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The final episode covers the post-war period, when discrimination against Jews in daily life begins to abate and Jews enter professions such as medicine, law and banking in record numbers.
May 2010 (check local listings)
With Hitler defeated and six million European Jews murdered,
American Jews were fighting despair. However, by 1946, with the
return of Jewish American servicemen and the crowning of the first
Jewish Miss America - Bess Myerson - a new spirit of optimism
emerged. In 1948, Jewish Americans actively supported the creation
of a Jewish state in Palestine - Israel - but few chose to live
there. By the 1950s, discrimination against Jews in daily life
began to abate as quotas at universities and restrictions at
resorts and housing gradually disappeared. Jews entered professions
such as medicine, law and banking in record numbers, and Jewish
American culture went mainstream as Jewish comedians came to
dominate the new medium of television. But for all the progress,
the old anxieties and vulnerabilities continued to bubble just
beneath the surface. The trial of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, two
Jewish Americans indicted on charges of stealing atomic secrets,
sent shock waves of fear through the Jewish community.
By the 1960s, Jewish Americans were directing their political
energies elsewhere and a fragile but sometimes untenable alliance
for civil rights was forged with African Americans. In the late
1960s and into the 1970s, as Americans began thinking about race,
gender and ethnicity, Jewish Americans explored their own concerns
with these issues more openly than they ever had before. Jewish
women began to question Judaic customs and rituals that had
excluded women for thousands of years and they fashioned new
ceremonies to give voice to their spiritual lives, focusing on the
ordination of women rabbis. Jewish Americans actively worked to
help nearly two million Jews in the Soviet Union who were suffering
imprisonment, deportation and the brutal denial of their human and
religious rights.
By the turn of the 20th century, as Americans of other faiths
began exploring the limits of their religious traditions, many Jews
begin experimenting with innovative spiritual practices as well,
bringing Buddhist meditation into their own religious practice
while Orthodox Judaism was thriving as it never had before. The
youngest generation of Jewish Americans developed their own "hip"
Jewish culture, which included a special connection to Jewish music
gone mainstream. Matisyahu - a Hasidic Jew with songs blending hip
hop, reggae and esoteric Jewish musing - rose to the top of the
charts. Today, Jewish Americans continue to weave themselves into
the social, cultural, economic and political life of the country.
There are a bewildering number of ways of being Jewish, but the
age-old issue of negotiating Jewish and American identities
remains.