This brief for the “endurance of heterogeneity” elaborates and complicates the current academic attention to “whiteness.” Cautioning that as Jewish and Catholic New Yorkers, Irish and Italian, “became white” (in Noel Ignatiev's and Karen Brodkin's phrase) during the past century, “whiteness did not equal sameness,” Zeitz challenges mid-century consensus history and its influential homogenization and assimilationist narratives. Zeitz shows how religious differences among white New Yorkers continued to divide them as much as, if not more than, suburbanization, upward mobility, “the storied New Deal coalition” and the demographic mixing that wartime mobility stimulated may have brought them together. The voting results Zeitz cites illustrate how postethnic integration took hold unevenly, so that a “transcendent category” embracing “the white middle class” never fully gelled.

Zeitz leavens his quantitative data – polls, surveys, vote counts – with anecdotal evidence: church archives, sermons, oral histories, memoirs, fiction, speeches, movies, newspapers. Zeitz's evidence – subjected scrupulously to numerous exceptions and telling permutations – pits catechistic deference to hierarchy and tradition prevalent among Catholics against a cosmopolitan affinity for intellectual independence that stimulated revisionist stances toward tradition among New York's Jews.

The book's many recollections by Catholic and Jewish babyboomers about coming of age as residually segregated ethnics show how their (my) experience differed dramatically from that of our parents (many first-generation, many “Americanized” by wartime service). Though remaining Catholic or Jewish, boomers enjoyed our entanglement in, rather simply enduring in bemusement, the emerging postwar postethnic culture: living daily the convergences that our parents' mobility fostered willy-nilly, we routinely inhabited the kind of ethnically mixed election ballots – like O'Dwyer, Impellitteri, Lazarus – that the political bosses carefully construed and our parents found so remarkable. Consequently “cracking” ethnic solidarities, Catholic and Jewish youth came to share, as Zeitz illustrates, a suspicion of authority. In documenting this transformation, Zeitz lays the groundwork for further inquiry into how the very ordinariness of boomers' “mixed-ticket” activities – sports, playing music, dating, teenage misbehavior, “opportunities to brush shoulders” in Zeitz's phrase – catalyzed the civil rights and youth-culture upheavals Zeitz probes in explaining how the proclaimed if unrealized collective postwar sense of togetherness yielded to prevailing preoccupations with fractures and fault lines.

The questions Zeitz's analysis prompts will contribute significantly to challenging the “melting-pot rhetoric” that still colors and hobbles public conversations about immigration and ethnicity, subtly showing not so much that these assumptions are “wrong” but rather woefully oversimplified to meet ideological rather than intellectual demands.