Stephen Sondheim’s Legacy and His Jewishness

I was not alive in the 1950s, but had I been, it is likely I would have thought poorly of the time I was living through -- for such was the conventional view among American thought workers, from the academy to the nation’s cultural institutions to its highfalutin media. They told themselves and the country that the decade was an "age of conformity," during which Americans did as they were told by cultural forces they did not understand. They moved into houses in the suburbs because the culture somehow mandated it, were horribly "other-directed" rather than properly "inner-directed," and lived in a cultural desert dominated by the "vast wasteland" that was the newest and most powerful mass medium, television.