Miami Beach: the making of a Jewish resort city

Abstract

ABSTRACT In the postwar decades, Miami Beach became a majority Jewish city partially due to the entrepreneurship first of Jewish hotel owners and then of Jewish builders. As a popular, middle-class vacation resort, it blended elements of big city sophistication with ethnic Jewish tastes. Its southern section housed an exceptional, visible community of elderly, Yiddish-speaking Jews who brought their public culture to its beaches and sidewalks. American Jewish photographers pictured this world as an American shtetl even as Jewish American television producers imagined Miami as a multicultural and multiracial site of vice, eroticism, and cool melodrama.