Embracing a Western Identity: Jewish Oregonians, 1849–1950 by Ellen Eisenberg

Abstract

287 Reviews REVIEWS EMBRACING A WESTERN IDENTITY: JEWISH OREGONIANS, 1849–1950 by Ellen Eisenberg Oregon State University Press, Corvallis, 2015. Photographs, illustrations, tables, notes, bibliography, index. 304 pages. $24.95, paper. Ellen Eisenberg’s Embracing a Western Identity is a gift not only to historians of American Jewry, Oregon and the Pacific Northwest, and the American West but also to all scholars of local history and minority communities. In its thoughtful , elegant approach, Eisenberg’s book is a model of how to write local history — and I write “local” advisedly, since this is really a study of the Portland Jewish community. Eschewing the strictly chronological narrative to which many similar works adhere, Eisenberg guides readers through a century of Jewish life in Oregon by way of five discrete themes — Jews as Oregon pioneers and founders, migration patterns and ethnic composition, the question of a Jewish political sensibility, the trajectory of Zionism in Portland, and the issue of race — as well as one central institution in Portland Jewish life: Neighborhood House. Throughout, she demonstrates a mastery of the relevant scholarship in Portland and Oregon history as well as American Jewish history. Eisenberg draws the requisite lines between Oregon Jewry and patterns in western and U.S. Jewish history that it exemplifies. But she is more intent on showing readers where those lines diverged: where the story of Oregon’s Jews — which, after about 1900, is to say Portland’s Jews — is not what we might expect it to be. The book’s initial chapter explores the early days of the Jewish presence in Oregon, which Eisenberg explains left a lasting impression in collective memory of Jews as “pioneers and native sons [and] fostered acceptance and paved the way for civic and political leadership” (p. 49). In her sweeping tour de force of a second chapter, Eisenberg analyzes the idiosyncratic migration patterns characteristic of western Jewish communities that are at variance with patterns in eastern states, which have come to stand in for all of American Jewry. Drawing on a wide array of sources, including a careful and insightful evaluation of oral histories of Portland Jewish women, Eisenberg’s analysis, a consummate example of immigrant history, paints a messier — and more accurate — picture of the ethnic and religious makeup of Portland Jewry than we have seen before. The complexities include the fact that a good number of Jewish migrants to Portland hailed from the Germanruled Polish province of Posen, which enabled them to serve as a bridge between the founding German-Jewish immigrants and the later wave of immigrants from the Russian Empire and Romania. Eisenberg effectively identifies the roles played by religious sensibilities, class identity, and ethno-geographic background in the sometimes-complex Jewish institutional landscape of early-twentieth century Portland. Among other important factors, she points to the functions of self-selection in migration — only those with “a relatively modernist outlook” would choose Portland over more traditional communities — and of many immigrants’ previous adaptation to modernity in the cities of the southern Pale of Settlement (p. 72). Eisenberg’s chapter on Neighborhood House, a settlement house created in the early twentieth century by acculturated Jewish women to help immigrants adjust to their new lives, explores the original goals of the institution and how they changed over time in dynamic response to the changing self-image of each of the two groups and their mutual relationship. In contrast to the collective memory expressed in oral histories that document South Portland as a Jewish enclave, Eisenberg reminds us that South Portland was a diverse place and that Neighborhood House accordingly served an increasingly diverse constituency. In chapter 4, Eisenberg charts Jewish political sensibilities in Portland, arguing that while at times Portland’s immigrant Jewish community made political choices similar to those of its non-Jewish socio- OHQ vol. 118, no. 2 288 economic peer groups — and distant from the establishment politics of elite Jewish politicians — at important junctures patricians and immigrants drew together in what might be called a progressive Jewish politics. As the chapter 5 title suggests, “A Western Exception” documents why, unlike other western cities such as San Francisco, a strong anti-Zionist movement never emerged in Portland...