In postwar America, the synagogue has once again become a central force a in Jewish life. For many American Jews living a more secular, less obviously "Jewish" life, the modern synagogue offers a connection to a cultural and communal identity.
Outside the embrace of the traditional immigrant community that their parents or grandparents knew, Jewish couples in the immediate postwar years sought to recreate community in the suburbs. Jewish school enrollment more than doubled from 1946 to 1956, while synagogue affiliation jumped from twenty percent in 1930 to sixty percent in 1960. Suburbanization sparked the growth of hundreds of new Conservative and Reform synagogues in the 1950s and 1960s, offering elementary schools, gyms and a lively program of social and cultural activities for young Jewish adults.
From the relative safety and affluence of the suburbs - complete with their expressions of secular Jewishness, the deli and the Jewish bakery - American Jews fashioned a new politics and a new self-definition that included the discovery of Israel.
