{"id":103917,"date":"2023-05-06T17:05:17","date_gmt":"2023-05-06T15:05:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/?p=103917"},"modified":"2023-04-28T16:59:35","modified_gmt":"2023-04-28T14:59:35","slug":"06-05-89","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/?p=103917","title":{"rendered":"When Jews Got Green Thumbs"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>When Jews Got Green Thumbs<\/a><\/strong><\/span><\/span><\/h5>\n

JENNA WEISSMAN JOSELIT<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

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LAMBERT\/GETTY IMAGES<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

Suburban living planted the seeds of gardening as a communal pastime.<\/strong><\/span><\/h4>\n
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On or about Oct. 1, 1947, American Jewry went green, taking to suburbia like plants to water. Three hundred families moved into their new Levittown homes on that day, marking the official opening of that suburban development. By the end of the following decade, demographers estimated that a whopping two-thirds of American Jews now called the suburbs their home.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201c\u2018Going to temple\u2019 is losing the alien ring it once had in areas more accustomed to hearing \u2018Going to church,\u2019 or \u2018Going to Mass,\u2019\u201d\u00a0The New York Times<\/em>\u00a0reported in 1959, marshalling an impressive array of anecdotes from synagogue presidents, rabbis, second graders, and their parents about what life was like for them in neighborhoods that had either once been off-limits and out of bounds or nonexistent.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Some of their observations made much of postwar American Jewry\u2019s newfound affinity for things that grew, even though this predilection happened to be nothing new. For nearly half a century, if not longer, those Jews who worked the dunams in what became the State of Israel or took up farming in the promised land of America had set their sights on and valorized the land. Two ideological responses to the challenges of modernity, Zionism and Americanization, both celebrated the regenerative promise of agriculture.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Suburbanization was something else again. Not without its ideological underpinnings, among them, the pursuit of what was known at the time as \u201ccultural one-ness,\u201d its promise resided elsewhere. Affording American Jewry a new address, this latter-day \u201cexodus,\u201d as some contemporaries called it, also affected the community\u2019s spatial expectations, giving rise to the embrace of spaciousness as the sine qua non of a modern and decidedly American Jewish existence.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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If you\u2019ve ever wondered why postwar synagogues were typically low-lying, spread-out, and even \u201csprawling\u201d horizontal affairs, whose sanctuaries fell just a wee bit short of cavernous, or why their ambitious building plans invariably called for some kind of garden complex\u2014Baltimore\u2019s Chizuk Amuno, for instance, envisioned itself \u201csurrounded by beautiful gardens in keeping with the suburban landscape of woodland and meadow\u201d\u2014here\u2019s your answer.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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An end in itself, spaciousness became one of the yardsticks by which postwar suburban Jewry measured itself and its institutions. At once a physical property and a cultural value, it took the form of oversize sanctuaries, single-family homes with multiple rooms, each one differentiated by function, and synagogues that proudly likened themselves more to a \u201ccampus\u201d than a tabernacle. Roominess, both indoors and out\u2014having lots of space in which to spread one\u2019s legs and wings\u2014became the norm, along with a green lawn and an ample backyard.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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But was it good for the Jews? It\u2019s not for nothing that among the spate of popular magazine and newspaper articles on the suburban experience released throughout the 1950s and early \u201960s\u2014a testament to both its efflorescence and its bewildering novelty\u2014many postwar cultural critics wondered about its impact on modern Jewish life. Did suburbia engender conformity\u2014what Rabbi Morris Adler of Detroit called a \u201cnew type of acquiescence\u201d\u2014or did it promote an equally new form of \u201cself-segregating?\u201d Did a life lived amid trees and non-Jewish neighbors strengthen, attenuate, or redefine Jewish identity?<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Opinions grew like topsy. Some American Jews, characterizing the suburbs as a \u201cnew adventure in Jewishness,\u201d held out much hope for the future. Others, especially those of an older generation, were baffled as to why their children would move to\u00a0yenemsvelt<\/em>, so very far, far away, and felt abandoned, even forsaken. And still others just held their breath and waited to see what might develop in the former potato fields of eastern Long Island, newly scrubbed and dubbed East Meadow.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Amid the welter of competing perspectives, one consensus clearly emerged: Suburbia called on its Jewish residents to attend to their lawns with as much, or perhaps even more purpose, than tending to their souls. Writing in\u00a0Commentary\u00a0<\/em>in 1954 on the \u201cnew suburbanites of the \u201950s,\u201d Harry Gersh placed himself among them as the \u201cpossessor of a home in the suburbs complete with lawn, garage and trees\u2014in short, a rather solid citizen.\u201d He also gave voice to some of his and his Jewish neighbors\u2019 newly acquired horticultural concerns. Or apprehensions.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Would Gersh, like those who came before him, be stumped by the \u201cmysteries of seed and soil?\u201d Would seeds \u201cwither in his hands\u201d and the soil turn \u201csour under his ministrations?\u201d Even Gersh\u2019s wife, who in high school and college had taken courses in botany, \u201clooked at the fertile earth and wondered would these growing things flourish under a new name on the deed of ownership?\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Happily, relievedly, Gersh told his readers there was nothing to fear. Despite his lack of prior experience, even he could now boast of having 14 trees, three varieties of lilacs, and prize roses in his own backyard. A green thumb, he came to see, was \u201cnot a\u00a0goyishe\u00a0<\/em>monopoly.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Thanks to the wide array of goods and services advertised in American Jewish newspapers of the time, freshly minted suburbanites such as Gersh were able to avoid any and all instances of what he memorably called \u201chorticultural\u00a0nudnikery.\u201d<\/em>\u00a0Tree pruning, landscaping, and monthly gardeners-for-hire, along with the latest sprinklers, were featured almost weekly in the Jewish press of the 1950s and \u201960s, from the\u00a0B\u2019nai B\u2019rith Messenger<\/em>\u00a0on the West Coast to the\u00a0Jewish Advocate<\/em>\u00a0on the East.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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And if that weren\u2019t enough to ensure that plenty of weedkiller and fertilizer were always on hand, local Jewish Community Centers offered classes in gardening\u2014in \u201chandling lawn problems, growing flowers from seed [and] propagating\u201d\u2014and hosted community garden clubs, once the preserve of the elite now gone mainstream.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Even the kids got an early start. In one Boston suburb, for example the members of the Cub Scout troop sponsored by the Brotherhood of Temple Mishkan Tefila had several opportunities to \u201cdisplay their talents in planting\u201d and to win a prize, too, for the best in show. Elsewhere, both Jewish day campers and their sleepaway counterparts at Camp Judea in New Hampshire and Brandeis in California had the chance to awaken their green thumbs by learning how to plant vegetables and flowers as part of their summertime exploits.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Somewhere along the highway from urban to surburban, cultivating one\u2019s garden became a Jewish pursuit, or, to put it more precisely, something postwar American Jews did. A sustained encounter with nature, an exercise in beautification, it also normalized their sense of themselves as Americans.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Suburban Jewish men may never have felt entirely comfortable sporting a tool belt, while suburban Jewish women, in turn, might not have fully cottoned to the latest recipe for tuna casserole laced with Campbell\u2019s mushroom soup.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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But then, supplied with handfuls of Burpee seeds\u2014Americana in a packet\u2014and with hefty packages of Miracle-Gro, a brand-new invention of the 1950s, there was no reason American Jews couldn\u2019t feel at home.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Jenna Weissman Joselit<\/a>,<\/strong> the Charles E. Smith Professor of Judaic Studies & Professor of History at the George Washington University, is currently at work on a biography of Mordecai M. Kaplan.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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When Jews Got Green Thumbs JENNA WEISSMAN JOSELIT LAMBERT\/GETTY IMAGES Suburban living planted the seeds of gardening as a communal pastime. On or about Oct. 1, 1947, American Jewry went green, taking to suburbia like plants to water. Three hundred families moved into their new Levittown homes on that day, marking the official opening of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[6],"tags":[26,24],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/103917"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=103917"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/103917\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":103930,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/103917\/revisions\/103930"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=103917"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=103917"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=103917"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}