In the United States, the creation of Israel would have its most visible
impact only after 1967. Between 1945 and 1967, American Jewry would fol-
low the larger trends of American society and culture – the central
characteristic of American-Jewish history. Demographically, Jews joined the
movement to suburbia, typically concentrating in one or two suburbs of each
major urban center. The political outlook of American Jews gravitated toward
the political center during the late 1940s and the 1950s. Until the end of the
1940s, there was considerable support among American Jews for the left, a con-
tinuation of the prewar support for the left among immigrants, Bundists, and
other working-class Jews. During the war, the popularity of the American
Communist Party was buttressed by the Soviet Union’s struggle against Hitler.
Bundist and Labor Zionist summer camps were sources of support for the left.
This trend continued through the 1940s. In 1946, the Communist candi-
dates for the New York state comptroller and attorney general received more
votes from Jews than from anyone else, although their votes represented only
a minority of the total Jewish vote. In the 1948 presidential election, Henry
Wallace, nominee of the Progressive Party, was endorsed by the American
Communist Party. Half of his 1.1 million votes were from Jews. In short,
although most Jews were not leftists, much of the left was Jewish.
By the 1950s, this support had waned with the disappearance of immi-
grant and working-class Jewish neighborhoods, whose limited privacy, street
life, and stoops were amenable for political action. In contrast, the increased
privacy and individualism of suburban middle-class neighborhoods was more
amenable to a liberal rather than a socialist outlook. In addition, the upward
mobility made possibility by the GI Bill, coupled with the souring of com-
munism during the McCarthy era, drove Jews from the left to left of center.
Yet Jews remained liberal. Jewish support for the radical left waned, but Jews
remained supporters of labor unions.
The upward mobility of American Jewry bred a growing self-confidence
that was evidenced, among other things, in the emergence of massive syna-
gogues and temples in many American cities. Like the Dohány Street Temple
in Budapest and other large European synagogues built during the heyday of
European liberalism, these new American synagogues signaled a coming of
age of American Jewry.
At the same time, suburbanization and prosperity also introduced certain
uncertainties and tensions within postwar American Jewry. The flight to the
suburbs and the decline of immigrant neighborhoods eliminated the built-in
ethnic and religious flavor that had hitherto been a pervasive component of
Jewish life in America. This shift was manifest in the controversy over driving
to the synagogue on the Sabbath – which traditionally was taboo. During the
1950s, the Conservative Movement, sensing that few of its members could
attend Saturday morning services without riding in a car, allowed its members
to drive. This drove a rift between Conservative and Orthodox Judaism, which
previously had been divided by a line that was, at best, blurred.
Jews in the postwar world 237