Even though I grew up as a Sephardic Jew in Brooklyn where we ate Syrian food and went to temple, it was still America.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
Most American Jews came from the lower middle classes, and therefore they brought with them not a lot of Jewish culture. The American Jewish story starts with Ellis Island, and the candy store in the Bronx.
My family were Conservative Jews. My parents were both born in this country, but my father grew up on the Lower East Side, and my mother was born and raised in Harlem when there was a large Jewish 'colony' there. Eventually, they moved to Jersey City to get away from New York.
The Jews integrated themselves into American life to the point that the argument that the Jews aren't American sounded so stupid, that people stopped thinking it.
I really don't even think of myself as being Jewish except when I'm in Germany.
The good Jew is ritually observant and resists assimilation, in some sense living apart, never fitting comfortably into American or any other society.
The majesty of the American Jewish experience is in its success marrying its unique Jewish identity with the larger, liberal values of the United States. There is no need anymore to choose between assimilation and separation. We are accepted as equals.
American Jews are no longer a homogenous minority; we come in all colors and from all corners of the world.
I was born in New York City, but I was raised in New Jersey, part of the great Jewish emigration of 1963.
I'm the New York Jew who actually grew up in Minnesota.
I grew up in the classic American-Jewish suburbia, which has a whole different sense of what it means to be Jewish than anywhere else in the world.