Lila Corwin Berman

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

In this provocative and accessible urban history, Lila Corwin Berman considers the role that Detroits Jews played in the citys well-known narrative of migration and decline. Taking its cue from social critics and historians who have long looked toward Detroit to understand twentieth-century urban transformations, Metropolitan Jews tells the story of Jews leaving the city while retaining a deep connection to it. Berman argues convincingly that though most Jews moved to the suburbs, urban abandonment, disinvestment, and an embrace of conservatism did not invariably accompany their moves. Instead, the Jewish postwar migration was marked by an enduring commitment to a newly fashioned urbanism with a vision of self, community, and society that persisted well beyond city limits. Complex and subtle, Metropolitan Jews pushes urban scholarship beyond the tenacious black/white, urban/suburban dichotomy. It demands a more nuanced understanding of the process and politics of suburbanization and will reframe how we think about the American urban experiment and modern Jewish history.

American Jews and the Ambivalence of Middle-Classness

Class in the United States may be one of the hardest things to determine, and yet one of the most determinant forces. while this has not always been the case, it has increasingly been so since the end of the Second world war, when a mix of economic prosperity and consumer culture helped spin a fantasy of social equality.1 The belief in an expanding middle class served as confirmation of fading class lines, but the postwar obsession with talking about the middle class also evidenced that class still mattered in american life. The trouble was how to define class, especially the middle class. The knowledge that class shaped american life, and yet that few americans could articulate how, bred a particular kind of anxiety. in 1955, for example, allen Ginsberg excoriated middle-class culture in his poem “Howl,” and that same year Sloan wilson depicted suburban middle-class life as desperately meaningless in his novel The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit.2 novelists and poets were not alone in searching for a language of middle-classness. in that same era, a group of social critics popularized a new vocabulary about and in many ways for the middle class. in their new terminology, middle class served as shorthand for the typical and normal in american life. it also came to define much of what was wrong in america. The writings of these social critics reflected a wider cultural ambivalence about the power a newly defined mass public—the postwar middle class—might wield. By diagnosing the problems of the middle class, these critics sought to control and contain its potential power. american Jews shared a deep ambivalence about middle-class power that paralleled broader american trends but also was connected to longstanding anxiety about the consequences of Jews assuming power in the