Jewish Life in the Industrial Promised Land, 1855-2005 | 
 enlarge | Authors: Nora Helen Faires, Nancy Hanflik
Publisher: Michigan State Univ Pr
Category: Book
List Price: $29.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  2 reviews
Sales Rank: 1048372
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1st
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 240
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.3
Dimensions (in): 10.1 x 6.9 x 0.6
ISBN: 0870137719
Dewey Decimal Number: 977.437004924
EAN: 9780870137716
ASIN: 0870137719
Publication Date: December 1, 2005
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Condition: Brand new. No marks, not ex-library, not a remainder. Quick shipping from a highly rated seller.
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Product Description
Award Winner: 2006 Historical Society of Michigan Award and 2006 Independent Publisher Book Awards (IPPY).
Jewish Life in the Industrial Promised Land--1855-2005 combines an examination of the evolution of a small ethnic and religious community with analysis of the dramatic rise and decline of an industrial boomtown. In both popular accounts and scholarly writings, Flint has become an icon of manufacturing production become rustbelt ruin. As this book shows, even during Flint's vaunted postwar golden age Jews participated in the good life of consumer abundance but remained outside the city's major industry of automaking and absent from its most important corridors of power. Throughout the twentieth century, most Jewish families in this General Motors town worked as storekeepers, entrepreneurs, and professionals. They carved out a niche in the interstices of a political economy over which, like the autoworkers who were their customers and clients, they had little control but upon which their economic fortunes depended. When General Motors began slashing jobs in the mid 1970s, Flint's Jewish families consequently suffered along with other city residents, both black and white. Flint Jewry thus was forged in a setting of economic boom, but has seen that white- hot prosperity turn to ash, as the city has become America s poster town for deindustrialization.
Jewish Life in the Industrial Promised Land provides a unique window on the religious, social, and communal structures created by Jews in this wildly turbulent environment. It traces a Jewish community comprised of multiple strands of migrants. It sees Flint Jewry as part of a global diaspora during decades of tumult, destruction, and international realignment. The study of Jewish Life in the Industrial Promised Land hopes to stir memories and imagination, to engage and enlighten, and to explicate key aspects of the evolution of twentieth-century American society and culture, while paying close attention to the voices of those whose story it tells.
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An examination of the history of Jewish families and daily life in Flint, Michigan, March 3, 2006
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Nora Faires (Associate Professor of History) and Nancy Hanflik (Co-Curator of the Sloan Museum exhibition "A Century of Jewish Life in Flint") deftly collaborate to present Jewish Life In The Industrial Promised Land 1855-2005, an examination of the history of Jewish families and daily life in Flint, Michigan, an industrial boomtown famous for its decay into rustbelt poverty when General Motors slashes jobs and closed plants. The Jewish community of Flint was comprised of many strains, including immigrants from a variety of nations; collectively, they were not invested directly in the automobile-driven economy but rather worked as storekeepers, entrepreneurs, and professionals; and they were affected as severely as everyone else when General Motors' closings caused the local economy to crumble. Black- and-white photographs illustrate this detailed chronicle of all aspects of an enduring and faithful community.
history of the Jewish community in the longtime automaking center Flint, Michigan January 25, 2006
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
The century and a half time frame covers Flint, Michigan, from its origins as a major industrial city, through the prosperity its inhabitants enjoyed in the decades when the automobile industy was the centerpiece of the American economy, until the last decades of the 20th century when Flint along with other major industrial centers fell into decline with the success of foreign automakers. During this long time, the lives of Flint's Jewish inhabitants reflected the general condition of the other residents. While Jews never participated in the well-paying and long-term factory work for the automobiles, they took part in the ups and downs, promising prospects and economic worries, affecting those involved in auto manufacturing and their families as shop owners, doctors and other professionals, and entrepreneurs in the areas of services for other city residents. Fairies and Hanflick's history of the Jews of Flint using their "own analytic framework and interpretive lens, but using the community's words and perceptions to help guide the analysis...and give shape and substance to the story" entails ecletic content. This ranges from oral history, many photographs from all periods, profiles of leading Jews, and social and economic history. All this is brought together coherently and informatively in this combination of regional, urban history and minority, Jewish study following mainly the assimilation and fortunes of the generations of the city's Jewish community. Both authors are connected with Michigan universities.
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