At Home in America?: Revisiting the Second Generation

DEBORAH DASH MOORE

My book, At Home in America: Second Generation New York Jews, appeared in 1981, not quite midway between its subject—New York Jews in the interwar decades—and today's children of immigrants now coming of age after three decades of renewed immigration to the United States. Their visible presence in New York City invites reconsideration of an earlier generation that lived in the 1920s and '30s. At Home in America, written in the 1970s, sought to extend the history of American Jews beyond the immigrant era and reframe then current conceptualizations of American Jewish history. Regnant frameworks for interpreting the second generation, especially models of assimilation propounded by sociologists, seemed to lack historical contextualization. Developed after World War II, these theories imagined the United States divided along religious lines—i.e., the triple melting pot made famous by Will Herberg in Protestant Catholic Jew. An alternative analysis of assimilation posited the substitution of a "symbolic ethnicity" for the real thing, an argument developed by Herbert Gans. Such interpretations, Werner Sollors argued, could be understood as visions of declension, especially if viewed from the perspective of ethnic groups working to retain their distinctive identity.