As the fortunes and social status of American Jews grew in the years after World War II, the symbolic power of the shtetl, the immigrant slum, and the struggling new state of Israel gained in importance. Jewish writers, educators, and clergy depicted these locations as deeply authentic Jewish spaces, uncorrupted by the influence and comforts of the non-Jewish world. Isolated rather than integrated, impoverished rather than affluent, they seemed to represent the opposite of mid-century American Jewish life. In the romantic imagination of American Jewish leaders, the deprivations suffered by their ancestors and co-religionists transformed into sources of pleasure, strength, and Jewish authenticity, and poverty and isolation emerged as integral components of a genuine and deeply satisfying Jewish identity.