In this provocative and accessible urban history, Lila Corwin Berman considers the role that Detroit’s Jews played in the city’s well-known narrative of migration and decline. Taking its cue from social critics and historians who have long looked toward Detroit to understand twentieth-century urban transformations, Metropolitan Jews tells the story of Jews leaving the city while retaining a deep connection to it. Berman argues convincingly that though most Jews moved to the suburbs, urban abandonment, disinvestment, and an embrace of conservatism did not invariably accompany their moves. Instead, the Jewish postwar migration was marked by an enduring commitment to a newly fashioned urbanism with a vision of self, community, and society that persisted well beyond city limits.

Complex and subtle, Metropolitan Jews pushes urban scholarship beyond the tenacious black/white, urban/suburban dichotomy. It demands a more nuanced understanding of the process and politics of suburbanization and will reframe how we think about the American urban experiment and modern Jewish history.

Lila Corwin Berman is associate professor of history at Temple University, where she holds the Murray Friedman Chair and directs the Feinstein Center for American Jewish History. She is the author of Speaking of Jews: Rabbis, Intellectuals, and the Creation of an American Public Identity.

— Deborah Dash Moore, author of Urban Origins of American Judaism

— Mark Wild, California State University-Los Angeles

— Beryl Satter, Rutgers University-Newark

— Matthew Lassiter, University of Michigan

— American Historical Review

— The American Jewish Archives Journals