by Joshua Zeitz
First published 2011
Most scholars blame racial tensions for reshaping American politics after World War II. Joshua Zeitz challenges this view by examining religious and ethnic divisions that split New York City decades earlier. He focuses on three major groups: Irish Catholics, Italian Catholics, and Jews. These communities held fundamentally different beliefs about authority, community, and individual rights. Eastern European Jewish traditions celebrated dissent and political activism. Irish and Italian Catholics valued order, respected authority, and prioritized loyalty to church and neighborhood. Zeitz traces how these cultural differences created deep fractures within the Democratic coalition that Franklin Roosevelt had built. Catholic voters eventually abandoned a party that increasingly championed individual liberties over traditional community values. Meanwhile, many Jews who favored political rebellion moved toward the antiliberal New Left movement. The book reveals how ethnic and religious identity shaped liberal politics long before black and white racial politics dominated American political discourse.
Genres: history, 20th-century, non-fiction, ethnic-studies, cultural-studies, american-history
Vibes: intimate, thought-provoking
Tropes: cultural-clash, political-divisions
Setting: New York City
Period: 20th Century
294 pages · Kindle Edition · The University of North Carolina Press