly structured and
traditional societies of Europe. This openness helped foster
a kind of biculturalism – Jewish and American. Even while
seeking to emulate the ways of their new surroundings, most
immigrants could not divest themselves of their old country
values and norms. As a result, many never felt fully at home in
America. By contrast, their children, born in the United States,
though only one generation removed from Eastern Europe,
saw themselves as American in all respects.
Structural acculturation among second generation Jewish
families began as early as the 1920s, says Feingold, and was
expressed through:
A loosening of the ties of kinship, and ultimately the large extended
family was replaced by a small nuclear one. Family
clans that had settled in the same neighborhood dispersed. The
nuclear family was compelled to bear alone the stress of rapid
change or decline in fortune. Occasionally families cracked under
the strain, but most often the changed Jewish family survived
and continued to live as before – or as much as was possible
(ibid., p. 37).
The dispersion to which Feingold refers was not universal. Second
generation families, in fact, often continued to live in the
same community, and sometimes even in the same apartment
building or complex. This was also true in certain cities more
than others. Pittsburgh for example, has had a stable Jewish
upper-middle-class neighborhood since the 1930s and is still
using the infrastructure created more than three quarters of
a century ago. During this era, three generation households,
consisting of grandparents, parents, and children, were not
as uncommon as they were to become. Grandparents often
maintained an active role in managing the family. No doubt
this helped many young couples by reducing their child-rearing
responsibilities, affording them additional time for work or
schooling. In spite of discrimination, many children of immigrants
succeeded in entering American colleges and universities.
They trained for the “free” professions of law, medicine,
dentistry, pharmacy and accounting (Glazer 1965, p. 33). It
was during this period that large numbers of American Jewish
families improved their socio-economic status, becoming
solidly middle class.
According to Glazer, in the mid-1930s almost one-half
of young Jewish adults came from homes where their fathers
were blue-collar workers, and about one-third from homes
where their fathers owned their own businesses or were managers
and officials in other enterprises. In one-tenth of the
homes the fathers were clerks, and in fewer than one-twentieth
they were professionals. In contrast, some 60 percent of
the younger generation was engaged in “clerical and kindred”
work, and many headed for an independent business career
or profession. In smaller cities during the 1930s, such as Detroit,
Buffalo, and San Francisco, an even larger percentage
of young Jews, including women, were becoming teachers,
white-collar clerks, and salespeople (ibid., pp. 30–32). Their
solid penetration of the middle class during this period set
the stage for even greater socio-economic advancement during
the next two decades.
Even before reaching the middle class economically,
American Jewish families displayed many of the social patterns
of this group. A prime example of this is the decline in
the birth rate. “The process of family limitation among American
Jews,” says Sklare, “has its roots in the fertility behavior
of the first generation. But it was not until the second generation
that newer conceptions of family size made deep inroads”
(ibid., 1971, p. 79). In 11 community-wide studies carried out
between 1930 and 1940 Seligman (see Glazer, p. 34) reports
on Jewish fertility ratios (the proportion of children under 5
per 1,000 persons aged 20–54) ranging from 81 to 122. Among
non-Jewish Caucasians in 1940 from across the United States,
the ratio is 154. Glazer comments that “in the late ‘Thirties, it
seem[s] fair to conclude that a modicum of relative prosperity
had been accompanied by a very rapid drop in the size of
698 ENCYCLOPAEDIA JUDAICA, Second Edition, Volume 6