In the years following World War II, a “golden age” seemed to open up for Jews. “Suddenly,” Irving Kristol remembered, “things were possible that seem[ed] utterly impossible.” Hitler's Holocaust had demonstrated the depths of human depravity at the cost of six million Jewish lives, but the battle against Nazism had been won. The United Nations was established to keep the peace, and a Jewish homeland was created. Anti-Semitism, while still a force to be reckoned with, seemed to be in retreat. The position of the Jew had been normalized, social critic Will Herberg proclaimed in his influential Protestant, Catholic and Jew (1955).

In the transformation of American society after the war, no ethnic group took greater advantage of the new emphasis on egalitarianism than the Jews. Their numbers were tiny even back then – there are still fewer than 6 million Jews in a national population of well over 220 million. Yet their influence in field after field – from law, medicine, entrepreneurship, and philanthropy to virtually all forms of high and popular culture – was extraordinary. “People talk about what Episcopalians have accomplished and their power,” wrote the University of Pennsylvania sociologist E. Digby Baltzell, an Episcopalian, “but what Jews have done in the United States … is now the great, untold story.”

It was not that American Jews merely began to win acceptance in the overwhelmingly Christian society, but rather that many became bright stars in a new cultural firmament.