America in the 20th Century

Significant Political, Social, and Economic Changes in America from the 1930s to the 1970s
From the 1930s to the 1970s, America modernized. Women gained suffrage in 1920 with the 19th amendment (The American Yawp, 2018), and America as a country was on the move, having just asserted itself abroad by helping to end WWI. Now with peace restored, America began to metamorphose. It transitioned from being a traditionally-minded country of various ethnicities—struggling from a decade of Prohibtion to a decade of Depression to the sequel to the Great War, which resulted in a victory for the Allies and a Baby Boom back home—to being a country torn apart by revolution, social unrest and a deep distrust of government that started with a string of assassinations in the 1960s (JFK, MLK, Malcolm X, RFK) and culminated in the resignation of Nixon in the wake of the Watergate cover-up (Dean, 2014; Stone & Kuznick, 2012). Two groups impacted in big ways during this period were American women and Jewish Americans. For both groups, the changes began with WWII: for women because they were finally introduced into the workforce, while the men were overseas fighting the Axis; for Jewish Americans because they obtained their own state in the aftermath of the War—Israel, founded in 1948, first recognized by the U.S.—a state that every Jew could call his home.
Both women and Jews were in the ascendancy following the war, socially, politically and economically. The Women’s Movement got underway with Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, published in 1963. Friedan (1963) lamented the woman’s lot in bitter terms: “We have made woman a sex creature…She has no identity except as a wife and mother. …She waits all day for her husband to come home at night to make her feel alive. And now it is the husband who is not interested. It is terrible for the women, to lie there, night after night, waiting for her husband to make her feel alive” (p. 29). The Feminine Mystique was the bugle call for women. As Horowitz (1998) pointed out, Friedan argued “that she came to political consciousness out of a disillusionment with her life as a suburban housewife” (p. 2) and her book was her manifesto. Women had gotten along fine during the War, had gotten a taste of the independent life, and had had their fill of Mary Tyler Moore type characters representing them on the screen. The 1960s were ripe for revolution—and Friedan (an American Jewish woman, no less) helped get the revolution going for women. Another Jewish American woman named Gloria Steinem would found Ms. Magazine that same decade and become the face of the Feminist Movement going forward. Steinem was a direct advocate of women’s liberation: the old world patriarchal order of the past had to be dismantled. Women’s liberation was their opportunity to dismantle it.
An example of the type of liberation Steinem represented was seen in an article she wrote years later entitled “We Had Abortions”—an article about women looking back from the standpoint of the 21st century on the revolutionary actions they took by aborting their babies and being proud of it: Steinem contended that no man had the right to her reproductive cycle—and that was her manifesto (Cooke, 2011). Roe v. Wade helped cement the status of the Feminists in 1973 and two decades later a strident abortion-rights advocate (an another Jewish American woman) by the name of Ruth Bader Ginsburg would be appointed to the Supreme Court by President Clinton. Looking back on Roe v. Wade with delight, Ginsburg would state that “government has no business making that choice for a woman” (Bazelon, 2009). Ginsburg would also sum up the spirit of Feminism with the words, “Better bitch than mouse,” which she was quoted as saying by the Jewish American journalist Jeffrey Rosen (1993) in an article celebrating Ginsburg’s appointment to the Court. Women had come a long way from their break-out turn as Rosie the Riveter during the war: they had made it all the way to Supreme Court as a Justice in the 1990s—and all it took was a little spunk, a little militancy, a little abortion advocacy, and a willingness to be called a “bitch” as Ginsburg was when she was younger (Bazelon, 20090. The New Woman that never quite materialized into anything substantial in the 1920s and 1930s now arrived full-blown like Athena out of the head of Zeus by the 1970s—and by the 1990s, after two decades of wielding her reproductive rights like a sledgehammer over men’s heads, she could support her claims with arguments like this one from leading Feminist scholar (and yet another Jewish American woman) Judith Butler (1990): “If there is no radical repudiation of a culturally constructed sexuality, what is left is the question of how to acknowledge and ‘do’ the construction one is invariably in” (p. 31). Thus, the opportunities that women gained were based on repudiation all the way around—repudiation of everything that had come before: the old world values, the old world woman, the old world identity—all of it was to be incinerated, the ashes tossed to the wind.
Jewish Americans (who were not women) saw plenty of opportunities for advancement around this same time. The 1960s were good to them: with Kennedy’s assassination, the proudly-Zionistic Lyndon Baines Johnson took the Oval Office and commenced having former Irgun member Mathilde Krim stay for sleepovers (Segev, 2007). When the Israelis attacked the USS Liberty during the Six Day War, Krim was there to stay Johnson’s hand and make sure Jews weren’t reviled either abroad or in the U.S. 34 dead Americans and 171 wounded later, all Johnson could do was accept Israel’s apology. It was a big week for Jews the world over: the Six Day War had allowed Israel to expand its borders beyond its UN charter and further increase its colonies on confiscated land.
Like women in America, Jews were in the ascendant. Their victimhood status secured after WWII, Jewish Americans were dominating in more and more sectors: from Hollywood to Wall Street to government, they enjoyed some of the biggest game in town. In reality, they had been enjoying it since the days of Prohibition, when the teetotalers led by Carrie Nation got legislators to outlaw alcohol. Jewish Americans like Meyer Lansky were able to capitalize on the crisis by creating a sprawling empire of organized crime, foreshadowing the eternally brilliant words of Jewish American Rahm Emanuel (President Obama’s Chief of Staff before becoming Mayor of Chicago), who would say, “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. And what I mean by that is it’s an opportunity to do things that you think you could not do before” (Wall Street Journal, 2008). That was exactly what Jewish Americans had been doing all along—from the Civil War when they set about funding both sides via the house of Rothschild to WWII when they installed Churchill as PM and got Roosevelt to join in the fight so that they could get the land in Palestine that Balfour had promised them and that Hitler was helping them to populate through the Transfer Agreement. The Jews even got the Catholic Church to stop accusing them of deicide at the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s in Nostra Aetate, in which the Church declared that Jews were no longer to be blamed for the death of Christ. Jewish Americans felt about as liberated as American women after reading Friedan’s book and Steinem’s magazines.
There were still challenges of course. Women still were not quite as respected in the workplace as they would have liked to have been. They still had to deal with male chauvinism, as they called it—sexist male attitudes and beliefs regarding the role of women, which were typically situated on old world values and dressed in masculine distaste. For many years, women were kept out of top positions in companies—one never would have seen a woman CEO in the 1960s. Katherine Graham became the first CEO of a Fortune 500 company when she took over the Washington Post in the 1970s (and helped to blow up Nixon’s Watergate cover-up). No one expected Graham to be up to the task—but her paper helped run a president out of office, which shored up both her and the paper’s reputation. Still, Graham was powerful and most women who were not in her shoes had to compete with men in the workplace for jobs. It was not always easy and the battle of the sexes was a real deal during the 60s and 70s.
Jewish Americans also had their fair share of challenges. They were still in the unique situation of being both separate from and part of American society: the Jewishness both distinguished them from most other ethnicities in the U.S. and gave them a special place of privilege (especially following WWII). Still, the suspicion towards Jews that many Americans had nursed in the 19th century and early 20th century never fully went away. Whenever the economy tanked or Wall Street seemed to pull the rug out from under the feet of Main Street, Jewish bankers like the ones at Goldman Sachs or J. P. Morgan or Bank of America—or the ones chairing the Federal Reserve, or the ones signing TARP into law and making sure their friends back in the banking business got bailed out during the 2007-2009 economic crisis—all of this was hard on Jewish Americans.
However, Jewish Americans were always able to turn a crisis into an opportunity. Guys like Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld, Kristol and Perle were able to secure their places in American politics, craft and shape American foreign policy in ways that would allow them to pursue their New American Century plans for toppling governments in the Middle East, beginning with Iraq and Libya and going on to Syria and Iran. With Operation Desert Storm, they thought they had their chance—but in reality they would have to wait till Bush II took the Oval Office before they could use one of the greatest crises to ever hit America—9/11—for their own purposes and get started on implementing their plans for the Middle East. Thus, in spite of the all the negativity and animosity they received from others, Jewish Americans still managed to succeed in their political ambitions, using their social connections in the media and their economic connections on Wall Street and their political connections in the criminal underworld/Washington to create a new future for themselves.
For Jewish Americans and for American women, their opportunities for advancement had changed significantly compared to other Americans. African Americans also gained some advantages in the Civil Rights Movement—but the assassinations of Malcolm X and MLK set them back, just as the assassinations of the Kennedys and the assassination of the Catholic Church in Vatican II set ethnic Catholics back in the U.S. after what appeared to be a massive Catholic Movement in the first half of the 20th century. Jewish Americans and American women (many of whose leaders were also Jewish) were in the ascendency in the latter half of the 20th century like no other group in the U.S. They benefited from social, political and economic changes all around—and were often right at the front and center of the changes themselves.
References
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Guardian. Retrieved from http://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/nov/13/gloria-steinem-interview-feminism-abortion
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Friedan, B. (1963). The Feminine Mystique. NY: W. W. Norton.
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Wall Street Journal. (2008). Rahm Emanuel on the opportunities of crisis. Retrieved
from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_mzcbXi1Tkk