
Metropolitan Jews
Politics, Race, and Religion in Postwar Detroit
Lila Corwin Berman(Author)
University of Chicago Press
Published on 6. May 2015
Book
Hardback
320 pages
978-0-226-24783-0 (ISBN)
Description
In this provocative and accessible urban history, Lila Corwin Berman considers the role that Detroit's Jews played in the city's well-known narrative of migration and decline. Taking its cue from social critics and historians who have long looked toward Detroit to understand twentieth-century urban transformations, Metropolitan Jews tells the story of Jews leaving the city while retaining a deep connection to it. Berman argues convincingly that though most Jews moved to the suburbs, urban abandonment, disinvestment, and an embrace of conservatism did not invariably accompany their moves. Instead, the Jewish postwar migration was marked by an enduring commitment to a newly fashioned urbanism with a vision of self, community, and society that persisted well beyond city limits. Complex and subtle, Metropolitan Jews pushes urban scholarship beyond the tenacious black/white, urban/suburban dichotomy. It demands a more nuanced understanding of the process and politics of suburbanization and will reframe how we think about the American urban experiment and modern Jewish history.
Reviews / Votes
"A brilliant intervention in intersecting areas of history, Metropolitan Jews is a significant and exciting contribution to scholarship on cities, suburbs, American Jews, postwar religion, and liberal politics. This is a subtle book, and one that will be read widely by scholars of cities and suburbs and of postwar religion and politics. It opens a fresh and exciting perspective on suburbanization, Jewish urban politics, and the postwar transformation of Judaism. Berman tells this complex story filled with pathos beautifully." (Deborah Dash Moore, author of Urban Origins of American Judaism)More details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
Chicago
United States
Publishing group
The University of Chicago Press
Target group
College/higher education
Dimensions
Height: 24 mm
Width: 16 mm
Thickness: 6 mm
Weight
595 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-226-24783-0 (9780226247830)
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Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions

E-Book
12/2022
University of Chicago Press
€31.02
Available for download
Person
Lila Corwin Berman is associate professor of history and the Murray Friedman Professor and Director of the Feinstein Center for American Jewish History at Temple University. She is the author of Speaking of Jews: Rabbis, Intellectuals, and the Creation of an American Public Identity.