Insecure Prosperity: Small-Town Jews in Industrial America, 1890-1940

(Paperback)

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This study of the Jewish community of Johnstown, Pennsylvania reveals a pattern of adaptation to American life surprisingly different from that followed by Jewish immigrants to cities. Although four-fifths of Jewish immigrants did settle in major cities, another fifth created small town communities like the one described here. Rather than climbing up the mainstream education and occupational success ladder, the Jewish Johnstowners created in the local economy a tightly knit ethnic entrepreneurial niche and pursued within it their main life goals: achieving a satisfactory standard of living against the recurrent slumps in local mills and coalmines and enjoying the company of their fellow congregants. The book begins with an examination of the Jewish life in the Eastern European regions from which most of Johnstown's immigrants came, tracing features of culture and social relations that they brought with them to America. After detailing the process by which migration from Eastern Europe ocurred, the author takes up the social organization of Johnstown, the place of Jews in that social order, the transformation of Jewish social life in the city, and relations between Jews and non-Jews

Reviews

Winner of the 1997 Anthony Leeds Prize, Society for Urban Anthropology Winner of the 1997 Saul Viener Prize in American Jewish History Winner of the 1997 Theodore Saluotos Book Award, Immigration History Society Honorable Mention for the 1997 Thomas and Znaniecki Award of the Immigration Section of the American Sociological Association One of Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles for 1996 "It will be difficult for anyone to assert that the Jewish experience in smaller United States communities is just New York in miniature after reading Ewa Morawska's masterly study... A magnificent addition to the literature of American Jewish History."--Hyman Berman, Journal of American History "Nicely supplements studies of the urban American Jewish experience... [One] comes away from this book impressed by its depth of research and by its socio-historical scope."--The Jerusalem Post "Ewa Morawska has written a gem of a book ... [an] opalescent mother of pearl with its many nuances... A new standard for historical and sociological studies of immigrants, small city societies, middle-class culture, and American Jews."--Deborah Dash Moore, Journal of Social History

Author Bio

Ewa Morawska is Professor of Sociology and History at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of a study of Johnstown Slavic immigrants, For Bread with Butter.