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Further, Tenney’s brother, Arthur, became Bar Mitzvah. As Tenney says, “we weren’t
religious, so my brother’s Bar Mitzvah was more symbolic than religious. It
symbolized to us that we were Jewish and that we were part of this greater
community.” 199 Tenney recalls that her parents chose to surround themselves with
other Jews; most, if not all, of her neighborhood friends were Jewish. Tenney grew
up in Brooklyn’s Flatbush neighborhood, which by the 1920s, had a reputation as a
Jewish, “upper-middle class enclave.” 200 As Deborah Dash Moore wrote in At Home
in America: Second Generation New York Jews, “Flatbush attracted Jewish
businessmen and professionals.” 201 Tenney’s father, Mr. Allan Emil, fit this mold: he
was a successful lawyer, sent his children to private school, and lived in a
picturesque townhouse.
As a child, Tenney attended New York’s School of Ethical Culture. The school
was associated with the Ethical Culture movement, which emerged out of Reform
Judaism. Most members of New York’s Ethical Culture Society (and the Ethical
Culture Societies that sprung up in other cities) were Jews. The School of Ethical
Culture, like the movement, was focused less on religion and focused more on
morality. According to Howard Radest’s Toward Common Ground: The Story of the
Ethical Societies in the United States, the school tried to instill an “ethical
personality” in its students, teaching them to be “humane, free, efficient, culture, and
199 Judy Tenney, Interview with author, January 20, 2013.
200 Deborah Dash Moore, At Home in America: Second Generation New York Jews
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1981), 78.
201 Ibid, 78.
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