The generation of American Jews that came of age during the 1950s,
moreover, lacked not only a widespread commitment to traditional obser-
vance but also any direct connection to the traditional world of the shtetl.
Their parents, raised by immigrants, maintained a strong sense of ethnicity
even in the absence of a traditional lifestyle. This was reflected in the final
decline of Yiddish as a lingua franca of American Jews during the 1950s. The
decline of Old World ethnicity stirred a sense of nostalgic loss among
American Jews. Such nostalgia became manifest in the romantic views of
immigration Jewish life on the Lower East Side, as evidenced by the popular-
ity of the The Goldbergstelevision program, and in the growing interest in
stories about life in the shtetls of eastern Europe.
1967 and beyond
A singularly influential event for postwar world Jewry was the Six Day War.
In retrospect, the rapid victory of the State of Israel over its Arab assailants
from June 4 to June 10 set in motion several key developments for Jews in
Israel and the United States. The territorial expansion of Israel through the
capture of the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, the Golan Heights, and the Sinai
Peninsula shone immense prestige on what had hitherto been a fledgling
state amid a host of larger, antagonistic neighbors. The Six Day War changed
the perception of the State of Israel from a tenuous invention that Jews hoped
would survive the birth pangs of statehood and the ever-present threat of mil-
itary destruction into a state whose permanence was no longer in doubt. For
some Jews, territorial expansion not only marked a military victory but had
messianic overtones, particularly the capture of East Jerusalem and the unifi-
cation of Jerusalem under Israeli rule.
In a sense, the timing of this great victory was crucial. Only five years ear-
lier, the attention of Israelis and Jews throughout the world had turned to the
trial of Adolf Eichmann, Hitler’s right-hand man, who had been captured by
the Mossad, Israel’s secret intelligence service, and taken from Argentina to
Israel. The Eichmann trial was a litmus test of the Jewish state in certain
ways. That a Jewish state was insistent on giving the most evil of Nazis other
than Hitler a fair trial attested to its democratic character – a realization of
one of the core aims of most early Zionist thinkers. In addition, the trial
included extensive testimony by Holocaust survivors, called to the stand to
attest that the defendant was indeed Eichmann and that he had committed
the atrocities of which he stood accused. This marked the first extensive pub-
lic airing of survivors’ testimony, opening the doors for more than a
generation of such testimony in the subsequent collection and publication of
memoirs and video histories.
Moreover, among those who testified was Hannah Arendt, a German-
Jewish émigré who accused wartime European Jewish leaders of passivity in
the face of persecution. For an Israeli audience, such an accusation underlined
238 Jews in the postwar world