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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.
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Notes
1. Stephen Birmingham, “The Florida Dream,” Holiday 34 (December 1963): 62.
2. Ira M. Sheskin, “The Changing Geographic Distribution of the Jewish Population in Dade County,” Florida Jewish Demography, ed. Ira M. Sheskin, 4:1 (1 December 1990). Jews were 62% of the population in 1982.
3. Deborah Dash Moore, To the Golden Cities: Pursuing the American Jewish Dream in Miami and L.A. (New York: Free Press, 1994), 25.
4. Deborah Dash Moore, “Miami Beach: Like Strawberries in Winter,” The Other Promised Land: Vacationing, Identity, and the Jewish American Dream, ed. Avi Y. Decter and Melissa Martens (Baltimore: The Jewish Museum of Maryland, 2005): 80–83.
5. Miami Beach Hotel Owners Association, Selling Vacations on Miami Beach (Miami Beach, 1949), 3–4. Tourism generated a mere $72.5 million for Miami.
6. Polly Redford, Billion-Dollar Sandbar: A Biography of Miami Beach (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1970), 240.
7. N. D. B. Connolly, A World More Concrete: Real Estate and the Remaking of Jim Crow South Florida (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 116–18, 121–29; Moore, Golden Cities, 168–74.
8. Moore, “Miami Beach,” 79.
9. Moore, Golden Cities, 35.
10. Two other Jewish photographers, Joel Meyerowitz and Mitch Epstein, came down to Miami Beach but neither of them focused their camera on elderly Jewish residents. Meyerowitz was fascinated by the contrast of pools and ocean, two very different bodies of water right next to each other. Epstein visited Miami Beach as part of a series he did on ‘Recreation’ in America. Iris Mandret, ‘Mitch Epstein: The Color of Recreation,’ Blind magazine, November 1, 2022, https://www.blind-magazine.com/news/mitch-epstein-the-color-of-recreation/ (accessed July 26, 2023); Zoe Whitfield, ‘Joel Meyerowitz’s Life in Photos,’ i-D, July 7, 2022, https://i-d.vice.com/en/article/g5vg7b/joel-meyerowitzs-life-in-photos (accessed July 26, 2023).
11. Lauren Groff, “The Brightest Still The Fleetest,” in Shtetl in the Sun: Andy Sweet’s South Beach 1977–1980 (Letter16 Press, 2018): 10–14.
12. Gary Monroe, “Life in South Beach,” in Jews of South Florida, ed. Andrea Greenbaum (Waltham: Brandeis University Press, 2005): 129.
13. Monroe, “Life in South Beach,” photos on pp. 132,133 (unpaginated, Figure 3 and ).
14. Gary Monroe to Sophie Reed, email communication, 7 July 2023.
15. Gary Monroe described Thrifties as ‘one of the few iconic institutions from that distinctly Jewish era.’ Gary Monroe to Sophie Reed, email communication, 7 July 2023.
16. Ira M. Sheskin, “Demographic Study of the Greater Miami Jewish Community, Summary Report,” (June 1984), typescript, 4–7. See also Moore, Golden Cities, 25–26.
17. Isaac Bashevis Singer, “Introduction,” My Love Affair with Miami Beach, photographs by Richard Nagler (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1991), v-vi.
18. Quoted in Robert Gluck, “Jewish Retirement to South Florida: Behind the Numbers,” Washington Jewish Week, 3 July 2014.
19. The photographs can be found in Shtetl in the Sun: Andy Sweet’s South Beach 1977–1980 (Letter16 Press, 2018): 32–33.
20. Moore, Golden Cities, 40–41.
21. Gluck, “Jewish Retirement.”
22. Joel Saxe, “Yiddishkeit on South Beach,” in Jews of South Florida, ed. Andrea Greenbaum (Waltham: Brandeis University Press, 2005): 122, 127.
23. Mary Ellen Mark, excerpt from ‘American Photo: The Masters,’ https://www.maryellenmark.com/bibliography/magazines/article/american-photo/the-masters/A (accessed July 3, 2023).
24. Gay Block, ‘LOVE: South Beach in the 80’s’ exhibit at Howard Greenberg Gallery; New York ArtBeat; http://www.nyartbeat.com/event/2013/BABA (accessed May 8, 2020).
25. Jess T. Dugan, Q&A Gay Block, November 1, 2018; http://www.strangefirecollective.com/qa-gay-block (accessed May 8, 2020).
26. Moore, Golden Cities, 44–45; quote from Irving Lehrman, ‘Historical Review of Annotated Card Bibliography of the South Florida Jewish Community,’ DHL, Jewish Theological Seminary of America (1957), 75.
27. Moore, Golden Cities, 46, 48.
28. Gluck, “Jewish retirement.”
29. Henry Hohauser, Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Hohauser (accessed July 11, 2019).
30. Barbara Baer Capitman, Champion of Art Deco, https://www.mdpl.org/blog/barbara-baer-capitman-champion-of-art-deco/ (accessed July 11, 2019). See also Barbara Baer Capitman, Deco Delights: Preserving the Beauty and Joy of Miami Beach Architecture (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1988).
31. Andres Viglucci, “The Vice Effect: 30 years after the show that changed Miami,” The Miami Herald, September 29, 2014.
32. Richard Zoglin, “Video: Cool Cops, Hot Show,” Time, September 16, 1985, http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,959822,00.html (accessed July 9, 2019).
33. Viglucci, “The Vice Effect.”
34. Richard Nagler, “Photographer’s Note,” My Love Affair with Miami Beach, photographs by Richard Nagler (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1991), n.p. for photos and text.
35. See pp. 40–41 in My Love Affair with Miami Beach for the photo and Singer’s comments. He explains that Saturday was Rosh Hashanah so they were going to do tashlik on Sunday. Nagler had never heard of it.
36. Stephen Benz, “Cuban Jews in Miami: Exile Redux,” in Jews of South Florida, ed. Andrea Greenbaum (Waltham: Brandeis University Press, 2005): 69.
37. Caroline Bettinger-Lopez, Cuban-Jewish Journeys: Searching for Identity, Home, and History in Miami (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2000), 24–35.
38. Moore, ‘Miami Beach,’ 90–91.
39. Lisa Sanders, “Jon Tisch Takes Risks with Loews Hotels,” Crain’s New York Business 14:38 (September 21, 1998), 3; Stan Bullard, ‘Forest City subsidiary bidding for Miami hotel deal,’ Crain’s Cleveland Business 15:19 (May 9, 1994), 4; ‘Loews Miami Beach Hotel: Miami Beach, Florida,’ Successful Meeting, (January 1998), p. 36.
40. Daniel Shoer Roth, “Dade attracts Hispanic Jews,” The Miami Herald, September 28, 1999; Uriel Heilman, ‘Miami Jewry Sees First Gain Since 1975,’ Jewish Exponent, October 16, 2014, p. 13.
41. Abby Goodnough, “For Shtetl by the Sea, Only a Few Fading Signs Remain,” New York Times. April 3, 2007, p. A14.
42. Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums, and Heritage (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 55.
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Deborah Dash Moore
Deborah Dash Moore is Frederick G. L. Huetwell Professor of History and Professor of Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan. An historian of American Jews, she specializes in twentieth century urban history. Her recent book, Walkers in the City: Jewish Street Photographers of Mid-Century New York (2023) extends her interest in urban Jewish history to photography. Currently she serves as editor in chief of The Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization, a ten-volume anthology of original sources translated into English from the biblical period to 2005, selected by leading scholars.