Metropolitan Jews: Politics, Race, and Religion in Postwar Detroit

Abstract

Much debate surrounds whether American Jews constitute a religious, racial, ethnic, or cultural group. Lila Corwin Berman's Metropolitan Jews posits urbanism as another key component of American Jewish identity. Berman is not the first historian to write about Jewish connections to city life, but her monograph of postwar Detroit offers a distinctive perspective on what she defines as “metropolitan urbanism” (p. 5). Metropolitan Jews assesses Jewish residential patterns, political advocacy, and economic pursuits in the greater Detroit region from the 1920s to the present, focusing on the 1950s and 1960s. In recounting the Jewish exodus from Detroit in the 1960s, Berman tells a familiar story of white flight, but she also notices a resilient urbanism. Detroit Jews fled Detroit neighborhoods at rates similar to those of other white ethnic groups, but their “metropolitan consciousness” kept them anchored in urban institutions and political life (p. 7). Unlike other ethnic groups, Jews never fully divested from the city that offered them unprecedented freedom, protection, and access to power. A metropolitan identity enabled Jews to expand the scope of the city and redefine their place in it. Berman shows how Jewish urbanism became a way to stem the tide of suburbanization, secularization, and middle-class consumerism. As Jews moved out of Detroit in the late 1950s and mid-1960s their ingrained urbanism transformed from local advocacy to broader city, state, and national causes. Maintaining a connection to the city became a way of asserting a Jewish identity grounded in cosmopolitan and liberal values.