And Jewish-Americans were now on the cusp of a new reality.
Unit IV: 1946-1976
In the 1950s the Anti-Defamation League sought to have the immigration laws of decades prior repealed. President Truman was sympathetic to the millions of displaced persons, a good portion of which were Eastern Europeans of Jewish descent. Even though America was largely outraged at news of the Holocaust, many Americans reserved the suspicion that Jews were crooked bankers secretly poised for world domination. The immigration laws were not repealed.
The 1950s also saw a debate concerning the census of 1960: should it contain religious questions? Here was an issue that embraced social, political and religious points all at once. The way Jewish-Americans faced the issue had repercussions for the entire nation. The book Protestant-Catholic-Jew had helped establish the idea in the 1950s that religion mattered more than race or class. Favored by the Eisenhower administration and by Catholic committees, the idea of adding religion to the 1960 census looked to go through. However, Jewish organizations had always tried to keep separation between church and state -- and now was no time to quit. "Between 1956 and 1958, the American Jewish Congress and other Jewish organizations worked hard to stop the plan, especially by lobbying members of Congress. In 1958 the Jewish organizations were able to declare victory" (Hollinger, 2009, p. 1-2). Through their vigilance, Jewish-Americans were able to keep church and state at a distance regarding this issue.
During this time, Jewish-Americans also began more and more to emerge as leaders in American literature. Bernard Malamud, Saul Bellow, Betty Friedan and Phillip Roth had much to say about Jewish and American life.
Betty Friedan had been shaped herself by much of what went on in early twentieth century America. An avid activist and strong supporter of equal rights for women, Friedan took the opportunity on the fiftieth anniversary of the granting of women's suffrage to organize a strike for equality. Her book the Feminine Mystique sparked the Feminist Movement. She claimed "that she came to political consciousness out of a disillusionment with her life as a suburban housewife" (Horowitz, 1998, p. 2) and wrote the book on feminism, literally, as a means of doing what the Jewish producers in Hollywood had done: reinvention of self. Not only did Friedan reinvent herself, she enabled millions of women to reinvent themselves as well. Women's roles changed significantly during the '60s and '70s and continued to change well into the present. For example, one such social and cultural issue Friedan and other women (not just Jewish) took to heart was the issue of abortion. Friedan founded the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws -- a repeal that was granted by the Supreme Court in 1973.
Phillip Roth's literary career took a much different route. As a Jewish-American, Roth often depicted characters in his novels as split or torn between American fundamental values and Judaic values. He himself was a second generation Jewish-American and often felt adrift: neither American nor Jew. His novels explore this idea as his characters search for a kind of transcendence neither Jewish nor American. His novels would help shape the way many Americans felt about their
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