The dawn of the 1960s is presented in “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” as Jewish comedy’s generational escape from its vaudevillian traditions (Lenny Bruce haunts scenes like a messenger from the future). But the era of the show was a seminal one for the American Jew as well. “Gone are the bowing, cringing, fearful ways of his ghetto ancestors, but also the burning, almost pathological desire to prove his mettle which characterized the Jew of the Emancipation era,” Lothar Kahn, a professor of modern languages, wrote in a 1961 essay titled: “Another Decade: The American Jew in the Sixties.” In their place, Kahn observes, “has emerged an American Jew who stands upright, speaks and lives freely, as one citizen among others, and openly preserves like them a measure of religious, cultural and even national autonomy.”
Source: latimes.com – Los Angeles Times