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.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
Even though I grew up as a Sephardic Jew in Brooklyn where we ate Syrian food and went to temple, it was still America.
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.
Like other important immigrant communities, the Jewish experience in the United States represents the ideal of freedom and the promise and opportunity of America.
American Jews are no longer a homogenous minority; we come in all colors and from all corners of the world.
What is unusual about the United States - and it's something that I have never gotten used to - is that Jews here, there are so many of them, and they are so important to the culture.
You look at Superman, the story of an orphan coming to America, keeping his identity secret and even the names, Kal-El and Jor-El, you can trace lines to the background of the creators, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, both Jewish. Overall, there was a remarkable confluence of events that led to the medium and the Jewish participation.
Jewish immigration in the 20th century was fueled by the Holocaust, which destroyed most of the European Jewish community. The migration made the United States the home of the largest Jewish population in the world.
Most of the Jewish writer friends I have are American, and I feel closer to them because they're always obsessed with one issue - identity: what does it mean to be an American Jew?
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.
In the New York metropolitan area, you can find Jews from just about every Jewish cultural community in the world.