JEWISH COMMUNITY IN WICHITA, 1920-1970: SAME WAGON, NEW HORSES

The Jewish experience in Wichita, Kansas, highlights the ongoing challenge of being Jewish in the Midwest. Ever since the mid-nineteenth century, Jewish life in the middle part of the country was quite different from that in cities like New York, which contained the largest concentration of Jewish Americans, and which has attracted most of the historical scholarship. From the 1860s to the 1880s, Wichita's early Jewish families tended to be first-generation immigrants from German-speaking areas. By the 1940s Wichita had a local Jewish community that was still adjusting to four decades of changes and was now poised for an even greater transformation. This meant the arrival of a new economy based on oil, aviation, and consumer goods. These industries brought in waves of new residents both native-born and immigrant, both Jew and Gentile. Jews coming of age in the 1920s and 1930s had to negotiate their identities to find a balance that was Jewish, Wichitan, Kansan, and American.