Book excerpt: Although frequently recognized as home to well-known personalities, Great Neck is also notable for the conspicuous way it transformed itself from a Gentile community, to a mixed one, and, finally, in the 1960s, to one in which Jews were the majority. In Inventing Great Neck, Judith S. Goldstein recounts these histories in which Great Neck emerges as a leader in the reconfiguration of the American suburb. The book spans four decades of rapid change, beginning with the 1920s. First, the community served as a playground for New York's socialites and celebrities. In the forties, it developed one of the country's most outstanding school systems and served as the temporary home to the United Nations. In the sixties it provided strong support to the civil rights movement.