And I Will Dwell in Their Midst: Orthodox Jews in Suburbia / Edition 1

by Etan Diamond

Overview

Suburbia may not seem like much of a place to pioneer, but for young, religiously committed Jewish families, it's open territory." This sentiment—expressed in the early 1970s by an Orthodox Jew in suburban Toronto—captures the essence of the suburban Orthodox Jewish experience of the late twentieth century. Although rarely associated with postwar suburbia, Orthodox Jews in metropolitan areas across the United States and Canada have successfully combined suburban lifestyles and the culture of consumerism with a strong sense of religious traditionalism and community cohesion. By their very existence in suburbia, argues Etan Diamond, Orthodox Jewish communities challenge dominant assumptions about society and religious culture in the twentieth century.

Using the history of Orthodox Jewish suburbanization in Toronto, Diamond explores the different components of the North American suburban Orthodox Jewish community: sacred spaces, synagogues, schools, kosher homes, and social networks. In a larger sense, though, his book tells a story of how traditionalist religious communities have thrived in the most secular of environments. In so doing, it pushes our current understanding of cities and suburbs and their religious communities in new directions.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780807848890
Publisher:	The University of North Carolina Press
Publication date:	10/30/2000
Edition description:	1
Pages:	240
Product dimensions:	6.12(w) x 9.25(h) x 0.54(d)

About the Author

Etan Diamond, an American social historian, is a senior research associate with The Polis Center at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis.

Read an Excerpt

Chapter One
Religion and Suburbia: To Choose or Not To Choose

Like many of his contemporaries in 1952, Sol Edell was looking for a place to live in Toronto. And like many of his fellow Orthodox Jews, he was looking in the "better neighborhoods downtown," where most of the city's traditionalist Jews lived. He quickly changed his mind, however, when one of his friends asked, "`What do you mean you're going to look downtown? Everyone is moving out of downtown. Where are you going to go? You're a young man. Why do you want to go with the old people? Old people are down there. Young man, you want to get out. Out there. Everybody's going up north, north of Eglinton and Lawrence.' So I said, okay." Responding to a newspaper advertisement for a house at Bidewell Avenue, just east of Bathurst Street and north of Wilson Avenue, Edell agreed to meet a real estate agent on Avenue Road, just north of Wilson Avenue. "I drove and I drove and I drove, and I thought I'd never reach it or find this place, it seemed like a hundred miles away. Anyway, I finally got to this place, and went around the corner, and he showed me this house. The first house I saw had picture windows, a gorgeous garden, open. Where we used to live was closed in. This was all open."

Standing outside the house with the agent, Edell heard a car horn. "I take a look and it's Joe Silverberg. I knew him since I was a kid, and his father and my father were in business together. He said, `What are you doing up here?' He was already up here. I said I was looking at a house and he said, `Buy it!' `What do you mean, buy it?' `We need you for a minyan [quorum of ten men necessary for Orthodox Jewish worship services]. We're looking for people.' So I said, `Is there any place around?' He said `Yes, we're davening [praying] together already, but every person counts.' So I thought about it. I went back, I eventually negotiated a deal that I could handle and I bought it. But if it wasn't for him going by saying that there was a minyan, that they were already starting to daven together, it wouldn't have been. So I say the Ribono Shel Olam [Master of the Universe] works in weird and wonderful ways. I hadn't seen Joe maybe in months, but all of a sudden he passed right there and spots me on the street. You never know, but that's the way community is built."[1]

The early 1950s were a time for relocation for Lillian Silverberg as well. She and her husband were living in a house on Rusholme Street, in downtown Toronto, but were looking for a newer and bigger home. She recalled that Bathurst Street north of Wilson Avenue was "just being developed. It was all farm at that time." Still, her younger brother decided to relocate to those newly built neighborhoods of north Bathurst Street. "He's the one that made the move up here. He moved up here on Raeburn east of Bathurst. We were very close and this was our incentive to move along. Sol [Edell] was living in this area. My brother-in-law, Joe Silverberg, he lived in this area. We knew quite a number of people living up this way." So Silverberg and her husband moved too, although their home was just "partially built, the streets weren't paved, [and] we didn't have phones for quite a while." Despite these hardships, one essential institution was already in place: the synagogue. After all, she explained, "If you're Orthodox you have to be close to [a synagogue] to attend your services." Fortunately for the Silverbergs, "the shul [synagogue] was already there. When we first moved up we davened in a tent. Then they built a hall where we used to daven."[2]

Aaron Weisblatt is a generation younger than Edell and Silverberg. Right before his thirteenth birthday in 1956, his parents moved from downtown Toronto to an apartment along Bathurst Street. After living downtown for a year following his wedding in 1969, he and his wife, Anne, hoped to settle down. Rather than stay downtown or in the neighborhoods of his childhood, he looked further north and bought a semidetached house in the Greenwin Village subdivision within walking distance of B'nai Torah Congregation. Weisblatt chose that neighborhood and that synagogue because "a lot of the young community was moving up here. I was a young grad, just starting out, trying to attract new business. This was where the action was." Besides, "it was fun, getting involved" in a new synagogue and a new community.[3]

Religion. Prayer services. God. Community. Not terms that one might typically associate with postwar suburbia. But then, one does not typically associate Orthodox Jews with postwar suburbia either. Yet in almost every major city in the United States and Canada, Orthodox Jews live lives that are far removed from the stereotypes of lower-class, urban immigrants of the early twentieth century or of modern suburbanites with few religious ties or community relationships. Instead, the late twentieth-century Orthodox Jewish suburbanite has blended into the upwardly mobile, consumerist world of North American suburban culture, all the while retaining a strong sense of religious traditionalism and community cohesion. This amalgamation did not evolve smoothly or free of conflict, but its sheer existence offers a strong counterpoint to the dominant assumptions about suburban society and religious culture in the twentieth century. How this blend of traditionalist religion and consumerist middle-class suburban secularism developed--what the historian Jack Wertheimer has described as a "law- and community-bound movement in the midst of freewheeling, individualist, late-20th-century America"--is the story told in the pages that follow.[4]

Table of Contents

Preface
1. Religion and Suburbia: To Choose or Not To Choose
2. Sanctifying Suburban Space
3. Religious Pioneering on the Suburban Frontier
4. Day Schools and the Socialization of Orthodox Jewish Youth
5. Fake Bacon: Orthodox Jewish Religious Consumerism
6. Continental Connections
7. Square Pegs into Round Holes: Religion, Place, and Community in the Late Twentieth Century
Glossary
Notes
Bibliography
Index

What People are Saying About This

Jonathan D. Sarna

Jonathan D. Sarna, Brandeis University
And I Will Dwell in Their Midst is one of the most illuminating studies of contemporary Orthodox Jewish life that I have read in many years. Beyond its significance for students of North American Judaism, it stands as the first comprehensive study of Orthodoxy's move out to the suburbs what it entailed, what it teaches, and what it portends.

From the Publisher

Diamond's analysis is appealing for the way he confronts a number of popular myths.—Journal of Jewish Education



The most thorough and analytically adept attempt to comprehend the interactions between Orthodox Jewry and suburban living, And I Will Dwell in Their Midst is a commendable addition to modern North American Jewish history and community studies.—Journal of American History



Should appeal to a wide audience, and to the interested lay reader as well as to the academic specialist. Scholars in the disciplines and topic areas of modern history, sociology, anthropology, urban geography, religion, ethnicity, and Jewish Studies will be . . . rewarded by its insights and information.—American Historical Review



[The development of vibrant Orthodox Jewish centers] is trenchantly analyzed and portrayed in Diamond's model social history.—Sh'ma Book Review



Despite dire predictions about declining religious attachment, And I Dwell in Their Midst reveals that traditionalist faith can and does thrive in the suburbs.—American Jewish History



This study is as readable as it is insightful. It is of interest to anyone concerned with the state of religion in North America today—especially those who imagine Orthodoxy to be a vestige of our crumbling inner cities.—Choice



A groundbreaking book. . . . Diamond's case is strong and his ideas are fresh. . . . [He] demonstrate[s] . . . that Orthodox Jewish life can thrive in America wherever you can organize a minyan.—Forward



An absorbing look at religion and suburbs, two of the most important aspects of North American society.—www.beliefnet.com



A significant, well-researched analysis of the move to the suburbs by the Orthodox segment of the Jewish community. By providing us with an in-depth portrait, Diamond has made a useful contribution to our understanding of the contemporary North American Jewish community.—National Jewish Post and Opinion



Generally seen as an urban people in America, Orthodox Jews are now primarily suburbanites. Diamond has done a superb job of documenting the nature and consequences of this shift.—Jewish Book World

Editorial Reviews

ÝThe development of vibrant Orthodox Jewish centers¨ is trenchantly analyzed and portrayed in Diamond's model social history.

"Sh'ma Book Review"

Should appeal to a wide audience, and to the interested lay reader as well as to the academic specialist.

"American Historical Review"

"Should appeal to a wide audience, and to the interested lay reader as well as to the academic specialist.

"American Historical Review""

[The development of vibrant Orthodox Jewish centers] is trenchantly analyzed and portrayed in Diamond's model social history.

"Sh'ma Book Review"

Diamond's analysis is appealing for the way he confronts a number of popular myths.

"Journal of Jewish Education"

The most thorough and analytically adept attempt to comprehend the interactions between Orthodox Jewry and suburban living.

"Journal of American History"

This study is as readable as it is insightful. It is of interest to anyone concerned with the state of religion in North America today--especially those who imagine Orthodoxy to be a vestige of our crumbling inner cities. ("Choice)

From the Publisher

The most thorough and analytically adept attempt to comprehend the interactions between Orthodox Jewry and suburban living, And I Will Dwell in Their Midst is a commendable addition to modern North American Jewish history and community studies.

Journal of American History

Generally seen as an urban people in America, Orthodox Jews are now primarily suburbanites. Diamond has done a superb job of documenting the nature and consequences of this shift.

Jewish Book World

Despite dire predictions about declining religious attachment, And I Dwell in Their Midst reveals that traditionalist faith can and does thrive in the suburbs.

American Jewish History

This study is as readable as it is insightful. It is of interest to anyone concerned with the state of religion in North America today—especially those who imagine Orthodoxy to be a vestige of our crumbling inner cities.

Choice

Diamond, an American social historian who is a senior research associate at The Polis Center in Indiana, notes that although "one does not typically associate Orthodox Jews with postwar suburbia," such Jews flocked to the suburbs of almost every major city in North America after WWII. To demonstrate, Diamond offers a persuasive case study of suburban Toronto's Orthodox Jews, whose experience was in certain ways quite different from the typical suburban life. While suburbs are thought to be atomizing, not at all conducive to the pop-in-and-chat familiarity of urban apartment buildings, Diamond counters that religion fosters built-in community. He shows that Orthodox Jewish suburbia has differed from regular suburbia spatially; since observant Jews can't drive on the Sabbath, they must all live within walking distance of their synagogue. Diamond also finds fascinating historical change over time. When Orthodox Jews first moved to the suburbs, they introduced some fashionable practices into their new synagogues, like doing away with the women's balcony and allowing women to sit, still sex-segregated, on the same level as men. In the 1980s, as they were more comfortably entrenched in their surroundings, Orthodox Jews eschewed these innovations in favor of more traditional worship services. This book raises the bar for Jewish North American history; Diamond accomplishes for postwar Jews what Jenna Weissman Joselit (The Wonders of America) did for fin de si cle immigrant Jews. Yasher koach! (Oct.) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Diamond's history of the postwar Orthodox Jewish suburbanization of Toronto is in a sense a personal history, paralleling his own experiences growing up in suburban St. Louis. More broadly, it describes how traditional religious communities may thrive in resolutely secular environments. The study, sprinkled with archival maps and photos, traces the development of and connections between suburban society and the Orthodox Jewish subculture, as expressed in neighborhoods, social networks, religious institutions, and consumer goods. Diamond is a researcher at The Polis Center, Indiana U.-Purdue U. Indianapolis. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Booknews