Erin Faigin is the Friedman Postdoctoral Fellow in Jewish Studies in the Jewish, Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies Department at Washington University in St. Louis. She completed her PhD in American History in 2024 at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Her first book project, As if!: A Jewish History of the Valley Girl and the Valley That Made Her, reframes the Valley Girl stereotype as a product of Jewish ethnoburbs in Los Angeles’s San Fernando Valley and offers a new angle on suburbanization, upward mobility, and Jewish difference in the postwar age.