Ambivalent Embrace
Jewish Upward Mobility in Postwar America
Rachel Kranson
Publisher: University of North Carolina Press
Imprint: The University of North Carolina Press
Published: 09/2017
Pages: 232
Subject: Social Science, History, Religion
| University of North Carolina
Print ISBN: 9780000000000
eBook ISBN: 9781469635453
DESCRIPTION
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.