The Aftermath of Johnson–Reed: John F. Montgomery and Jewish Immigration from Hungary in the 1930s

Reviewed by: Kugel and Frijoles: Latino Jews in the United States by Laura Limonic Amalia Ran (bio) Kugel and Frijoles: Latino Jews in the United States. By Laura Limonic. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2019. viii + 256 pp. Recent scholarship on immigration stresses the various, often contradictory, ways in which processes of social integration, acculturation, [End Page 466] linguistic barriers and economic challenges shape individual and collective identities. The history of Jewish immigration to the Americas is well documented, beginning with sporadic and unorganized settlements of individual Jews in colonial Latin America following the Spanish Inquisition. During the modern era, Ashkenazi Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe and Sephardic Jews from the declining Ottoman Empire arrived in growing waves of immigration due to socioeconomic and political unrest, as well as antisemitic persecutions in the Old World. Jewish immigrants were drawn to the United States by the principle of religious freedom inscribed in the US Constitution and by the hope of finding a tolerant society. From the 1960s onwards, new waves of Jewish immigration from the Southern Cone and Central America were drawn toward the northern neighbor on American shores. This historical context is at the core of Laura Limonic's research. Kugel and Frijoles: Latino Jews in the United States explores the different ways in which Jewish immigrants from Latin America (mostly from Argentina, Venezuela and Mexico) navigate the different ethnic and racial landscapes upon arriving in the US, where 39.5% of world Jewry currently resides. The book focuses on the processes of group construction within US society and the formation of a panethnic identity as Latino Jews. According to the author, this is an interesting case study, since Jewish immigrants from Latin America are not clearly identified in the US racial and ethnic classification system and instead are commonly viewed as white; i.e. as privileged newcomers who quickly acquire the status of insiders, unlike non-Jewish Latino immigrants. Limonic studies the in-between status of this group of immigrants: Although primarily classified as Jewish (i.e. white), in certain situations national identities overlap ethnic or religious identities as they correlate to fellow immigrants from their home countries. Moreover, a new panethnic identity emerges, as stated by the interviewees, as Latinos in the US, yet this social construct of Latin American identity is not embraced without conflict or doubt. Class, family status, prior social capital, and level of education are among the factors that determine their successful integration into the US and their affiliation with different groups. The book opens by reviewing the history of Jewish immigration to Latin America and the formation of ethnoreligious identity as a minority group within the wider Catholic society in Argentina, Mexico and Venezuela. The following chapter shifts to focus on the formation of the Jewish community in the United States as a "majority minority," a privileged group accepted by the mainstream despite its relatively small size in comparison to other racial and ethnic migratory groups (21). The author then shifts to examine the difficulties associated with defining a [End Page 467] Latino panethnic identity in the US as a post-migratory construct, which constitutes a secondary or tertiary identity for Latin American Jews. The analysis of the various circles of identification in which Latin American Jews affiliate with fellow Jews, Latinos or compatriots highlights the fluidity and ambiguity of such ethnic membership in the United States. Furthermore, as indicated in Chapter six, various institutional, informal, social and religious networks provide Latino Jews support and cater to different individual and collective needs. Institutions such as the Jewish Latin Center in New York or the various synagogues, Jewish schools and community centers in Aventura, Florida, emphasize the relevance of geographical proximity and of an identified tangible place to express these affiliations. This sociological research is based upon eighty-five in-depth interviews with Jewish immigrants from Latin America who settled in Southern Florida, New York and the Northeast, and California. It is based also on participant observations at Latino Jewish organizations and social events, conducted from 2010 to 2016, combined with quantitative data from the Pew Research Center's study on American Jews. By employing combined methodology, Limonic arrives at the following conclusions: Navigating...

Reviewed by: The Invention of the Jewish Gaucho: Villa Clara and the Construction of Argentine Identity Marcelo J. Borges Judith Noemí Freidenberg, The Invention of the Jewish Gaucho: Villa Clara and the Construction of Argentine Identity. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2009. 184 pp. Since the publication of Alberto Gerchunoff's stories in 1910, the saga of the Jewish gauchos has become a central part of the narrative of Argentine immigration. For both the descendants of early Jewish immigrants and Argentine society, it provided a cherished tale of successful integration—a symbolic link to the origins, for the former, and an example of the welcoming nature of the land and its people, for the latter. Judith Freidenberg refers to recent reevaluations of Gerchunoff's work but, despite its title, that is not the main focus of this book. Freidenberg is more interested in the topic suggested in the subtitle—a reassessment of the immigration narrative in the construction of Argentine identity from a local perspective. Since she has chosen the historical perspective of the inhabitants of Villa Clara—located at the heart of the rural settlements created by the efforts of Baron Maurice de Hirsch and the Jewish Colonization Association in the Province of Entre Ríos—Jewish rural immigration is an important element of this study, but not an exclusive one. (In [End Page 565] fact, a central point in her retelling of the story of Jewish rural immigrants is that it cannot be understood in isolation, for they interacted and were influenced by previous inhabitants of the land and by settlers of a variety of ethnicities.) Thus, history and memory are the central foci of this book—in particular, how the past is remembered by peoples of diverse origins in Villa Clara as they construct the story of immigration of their ancestors from Europe and the place of different versions of that past in the collective and official history of the town. As the officially sanctioned local story has traditionally emphasized its Jewish origins, other European groups have found ways to claim a part in the foundational story, but the voices of the residents of non-European descent have remained marginal. Freidenberg proposes to revise this homogenous version of the local past—and, by implication, of Argentina's foundational immigration narrative—with a more complex reading that takes into account the influence of generation, ethnicity, class, and power dynamics. The premise of the book is promising, yet the results are mixed. After an overview of different phases of immigration from Europe to Entre Ríos during the second half of the 19th century and the early 20th century (chapter 2), the book focuses on the history of Jewish rural colonization and the origins of Villa Clara (chapter 3), the integration of Jewish immigrants in the countryside (chapter 4), and the evolution of Villa Clara from a Jewish colony to multiethnic and socially diverse locality (chapters 5 and 6). The narration is interspersed by recollections from local residents, most of them descendants from European immigrants, as well as descriptions from local chroniclers and community historians. Several key points emerge from a mostly descriptive account, namely the diversity of experiences within the Jewish immigrant group and among early immigrants in general; the interdependence among immigrants and between immigrants and Argentines of nonimmigrant origin (criollos); the spatial transformation of Villa Clara; and the interplay of ethnicity and class in the local social makeup. The personal testimonies are good illustrations of the history of rural colonization in Entre Ríos and the transformation of Villa Clara, but they add little to what previous scholarship has shown. If the intention is to show the similarities and discrepancies between the local past as remembered by the descendants of European immigrants and the history of rural colonization which has crystallized in traditional historiography, that connection is largely left to the reader. Moreover, the reader is also solely responsible for connecting the case presented in this [End Page 566] book and Freindenberg's analysis to the broader scholarship on Argentine immigration—how it contributes to it, revises it, or challenges it. This lack of dialogue with relevant scholarship is puzzling, as the history of Argentine immigration...

Journal Article Unlikely Allies: Britain, America, and the Victorian Origins of the Special Relationship. By Duncan Andrew Campbell. (New York: Continuum, 2007. x, 307 pp. $29.95, ISBN 978-184725-191-6.) Get access Brian Jenkins Brian Jenkins Bishop's UniversitySherbrooke, Canada Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 96, Issue 1, June 2009, Pages 216–217, https://doi.org/10.2307/27694785 Published: 01 June 2009

This thesis is a case study in ethnic relations and identity formation. It attempts to problematize Jewish American immigration history by examining the actions and personal development of one 19th century Jewish immigrant, not through the literature of Jewish American immigration, but through the history and literature of the Chinese migrants with whom he interacted. In 1885, Dr. Felix A. Bettelheim launched a year-long venture to obtain 5,000 Chinese contract laborers to work on the construction of the Panama Canal. This thesis is an attempt to understand how, as a migrant and a member of a persecuted minority himself, Bettelheim could attempt to control the movement and migration of Chinese laborers, oblivious to the parallels that existed between his own experiences and those of the people he sought to exploit. By building an understanding of Bettelheim and his actions through the history and historiography of the people whose movement he was attempting to control, this thesis challenges expectations that because he was Jewish, Bettelheim and his actions must be examined from within a framework of Jewish American migration history. In asking “how could he attempt to broker and transport the labor and bodies of Chinese migrants?” this thesis ultimately seeks to understand how his venture contributed to the construction of his own sense of identity and belonging as an American, and how his story helps to illuminate the history of anti-Chinese prejudice in the United States.

174 SHOFAR Summer 1996 Vol. 14, No.4 appears about AmericanJewish life today. In the shadow ofthe Holocaust, when a third of world Jewry was murdered, it is not surprising that survival has become central to the minds of scholars and communal leaders. But this preoccupation with questions about group survival and continuity results in a failure to explore different issues related to AmericanJewish life. Ifwe do not begin to ask other interesting questions, then I fear that the survival of contemporary American Jewish studies is seriously threatened. Shelly Tenenbaum Department of Sociology Clark University Tropical Diaspora: TheJewish Experience in Cuba, byRobert M. Levine. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1993. 398 pp. $34.95. In Tropical Diaspora, Robert Levine traces the arrival offive different groups of Jewish immigrants and refugees to Cuba-Ashkenazim, Sephardim, Americans up to the early twentieth century, Gennan refugees, and survivors of concentration camps during and after World War II-and their interactions with each other and with several sectors of Cuban society. In doing so, he not only provides "a chronicle of the experiences of Cuba's Jewish immigrants" (p. 8), but also fleshes out their lives in several relevant contexts-the Cuban social and political milieu, the climate shaping immigration policies in other Latin American countries, and the larger arena of international politics. Although the subject is difficult and Levine's sources problematic, the author's good sense prevails throughout the book. Tropical Diaspora is an original scholarly history of Jewish immigration to Cuba and an admiring portrait of the men and women who contributed to its writing. Writing about Jews in Cuba is ridden with dilemmas that a historian must sort out. If Sephardic and AshkenazicJews remained separate entities for almost all of their time in Cuba, is it appropriate to talk about a single Jewish community with particular needs and desires, attitudes and expectations? If Cuban society effectively embraced various ethnic minorities (including Jews), how correct is it to consider Jewish immigrants a readily identifiable group (integrated, to use Levine's word) and not simply part ofCuban society (assimilated)? IfCuban communists in the 1960s and 1970s were not antisemites, how did anti-Israeli sentiment spread so fast and penetrate so deep in the Cuba psyche? If institutional- Book Reviews 175 ized discrimination did not exist in Cuba, and Jews adjusted to circumstances with pragmatism, which actions (on the part ofJews and on the part of other Cubans) can we attribute to the "Jewish" component of any one situation and which ones to other group characteristics (such as class, culture, family, etc.)? In other words, how do we as readers, and Jews and non-Jews in Cuba as actors, "construct" Jews and others? What is the right combination of religion, ethnicity, national origins, cultural practices, and so on that permits discrimination, or prevents it? These 'are the predicaments Levine faces in this volume. The problem is compounded by the fact that a weighty-and essential -portion of Levine's sources is elderly Miami Jews and their offspring. They tell moving stories, which Levine reproduces with respect. But they are not always aware of the import of their tales, or at times of their historical insignificance. It is Levine, again, who must place this wealth of information in proper perspective within a larger framework. Fortunately, Levine is an accomplished historian, who not only knows how to evaluate and corroborate evidence but also has vast experience in the subject at hand. As a Latin Americanist, the author is careful to provide the reader with the information necessary to understand fairly complicated circumstances, ,such as social relations in Cuba during the 1950s or revolutionary attitudes and policies. His skilled hand has also uncovered rich primary material and made use of pertinent secondary sources about both Cuba in the twentieth century and Jewish immigration to other Latin American countries. Emotion-filled statements obtained from oral interviews, sober official reports bygovernment and international agencies, as well as sensationalistic and "objective" newspaper accounts form part of this engaging narrative. Levine's prior work with and on MiamiJews has served him well. The SS St. Louis incident is exemplary of Levine's attention to detail and evenhandedness. The luxury liner...

Socialist Ideology, Traditional Rhetoric:Images of Women in American Yiddish Socialist Dailies, 1918–1922 Rachel Rojanski (bio) The Yiddish press in the United States came into existence with the beginning of Jewish immigration from eastern Europe and soon became, like any other foreign language press, a very important immigrant institution. 1 It encompassed a wide range of newspapers and periodicals, including not only monthlies and weeklies but also dailies, several of which were already appearing at the turn of the century. Almost all the Yiddish dailies reflected their own ideological tendency, ranging from Orthodox to Zionist to socialist, and they were, to some extent, intended to advance the interests of these groups and parties and to support their political struggles.2 Nonetheless, scholars—following the pioneering studies of Robert E. Park and Mordechai Soltes—have largely agreed that Yiddish newspapers in the United States were not merely a tool to advance various ideologies; they were also important agents of acculturation and Americanization for Jewish immigrants from eastern Europe.3 At the end of World War I, by which time Jewish immigration to the United States had begun its decline, there were five Yiddish dailies in the United States. Each attempted in its own way to deal with all aspects of Jewish immigrant life: politics, culture, social and economic activities, and even family matters. They aspired to help create the profile of the American Jew and to shape the image of Jewish immigrant society. Three important figures in the American Yiddish world—the poet Jacob Glatstein, the journalist and critic Shmuel Niger, and the journalist and editor Hillel Rogof—eloquently (though somewhat nostalgically) recalled these aims in the opening essay to a book marking the seventy-fifth anniversary [End Page 329] of the Yiddish press in the United States: "The Yiddish newspaper gave the immigrant a face. It made him a socialist, a Zionist, or a supporter of diaspora nationalism. But generally it made him a proud American Jew. . . . The newspaper in Yiddish was the stock market of ideas and of ideals. It shaped Jewish life."4 Thus, an examination of how the Yiddish press discussed Jewish women, the ways in which it tried to appeal to them and to mold their image, will reveal how it viewed their place and their roles in eastern European Jewish immigrant society in the United States and will also tell us much about their status in that society. In the following pages, I will examine the image of immigrant women in the Yiddish socialist dailies in the United States as they were depicted in four different arenas: the public sphere, the workplace, the world of writing, and the family. The dailies I will discuss are the two socialist newspapers: Di tsayt, published from August 1920 to April 1922 by the Labor Zionist movement, Poalei Zion; and the much more successful Forverts (Jewish Daily Forward), founded in 1897, which was the most important Yiddish newspaper in the United States and also the most widely circulated foreign language newspaper in the country.5 I have chosen to discuss these dailies both because their editors and writers exerted a strong influence on the Jewish public scene, adhering to progressive, liberal views and using the papers to achieve public and political aims, and because, unlike the other Yiddish dailies, they had special pages for women. Since it is impossible to draw a full comparison between these two papers because of Di tsayt's short life, the bulk of material presented is drawn from the Forverts with relevant insights from Di tsayt. Since they published regular women's pages dealing with a range of issues beyond simple housekeeping and health matters, both socialist dailies viewed the status of Jewish women in the spirit of the progressive ideologies they represented. Yet, the content of the women's pages, and especially their rhetoric, also had a great deal in common with the view of women's status and role prevalent in what was still a rather conservative eastern European Jewish immigrant society.6 In order to explain this, [End Page 330] I shall argue that although the Yiddish press used traditional images of Jewish women as mothers and housewives, its portrayal...

Abstract: During the early twentieth century, suicide among Jewish immigrants in the United States was hardly uncommon. The American Yiddish press regularly reported on suicide cases, and Jewish public figures acknowledged the phenomenon's frequency. Uncovering this forgotten chapter in American Jewish history and drawing on immigrants' letters, reports from the Yiddish press, burial records, and autobiographies, this article explores patterns of despair and self-violence among eastern European Jewish immigrants and their reflections in the American Jewish press, specifically in Yiddish. It traces expressions of immigrant suffering and identifies patterns of cultural failure to revisit the emotional and cultural dynamics of east European Jewish immigration to the United States in the age of mass migration. By focusing on marginal cases in American Jewish history, this article highlights a broad cultural spectrum of immigrant experiences.

Abstract: During the early twentieth century, suicide among Jewish immigrants in the United States was hardly uncommon. The American Yiddish press regularly reported on suicide cases, and Jewish public figures acknowledged the phenomenon's frequency. Uncovering this forgotten chapter in American Jewish history and drawing on immigrants' letters, reports from the Yiddish press, burial records, and autobiographies, this article explores patterns of despair and self-violence among eastern European Jewish immigrants and their reflections in the American Jewish press, specifically in Yiddish. It traces expressions of immigrant suffering and identifies patterns of cultural failure to revisit the emotional and cultural dynamics of east European Jewish immigration to the United States in the age of mass migration. By focusing on marginal cases in American Jewish history, this article highlights a broad cultural spectrum of immigrant experiences.

IN RECENT YEARS, NUMEROUS STUDIES on various aspects of Israeli immigration to the U.S. have been published by Israeli and American social scientists. This is not surprising, given the fact that the U.S. is the country of destination for most Israeli emigrants, and that large-scale emigration is inconsistent with Zionism, the dominant ideology in Israel. Thus emigration in general, and to the U.S. in particular, is viewed in Israel as a major social problem. Perhaps this is why Arab emigration from Israel to the U.S., as well as to other destinations, has rarely been studied. In fact, the vast annotated bibliography on emigration from Israel, published by the Szold Institute,' does not contain a single item discussing emigration of Israeli-Arabs. This paper analyzes Israeli-born immigrants to the U.S., both Jews and Arabs. Specifically, it focuses on Jewish and Arab emigration from Israel, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip to the U.S. until 1980, relying on a subset of the I980 U.S. census. This data set enables us to distinguish between Israeliborn Jews and Arabs. It is thus possible to describe and test hypotheses regarding the types of Jews and Palestinian-Arabs2 who emigrated from Israel and the Occupied Territories to the U.S. The first section of the paper advances the argument that out-migration from Israel and the Occupied Territories to the U.S., unlike in-migration, is governed primarily by economic factors, and that all Jewish and most Arab immigrants to the U.S. can thus be considered economic migrants. The second section briefly discusses theories of immigrant selfselection and economic assimilation and extends them to cases in which one

Reviewed by: Quarantine! East European Jewish Immigrants and the New York City Epidemics of 1892 Alan M. Kraut Howard Markel. Quarantine! East European Jewish Immigrants and the New York City Epidemics of 1892. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997. xvi + 262 pp. Ill. $29.95. Headlines today raise fears that Southeast Asian and Latin American immigrants are responsible for a spike in the number of reported tuberculosis cases. Portraying the foreign-born as health menaces and debating whether the threat warrants a broader restrictionism is old wine in new bottles. All the more reason, then, to read with interest and enthusiasm Dr. Howard Markel’s penetrating volume on what happened a century ago, in 1892, when health officials alleged that typhus and cholera germs were arriving in the United States on the bodies of Russian Jewish immigrants and sought to control the looming health crisis through quarantine. Markel, a physician as well as a historian of medicine, understands typhus and cholera from a clinical perspective. Familiar with the history of Russian Jewry, he adroitly contextualizes the immigrants’ quarantine experiences. Adept at Yiddish, he conveys those experiences in the immigrants’ own voices with unusual sensitivity. The 1892 outbreak of typhus in New York City was remarkable because most of the reported cases occurred among the 268 Russian Jewish passengers who had arrived on the SS Massilia and those who came into close contract with the immigrants. Public health officials called for quarantine. Jewish immigrant typhus victims from the ship, and their new neighbors who had contracted the disease, were forcibly removed to New York’s contagious-disease hospital on North Brother Island. Those just developing the disease and their healthy contacts were also quarantined. Soon, quarantine detention was extended to include all Russian Jewish newcomers, but not other immigrants arriving at the same time. Markel explains the perils of the voyage, including the three-month stopover in Constantinople, where typhus was endemic and where the voyagers may have contracted the disease. He takes readers into the Lower East Side tenements, so filthy and ripe for typhus that Jacob Riis called the Jewish neighborhood “the typhus ward.” However, Markel’s most original contribution is his critique of health officers’ insufficient and inconsistent response to the crisis. New York Port Health Officer Dr. William R. Jenkins scrambled to calm public fears, but he could not overcome his own prejudices, at times practicing “quarantine by ethnicity.” Russian Jews were quarantined without the slightest evidence that typhus was present on the ships they had ridden to America. Yiddish writers such as Abraham Cahan and Getsl Zelikowitch protested, but to no avail. Meanwhile, congressional nativists such as Republican Senator William Chandler of New Hampshire, chairman of the U.S. Senate Committee on Immigration, sought unsuccessfully to capitalize upon the episode in support of immigration restriction. Shortly after the typhus scare abated, public fears were further inflamed when cholera threatened New Yorkers. Cholera represented a broader, more frightening public health menace than typhus. Officials suspected that Jewish immigrants [End Page 785] passing through Hamburg and sailing on the SS Moravia had brought Vibrio cholerae with them. President Benjamin Harrison directed that all passengers traveling steerage on every arriving ship undergo a twenty-day quarantine. Cabin passengers, holding more expensive tickets, were exempt. If Harrison hesitated to push for broader restriction, or to mention Russian Jews as a special threat, state and municipal public officials were less reticent. Again, Jewish spokesmen denounced the medicalized prejudice, but gained little satisfaction. In 1893, Congress passed the Rayner-Harris Quarantine Act separating the controversial issue of immigration restriction from quarantine. The law, to be administered by the U.S. Marine-Hospital Service, called for a national system of quarantine regulations, immigrant inspection procedures, and health standards. Markel explains that because the typhus and cholera epidemics were short-lived public health crises, the backlash against immigrants was equally brief. Immigration restriction failed to pass in 1892. The episode was over, but the pattern of prejudice remained. Howard Markel intentionally limits the scope of his book to the stigmatizing of Russian Jewish immigrants as health menaces in New York a century ago—but his work offers an impressive model for later scholars who...

Reviewed by: Sephardic Jews in America: A Diasporic History Roger Daniels (bio) Sephardic Jews in America: A Diasporic History. By Aviva Ben-Ur. New York: New York University Press, 2009. v + 321 pp. This is a mistitled book. It is not a history of Sephardic Jews in America, diasporic or otherwise. The author, herself, denies the title: “The aim here is not to compose a linear history of the Sephardic community in the first half of the twentieth century or of the various institutions that Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews founded over the years. Rather this study has the thematic aim of exploring intra- and interethnic relations between the various groups that Eastern Sephardim, and, to a lesser extent, Mizrahi Jews encountered in the United States”(8). The book contains a great deal of information about relatively recent Sephardic immigration, much of it from interviews conducted by the author and from her research in obscure newspapers and other printed and manuscript sources that will be of value to any person who attempts such a history, which is surely one of the more apparent gaps in American Jewish history. The focus on relatively recent American Sephardic history reflects the work’s origin in the author’s 1998 Brandeis University dissertation, “Where Diasporas Met: Sephardic and Ashkenazic Jews in the City of New York, a Study in Intra-ethnic Relations, 1880–1950.” The book emphasizes what the author believes has been the “structural and scholarly exclusion” of “the Jews who weren’t there” and it is this alleged intellectual discrimination that fuels and, I am afraid, distorts her vision (1). To her, the conflict, most evident in New York City, between Ashkenazic and Sephardic Jews, is a unreported major event in American Jewish history and anyone who has ignored it is taken to task, chiefly in some of the 1,170 footnotes that accompany the 192 pages of text. Her targets include not only many of the major scholars of American Jewish history, but even immigration historians. Rudolph Vecoli is chastised for an encyclopedia article of nearly 6,000 words covering immigration in all of American history because “the Jewish immigrants who arrived in 1654 are not specified as Sephardim” (201, n. 12). In that essay Vecoli, as was his wont, stressed the diversity of American immigration from its outset and did not feel it necessary to refer to the Ashkenazic/Sephardic dichotomy, but did discuss the conflicts between German-speaking and Yiddish-speaking Jewish immigrants.1 [End Page 335] That some, perhaps most, of the Sephardic immigrants of her period were insulted because at one time or another other Jews refused to accept them as fellow Jews is recounted effectively in several places. That this is made a kind of leitmotif is, it seems to me, unbalancing as is Ben-Ur’s insistent categorization of all Jewish immigrants as either Ashkenazic or Sephardic, when many, perhaps a majority, never thought of themselves as either. A further weakness is a persistent attempt to provide precise numbers for various American Jewish populations and precise percentages of the numbers of Jews among the immigrants from various nations and of what kinds of Jews they were. Although the author, in introducing an “Appendix: Population Statistics of Non-Ashkenazic Jews in the United States,” recognizes that “[s]tatistical ambiguity is characteristic of U.S. Jewish population [estimates] in general,” nevertheless the text is literally peppered with overly precise numerical statements about both American Jewish population in general and of its component parts (32, 193). A further flaw is that many of her factual statements about American immigration are not to be relied upon. For example, persons denied admittance are not “deported” but “excluded,” Benjamin Harrison did not veto a literacy test bill, and the detention rate at Ellis Island never approached 20 percent. On the other hand, I found Ben-Ur’s extended remarks on Ladino and on the significance of immigrant languages instructive and sensitive. I hope that my stress on what seem to me to be the serious flaws of this work do not cause other scholars to ignore her call for a more nuanced analysis of the ethnocultural variations of the American Jewish experience...

We Hope to Find a Way Out from Our Unpleasant Situation:Polish-Jewish Refugees and the Escape from Nazi Europe to Latin America Mariusz Kałczewiak1 (bio) On September 26, 1940 Zygmunt Turkow, a Yiddish-speaking Polish actor and theater director, arrived in Argentina, escaping the war in Europe. Upon his arrival, Turkow tried his luck at establishing a new life for himself in Buenos Aires, which he knew because his theatre work had brought him there previously. But it was hard for him to focus on the arts. Local Jews worried about the situation in their "old countries," meaning that they barely had the time to think about producing and attending theater performances.2 Turkow soon left for Brazil, living there for twelve years. In Recife, Turkow and his wife spent sleepless nights listening to BBC news reports filled with words such as "ghettos," "camps," and "crematoriums." The war in Europe had a tremendous effect on Turkow's psyche: he had nightmares, and his days were filled with pain and "thoughts of German cannibalism."3 The actor feared that Brazil might not be a safe refuge and that the Nazis could reach him from across the ocean. These fears were not unfounded. During the war, German submarines sank numerous Brazilian merchant ships, and thwarted Brazilian ship navigations systems.4 When invited to perform in Rio de Janeiro, Turkow had to travel by boat. Although the Brazilian navy provided an escort, the sense of danger remained ever-present.5 [End Page 25] While Turkow's experiences may have been unusual—following the outbreak of World War II most Jews had no choice but to remain in Poland—they are nonetheless representative of a small group of relatively privileged Jews who had sufficient personal connections and financial means to arrange their escape. This article examines the fate of Jews who sought to enter Latin America during and shortly after World War II. I concentrate on the periods 1939–1941 and 1945–1948, and on Argentina as well as Brazil. The case studies I illuminate inform several broader themes including Argentine and Brazilian nationalism, antisemitism in Latin America, and the postwar refugee crisis. Attitudes towards Jewish refugees reveal that anti-Jewish policies hardly changed, even in the face of genocide in Europe. I focus on the dramatic experiences of those Jews who docked in Latin American ports, but were barred from disembarking. I analyze the experience of those who were smuggled illegally into Argentina.6 I examine how they took their fate into their own hands, thereby uncovering Jewish agency and lived experience during desperate time. Jewish Refugees and Latin American Politics Polish Jews' attempts to escape to Latin America between 1939 and 1941 followed a long history of Jewish migration to Latin America. Since the 1890s, impoverished and persecuted Eastern European Jews immigrated to Latin America, and for many it seemed to be a reasonable option with the Nazi threat looming on the horizon.7 Many Polish Jews had family members in Latin America who had the potential to assist them upon their arrival. Indeed, following the Nazi's rise to power in 1933, thousands of German Jews sought and found refuge in Argentina and Chile.8 When the war broke out in 1939, Latin America seemed to be sufficiently far away from Europe to provide safety for those seeking [End Page 26] refuge. Argentina maintained its official neutrality for almost the entirety of the war, declaring war against Germany only in March 1945.9 Brazil had declared war against Nazi Germany three years earlier, in August 1942. Yet in the first two years of the war the likelihood of finding refuge in Latin America appeared slim.10 In Argentina, quotas introduced in 1930, in the wake of a right-wing takeover, severely curtailed Jewish immigration. After 1938, new immigration laws, which were racially based, made it virtually impossible for Jews to enter as immigrants.11 In Brazil, president Getúlio Vargas and minister of foreign affairs Osvaldo Aranha introduced a policy in 1937 that effectively banned Jewish immigration. Circular 1,127 prohibited people of "Semitic origin" from obtaining visas. The result was a seventy-five percent drop in Jewish immigration...

The history of American-Hungarian relations has enjoyed renewed interest in the past thirty years. Despite this fact, there are still many uncovered or poorly documented episodes and persons concerning this academic territory. This article wishes to shed some light on one such character and period. It was in 1922 that the United States and Hungary established official diplomatic relations for the first time. Consequently the two countries exchanged ministers; thus, a long line of American ministers began to come and reside in Hungary. The very first of them was Theodore Brentano, who served five years in Budapest, between 1922 and 1927, but who seems to have disappeared from historical memory in both countries. Since 2022 marks the centenary of establishing diplomatic relations between the two countries, this article will introduce Theodore Brentano, the first American minister for Hungary and his work there. Brentano's years coincided with momentous events in Hungary in the post-Trianon era and were a time of relatively active relations between Washington and Budapest. Using primary and secondary sources alike, this article will hopefully illustrate a sorely missed part of the history of American-Hungarian history and rekindle interest in what took place a century ago.

Edgar Erskine Hume, A Proposed Alliance Between the Order of Malta and the United States, 1794: Suggestions Made to James Monroe as American Minister in Paris, The William and Mary Quarterly, Vol. 16, No. 2 (Apr., 1936), pp. 222-233

After Theodore Brentano's long tenure (1922–1927), a new American minister arrived in Hungary, who in many ways was a very different breed from his predecessor. Joshua Butler Wright was a career diplomat and, as it turned out, the only such American minister in Hungary in the interwar years, which meant a somewhat different approach to the job. Many in Hungary also interpreted the change as a positive sign as to the country's greater importance for Washington. However, this was not to be. Butler Wright's three years in Budapest did not bring any fundamental changes in the relationship between the two countries, and Hungary's importance, or the lack thereof, to the United States remained as before: as long as there was a politically stable government in Hungary and it did not cause diplomatic headaches to Washington, the American State Department was satisfied with reading about the political and economic situation in Hungary. Therefore, any Hungarian hopes or expectations that the United States might help in the revision of the Treaty of Trianon were frustrated.