"To read about #American #Jews this summer, you only need to open the newspaper. For better or worse, and probably for worse, Jews have been all too much in the news of late.
Seventy years ago, the situation was quite different. With #WorldWarII moving into the realm of history, in the mid-1950s Jews were being depicted not as alien or disreputable #immigrants but rather as members of a respected American #religion, reflected in a middlebrow #literary #culture that reached a mainstream audience. That was true at the end of the 1955 beach #reading season when an unlikely pair of popular #novels made a splash on the #NewYorkTimes #Bestsellers list.
Patrick Dennis (the pen name of Edward Everett Tanner III) published his first #novel, “Auntie Mame,” in August of 1955. “Mame” quickly reached number one on the fiction #bestseller list. A few weeks later, Dennis’s novel ceded the top spot to Herman Wouk’s “Marjorie Morningstar.”
https://www.jta.org/2025/06/12/ideas/70-years-ago-these-beach-reads-explained-jews-to-america
