Free Steven Spielberg by Joseph McBride Page A

negative sense. But he could not have helped internalizing the effects of their isolating gazes.
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    L OOKING back from the perspective of 1994 and her born-again Orthodoxy, Leah felt that, aside from the family’s observance of the Sabbath and Jewish holidays during the years when Steven was growing up, Judaism was “a very nothing part of our lives.”
    â€œLeah’s parents, while they were Orthodox, attended a Conservative synagogue,” Arnold relates. “But they obeyed the Sabbath. They did not do anything on the Sabbath, except during the worst times in the Depression, when Mr. Posner just had to work. When Leah and I got married, first we were observant, then she said, ‘I’ve got to get off the kosher standard. I want lobster and things like that.’ So we’d go off the kosher standard, then her conscience would prick her, and we’d go back on the kosher standard. We’d go in and out of it. But when she married [her second husband] Bernie Adler, he was very religious, so she stayed totally Orthodox.”
    After leaving Cincinnati, the Spielbergs tended to observe the laws of kashrut (kosher food preparation) only when their rabbi or Leah’s parents came for visits. As Steven put it, they were “storefront kosher,” Leah once was preparing to boil three live lobsters for dinner when they heard the rabbi’s car pulling up in their driveway. Steven hid the lobsters under his bed until the rabbi departed.
    If Leah and Arnold felt limited, and perhaps even somewhat stifled, by the traditionalism of their decaying hometown environment, and were willing to brave alienation and loss of identity by leaving it, they were typical of their generation of Americans who were starting families and careers in the late 1940s and early 1950s.
    â€œIn the years following the traumatic experiences of the Depression and World War II, the American Dream was to exercise personal freedom not in social and political terms, but rather in economic ones,” David Halberstam wrote in The Fifties. “Eager to be part of the burgeoning middle class, young men and women opted for material well-being, particularly if it came with some form of guaranteed employment. For the young, eager veteran just out of college (which he had attended courtesy of the GI Bill), security meant finding a good white-collar job with a large, benevolent company, getting married, having children, and buying a house in the suburbs. In that era of general good will and expanding affluence, few Americans doubted the essential goodness of their society.”
    Arnold Spielberg, thirty-two years old and newly graduated from the University of Cincinnati, was hired by RCA in June 1949 to work at its manufacturing plant in Camden, New Jersey, across the Delaware River fromPhiladelphia. “I thought RCA hired me to work on television,” he recalls. “When I showed up there, no, they didn’t have a job in television: ‘You’re in military electronics.’ I was doing circuit development, then I got involved in advanced circuit development leading toward computer technology. We were trying to prove, ‘Do we use tubes? Do we use magnetics?’ Transistors were just beginning to come in. ‘Do we use transistors?’ We had contests to see which design would win for the technology to be used in designing computers. It was that early. I hardly even knew about computers at college, other than about analog computers. I only became interested in computers while I was at RCA.”
    Arnold’s chosen field of electronics at that time was still a profession dominated by WASPs, although the fact that RCA chairman David Sarnoff was Jewish helped make that company more hospitable to Jews than others. As the Cold War and scientific competition with the Soviet Union intensified in the 1950s, many of the long-standing barriers against Jews in American science and higher education began to