Introduction: A New Angle on Midwestern History

Abstract

IntroductionA New Angle on Midwestern History Jon K. Lauck In a 1966 interview, Bob Dylan said "I'm not a New Yorker. I'm North Dakota-Minnesota-Midwestern. I'm that color. I speak that way. I'm from someplace called the Iron Range. My brains and feeling have come from there." Dylan was the son of Abe and Beatrice Zimmerman, both products of Jewish immigrant families. The Zimmermans lived up on Minnesota's northern mining range in the town of Hibbing, where Abe sold appliances with his brother. Beatrice, known as "Beatty," recalled having served latkes to all her Christian neighbors on Hanukah and embraced her identity "as an American … who went to school and enjoyed every one of my Christian friends." She sent young Bob off to college at the University of Minnesota, where he found his purpose as a musician.1 The story of the Jews of Minnesota's Iron Range, including the Zimmermans, is told in this issue by Marilyn Chiat, who is an architectural historian and codirector of the Houses of Worship Project at the University of Minnesota. Our cover features the B'nai Abraham Museum and Cultural Center, formerly B'nai Abraham Synagogue, in Virginia, Minnesota, which is discussed in Chiat's article. Chiat's treatment of Iron Range Jews is part of a special symposium in this issue of Middle West Review focused on the history of midwestern Jewry. We seek to expand the scope of the story of ethnic immigration to the Midwest with this issue and seek to add to what we already know from prominent books about the immigration of Norwegians, Germans, and Poles to the region.2 Erin Faigin of the University of Wisconsin explains how Jewish immigrants to Chicago built a world of reading and debating and a lively community discourse. More specifically, they gathered in places like Ceshinsky's Bookstore in Humboldt Park and read venerable Yiddish works and translations of American classics such as Uncle Tom's Cabin. They explored their new place in the world by reading books published at Ceshinsky's such as Antologie Mitvest-Mayrev, a collection of writings about Detroit, Milwaukee, Chicago, and points west. They contributed, therefore, [End Page xi] to a midwestern regionalism that blossomed during the 1930s and did so from an interior point of view, not one from New York, whose gaze tends to dominate the historiography. As Jessica Kirzane of the University of Chicago explains, Jewish writers brought a fresh set of eyes to happenings in the Midwest. They could see the Midwest differently, as their shock at the famed Chicago stockyards makes clear. Their viewpoint, Kirzane argues, "offers a striking example of what is to be gained by studying Yiddish engagements with the American Midwest." Another important engagement took place in Cleveland, where, as Sean Martin explains, Jewish civic leaders built a monument to interethnic cooperation in the form of the Cleveland Cultural Gardens. Martin, a curator of Jewish history at the Western Reserve Historical Society in Cleveland, connects this effort to the theory of American pluralism devised by Horace Kallen, who developed his idea while living in and experiencing the ethnic diversity of Wisconsin.3 Martin sees the Gardens as a successful "enactment of the theory of cultural pluralism." Although much social and cultural cooperation and ethnic blending can be found on the Iron Range and in Chicago and Cleveland, evidence of the ancient problem of anti-Semitism can also be found. Carey McWilliams, for example, the long-time editor of The Nation, famously characterized Minneapolis as the "capital of anti-Semitism in the United States." In her contribution to our symposium, Laura Weber, most recently the editor of the journal Minnesota History, seeks to demythologize and contextualize McWilliams's claim. Weber explains Hubert Humphrey's efforts to combat anti-Semitism as mayor of Minneapolis, highlights Twin Citiesbased Jewish leaders' responses to McWilliams's article, and suggests a nuanced reading of McWilliams's later conclusion that anti-Semitism in Minneapolis was "not precisely duplicated elsewhere in the Midwest." The claims of McWilliams, the consideration of the evidence by Weber, and the comparative work of the other scholars assembled in this issue suggest even more...