JUDAICA - Wisdom In Torah

the Jewish family” (ibid., p. 35). “By 1938,” notes Feingold, “50
percent of Jewish families produced two or fewer children.
Jews were on their way to becoming America’s most efficient
contraceptors” (p. 48). Sociologists and others at that time
who were sensitive to these trends predicted a decline in the
size of the American Jewish community.
By 1940 American Jews had adopted the model of the
middle-class American family more successfully than any
other immigrant group. This status is portrayed in a number
of popular wartime- and postwar-period novels, including
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (Betty Smith, 1943), A Walker in
the City (Alfred Kazin, 1951), Marjorie Morningstar (Herman
Wouk, 1955), and Good-bye Columbus (Philip Roth, 1959).
Jewish families portrayed in earlier works, such as Abraham
Cahan’s The Rise of David Levinsky (1917) and Henry Roth’s
Call It Sleep (1934), are, by comparison, preoccupied with the
more fundamental issues of resettlement and becoming “real”
Americans. After 1940, these themes are no longer relevant.
Fictional Jewish families as portrayed by Jewish authors in the
1940s are unmistakably, middle-class American families who
also happen to be Jewish.
Glazer asserts that “the fifteen years of prosperity from
the end of the thirties to the mid-fifties … wrought great
changes, and created the Jewish community we know today.…
This community of businessmen and professional
men is better educated and wealthier than most of the population
– probably as well educated and as wealthy as some
of the oldest and longest established elements in the United
States” (ibid., p. 3). Glazer attributes this success to the fact that
Jews, more than other immigrant groups, had for generations
engaged in various urban, middle-class occupations, and in
spirit had long belonged to the middle class.
Upon its rise to the middle class, the Jewish family began
exhibiting additional signs of modernization. Strodbeck
(1957) offers evidence which demonstrates that after World
War II, Jews, as compared to Italians, place less stress on “familism,”
i.e., they are more willing to leave home and live independently.
This suggests that certain values, which helped
American Jews achieve higher social rank, might have had
a negative impact on family solidarity. Balswick (1966) concludes
on the basis of “writings and research material of the
last twenty years,” that “the American Jewish family is closely
knit. It is more closely knit than non-Jewish families with
which it has been compared” (p. 166). However, this conclusion
is challenged by Westerman (1967), who cites various
methodological problems with Balswick’s analysis, particularly
a failure to compare contemporary Jewish families with
those of previous generations.
America’s economic boom following World War II helped
to usher in a golden age for the American Jewish family. The
G.I. Bill of Rights helped American Jewish veterans get an
education and universities expanded to meet growing needs.
Veterans’ benefits also enabled them to purchase homes. Social
integration was advanced by the relocation of second- and
third-generation Jewish families from urban areas of second
family, american jewish
settlement to the periphery of the city and its suburbs. This
migration brought about a paradigm shift in American Jewish
life whose effect on the family, in particular, was fundamental
and far reaching.
Shapiro (1992) cites the reasons for the unprecedented
growth of the suburbs after 1945 as follows, including:
the increased use of automobiles, postwar prosperity, the pentup
demand for housing created by the depression and the war,
the desire of veterans to resume a normal family life after the
dislocations of wartime, the baby boom of the late 1940s and
1950s, government programs that encouraged the building and
purchase of houses by veterans … (p. 43)
Many Jewish families found the means to abandon the
crowded and deteriorating conditions of the city for the newness
and openness of the suburbs. Gordon (1959) specifically
cites the shortage of urban living space as a key factor in their
migration.
The depression years of the 1930s were followed closely by
World War II. During that fifteen-year period, few, if any, new
homes were built, and even fewer families could afford to purchase
them, whatever their cost. Families “doubled up”: sons
or daughters who were recently married moved in with their
parents until conditions improved.… The builders of massproduced
homes, such as those in Levittown, provided “lowcost
housing.” Prices were reasonable enough to satisfy young
people who were determined to establish their own family life,
independent of parents and in-laws.
But not all young, upwardly mobile Jewish families in the period
were so determined, and pockets of urban Jewish life remained.
Dawidowicz describes one postwar group that chose
to stay in the city.
After years of housing starvation (during the Depression and
the war years), many young families in New York found that the
great Queens building boom of 1948–1951 offered them a wide
choice of modest apartments at modest monthly rentals from
$75 to $140. Besides wanting a place to live at rents they could
afford, these young people were fleeing from the changes in
their old neighborhoods in Manhattan, the Bronx, and Brooklyn.
They were looking for an inexpensive facsimile of the suburbs
a half hour from Times Square. (p. 68)
The experience of suburban living influenced the dynamics
of Jewish family life. The new environment engendered a
process of social change reminiscent of the experience of immigrant
families two generations earlier. This is described by
Mary Antin in her autobiography The Promised Land (1912),
in which she notes how:
In Polotzk we had been trained and watched, our days had
been regulated, our conduct prescribed. In America, suddenly
we were let loose on the street. Why? Because my father having
renounced his faith, and my mother being uncertain of hers,
they had no particular creed to hold us to… My parents knew
only that they desired us to be like American children; and seeing
how their neighbors gave their children boundless liberty,
they turned us also loose, never doubting but that the American
way was the best way (pp. 270–1).
ENCYCLOPAEDIA JUDAICA, Second Edition, Volume 6 699