night with Peter Jennings. During the 1980’s, Jennings
covered the 1984 and 1988 presidential elections, the
1985 highjacking of Trans World Airlines (TWA)
flight 847, and the 1986 Space ShuttleChallengerdi-
saster. Tall and handsome with soulful brown eyes,
Jennings soon became a news celebrity. Jennings pro-
jected a sense of trust that transferred through the
television camera and into viewers’ homes. Through-
out the 1980’s, Jennings helped viewers make sense of
the world’s chaos. His mellow, staccato voice, inter-
laid with Canadian pronunciations, brought a com-
forting familiarity to the nightly news.
Impact Peter Jennings delivered the news with a
cool detachment that set him apart from other an-
chors. Viewers trusted him to report truthfully, ac-
curately, and fairly. Jennings’s believability helped
makeWorld News Tonight with Peter Jenningsthe most
watched nightly network news broadcast.
Further Reading
Goldberg, Robert, and Gerald J. Goldberg.Anchors:
Brokaw, Jennings, Rather, and the Evening News.New
York: Carol, 1990.
Jennings, Peter, and Todd Brewster.The Centur y.
New York: Doubleday, 1998.
___.In Search of America.New York: Disney Press,
2002.
Rhonda L. Smith
See also Beirut bombings;Challengerdisaster; Elec-
tions in the United States, 1984; Elections in the
United States, 1988; Journalism; Network anchors;
Television.
Jewish Americans
Identification Americans of Jewish descent from
many countries of origin
For many Jewish Americans, the 1980’s was a period of in-
creasing commitment to Jewish life in its diverse forms, in-
cluding Jewish contributions to the larger American cul-
ture. The ver y diversity of those forms sparked controversies,
however, particularly over how to accommodate such wider
American concerns as equality for women, as well as how
best to promote human rights in Israel and the Soviet
Union.
Two major shifts in non-Orthodox Jewish religious
life occurred in 1983. First, the Conservative move-
ment, a century-old American movement within Ju-
daism that charted a middle way between the more
liberal Reform movement and traditional Ortho-
doxy, decided to permit women to serve as rabbis.
The movement began to accept women as rabbinical
students, and the first Conservative woman rabbi,
Amy Eilberg, was ordained in 1985. (The Reform
movement had ordained its first woman rabbi in
1972.) In the 1980’s, “egalitarian” Conservative syna-
gogues, which accorded women the same religious
rights and responsibilities as men, increased dramat-
ically.
The Reform movement, meanwhile, announced
that it would accept as Jews the children born of Jew-
ish fathers and non-Jewish mothers, if these children
were raised as Jews. In traditional Jewish law, only
birth to a Jewish mother or conversion rendered a
child Jewish, but as intermarriage between Ameri-
can Jews and non-Jews steadily increased, Reform
leaders felt that a public ruling on this issue was
needed. They maintained that Jewish fathers, as well
as mothers, should be able to raise their children as
Jews. Orthodox and some Conservative leaders con-
demned this decision.Jewish Americans and Soviet Jewry In 1980, the
Soviet Union began to cut the number of Jews it al-
lowed to leave the country. At the same time, these
emigrants increasingly elected to settle in the United
States rather than Israel. The United States granted
Soviet Jews refugee status, and Jewish American re-
lief agencies oversaw their resettlement and integra-
tion into American life. The Soviet Union became
increasingly reluctant to allow Jews to emigrate, how-
ever. The Jewish American community advocated
strongly for increased freedom of movement for
Soviet Jews, and this became an important negotiat-
ing issue between the United States and the Soviet
Union. In the early to mid-1980’s, the issue of Soviet
Jewry was one unifying issue for the Jewish American
community.
Then, in the late 1980’s, the Soviet Union began
to collapse, and with its dissolution, the barriers to
Jewish emigration came down. Between 1986 and
1990, 300,000 Soviet Jews emigrated, almost one-
third of them to the United States. The Israeli gov-
ernment, which desired these immigrants to aug-
ment its Jewish population, advocated for the United
States and the Jewish American community to direct
more Soviet emigrants to Israel. At the same time,The Eighties in America Jewish Americans 549