This week marked the passing of Stephen Birmingham, the author of the 1967 best-seller, Our Crowd, an account of the German Jewish elite in America. With its "frothy" tales of the rich and famous within the American Jewish community, Birmingham’s book, as one reviewer put it, fell somewhere between "social history and elevated tattletale," generating lots of interest among those who fancied both.
A novelist before he turned to history, Birmingham had a keen eye for the telling detail and the revealing anecdote. Story-telling rather than scholarship was his métier, prompting several prominent members of the academy to take him to task. Writing in Commentary, Marshall Sklare, the Brandeis University sociologist, publicly chided Birmingham for the casual way in which he documented his findings -- his footnotes left a lot to be desired -- as well as for his limitations in wrestling with the "serious implications of his material." Still, Birmingham's subject, the sociologist grudgingly conceded, was "certainly ripe for exploitation."
Sklare was right about that. Even so, it’s been nearly 50 years since Our Crowd first saw the light of day and near as I can make out, the book has yet to be superseded or seriously challenged. Perhaps we're due for another look. Any takers?
In the meantime, Birmingham’s lavishly detailed account of the tightly knit culture of America’s German-Jewish elite holds its own. That his book also imprinted the words, “our crowd,” on the contemporary Jewish imagination is an accomplishment to which few writers can lay claim.
