Sex, War, and Community Service: The Battle for San Francisco's Jewish Community Center

Abstract

Sex, War, and Community ServiceThe Battle for San Francisco's Jewish Community Center Mary Ann Irwin (bio) In 1954 San Francisco's Jewish Community Center (JCC) published a history of its first seventy-seven years. The slim volume also marked the one hundredth anniversary of the community center movement in the United States. Louis Blumenthal, the history's author as well as the JCC's executive director, began the tale in 1877, when the organization was founded as the Young Men's Hebrew Association (YMHA). Subsequent pages detail the YMHA's slow evolution from social club, to athletic fraternity, to "town hall for Jewish communal organizations." Blumenthal admits that the YMHA's course had not been smooth. Indeed, the association had failed—twice. Success came at last in 1920 when, "at the request of the Emanu-El Sisterhood," a Jewish women's organization, the YMHA took over Sisterhood's community service functions. As a YMHA newsletter later explained, taking over the activities of the Emanu-El Sisterhood was "part of a plan" by which the YMHA had become San Francisco's Jewish Community Center.1 A fascinating story lies just beneath the surface of this simple recital. Local histories obscure a whirlwind of class-, ethnic-, and gender-based rivalries as Jewish agencies battled for the right to become the city's one and only community center. This essay considers the gendered dimensions of this conflict, as well-established women's groups struggled to repel the advances of the perennially unsuccessful YMHA. This story is not simply an isolated instance of institutional rivalry in a Western town. The transfer of what Blumenthal calls "leisure-time activities" from Sisterhood to the YMHA mirrors a much larger story that was taking place nationwide. As community leaders phased out settlement houses in the 1920s and 1930s, their places were taken by community centers, neighborhood institutions whose facilities and programs often mirrored those of their predecessors in all save one crucial element—female leadership. The victims of "shifting political winds," according to historian Judith Ann Trolander, settlements [End Page 36] lost their community functions and, with them, their access to community funding. The fiercest winds came at the onset of World War I, when European immigration to the United States fell off sharply, and continued into the 1920s, when Congress placed severe restrictions on immigration. The shift to centralized fund-raising also damaged the settlements. During World War I private donors were overwhelmed by the fiercely competitive war-bond campaigns of rival groups. To limit the assault on their pocketbooks, civic leaders opted for centralization under Community Chests, the 1920s version of charity organization societies. Centralized funding, in turn, put pressure on settlements and other woman-led entities. As demand for immigrant services fell, so did appropriations to settlement houses. At the same time, however, urban Americans had learned the value of the houses themselves. As communal spaces settlements had proven their worth as sites for delivery of various social goods and services, from lectures on public health, to children's after school programs, to evening activities for working adults. A growing share of Community Chest budgets was allocated to the new spaces known as community centers. In the process authority for designing and delivering community services shifted from women to men.2 Women's service organizations were also undone by an antifeminist backlash, a reaction that increased in intensity after passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1919. Beyond that backlash was a growing belief that American women's work as "municipal housekeepers" came at the expense of American men. Some historians link this sense of eroding masculine authority to the birth of the Boy Scouts of America, the organized play movement, and the country's growing enthusiasm for team sports and the manly art of boxing. Religious spokesmen of every stripe campaigned to bring men back into the fold and, at the same time, to regain control of programs begun by female congregants. The final blow to many woman-run settlements came with World War I, which captured the attention of America's progressive leaders and turned them from social reform (long the province of organized women) to preparing men for war (traditionally...