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Article Excerpt
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 non-Jewish world. (3) By their own accounts, American Jews' economic standing rose remarkably quickly, placing the vast majority of them in the ranks of the middle class by the postwar era. (4) General portraits written about the middle class often similarly characterized American Jews as paradigmatic of the postwar expansion and democratization of the middle class. Yet neither Jews nor other Americans saw this fact as unequivocal reason for celebration. For centuries, Jewish economic success, a sign of Jewish power, stirred resentment in the non-Jewish world. During the enlightenment, Jews' economic behavior, and stereotypes about it, informed debates about whether Jews were fit for citizenship. (5) Later, these ideas filtered into the theories of many influential social commentators, even some of Jewish origin. In his famous 1844 essay, "On the Jewish Question," Karl Marx posited that Jewish money--what he termed the Jews' "worldly God"--and Jewish "huckstering"--the Jews' "worldly religion"--dominated Europe, making true emancipation and equality impossible. (6) While his true nemesis was bourgeois society, Marx's contention that Jewish economic power perpetuated societal ills fueled pernicious conspiracy theories about Jews that arose in the late nineteenth century. In the United States, Jews hoped to prove their Americanness precisely through their rising economic status. Yet, although America was not Europe, suspicion about Jews' economic success followed them across the Atlantic. During the Great Depression, some populist leaders, respinning Marx's almost century-old conclusions, tried to characterize Jews as at the helm of an economic system that benefited them more than others. (7) When economic times were better, however, Americans tended to eschew socialist-tinged rejections of capitalism. Instead they believed that money was a legitimate marker of success.
In many ways, Jewish middle-classness was just the kind of success story Americans loved to hear and tell about themselves. Jews helped create American lore about boundless opportunity and individual pluck. American Jews living in new suburbs, full of new homes, new cars, and new consumer goods worked to prove that they could strengthen a middle-class American public and thus American national interests. Yet Jews perceived that the same middle class structure that was expanding to make room for them was hastening two transformations in American life: the effacement of certain lines of social difference that had once seemed inviolable and the empowerment of a mass public. Jews, and especially their leaders, were conflicted about both of these changes. Indisputably, an inclusive and large middle class offered Jews an unprecedented level of acceptance and security. Jewish leaders also believed that it threatened the very basis of Jewish life. An underlying anxiety about Jewish power and Jews' relationship to non-Jewish power structures framed the way Jewish intellectuals and leaders described Jewish middle-classness and echoed larger American concerns about power, and in whose hands it should reside.
Whether Jews were assimilated into the new mass public, becoming just like other American middle classers, or were victims of that new mass public, many Jewish leaders feared middle class expansion. The concept of an undifferentiated mass public had become central in a number of Jewish intellectuals' efforts to explain why Nazism had succeeded and how it could be prevented. They suggested that when a public grew into a mass, it lost any moral compass. Driven by the pressures of conformity and an overwhelming sense of anonymity, a seemingly normal public could become complicit in a genocidal system. Jewish leaders worried that for all the security Jews might gain from an expanding middle class, they stood to lose just as much.
Historians have tended to level invective against the postwar American middle class, replicating the kind of vitriol that social critics produced at the time. Similarly, those scholars studying American Jewish history often portray the middle class as vacuous and shallow, in contrast to a vaunted working class. (8) Although one may interpret this historiographic trend itself as an indication of deep cultural ambivalence about middle-classness, historians have overlooked the roots of that ambivalence. Instead they often label the postwar middle class as consensus driven and incapable of challenging power structures. Such a narrative has guided historical assessments of American Jews. Yet, as I argue, it demands retelling, and here I start to do just that by showing how Jewish leaders created a language of middle-class ambivalence, melding popular social criticism with Jewish concerns about communal identity, religious normativity, gender ideals, and family stability. From the ways that Jews classified themselves as part of the middle class to their participation--whether as authors or examples--in postwar social criticism, it is impossible to ignore the multilayered anxiety that Jews felt about middle-classness. Middle-class ambivalence--and not simply middle-class conformity--became central to the public articulation of American Jewishness by the second half of the twentieth century.
Ways of Knowing Jewish Middle-Classness
In the late 1950s, a Jewish sociologist enthused, "The Jew is not only a member of a religious minority, but also part of the majority of Americans known as the middle class." (9) His assertion that Jews were, indeed, members of the middle class echoed in countless pronouncements that Jews made about themselves at the time and that historians have made since. The public act of classifying Jews as middle class was, to an extent, self-fulfilling: the more Jews pronounced themselves part of the middle class, the more they felt as if they truly were middle class. In calling themselves middle class, they also participated in a clearly American pattern. A Fortune poll conducted in 1940 discovered that 79 percent of Americans identified themselves as members of the middle class. Over the next decade, the percentage only increased. (10)
Why did the vast majority of Americans classify themselves as middle class, so much so that a Jewish sociologists could proclaim Jews' middle-classness an indication of their acceptance into the majority culture? Far from an empirical reality, middle-classness was a self-conscious category that individuals and groups employed to characterize economic, cultural, social, and political behavior. (11) Starting in the 1920s, cultural authorities and experts, especially social scientists, sought to hone their tools to encapsulate the core characteristics of American life. Convinced that firsthand observation of Americans living their lives could be converted into data sets indicative of norms, they sculpted a new set of standards to define normalcy and deviance. Increasingly, they used the terminology of middle-classness as shorthand for that which was most fundamentally American. (12)
Class was of persistent interest to researchers studying the American public, especially because American class structure appeared so distinct from European class models, most importantly Marxist ones. Researchers such as Robert and Helen Lynd in their famous Middletown studies or W. Lloyd Warner and his colleagues, who examined so-called "Yankee City," believed that to understand American life one had to understand how class functioned. Over and over, they noted that the class system, far from creating a rigid boundary among groups, was an instrument for individual and group reinvention. One could behave, consume, and earn as if one belonged to a higher class and, by and by, one would indeed belong to that class. In the 1940s, Warner noted that even so-called "ethnic minorities" such as Jews, Greeks, or Armenians were gaining a foothold on America's class ladder and working their way up. Only "Negroes," he noted, remained isolated "from the general life of the community," no matter their economic status. (13) Class identity, in other words, transcended almost every ethnic boundary. He implied that those ethnic groups that did not rise into the middle class exposed themselves to invidious comparisons with black Americans and undermined the logic of opportunity that justified American class and race structure.
For Jews, proclamations of their arrival into the middle class went hand in hand with attempts to secure their membership in white America. Certain public moments, like the tercentenary of Jewish settlement in America celebrated in 1954, elicited particularly self-conscious pronouncements of Jewish middle-classness. (14) "One way or another," Harvard historian Oscar Handlin wrote on the occasion, "the Jews were coming to conform to the standards of middle-class life in America." (15) Likewise, in the volume of the American Jewish Year Book issued to celebrate the tercentenary, sociologist Nathan Glazer described the trajectory of Jewish life in America as marked by "the tone of respectable, prosperous, 'middle class' existence." (16)
While American Jewish leaders took great pride in the facts and figures evidencing Jewish accumulation of wealth, most also realized that the same information made Jews vulnerable. A 1947 Fortune poll reported that more than one third of Americans believed that Jews were "getting more economic power ... than is good for the country." (17) Statistics, such as those generated from the 1957 Current Population Survey on Religion, which contained a limited amount of personal information cross-tabulated by religion, seemed possible fodder...
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