New York Jews and the Great Depression: Uncertain Promise (Yale Historical Publications Series) - Hardcover

Wenger, Beth S.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0300062656 ISBN 13: 9780300062656

Publisher: Yale University Press, 1996

Synopsis

This remarkable chronicle of New York City's Jewish families during the years of the Great Depression describes a defining moment in American Jewish history. Beth S. Wenger tells the story of a generation of immigrants and their children as they faced an uncertain future in America. Challenging the standard narrative of American Jewish upward mobility, Wenger shows that Jews of the era not only worried about financial stability and their security as a minority group but also questioned the usefulness of their educational endeavors and the ability of their communal institutions to survive. Wenger uncovers the widespread changes throughout the Jewish community that enabled it to emerge from the turmoil of this period and become a thriving middle-class ethnic group in the post-World War II era.

About this title

About the Author

Beth S. Wenger teaches Jewish history at the University of Pennsylvania.

From Publishers Weekly

In the 1930s, the two million Jews living in New York City represented the largest ethnic group in the city. Jewish immigrants had established themselves as successful professionals and entrepreneurs during the prosperous '20s, but with the crash of 1929 and the ensuing years of the Great Depression, they were faced with more than just economic crisis. Wenger, a professor of Jewish history at the University of Pennsylvania, offers an informative history in which the Depression became the catalyst that transformed the Jewish immigrant into the American Jew. She puts a positive, though not altogether convincing or reassuring, spin on a process of acculturation through which "New York Jews ensured the persistence of Jewish identity and community by tailoring Jewish ethnicity to American norms." Challenged by rising anti-Semitism, employment discrimination and college quotas, New York Jews drew upon a tradition of private philanthropy and communal responsibility to establish "informal networks for economic assistance and personal support." In the New Deal era, the Jews of New York found that public welfare and social legislation were at one with this tradition, and forged a lasting bond with the Democratic Party. Wenger provides valuable detail on the history of philanthropy, social services and political activism in the Jewish community, though there is less than one would like on the personal and social lives of these first- and second-generation immigrants. But readers interested in the history of Jews in New York will appreciate the author's thorough treatment of a decade of transition. Photos.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Yale University Press
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 0300062656
• ISBN 13: 9780300062656
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 288