Jewish New York: The Remarkable Story of a City and a People by Deborah Dash Moore

Abstract

Reviewed by: Jewish New York: The Remarkable Story of a City and a People by Deborah Dash Moore Jerome A. Chanes (bio) Jewish New York: The Remarkable Story of a City and a People. By Deborah Dash Moore (with Jeffrey S. Gurock, Annie Polland, Howard B. Rock, and Daniel Soyer). New York: New York University Press, 2017. 500 pp. "Very few people know who I am," Salvador Dalí is reputed to have said, "And I am not one of them." Well, count me in—at least when it comes to the question of what is a Jew. Are Jews a national group? Are Jews a religion? A race? Are Jews an "ethnicity"—whatever that means? A language group? All of the above? These questions—even some answers—cohere in Deborah Dash Moore's (and four co-authors') comprehensive and eminently readable Jewish New York: The Remarkable Story of a City and a People, a tour-de-force historical survey of New York's Jewish communities. Jewish New York? What's that? Sephardim? German Jews? Russian Jews? "Uptown" versus "Downtown"? Bundists? Zionists? Orthodox? Reformers? Holocaust survivors? Hasidim? Misnagdim? All come together in the pungent cholent that is Jewish New York. Jewish New York, a telescoped version of the five authors' magisterial three volume City of Promises—principal author Deborah Dash Moore synthesized the three volumes into one here—is a comprehensive roadmap to who made Jewish New York and how it happened. The book consists of four parts; each plumbs a discrete era in New York Jewish history, from its "Foundations" (the "why" of the twenty-three Jews leaving Recife for New Amsterdam in 1654 in itself makes for a good yarn!), to the present-day "A Changing City," the second decade of the twenty-first century. The book uses the history of the waves of immigration of Jews to America—each wave had its own "flavor" of Jews—as a vehicle for narrating the more narrow New York Jewish history. While the story is compellingly told, there are occasional weaknesses. An example is the treatment of the migration from Germany, beginning in 1836, the second of the four migrations of Jews to the new land, which was important in that it was the first mass migration of Jews to America and to New York. Moore notes that "many [German Jews] traveled on to midwestern cities … [but] thousands remained in New York" (43). But the book misses the point. Yes, thousands of German Jewish immigrants did remain in New York; but most soon left the seaboard cities and struck inland with peddler packs on their backs. The German Jews arrived during the period of national expansion, and they followed the routes of expansion, establishing most of the Jewish communities in the United States. This [End Page 385] missing piece—who did stay in New York?—of the national historical narrative is important in illumining the New York story. Jewish New York is strongest in nineteenth- and twentieth-century urban history, the "urbanization and becoming city people," in the singularly New York sense, of immigrant Jews (4). Moore indeed has urbanization and city front and center of her history, and rightly so. And in two superb chapters, "Jewish Geography" and "Raising Two Generations," the authors, in forty-six exceptionally concentrated pages, cover the results and consequences of urbanization: changing neighborhoods, from the Lower East Side to everywhere; public transit; housing; discrimination; education; innovation in religion; culture (including, brilliantly, fashion); and health. The book takes the reader seamlessly from 1880s New York to the 1970s, the cusp of contemporary New York. Thence, from the 1970s to the first decade of the twenty-first century, Jewish New York charts the sociology and the politics of "A Changing City." On the very last page of the book, the word "challenge" pokes through the prose; the reader is left to ponder, again, the book's thesis—the challenge of how Jews continue to change New York, and how they are changed by New York. As compelling as Jewish New York is, there are holes in the narrative. In her discussion of the Yiddish press—the journalistic vehicle for immigrant Jews in the first decades of the...