Struggle As Jews And American Jews-A Historical Review Of American Jewish Acculturation & Its Role In The United States Since 1924

American Jews today assume a prominent status disproportionate to their population in the United States. For three and a half centuries, they've passed through a journey from a marginalized people to an integral or somewhat prominent part of the mainstream society. The history of American Jews in the United States can be characterized as a history of acculturation and assimilation. However, although Jews arrived in the United States as early as 1654, the real interaction between ancient Jewish culture and American culture did not occur until the vast immigration of Jewish community from Eastern European between 1880 and the 1920s. Since then, American Jews have tried hard to adapt themselves to American culture at a greatly accelerated pace. This thesis is a study of the Jewish experiences in the U.S. since 1924, offering a historical perspective on the second- and third-generation Jewish immigrants, who first suffered the Great Depression and the outpouring of anti-Semitism, then greeted the prolonged prosperity in the decades following WWII, and are now concerned with Jewish identity and continuity amid the rise of intermarriage and the decline of birth rate in the Jewish community. The thesis argues that it is the acculturation process that redefined Jewish identity in any given historical period, which, in turn, helped shape their role in the development of American Society.