Nora Faires

Nora Faires is Associate Professor of History and Women’s Studies at Western Michigan University. Faires serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of American Ethnic History and the ...

Nancy Hanflik

Nancy Hanflik received her master’s degree in American Culture from the University of Michigan-Flint. Her thesis became the foundation of an exhibit, 'A Century of Jewish Life in Flint,' which she co-curated at the Alfred P. Sloan Museum in Flint, Michigan. She is a past president of the Flint Jewish Federation.

Jewish Life in the Industrial Promised Land 1855-2005

Nora Faires

Nancy Hanflik

Award Winner: 2006 Historical Society of Michigan Award and 2006 Independent Publisher Book Awards (IPPY)

Jewish Life in the Industrial Promised Land--1855-2005 combines an examination of the evolution of a small ethnic and religious community with analysis of the dramatic rise and decline of an industrial boomtown. In both popular accounts and scholarly writings, Flint has become an icon of manufacturing production become rustbelt ruin. As this book shows, even during Flint's vaunted postwar "golden age," Jews participated in the good life of consumer abundance but remained outside the city's major industry of automaking and absent from its most important corridors of power. Throughout the twentieth century, most Jewish families in this General Motors town worked as storekeepers, entrepreneurs, and professionals. They carved out a niche in the interstices of a political economy over which, like the autoworkers who were their customers and clients, they had little control but upon which their economic fortunes depended. When General Motors began slashing jobs in the mid 1970s, Flint's Jewish families consequently suffered along with other city residents, both black and white. Flint Jewry thus was forged in a setting of economic boom, but has seen that white- hot prosperity turn to ash, as the city has become America’s poster town for deindustrialization.

Jewish Life in the Industrial Promised Land provides a unique window on the religious, social, and communal structures created by Jews in this wildly turbulent environment. It traces a Jewish community comprised of multiple strands of migrants. It sees Flint Jewry as part of a global diaspora during decades of tumult, destruction, and international realignment. The study of Jewish Life in the Industrial Promised Land hopes to stir memories and imagination, to engage and enlighten, and to explicate key aspects of the evolution of twentieth-century American society and culture, while paying close attention to the voices of those whose story it tells.

Reviews

"authors note that, for the most part, Jewish residents didn't work in local auto factories but chose business occupations...map the lives of several early settlers....After chronicling the decline of GM locally, Hanflik and Faires close with an upbeat epilogue that includes commentaries by prominent community and business leaders...."

- Flint Journal

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