Strategies for Social Mobility

Anthropological research on culture change and continuity all too rarely narrows in on particular family dynamics as a means for describing and explaining cultural transmission and transformation. Myrna Silverman's study is a welcome exception to this generalization, thereby making it a special contribution to understanding ethnicity as a cultural process. Her focus is, of course, upon the Jewish community in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. In the 1990s Pittsburgh still retains a highly European flavor in its neighborhoods and cultural life, and this book documents the historical and spatial features of the Jewish community with respect to its place in Pittsburgh's ethnic history. Broadly speaking, the Jewish community in Pittsburgh is characterized as being representative of the American Jewish population (p. 49). Some features, however, clearly set it apart. The topography of Pittsburgh-with its rivers and mountainous terrain-has fostered the development and persistence of close-knit communities located mainly within the city limits. By the time the author conducted her study in the 1970s, the Jewish community had been relatively stable geographically and socially for at least forty years. Young people retained strong bonds to the neighborhood communities in which they and their parents had grown up, and friendship ties were often maintained over three generations even following relocation to other neighborhoods. Overall, it remained basically a conservative community, ideologically, socially, and geographically. Two features about this study and publication make it especially valuable for ethnicity and family research: its close attention to history and its indepth family cases. The thorough overview of the history of the Jewish community in Pittsburgh begins in the 1830s and 1840s with the arrival of German Jews and then moves to the arrival of the

Archaeology · Ethnic group · Fictive kinship · Genealogy · Judaism · Kinship · Sociology · Anthropology · Gender Studies · History · Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies · Jewish Identity and Society · Latin American and Latino Studies