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

Abstract

Reviewed by: Embracing a Western Identity: Jewish Oregonians, 1849–1950 by Ellen Eisenberg Mark I. Greenberg (bio) Embracing a Western Identity: Jewish Oregonians, 1849–1950. By Ellen Eisenberg. Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 2015. X + 292 pp. To the growing scholarly literature on American Jewish regionalism, enter Ellen Eisenberg’s monograph on Jewish Oregonians. Her work speaks directly to differences in the experiences of American Jews who settled outside the East Coast’s large urban areas. “Many remain convinced that Jewish authenticity resides only in the East, and that to put Jewish and Oregonian in the same phrase is somehow oxymoronic. Yet Jewish Oregonians and Jewish westerners have long embraced both parts of their identities and see them as compatible,” the author contends (9–10). [End Page 101] Analysis of the complex interplay between regional and ethnic identity unfolds in six chapters. Eisenberg begins with Oregon’s first Jewish settlers–“town leaders, civic boosters, and neighbors”–who settled small towns in the mid- to late-nineteenth century (15). Their prominence and high levels of acceptance within the state’s social and political hierarchy, as compared with Jews in other regions, stemmed from their acculturation prior to arrival, status as pioneers, contributions to community building, and racial status as white. The author explores migration in the second chapter as well, arguing that the Sephardic/German/Eastern European periodization often used to explain Jewish immigration to America does not work in Oregon. Instead, Bavarian Jews predominated in Oregon’s first wave, joined in Portland by growing numbers of Jews from Posen in the 1860–1880s. Particularly through the synagogue they founded in 1869, these Poseners served as a cultural bridge to the late nineteenth-century influx of Eastern Europeans Jews. By 1920, over 2,000 Sephardim from the Mediterranean Basin comprised the second largest Sephardic community in the U.S. after New York City. Despite their national differences, modernization influences in the southern Pale of Settlement prior to arrival in America, acculturation in America prior to arrival in Oregon, and an occupational structure that reduced class conflict created “relative cohesion among ethnic groups in Portland’s Jewish community” (70). Chapters 3 and 4 analyze social and political relationships between Jews and non-Jews within and outside of the Jewish community. Neighborhood House, founded in 1905 by Portland’s National Council of Jewish Women chapter, served as an important point of contact between the city’s American-born and immigrant communities through the 1930s. For affluent women, Neighborhood House offered “significant work outside the home” (91). Recent immigrants benefitted from the charity’s educational, recreational, and social opportunities but sometimes resented the unequal relationships that underlay the NCJW’s “assimilationist and preservationist impulses” (107). The interplay between class and ethnicity also played out in the political sphere. Electoral campaigns and ballot measures in the first several decades of the twentieth century revealed the emergence of a “Jewish vote.” Working-class and affluent Jews came together across class lines to oppose Sunday closing laws and Prohibition, policies they associated with Christianity’s influence on daily life. The School Bill unified the Jewish community against an initiative strongly supported by the Ku Klux Klan and tainted by religious intolerance. Yet the “Jewish vote” was not guaranteed. Despite Joseph Simon’s strong support from white elites, working-class Jews in South Portland believed that he represented [End Page 102] Oregon’s moneyed interests, and they did not rally around him during his various local, state, and national campaigns. Two decades later, Portland Jews voted overwhelmingly for progressive gubernatorial candidate Julius Meier, but he faced ugly, anti-semitic attacks from Christian opponents. The monograph’s interwoven theme of western exceptionalism, Oregon style, is in strong evidence again in the final two chapters. Anti-Zionism never became popular in Portland, unlike in San Francisco. By the 1930s, the city’s increasingly affluent, acculturated, and accepted Jewish community embraced a Jewish homeland in Palestine as a remedy to growing antisemitism in Europe and as a philanthropic enterprise. Several prominent local rabbis and lay leaders, most notably Stephen Wise, founded the Portland Zionist Society and gave the movement greater credibility. Portland Zionists did not succumb to fears that their views...