Defining American Jewish Ethnicity

Abstract

The Child of Eastern European Jewish immigrants, American Jewish ethnicity grew from a complex synthesis of Jewish immigrant and American urban life. As the historian Timothy Smith observes, “That this nation's ethnic groups, viewed structurally, were made in America by voluntary association of newcomers has long been evident.” Yet nineteenth-century German Jewish immigrants to the United States, who pioneered in developing ethnic Jewish fraternal associations, elaborated a religious definition of Jewish group identity. American Jewish ethnicity as an ideology and social reality defining Jewish group life in the United States emerged in the years preceding World War II, when a native-born generation of Jews came of age. These second-generation Jews were descendants of the massive Eastern European immigration of 1880–1920, which peaked in 1906. Seeking to become fully American, second-generation Jews climbed out of lower-class jobs and poor immigrant neighborhoods. Norman Podhoretz, who moved from a lower-class section of New York City to an upper-middle-class one, writes that “one of the longest journeys in the world is the journey from Brooklyn to Manhattan — or at least from certain neighborhoods in Brooklyn to certain parts of Manhattan.”