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2. German and Sephardic Jews preceded Eastern European Jews to the United States, the Sephardim migrating during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in small numbers and the German Jews coming during the nineteenth century, with peak years in the 1850s. Neither Sephardic nor German Jews emphasized the ethnic components of Jewish life; the former made the community coextensive with the synagogue, while the latter opted for a religious definition of Jewish identification. See Jick, Leon A., The Americanization of the Synagogue, 1820–1870 (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1976), esp. Chaps. 1 and 2.Google Scholar

3. In 1906 more than 152,000 Jews from Eastern Europe entered the United States. During the ten years 1904–14 more than a million Jews came to America, as against approximately 700,000 during the preceding two dozen years. Rischin, Moses, The Promised City: New York's Jews 1870–1914 (New York: Corinth, 1962), p. 270.Google Scholar

4. Podhoretz, Norman, Making It (New York: Random House, 1967), p. 3Google Scholar

5. Nahirny, Vladimir C. and Fishman, Joshua A., “American Immigrant Groups: Ethnic Identification and the Problem of Generations,” Sociological Review, 13 (1965), 316.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed

6. Since the term became popular in the United States about a dozen years ago, debate has raged over a definition of “ethnicity,” and little consensus has been achieved. In their most recent volume on the subject, Ethnicity: Theory and Experience (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1975), pp. 2–4Google Scholar, editors Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan note that the word denotes group membership, an objective condition and a new social category of the twentieth century. “Ethnic” is not simply a social category, like “left-handed” people; it refers in some ways to a functioning social group. Ethnicity is an objective category, but it also describes subjective identification. Indeed, the linking of ethnicity not only with the objective existence of ethnic groups but also with the subjective experience of ethnic identity has generated much of the argument over the meaning of the term. The focus here will be on defining Jewish ethnicity in the American context as it relates to Jews' functioning as an ethnic group in American urban society, specifically in New York City. Issues of individual ethnic identity will be examined only indirectly through a discussion of American Jews' ideologies and cultural values.

7. Sklare, Marshall, in The Jews: Social Patterns of an American Group (New York: Free Press, 1958), p. 43Google Scholar, notes that “even if reliable data were available for every other Jewish community in the country, the lack of material about New York City would mean that a valid demographic portrait of American Jewry would still be unavailable.”

8. See American Jewish YearBook for statistics onthe distribution of the Jewish population of the United States.

9. Goren, Arthur A., New York Jews and the Quest for Community: The Kehillah Experiment, 1908–1922 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1970)Google Scholar, describes the way in which Eastern European Jews influenced New York Jewish institutional life, while Rischin, , The Promised CityGoogle Scholar, portrays their pervasive effect on all aspects of Jewish life in the city.

10. See Howe, Irving, World of Our Fathers (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976)Google Scholar, for a good recent treatment of these themes for New York Jews.

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17. Liebman, , Ambivalent American Jew, p. 23.Google Scholar

18. For example see Sherman, C. Bezalel, The Jew Within American Society: A Study in Ethnic Individuality (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1960)Google Scholar, Chapter 2; Berkson, Isaac, Theories of Americanization: A Critical Study: With Special Reference to the Jewish Group (New York: Teachers College, Columbia University, 1920)Google Scholar; and Lipset, Seymour Martin, “The American Jewish Community in a Comparative Context,” Rose, Peter I., ed., The Ghetto and Beyond: Essays on Jewish Life in America (New York: Random House, 1969), pp. 21–32.Google Scholar

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20. Elazar, Daniel J., “American Political Theory and the Political Notions of American Jews: Convergences and Contradictions,”Google Scholar in Rose, , Ghetto and Beyond, pp. 207–9, 215–23Google Scholar, quotes on p. 215. Elazar also argues that American political thinking draws on biblical sources in its emphasis of tradition over ideology, agrarianism over urbanism, federalism over centralism, and messianism over fatalism.

21. Smith, , “Religion and Ethnicity,” (note 1 above), p. 1155.Google Scholar

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26. Quandt, Jean B., From the Small Town to the Great Community: The Social Thought of Progressive Intellectuals (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1970), pp. 3–10.Google Scholar American ideals of communal life include Tonnies's concepts “Gemeinschaft of locality (neighborhood)” and “Gemeinschaft of mind (friendship).” See Tonnies, Ferdinand, Community and Society, trans, and ed. Loomis, Charles P. (New York: Harper & Row, 1957), pp. 42–44.Google Scholar

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29. To an extent, each city neighborhood has a life of its own in addition to the activities it shares with the rest of the metropolis. There is a large literature on the neighborhood. See, for example, From Small Town to Great Community, especially Chapters 3 and 10, for an analysis of Progressive thinking on neighborhoods, and Gurman, Robert and Popenoe, David, Neighborhood, City and Metropolis: An Integrated Reader in Urban Sociology (New York: Random House, 1970)Google Scholar, for sociological essays on neighborhoods.

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