Jewish life in the industrial promised land, 1855-2005

"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 is 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 auto-workers 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 1970s, Flint's Jewish families 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 de-industrialization." "Jewish Life in the Industrial Promised Land, 1855-2005, provides a unique window on the religious, social, and communal structures created by Jews in this turbulent environment. It traces a Jewish community made up of multiple strands of migrants. It sees Flint Jewry as part of a global diaspora during decades of tumult, destruction, and international realignment, incorporating photographs and testimonies of those whose stories it tells."--BOOK JACKET.