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Portrait of American Jews - The Last Half of the Twentieth Century (Paperback, New)
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Portrait of American Jews - The Last Half of the Twentieth Century (Paperback, New)
Series: Samuel and Althea Stroum Lectures in Jewish Studies
Expected to ship within 10 - 15 working days
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Has America been a place that has preserved and protected Jewish
life? Is it a place in which a Jewish future is ensured? Samuel
Heilman, long-time observer of American Jewish life, grapples with
these questions from a sociologist's perspective. He argues that
the same conditions that have allowed Jews to live in relative
security since the 1950s have also presented them with a greater
challenge than did the adversity and upheaval of earlier years. The
second half of the twentieth century has been a time when American
Jews have experienced a minimum of prejudice and almost all domains
of life have been accessible to them, but it has also been a time
of assimilation, of swelling rates of intermarriage, and of large
numbers ignoring their Jewishness completely. Jews have no trouble
building synagogues, but they have all sorts of trouble filling
them. The quality of Jewish education is perhaps higher than ever
before, and the output of Jewish scholarship is overwhelming in its
scope and quality, but most American Jews receive a minimum of
religious education and can neither read nor comprehend the great
corpus of Jewish literature in its Hebrew (or Aramaic) original.
This is a time in America when there is no shame in being a Jew,
and yet fewer American Jews seem to know what being a Jew means.
How did this come to be? What does it portend for the Jewish
future? This book endeavors to answer these questions by examining
data gleaned from numerous sociological surveys. Heilman first
discusses the decade of the fifties and the American Jewish quest
for normalcy and mobility. He then details the polarization of
American Jewry into active and passive elements in the sixties and
seventies. Finally he looks at the eighties and nineties and the
issues of Jewish survival and identity and the question of a Jewish
future in America. He also considers generational variation,
residential and marital patterns, institutional development
(especially with regard to Jewish education), and Jewish political
power and influence. This book is part of a stocktaking that has
been occurring among Jews as the century in which their residence
in America was firmly established comes to an end. Grounded in
empirical detail, it provides a concise yet analytic evaluation of
the meaning of the many studies and surveys of the last four and a
half decades. Taking a long view of American Jewry, it is one of
very few books that build on specific sociological data but get
beyond its detail. All those who want to know what it means and has
meant to be an American Jew will find this volume of interest.
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