Ambivalent Embrace

The entry of American Jews into the American middle-class mainstream during the post–World War II decades has traditionally been presented as an unequivocal triumph. Yet Rachel Kranson's Ambivalent Embrace suggests that this view was not so universal as assumed, adding a different voice to the growing chorus of accounts of American Jewry in the immediate postwar period. This slim volume, which includes a brief chapter about the era's younger generation rejecting the values with which they were raised, seeks to demonstrate how much closer the prevailing view of the postwar American Jewish experience was to the views of critics of postwar materialism. The first chapter describes the fear that material success had come at the price of spiritual impoverishment and the loss of Jewish authenticity, of the idealization of the harsh life of the old-world shtetl (and even the urban immigrant neighborhood), and of the new state of Israel, then characterized by economic austerity. The second chapter speaks of optimism about the continued political liberalism of American Jews, even as left-leaning activism declined

Ambivalence · Austerity · Economic history · Idealization · Judaism · Mainstream · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Psychoanalysis · Sociology · Gender Studies · History · Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies · Jewish Identity and Society · Law · Race, History, and American Society