Keeping up with the Goldbergs: Gender, consumer culture, and Jewish identity in suburban Nassau County, New York, 1946--1960

In 1953, Rita Newborn, a founder of the Plainview Jewish Center in Nassau County, New York, asked the Waring Company to loan her a blender so she could make latkes for a Hanukkah party. By incorporating this blender into her Hanukkah celebration, rather than grating the potatoes by hand, Newborn combined her identity as a suburban American consumer with that of a Jewish homemaker concerned with maintaining traditional Jewish foodways. In the wake of widespread migration of Jews to the suburbs during the 1950s, social critics predicted the attenuation of Jewish affiliation in the face of assimilation. This dissertation, however, argues that second-generation Jews, like their parents and grandparents, used consumer culture to connect with Judaism, and shows how Jewish suburban experience was refracted through the practices of consumer culture. Building on the existing literature examining the intersection of Jewish identity and consumer culture, this dissertation shows that in the typically homogenous suburbs Jews used the culture of consumption to create Jewish space. Like earlier immigrants who fashioned an American element in their personal identity through consumer culture, suburban Jews used the culture and process of consumption to enhance their individual and communal Jewish identities and to create a Jewish space in suburbia. Women, men, and children purchased goods and services that helped them construct their identity, not only by supplying the items necessary for religious celebration and observance, but also by assisting in their presentation of themselves as Jews. These purchases announced the consumers' membership in the group or, alternatively, separated them from the group. Moreover, the products and services needed on an individual level, such as kosher food or Jewish education, encouraged the creation of businesses and institutions that in turn helped create Jewish community. In other words, Jewish suburban migrants' engagement with consumer culture helped to create Jewish American space. Situated at the intersection of developing literatures in American Jewish history, suburbanization, and consumer culture, this study engages significant issues from each field, including the conflict between traditional Judaism and secular acculturation, the transformation of ethnic identity in the 1950s, and the gendered experience of the suburbs.