Postwar Jewish nostalgia equated distance from the shtetl with inauthenticity

Evidence

21. See Mark Zborowski and Elizabeth Herzog, Life is With People: The Culture of the Shtetl (1952; New York: Schocken, 1995). In her illuminating new introduction, Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett argues that the logic of Zborowski and Herzog’s work can be reduced to the following: “To be less like the shtetl was de facto to be less authentically Jewish” (xvi). — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 1058

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to primitivist/nostalgia logics in other identity contexts — e.g. the romanticization of rural peasant authenticity versus urban assimilation in many nationalisms.
• DEFINE: Capsules how postwar shtetl nostalgia reframed authenticity as proximity to a romanticized, largely vanished way of life.