"White ethnic" New York: Jews and Catholics in post-war Gotham, 1945-1970

The dissertation focuses on Irish and Italian Catholics and Jews in New York City and examines the interplay between religious values, ethnic sensibilities and Cold War-era politics. It modifies wisdom regarding the decline of American liberalism in the post-war period. Most writers agree that race played a central role in this story. The example of New York City suggests otherwise. In Gotham, the Roosevelt coalition began to experience serious ruptures long before terms like "Black Power" entered the American political lexicon. This political break had little to do with race. As early as the 1940s, highly salient cultural differences between Catholics and Jews drove a wedge between the Roosevelt coalition's two principal white ethnic constituencies.For reasons owing to the democratization of Jewish political life in Eastern Europe and in the immigrant ghetto, New York Jews refashioned their popular theology and history to place disputativeness and liberalism at the center of Jewish identity. By contrast, at home and in parish schools, generations of Catholic New Yorkers internalized respect for public and religious authority and a general skepticism of radical dissent. Because they disagreed on fundamental questions about citizenship and authority, Jews and Catholics often clashed over diverse political phenomena like domestic anti-communism, civil rights and the "counter-culture."Recent scholarship suggests that as early as the 1940s many white Americans developed a sense of white solidarity based on exclusive patterns of employment and home ownership. Thus, backlash against liberalism in the 1960s was the natural culmination of racially conservative politics dating back two decades. In New York this interpretation does not hold up. Jews and Catholics never perceived themselves as partners in a white political movement. They continued to support different political candidates and fundamentally different visions of civic authority. Ironically, though Catholics were far more supportive of law-and-order "backlash" candidates, Jews demonstrated more intense skepticism of integration. Still, Jews continued to reject the overtures of political conservatives, who in turn enjoyed widespread Catholic support. Backlash politics in the late 1960s were a continuation of patterns established in the 1940s, when Catholic social conservatism first clashed with Jewish liberalism.Thesis (Ph.D.)--Brown University, 2002.School code: 0024