Eastern European Jewish Immigrants Research Articles

"Like Salt in Water": Toward a History of Jewish Immigrants' Suicide in Urban America, 1890–1910

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.

"Like Salt in Water": Toward a History of Jewish Immigrants' Suicide in Urban America, 1890–1910

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.

Representations of Eastern European Jewish Immigrants in Early Twentieth-Century British Press: Judaism and the Urban Regeneration of London

This paper examines the (mis)representations of Eastern European Jewish immigrants in the British newspapers of the early twentieth century. As members of transnational networks, as simple travelers or victims of a forced emigration, Jews pursued economic prospects, freedom from antisemitism or the right to assert their political and cultural liberties while exploring new cities. The migration flows brought them to various European metropolises that were not only observed through the eyes of “the other,” “the stranger,” but also shaped by the cultural articulations of Judaism. Jewish migrants were nonetheless often perceived as dangerous to the ideas of national homogeneity. Positioning itself at the nexus of discourse and experience, a particular focus of this paper is to investigate the manner in which the cultural and religious differences experienced by both Jewish migrants and the settled population were depicted and negotiated, as well as the impact that Jewish immigrants had on the development of the modern city, specifically on London’s East End.

Becoming Canadian: Folk Literary Innovation in the Memoirs of Yiddish-Speaking Immigrants to Canada

This article considers the ways Yiddish-speaking immigrants to Canada creatively adapted folklore that they learned in “the old home” in order to make it fit their new Canadian contexts, and in doing so created new hybrid folklore and identities. To do this, I discuss the autobiographical texts of three people who migrated between 1900 and 1930, J.J. Goodman’s Gezamelte Shriften (Collected Writings) (Winnipeg: 1919), Michael Usiskin’s Oksn un Motorn (Oxen and Tractors) (Toronto: 1945), and Falek Zolf ’s Oyf Fremder Erd (On Foreign Soil) (Winnipeg: 1945). I argue that these personal narratives offer important insights into how the first major wave of Eastern European Jewish immigrants to Canada formed and expressed Canadian-Eastern European Jewish culture.

Arthur Ashkin: Father of the optical tweezers

The father of the optical tweezers, Arthur Ashkin, passed away peacefully at his home in Rumson, NJ, on September 21, 2020, at the age of 98, two years after being awarded the 2018 Physics Nobel Prize. Arthur Ashkin, in his backyard, looking through a magnifying glass. Image credit: Daniel Ashkin (photographer). From right to left: Arthur Ashkin, Steven Chu, and John Bjorkholm in 1986, around the time of the first demonstration of atom trapping. Reused with permission of Nokia Corporation and AT&T Archives. Arthur Ashkin in his homemade laboratory in his basement in November 2018. Arthur Ashkin was born in Brooklyn, NY, on September 2, 1922, the son of humble eastern European Jewish immigrants. Arthur’s father, Isador, was an orphan from Odessa, then part of Russia, while his mother, Anna, was from the province of Galicia, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Isador immigrated to the United States in 1910, shortly before his nineteenth birthday. Upon his arrival at Ellis Island, his surname, Ashkenasy, was Americanized to Ashkin. Having trained as a dental technician in the orphanage where he was raised, Isador established his own dental laboratory on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, specializing in dental prostheses. Anna, who worked briefly as a secretary in Red Hook, Brooklyn, became a homemaker, raising Arthur and his siblings in Flatbush, Brooklyn. Arthur had three siblings, a younger sister, Ruth, an elder brother, Julius, and the first-born, Gertrude, who died at a young age. Ruth studied Greek and Latin at The City College of New York and became an esteemed teacher in the New York City elementary school system. Julius became a physicist. He was an exceptionally gifted student who graduated early and became a close collaborator with many leading physicists of the time, including Richard Feynman, Edward Teller, and Hans Bethe. … [↵][1]1Email: rene.essiambre{at}nokia-bell-labs.com. [1]: #xref-corresp-1-1

Eastern European Jewish American Narratives, 1890–1930: Struggles for Recognition by Dana Mihăilescu

Reviewed by: Eastern European Jewish American Narratives, 1890–1930: Struggles for Recognition by Dana Mihăilescu Markus Krah (bio) Eastern European Jewish American Narratives, 1890–1930: Struggles for Recognition. By Dana Mihăilescu. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2018. xxi + 249 pp. The transformation, adaptation, acculturation, and, if you will, Americanization of immigrants from the eastern parts of Europe around the turn of the twentieth century has been crucial to the ways in which American Jews understood and presented themselves as individuals and as a group in their American and Jewish contexts. The existing studies of these complex processes leave room for new perspectives, so Dana Mihăilescu's book is a welcome addition. Mihăilescu, a professor of English/American Studies at the University of Bucharest, takes an innovative approach by connecting literary, philosophical, and historical perspectives on the topic. Analyzing the work of six writers who came to the US from Russia and Romania, she argues that immigration caused "the need to re-imagine the subject's ethical agency in a new regime of state, showing how the dilemmas associated with eastern European Jewish American identity represent a critical element in fashioning modern subjectivity" (xi). This re-configuration involves a shift from a "fixed-type of identity in autocratic eastern European societies to contingent, fluid identity in democratic United States." Moreover, immigrants transitioned from "double ethical standards" and a focus on self-preservation and survival (eastern Europe) to an "emphasis on ethical responsibility for the ethnic/generational/human other via critical resistance to limitations of norms in a democracy" (xi). Mihăilescu comes to this original thesis by analyzing the novels, memoirs, and essays written by the six writers who form the source base [End Page 469] for her study: Mary Antin, Abraham Cahan, Anzia Yezierka, Konrad Bercovici, M. E. Ravage, and Maurice Samuel. By recuperating the voices of Romanian Jewish immigrants through the three latter authors, she aims to complete the picture of the eastern European Jewish experience of America. To the body of their work she applies the theories of philosophers Judith Butler, Axel Honneth, and Emmanuel Levinas. Butler's notion of vulnerability, Levinas's encounter with and responsibility for the other, and Honneth's concept of "recognition" in the face of moral injury are the main ingredients of the "new sense of ethical agency characterizing Jewish identity in America" (xvii). This philosophical framework in which Mihăilescu situates eastern European Jewish immigrant identities runs as a thread throughout the book and is woven into sections sketching the historical background of the immigration experience. These considerations make up the first part of the study, preceding the analysis proper of the writings of the six authors. The analysis follows several leitmotifs which Mihăilescu traces from eastern Europe to the US in the writings of the immigrant authors. In her brief concluding chapter, she doubles down on her thesis by stating that the "awakening to the other […] marks the positive refashioning of Jewishness in America in the early twentieth century" (231). Surprisingly, however, she states that this identity reconfiguration through the experience of responsibility for the other was not unique to immigrants to the US but also characteristic of Jews who remained in Europe and engaged the other in various ways (232). A review by a historian cannot do justice to the philosophical analysis Mihăilescu performs on her literary sources, but it does need to point out problematic aspects of the study, which is premised on questionable assumptions about the history of eastern European Jewish immigration to the US and makes claims about this experience based on the analysis of its sources. Bracketing the larger issue of a unified "eastern European" background to these immigrant experiences, Mihăilescu's thesis of the shifting identity of immigrants rests on reductive and over-simplified dichotomies and concepts, such as the opposition between "Orthodox" and "Progressives" in Eastern Europe (for which the shtetl serves as a pars pro toto) and the US (62). She stresses the differences between western and eastern European Jews by quoting Simon Dubnow and Nathan Glazer (59). She uses writings by her six authors to illustrate or prove problematically large claims about the development of different...

The Trek Uptown: The Migration of Harrisburg's Jewish Community in the Early Twentieth Century

ABSTRACT The demolition of Harrisburg's Eighth Ward between 1913 and 1919 displaced a substantial population of eastern European Jewish immigrants and uprooted their religious congregations. Yet the migration of people, synagogues, and institutions uptown and their continuity in the following decades are a testimony of the community's essential cohesion.

Breaking the Taboo: Investigating the Complex History of Jews and the American Economy

Breaking the Taboo:Investigating the Complex History of Jews and the American Economy Rebecca Kobrin (bio) "History is useful" when thinking about America's economy, Ben Bernanke stressed to me as he leaned back in a swivel chair, looking considerably more relaxed than he was in 2008, when the world got to know him as the person responsible for keeping the American financial system afloat.1 For all the attention devoted then and since to the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers—the proximate cause of the cascading crisis in 2008—few have recalled that firm's long history as a Jewish immigrant family business, founded by Bavarian Jews who immigrated to plantation Alabama 160 years ago. Indeed, the fact that a grandson of East European Jewish immigrants—who also hailed from the South—was at the helm of the governmental regulatory body responsible to address the crisis facing one of the oldest Jewish investment banks, speaks to the important, though yet to be fully understood role that Jews played in the 2008 crisis. This history will be written one day. But as this volume demonstrates, the earlier history of Jewish involvement in the American economy still needs attention. Tales of Jews' economic endeavors fill the pages of many American Jewish history books, but few have fully analyzed the "collective memory" conveyed of American Jewish economic life conveyed through these stories. As economist Robert Schiller recently pointed out in his work on "narrative economics": popular stories affect individual and collective economic behavior.2 How can we ascertain more precisely what factors and variables shaped Jews' encounters as they engaged, challenged, failed, reformulated, and reshaped the American economy? What has been the role of Jews in the historic development of different aspects of the American economy? Almost a decade ago this question prompted the editorial board of this journal to embrace the idea of devoting a special issue to Jews and the American economy. Despite the centrality of capitalism to the United States, and the fact that this country has been home to one of the globe's largest Jewish populations since the early twentieth century, the relationship between [End Page 393] Jews and American capitalism has been a somewhat avoided topic. Few scholars have devoted themselves to exploring how Jews have molded the development of America's economy, and, in turn, how the American economy's shifting paths have shaped Jews. How have Jews engaged with and integrated themselves into various niches and spaces of the US economy?? How did the particular economic development of the United States and its embrace of capitalism shape the lives of millions of Jews who have called it home? How did America's economy shape the practice of Judaism itself? And what can focusing on economic history teach us about Jewish history, or thinking about Jews illuminate about American economic history? Even as academic Jewish studies have expanded dramatically in the past half-century, these questions have not been interrogated to the degree they deserve. As Jerry Mueller notes, "the relationship of the Jews to capitalism"—or as I would say, Jews to American economic developments and practices—has "received less attention than its significance merits."3 To be sure, there were pioneers of the field, most notably, Nobel-prize winner Simon Kuznets. His groundbreaking 1975 article, "Immigration of Russian Jews to the United States," is still widely cited and assigned today. Indeed, the "data and rigorous analyses" of that article debunked many myths concerning East European migration, even as it laid down new frameworks to study group identity, immigration streams, and economic structures.4 Another economist, Arcadius Kahan, also collected data in the 1970s relating to Jewish labor in the United States in order to understand the encounter of Jews with the American economy. His insightful research on Eastern European Jewish immigrants and the American labor market before 1914 still influences how economists think about immigrant mobility in early-twentieth century America.5 The fact that scholars still return to and cite the studies these scholars produced in the 1970s speaks both to the importance of their findings and to the paucity of sustained scholarship on this topic written by [End Page 394] social scientists...

Masculinity and the Making of American Judaism by Sarah Imhoff

Reviewed by: Masculinity and the Making of American Judaism by Sarah Imhoff Riv-Ellen Prell Sarah Imhoff. Masculinity and the Making of American Judaism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017. Vii + 312 pp., 4 b&w illustrations. Hardcover $85, paper $38, ebook $37.99. ISBN 978-0-253-02606-4, 978-0-253-02621-7, 978-0-253-02636-1. Sarah Imhoff suggests that Jewish masculinity in the United States has been almost entirely overlooked by scholars. Despite their more than forty-year [End Page 79] engagement with the study of the lives of American Jewish women, barely a handful of such studies exist for Jewish men. Beyond the scholarship on “roles” and activities, the study of gender as a dynamic force in American Jewish life is similarly focused on women rather than men or masculinity. In its “unmarked,” role, to use a linguistic term, Jewish masculinity is the norm of American Jewish political, cultural, and organizational life, and it has escaped significant analysis. Imhoff argues that, rather than seeking a generic American Jewish masculinity in the early twentieth century in the United States, she is interested in one crucial part of that population. She chose to study “acculturated” Jewish men in order to understand how they were shaped by a set of concepts and ideas that were different from Christians or Eastern European Jewish immigrants of the time. Similarly, she argues that understanding the lives of ordinary, rather than exceptional, men will more effectively provide an understanding of the ideas that shaped Jewish masculinity. That ideas that grounded American Jewish masculinity for acculturated Jewish men were “universalism” and “rationality.” They were more than a variation on Christian ideas of the time, particularly diverging from the significance of physical prowess for Christian manhood. Just as Christians linked their notions of male virtue to Christianity, so did acculturated Jewish men believe that what they most prized as masculine was central to the principles of the Reform Judaism with which they most likely identified. Therefore, Imhoff’s analysis of American Jewish masculinity simultaneously offers an analysis of the development of Reform Judaism. American Judaism was constructed simultaneously with American Jewish masculinity, she argues. The two were mutually constitutive. Her serious attention to ideation and religious construction through a lens of a gender analysis is an important contribution. Imhoff builds her case for the mutual construction of Jewish masculinity and Reform Judaism by an analysis of the American Reform thinkers. They viewed Judaism as built on the ideas of rationality and universalism, and envisioned its modern formulation as vastly superior to the other Judaisms of various forms of Orthodoxy. This ennobling message of Judaism could speak to all, Jewish or not. As Imhoff argues, these principles have deep roots in very Western notions of masculinity, and thus Judaism was simultaneously religious, American, and masculine. However, in contrast to American Protestantism of the era, it did not depend on a “muscular” or hyper-masculine vision. Nor did it reject the presence of women or minimize their place in the synagogue. Nevertheless, the Jewish male body did play a role in the ideology of Jewish masculinity. Imhoff draws on and analyzes a number of interesting examples that reveal the importance of a healthy body. Indeed, it is her close reading and unexpected juxtapositions of movements, cultural analogies, and ideas that are a real strength of this book. For example, the Galveston Movement, which directed Jewish immigrants to live away from cities in [End Page 80] the West, offers a well-developed example of how ideas about a healthy male body, physical labor, a connection to the land, and perhaps surprisingly, a modern Judaism were all critical to acculturated Jews’ aspirations for Eastern European Jewish immigrants. The Galveston Movement was brief (1907–1914), but Imhoff effectively and imaginatively demonstrates that it was a paradigm of this vision. Acculturated Jewish leaders who differed on Zionism could agree on the importance of directing immigrant Jews away from the city and to land and the West. Israel Zangwill and Jacob Schiff, among others, envisioned a new American Jewish life on the land for immigrants who needed to be transformed through physical labor into exemplary American men. They worked with a...

The Autobiography of Citizenship: Assimilation and Resistance in U.S. EducationFashion and Fiction: Self-Transformation in Twentieth-Century American Literature

The Autobiography of Citizenship: Assimilation and Resistance in U.S. EducationFashion and Fiction: Self-Transformation in Twentieth-Century American Literature

“Negroes Must Not Be Likened to Jews”: The Attitudes of Eastern European Jewish Immigrants toward African Americans in a Transnational Perspective

“Negroes Must Not Be Likened to Jews”: The Attitudes of Eastern European Jewish Immigrants toward African Americans in a Transnational Perspective

Victims and Intruders

This article sets out to investigate how the Swedish regional press framed anti-Jewish violence in Russia and Jewish immigration to Sweden between 1881 and 1921. Furthermore, it analyses how the Swedish newspapers framed differences between the Jewish minority and the Swedish majority, and between the newly arrived Jews and the already established Jewish community in Sweden. The study, which combines quantitative and qualitative methods, is based on articles gathered from the National Library of Sweden’s digital database Digitized Swedish Newspapers. An analysis of some 400 articles suggests that sympathy towards the Jews in Russia dominates the reports on violence in the tsarist empire. In these texts, the Jews are mainly framed as innocent victims of brutal violence. In the articles concerning the eastern European Jewish immigration to Sweden, however, hostile attitudes are the most prominent. The Jewish immigrants are framed as menacing intruders, threatening law and order and the general welfare of Sweden.

Who Built New York?: Jewish Builders in the Interwar Decades

Who Built New York?Jewish Builders in the Interwar Decades1 Deborah Dash Moore (bio) In 1925, an ambitious New York Jewish builder, Irwin Chanin, decided to visit Paris. Born in Brooklyn, Chanin had spent his youth in Poltava, Ukraine, before returning with his parents to settle in Bensonhurst.2 After graduating with an engineering degree in 1915 from Cooper Union, the city’s free architectural and engineering school, Chanin worked for several years on the New York and Philadelphia subways. When the United States declared war in 1917, he entered military service. During the war, Chanin helped construct poison gas facilities in Cleveland. Back in New York as a civilian, he built his first two single-family houses in Bensonhurst, scraping together capital for the project. This experience proved financially successful, so Chanin brought his younger brother, Henry, into his budding construction business in 1919 to handle the finances.3 Soon Chanin was not only building single and two-family houses in Brooklyn, but also buying larger properties to flip, such as 26 Court Street, the old Garfield Hotel in downtown Brooklyn. In this case, he sold the building to a group of three other Brooklyn Jewish builders—Abraham Bricken, Isidor Friedman, and Leo Schloss—who announced plans to construct a 26-story office building on the site, the largest office building at that time in Brooklyn.4 Chanin’s timing was propitious. The end of World War I released a flood of construction in New York City—residential, commercial, and industrial. During the 1920s, New York City, housing a small fraction of the American population, accounted for twenty percent of new residential [End Page 311] units in the United States. Encouraged by ten-year tax abatements, builders covered vast tracts of land in Brooklyn, the Bronx, and Queens with a mix of one, two, and multi-family houses. At the same time, substantial sections of Manhattan, such as the Upper West and East Sides, along with Washington Heights, attracted builders eager to erect both upper-class and middle-class apartment buildings in place of single-family brownstones and private luxury houses. Jewish builders, who entered the city’s real estate and construction industry in the nineteenth century, often building and remodeling tenements for the enormous influx of Eastern European Jewish immigrants, expanded their activities even as newcomers like Chanin joined their ranks.5 Jeffrey Gurock’s masterful history of Jews in Harlem, for example, uncovered how Jewish involvement in construction often led to Jewish residential concentration.6 As the pace and extent of construction increased, Jews gradually moved from being outsiders to the industry. They became insiders within their own extensive and burgeoning ethnic network that included architects, mortgage firms, and building-supply companies. Apartment buildings, 39 percent of new residential construction in 1919, soared to 77 percent during the peak year of 1926. Jewish builders participated in this transformation of New York from a city of mansions and tenements to one that offered a wide array of housing choices geared to a tenant’s socioeconomic standing.7 They also built up significant segments of midtown Manhattan, fashioning a new cityscape in response to changing trends in diverse industries where large numbers of Jews worked. Construction remained Chanin’s passion and he soon shifted his focus to Manhattan, erecting a new center for the fur industry in 1924 in what was becoming the heart of the needle trades in midtown. Then, he decided to build theaters in the emerging theater district around Times Square. Chanin “enjoyed the city and mass culture. He had nothing to lose,” observed Diana Agrest, “and everything to gain, and so he did.” This “love for the multifaceted aspects of city life” informed his most important [End Page 312] contributions to New York’s cityscape. As Agrest notes, “theater is an essential component of the life in the city, both as a reflection and creation of the spectacular.”8 Commercial entertainment also attracted many Jews as producers and owners of theatrical chains.9 Theatrical flair undoubtedly influenced Chanin’s other buildings as well, especially the desire to create “a world of fantasy in which the architectural styles were there to be used in the...

Refugee or Alien?: The Long-Term Influence of Eastern European Jewish Immigrants on the Reception of German Jews into Great Britain in the 1930s

Refugee or Alien?: The Long-Term Influence of Eastern European Jewish Immigrants on the Reception of German Jews into Great Britain in the 1930s

How Eastern European Jewish immigrants, modernist Yiddish culture, and anti-fascist politics dragged the Netherlands into the twentieth century

ABSTRACTMy essay examines Yiddish-speaking immigrants in the Netherlands between the two world wars with a focus on Amsterdam, the Jewish center of the country. The Netherlands was never a major recipient of migrants of any kind, let alone Eastern European Jewish immigrants. Despite seeing the Netherlands primarily as a transit site, enough Yiddish-speakers stayed – either due to finding work in the country or because they failed to get entry papers to other countries – that they formed a visible presence in Amsterdam, The Hague, Scheveningen, and other cities across the country. Due to its small size and unstable immigrant population – since most immigrants did not plan on settling in Amsterdam – this community remained on the periphery of the global interwar Yiddish-speaking map. I argue that by being on the margins of the global Yiddish community Amsterdam's left-wing Yiddish-speaking community, organized around the Ansky Society, remained above the sharp politicized polemics that drove a wedge between communists and non-communist leftists in other Yiddish cultural centers not located in the Soviet Union. (There, the Communist Party's Evsektsiia had long ago ended public internecine debates.) I also show that Yiddish-speaking immigrants affected Dutch culture more generally. Because it operated in Yiddish, the Ansky Society was perceived to be marginal in the Netherlands. That marginalization allowed its members the political space (on the margins of both Dutch society and the global Yiddish-speaking diaspora) to advocate for international political positions that in any Dutch-language institution, Jewish or not, would have been considered too radical in a political culture that avoided extremes of any kind. The Ansky Society nonetheless served as the Netherlands' outspoken voice against the rise of fascism in all of its 1930s manifestations. Unlike the mainstream Dutch Jewish community, members of which enfranchised citizens and therefore deeply implicated in party politics and questions of loyalty, the Ansky Society had no such fears, because most of its members lacked citizenship. They were beyond (or perhaps beneath) questions of loyalty. Finally, the Ansky Society also publicly criticized the Dutch government's complacency in the face of fascism spreading across Europe. In other words, Amsterdam's Yiddish-speaking community in the interwar period was doubly marginalized – from global Yiddish culture and from Dutch politics – and was therefore politically empowered.

Louis Marshall and the Rise of Jewish Ethnicity in America by M.M. Silver (review)

Reviewed by: Louis Marshall and the Rise of Jewish Ethnicity in America by M.M. Silver Jessica Cooperman M.M. Silver. Louis Marshall and the Rise of Jewish Ethnicity in America. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2013. 616 pps. Cloth $49.95. ISBN 978-0-8156-1000-7. Louis Marshall and the Rise of Jewish Ethnicity in America fills a significant gap in our understanding of this towering figure in America Jewish history. M.M. Silver’s book illustrates the profound scope of Marshall’s engagement with issues facing American and world Jewry from the time he moved to New York City in 1894 to his death in 1929. It successfully demonstrates the remarkable extent of his activities, offering a useful analysis of Marshall’s commitment to Jewish rights and of how his understanding of Jewish interests evolved over time. Silver divides Marshall’s life into four periods. The first looks at his early years in Syracuse, New York and then moves “from upstate to uptown,” as Marshall transitioned from successful local attorney to one of the leading figures in American Jewish life. Silver describes this as Marshall’s “moral [End Page 207] amelioration phase,” and in this light examines Marshall’s involvement with projects intended to educate and “improve” Eastern European Jewish immigrants, including the Educational Alliance, the Jewish Theological Seminary, and an ill-fated foray into the Yiddish newspaper business via his supervision of Di Yidishe Velt on behalf of a group of “uptown” investors. The second section initiates what Silver sees as Marshall’s turn away from the paternalistic politics of a Jewish elite concerned with making sure that Jews “had no distinctive issues or concerns of their own in the public domain” (79), and toward an embrace of Jewish ethnic politics sympathetic to the perspectives of “downtown” Jews. This change in Marshall’s attitude and approach, Silver claims, “did not exactly promote unity between settled elite and poor immigrant Jewish groups,” but, he argues, it was at this point that Marshall put systems into place that “provided a steady lever for coordinated action between disparate Jewish groups on issues of obvious, overwhelming concern to all Jews.” (79) In this context, Silver examines numerous events, including Marshall’s organization of the American Jewish Committee, mediation between Jewish garment workers and bosses, efforts to abrogate the Russo-American Treaty of 1832, and most extensively, his long struggle to stave off immigration restriction. The third section, “War and Peace,” examines Marshall’s work during and immediately following World War I, focusing in particular on the tensions surrounding the formation of the American Jewish Congress, and on Marshall’s work as part of the American Jewish Congress’s delegation to the postwar Paris peace talks. The last section examines the period of “Marshall Law,” as Silver, following Israel Zangwill, calls the final years of Marshall’s life. The material in the section highlights both the extent of Marshall’s personal power and influence, perhaps best exemplified in his successful showdown with Henry Ford over antisemitic accusations made in Ford’s newspaper, The Dearborn Independent, and also foreshadows the end of patrician control over Jewish communal politics, as seen in Marshall’s futile struggle to exercise control over disparate Jewish groups resistant to his ongoing faith in constitutional rights as the best path to a secure Jewish future. Silver’s book does an excellent job at portraying Marshall’s deep commitment to and tireless advocacy for Jewish rights in the United States and beyond. Silver also demonstrates the interrelated nature of Marshall’s activities so that the reader can appreciate how the founding of the American Jewish Committee, for example, served simultaneously “as a means to streamline responses to the dire emergency faced by Russian Jewry,” and as “a forum for rationalized discussion about [community] control and for minimizing the dangers and damages the contests about control had already caused or could cause in the future.” (108) This sense of interconnectedness is particularly fascinating in the chapter “Jews and Birds,” in which Silver argues that Marshall’s advocacy for environmental protection was tied both to his Judaism and his to patriotic commitment to the land of America. The book is long...

The Bibliothèque Medem: Eighty Years Serving Yiddish Culture

The Bibliothèque Medem (or Medem-Bibliotek, in Yiddish), in Paris, is the largest Yiddish library in Western and Central Europe, as well as a major Jewish cultural center. Founded in 1928 by a group of Eastern European Jewish immigrants who were aligned with the socialist Bund, its trajectory over eight decades (including the four years of the German occupation) is chronicled here. Today, the collections of the Bibliothèque Medem comprise 20,000 volumes in Yiddish and 10,000 titles in the Latin alphabet dealing with Jewish culture. In addition, it maintains about 30,000 uncataloged book volumes, extensive serial holdings, 300 posters, archives of a number of Yiddish authors, and a sound archive containing 7,500 recordings. Together with the libraries of the Alliance Israélite Universelle and the Séminaire Israélite de France (SIF), the Bibliothèque Medem is a principal partner in the Réseau Européen des Bibliothèques Judaica et Hebraica (European Network of Judaica and Hebraica Libraries), which administers their union catalog and sponsors digitization projects of their holdings.

‘In Glasgow but not quite of it’? Eastern European Jewish immigrants in a provincial Jewish community from c.1890 to c.1945

This article makes use of autobiographies and oral interviews in order to explore the lifestyles of the first generation of immigrants within one particular provincial Jewish community – the Gorbals in Glasgow – between 1890 and 1945. The experience of this generation of immigrants was characterised by diversity to an extent that was not true of the second generation. Thus, the community cannot be described in terms of either ‘assimilation’ or ‘separation’. Instead, an alternative description has been coined: ‘variegated acculturation’ in order to encompass the complexity of the lives of the immigrants.

Portugal, Salazar, and the Jews (review)

Reviewed by: Portugal, Salazar, and the Jews Marion Kaplan Portugal, Salazar, and the Jews, by Avraham Milgram, translated by Naftali Greenwood. Jerusalem: Yad Vashen, 2011. 324 pp. $50.00. In his densely researched book, Portugal, Salazar, and the Jews, Avraham Milgram focuses on the gap between the rescue potential of Portugal, a European nation that, surprisingly, resisted rabid and rampant antisemitism, and the number of Jews who actually received permission to enter Portugal during World War II. Unique in its more open approach to Jews, it nevertheless hobbled Jewish immigration when Jews most needed it. Milgram provides important background first. Starting with the Inquisition, he shows that, with few significant exceptions, Portugal began to accept Jews in the late eighteenth century, opening its gates to North African Jewish immigration in the nineteenth and Eastern European Jewish immigrants in the early twentieth centuries. A very small and diverse Jewish community made up of Sephardic, Ashkenazi, and former crypto Jews thrived in the early twentieth century. As the absolutist state of the nineteenth century consolidated itself, [End Page 165] its leaders disdained the Inquisition as anachronistic. "Antisemitism seems to have petered out in Portugal" (p. 43), as the state adopted a utilitarian and liberal attitude towards Jews. Indeed, the vast majority of rightists, monarchists, and anti-liberal circles marginalized racist antisemitism and pointed to intellectuals, liberals, and Freemasons as the new enemies. (Milgram does not explore if the Right assumed that Jews belonged to these stigmatized groups, or if Portuguese citizens understood these terms as code words for "Jews.") A liberal Republic emancipated Jews fully in 1911. Conservatives aimed their ire at liberalism, not at the minuscule number of Jews in Portugal. Milgram insists, and is convincing on this point, that modern antisemitism failed "to establish even a toehold in Portugal" (p. 11) while it grew racist and virulent elsewhere in early twentieth-century Europe. Moreover, António de Oliveira Salazar, Portugal's dictator, rose to power in 1932 without antisemitic rhetoric or violence. Even Portuguese fascists (the Blue Shirts) eschewed the antisemitism that proponents of their ilk espoused in the north. They admired Hitler, yet did not oppose Jews coming to Portugal to escape his violent persecution. This is impressive. Still, readers may wonder about this lack of prejudice, especially since Salazar dreaded and stigmatized "communism," "republicanism," and "liberalism"—more code words for "Jews," at least among Portugal's neighbors. In addition, Milgram admits that the police harbored antisemitism, transposing their general dislike of foreigners onto Jews. But even as the police harassed and threatened Jews, they did not turn them over to the Germans. Salazar and his minions performed a precarious balancing act before and during the war. At first they tried to please both sides, the Allies and the Germans. Starting in 1938 with the annexation of Austria, Portugal provided an important escape route for refugees to havens overseas. Then, in the summer of 1940 when the Germans overran France, a veritable flood of refugees— Jewish and non-Jewish—sought safety in Portugal. The largest number of Jews (13,000-15,000, according to Jewish sources) passed through Portugal, entering when, as Milgram notes, "the Germans called the shots" (p. 12). Milgram's statistics radically challenge long-established but fuzzy numbers ranging between Yehuda Bauer's estimate of 40,000 Jews passing through Portugal in 1940-41 (p. 61) and the American Jewish Yearbook's (1944) estimate of 100,000 mostly Jewish refugees. Still, Jewish sources cannot tell the whole story, since Jews also passed through Portugal on their own, without the assistance of Jewish organizations. Numbers aside, Milgram underlines that only in the summer of 1940 did the Portuguese ease their strictures and only for a few months. Since most of these refugees hoped to flee Europe and since local business people welcomed them as consumers in the small resort towns where the government [End Page 166] placed them (and where they were forbidden to compete with Portuguese businesses), why did Salazar insist on 30-day tourist visas and limit the number of refugees? Salazar feared all aliens, Jewish and non-Jewish, as potential communists and liberals who would undermine his regime. Before allowing entry, he demanded assurance...

The Matter of Identification: Yezierska's Arrogant Beggar and the Gendered Injuries of Class

Anzia Yezierska’s early story, “The Lost Beautifulness,” movingly depicts the “injuries of class” that afflict Eastern European Jewish immigrants in early twentieth-century New York. The text focuses on Hanneh Hayyeh, a pushcart peddler and laundress whose overriding “ambition” is to “have a white-painted kitchen” like the one in the “old Stuyvesant Square mansion” of Mrs. Preston, whose “fine silks and linens” she has washed for years. 1 Aligned with Hanneh’s point of view, imbued with psychic immediacy by incorporating the cadences of Yiddish speech, the story records the affective intensities—the desire and longing, as well as the anger, disillusionment, and grief—produced by the conflict between the beautiful “chimera” (92) of American democracy and the systematic inequities of class. Seduced by domestic intimacy with Mrs. Preston, who assures her that wartime’s heightened nationalism “means that everybody in America is going to be with everybody else” (69), Hanneh sees in the women’s “friend[ship]” (68), rooted in a surrogated kinship, the equalizing force of cross-class identification and the promise of mobility. Here as elsewhere in Yezierska’s oeuvre, this promise is fueled by a visual culture of mass consumption. Hanneh aspires to social inclusion through what Lizabeth Cohen calls “consumer citizenship”: 2 the gendered counterpart to her son’s enlistment in the army (an identification signaled in the story’s first paragraph), Hanneh’s embodiment of consumerist norms of “respectability” constitutes a bid for recognition as a national subject—a means to, in Hanneh’s words, “make myself for an American” (68). Repudiating the passion for fancy dress exhibited by contemporary “working girls” and resisting more transient pleasures such as an ice-cream soda or “a