To read about American Jews this summer, you only need to open the newspaper. For better or worse, and probably for worse, Jews have been all too much in the news of late.

Seventy years ago, the situation was quite different. With World War II moving into the realm of history, in the mid-1950s Jews were being depict­ed not as alien or disreputable immi­grants but rather as mem­bers of a respect­ed Amer­i­can reli­gion, reflected in a mid­dle­brow literary cul­ture that reached a main­stream audience. That was true at the end of the 1955 beach reading season when an unlikely pair of popular novels made a splash on the New York Times Bestsellers list.

Patrick Dennis (the pen name of Edward Everett Tanner III) published his first novel, “Auntie Mame,” in August of 1955. “Mame” quickly reached number one on the fiction bestseller list. A few weeks later, Dennis’s novel ceded the top spot to Herman Wouk’s “Marjorie Morningstar.”

Other than featuring female protagonists whose name started with M, it was not obvious that the two books — one by a WASP from Evanston, Illinois, and the other by a Bronx-born Jew — had anything in common. Wouk’s novel followed Marjorie Morgenstern, a young Jew coming of age on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, and her adventurous dating life. Time magazine called Marjorie “an American Everygirl who happens to be Jewish.” The Morgensterns’ journey from the Bronx to Central Park West was not only the stuff of Jewish dreams; postwar Americans from all over the country could identify with their desire to move up in the world.

In Marjorie’s case, the family’s new home in the famous El Dorado building provided a feeling of luxury every morning when she woke to a sweeping view of Central Park. It was also the perfect address for launching a Manhattan social life — just as soon as she managed to disentangle herself from her old life and Bronx boyfriend. Readers follow as Marjorie negotiates her social and religious life, including observing kashrut.

The “will she or won’t she” question of the novel mostly concerns........

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