The 2003 documentary “Capturing the Friedmans” told the sordid tale of a suburban father and son accused of sexually abusing young children. The Friedmans lived in affluent Great Neck, Long Island, and the documentary provided the kind of notoriety that no suburban town would want to attract.

And it is not the story that Judith Goldstein wants to tell about Great Neck. Instead, she has written a history of her hometown that paints it as a great example of American, specifically Jewish, upward mobility. It is a sociological story told through vignettes and character portraits.

Ms. Goldstein’s story begins in the 1920s. For the literary minded, Great Neck appears in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic “The Great Gatsby” as the not-too-disguised town of West Egg, the home of Gatsby and the wild parties of the nouveau riche. Fitzgerald lived for a time in Great Neck, where he encountered the great parties put on by Herbert Bayard Swope, the famous New York newsman. Swope hailed from humble origins in St. Louis, but by the 1920s had become the editor The New YorkWorld. He was a bon vivant whose parties attracted guests that ranged across the spectrum from Harpo Marx to Walter Chrysler.

The fabulous parties and the beautiful people of the 1920s could not last. One of Ms. Goldstein’s sadder tales is that of Eddie Cantor, the great Jewish comedian and singer, who rose to stardom from the gritty tenements of the Lower East Side. At the peak of his fame, Cantor moved to a mansion in Great Neck in the late 1920s, but lost his wealth in the stock market crash of 1929 and soon moved away from Great Neck.

Great Neck’s significance lies not with the rich and famous, but with the upwardly mobile middle class it attracted in the post-war years. Convenient to New York City, thanks to trains and highways, Great Neck began luring middle-class businessmen eager for the benefits of suburbia. Many of the newcomers were Jewish and the old guard Protestant residents began to leave or pass away.

Fueled by post-war prosperity, federal policies benefiting homeowners, and a decline in anti-Semitism, Great Neck grew into what Ms. Goldstein calls “the most talked about Jewish suburb in the country.” It possessed a socially active Reform synagogue. Its residents raised money to build a top-flight suburban hospital, and its school district became one of the best in the state.

Ms. Goldstein proudly gives the reader a roll call of Great Neck’s sons and daughters, a list top-heavy with academics and writers. Some of the big names include Francis Ford Coppola, the Nobel Prize winning scientist David Baltimore, and the “60 Minutes” correspondent Bob Simon.

With Great Neck’s success came criticism. As Ms. Goldstein admits, the suburb’s reputation was mixed. Not only was it “cultured, ambitious, successful, rich, dynamic,” but it could also appear “materialist, shallow, and spoiled.” In addition, with few black residents, Great Neck highlighted the racial disparities of the postwar years. Most blacks in the town were domestics who worked in Jewish homes.

The book ends with Great Neck becoming a majority Jewish town in the 1960s, yet Ms. Goldstein doesn’t neglect to discuss the interesting changes in the town since then. Still a largely Jewish community, Great Neck is now home to a large and growing Orthodox community. In addition, the suburb now supports a large Iranian community, as well as Asian immigrants.

Like its subject, the book sometimes falls into the trap of smugness and self-congratulation. Ms. Goldstein seems to think that Great Neck had the only decent public school district in the country during the postwar period. Furthermore, she wants to convince readers that Great Neck was better than the rest of suburbia because of “its special mix of intellectuals, achievers, and the social conscious who transcended the bland, mediocre, and self-serving contentedness of much of suburban life.”

That kind of chauvinism creeps into Ms. Goldstein’s account of the tensions between Great Neck’s middle-class Jewish children and their working-class Irish, Italian and Ukrainian contemporaries. Ms. Goldstein writes: “Not all children could keep up with Great Neck’s unrelenting challenge to be smart, sophisticated, athletic, attractive, and popular.” No wonder Great Neck got its reputation for self-satisfaction and snobbery.

Small errors also mar the text. New York City’s population in 1940 was 7.4 million, not 3.4 million. But that aside, “Inventing Great Neck” (Rutgers University Press, 205 pages, $24.95) is solid local history that captures America’s love-hate relationship with suburbia.

Mr. Cannato teaches history at the University of Massachusetts, Boston.