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Ambivalent embrace : Jewish upward mobility in postwar America / Rachel Kranson.

by Kranson, Rachel, author.

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Chapel Hill : The University of North Carolina Press, [2017]

Jews -- United States -- Social conditions.

Jews -- United States -- Attitudes.

Wealth -- Religious aspects -- Judaism.

Wealth -- Moral and ethical aspects.

Wealth -- Psychological aspects.

Jews -- United States -- Identity.

9781469635439 (paperback ; alkaline paper) :

1469635437 (paperback ; alkaline paper)

xiv, 216 pages : illustrations, portrait ; 24 cm

Materially poor, spiritually rich: poverty in the postwar Jewish imagination -- What now supports Jewish liberalism?: upward mobility and Jewish political identity -- Pathfinders' predicament: negotiating middle-class Judaism -- What kind of job is that for a nice Jewish boy?: masculinity in an upwardly mobile community -- Hadassah makes you important: debating middle-class Jewish femininity -- From generation to generation: the Jewish counterculture's critique of affluence.

This new cultural history of Jewish life and identity in the United States after World War II focuses on the process of upward mobility. Rachel Kranson challenges the common notion that most American Jews unambivalently celebrated their generally strong growth in economic status and social acceptance during the booming postwar era. In fact, a significant number of Jewish religious, artistic, and intellectual leaders worried about the ascent of large numbers of Jews into the American middle class. Kranson reveals that many Jews were deeply concerned that their lives--affected by rapidly changing political pressures, gender roles, and religious practices--were becoming dangerously disconnected from authentic Jewish values. She uncovers how Jewish leaders delivered jeremiads that warned affluent Jews of hypocrisy and associated "good" Jews with poverty, even at times romanticizing life in America's immigrant slums and Europe's impoverished shtetls. Jewish leaders, while not trying to hinder economic development, thus cemented an ongoing identification with the Jewish heritage of poverty and marginality as a crucial element in an American Jewish ethos--back cover.

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