The working class

With this article, Michael Gold (born Itzok Isaac Granich, 1894–1967) joins Lucy Dawidowicz ( C19 ) and Rabbi Edgar Siskin ( C18 ) in bemoaning the effects of upward mobility on postwar American Jews. Although Gold, a committed leftist, may not have appreciated Siskin’s liberal Judaism nor Dawidowicz’s decidedly conservative political leanings, all three of these thinkers shared a disappointment with the middle-class Jewish culture of the postwar years. They denigrated affluent American Jews as superficial and shallow, and idealized the ethics and authenticity of the poorer Jewish communities of the recent past.