Book Review

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Book Review | The Journal of American History, 86.2 | The History Cooperative

Middletown Jews: The Tenuous Survival of an American Jewish Community. Ed. by Dan Rottenberg. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997. xxxvi, 142 pp. Cloth, $19.95, isbn 0-253-33243-5. Paper, $14.95, isbn 0-253-21206-5.)

"Middletown," or Muncie, Indiana, was the typical American town that the sociologists Robert Lynd and Helen Lynd studied in the 1920s and 1930s in their two major books, Middletown (1929), and Middletown in Transition (1937). Little attention then was devoted to its small Jewish community, partly because of the mild nature of local discrimination and partly because the Lynds were concerned mainly with old-stock Protestants. In 1979, however, a Harvard University-educated Jewish businessman in Muncie wanted to have his generation's experience preserved. To that end, he commissioned two professors at Ball State University to interview two dozen long-term residents about the changes they had seen during their lives. Nineteen of those edited transcripts, along with an introduction by Dwight Hoover, one of the original interviewers, form the body of this book. . . .

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