20th century
A01=Lila Corwin Berman
anthropology
Author_Lila Corwin Berman
big cities
Category=JBSR
Category=NHK
communal institutions
community
conservatism
decline
detroit
eq_bestseller
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
ethnic relations
ethnography
identity
immigration
jewish neighborhoods
jews
judaism
justice
liberalism
local politics
metropolitan urbanism
michigan
modern history
postwar migration
provocative
race
racial transition
religion
social issues
society
suburbanization
synagogues
urban areas
white flight
whiteness studies
Product details
- ISBN 9780226247830
- Weight: 595g
- Dimensions: 16 x 24mm
- Publication Date: 06 May 2015
- Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
Secure
checkout
Fast Shipping
Easy returns
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.
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.
