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Losing a good friend is never easy. Later learning they were not who you thought they were can be even more unsettling. This was the scenario into which All in the Family (1971–79) writers cast their insular Archie Bunker character in the 1977 episode “Stretch Cunningham, Goodbye.”1 Stretch was Archie’s co-worker and friend who died unexpectedly. Since the two men were outwardly close, Stretch’s family asked Archie to deliver the eulogy. At the funeral, however, Bunker discovered he didn’t really know his buddy at all. Stretch was Jewish, the “beloved son of Chaim Kornheimer.”2 Such revelations confounded Bunker. He exclaimed to his wife, Edith, “How could he be Jewish . . . a Jewish name ain’t supposed to have no ‘ham’ in it!”3 Setting the humor aside, Stretch’s decision to pass with Archie indexed a familiar tale. Like the earlier characters of Jakie Rabinowitz, David Levinsky, Private Izzy Murphy, and Elaine Wales, Stretch’s experiences encapsulate the difficult choices that some Jews in the United States faced when living outside the boundaries of their primary reference group.4
It is not that things were especially bad for American Jews during the 1970s. This is why Stretch’s masking is so interesting. The preceding decades were times of increased Jewish visibility and decreased public anti-Semitism.5 Jews in the United States were “strangers no longer.”6 They moved into non-Jewish communities;7 they joined civic organizations that were once off-limits.8 Even Jewish holy spaces and traditions became more accommodating of Americanism, a process Deborah Dash Moore has characterized as the “secularizing of the synagogue.”9 The origins of this welcoming reached back to the World War II period, when Jews joined Christians in soldiering against Nazism.10 It is true that most GIs did not consciously see in their fight against Hitler’s armies as a simultaneous contest against his anti-Semitism. Nevertheless, this theme—crushing Nazi racism overseas meant ending domestic bigotry—was visible in wartime motion pictures,11 radio programs,12 plays,13 novels,14 comic book plots,15 and public advocacy campaigns.16 Especially by the 1960s and 1970s, successive generations of citizens learned that helping blunt Hitler’s anti-Semitism was a US wartime accomplishment.
While aspirational, such claims were at odds with the realities of...