City of Promises: A History of the Jews of New York, 3-volume box set 9780814729328

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Jews in Gotham New York Jews in a Changing City, 1920 – 2010

C ITY O F PROMISES was made possible in part through the generosity of

a number of individuals and foundations. Their thoughtful support will help ensure that this work is affordable to schools, libraries, and other not-for-profit institutions. The Lucius N. Littauer Foundation made a leadership gift before a word of CITY O F PROMISES had been written, a gift that set this project on its way. Hugo Barreca, The Marian B. and Jacob K. Javits Foundation, Mr. and Mrs. Peter Malkin, David P. Solomon, and a donor who wishes to remain anonymous helped ensure that it never lost momentum. We are deeply grateful.

C I TY O F PR O M I S ES A

H ISTORY

G E NE R A L

OF

THE

E D I T O R :

JEW S

D E BORAH

O F

NEW

DASH

Y O R K

M OORE

Volume 1

Haven of Liberty New York Jews in the New World, 1654 – 1865 H o wa r d b . R o c k Volume 2

Emerging Metropolis New York Jews in the Age of Immigration, 1840 – 1920 Annie Polland and Daniel Soyer Volume 3

Jews in Gotham New York Jews in a Changing City, 1920 – 2010 Jeffrey S. Gurock Advisory Board: Hasia Diner (New York University) Leo Hershkowitz (Queens College) Ira Katznelson (Columbia University) Thomas Kessner (CUNY Graduate Center) Tony Michels (University of Wisconsin, Madison) Judith C. Siegel (Center for Jewish History) Jenna Weissman-Joselit (Princeton University) Beth Wenger (University of Pennsylvania)

CITY OF PROMISES A HISTORY OF THE JEWS OF NEW YORK

JEWS IN

GOTHA M NEW

YORK

JEWS

IN

A

CHANGING

C I T Y,

1920–2010

JEFFREY S. GUROCK WITH A FOREWORD BY

DEBORAH DASH MOORE AND W I T H A V I S U A L E S S AY B Y

DIANA L. LINDEN

a NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS ■

N E W

YO R K

A N D

L O N D O N

NEW YORK UNIVERSIT Y PRESS New York and London www.nyupress.org © 2012 by New York University All rights reserved References to Internet websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor New York University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data City of promises : a history of the Jews of New York / general editor, Deborah Dash Moore. v. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. Contents: v. 1. Haven of liberty: New York Jews in the New World, 1654 – 1865 / Howard B. Rock — v. 2. Emerging metropolis: New York Jews in the age of immigration, 1840 – 1920 / Annie Polland and Daniel Soyer — v. 3. Jews in Gotham: New York Jews in a changing city, 1920 – 2010. ISBN 978-0-8147-7632-2 (cl : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8147-4521-2 (ebook) — ISBN 978-0-8147-7692-6 (ebook) — ISBN 978-0-8147-1731-8 (boxed set : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8147-2932-8 (e-set) 1. Jews — New York (State) — New York. 2. New York (N.Y.) — Ethnic relations. I. Moore, Deborah Dash, 1946 – II. Rock, Howard B., 1944 – F128.9.J5C64 2012 305.892’40747 — dc23

2012003246

New York University Press books are printed on acid-free paper, and their binding materials are chosen for strength and durability. We strive to use environmentally responsible suppliers and materials to the greatest extent possible in publishing our books. Manufactured in the United States of America 10

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CON TENTS

Foreword by Deborah Dash Moore, General Editor General Editor’s Acknowledgments Author’s Acknowledgments ■

1 2 3 4 5 6 7

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Prologue: Neighborhood Dreams and Urban Promises Building and Sustaining Common Ground Friends or Ideologues During Catastrophe and Triumph Élan of a Jewish City Crises and Contention Amid Decline and Revival Renewed Activism Epilogue: In a New Millennium

1 9 39 73 101 127 151 185 211

Visual Essay: An Introduction to the Visual and Material Culture of New York City Jews, 1920 – 2010

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Diana L. Linden

Notes Bibliography Index About the Author

255 291 307 327

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FOR EWORD

“[O]f all the big cities,” Sergeant Milton Lehman of the Stars and Stripes affirmed in 1945, “New York is still the promised land.”1 As a returning Jewish GI, Lehman compared New York with European cities. Other Jews also knew what New York offered that made it so desirable, even if they had not served overseas. First and foremost, security: Jews could live without fear in New York. Yes, they faced discrimination, but in this city of almost eight million residents, many members of its ethnic and religious groups encountered prejudice. Jews contended with anti-Semitism in the twentieth century more than German Protestants or Irish Catholics dealt with bias, perhaps; but the Irish had endured a lot in the nineteenth century, and Jews suffered less than African Americans, Latinos, and Asian New Yorkers. And New York provided more than security: Jews could live freely as Jews. The presence of a diverse population of close to two million New York Jews contributed to their sense that “everyone was Jewish.”2 New York Jews understood that there were many ways to be Jewish. The city welcomed Jews in all their variety. New York Jews saw the city as a place where they, too, could flourish and express themselves. As a result, they came to identify with the city, absorbing its ethos even as they helped to shape its urban characteristics. When World War II ended in Europe with victory over Nazi Germany, New York’s promises glowed more brightly still. New York’s multiethnic diversity, shaped in vital dimensions by its large Jewish population, shimmered as a showplace of American democratic distinctiveness, especially vis-à-vis Europe. In contrast to a continent that had become a vast slaughterhouse, where millions of European Jews had been ruthlessly murdered with industrial efficiency, New York glistened as a city Jews could and did call their home in America. The famous skyline had defined urban cosmopolitanism in the years after World War I. Now the city’s thriving ethnic neighborhoods — Jewish and Catholic, African American and Puerto Rican, Italian and Irish — came to represent modern urban culture. New York’s economy responded robustly to demands of war production. By the end of hostilities, its per capita income exceeded the national average by 14 percent.

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But as a poster city for immigration, with a majority population composed of immigrants and their children, the city had to contend with negative perceptions. Considered undesirable by many Americans, Jews and other foreigners in the city contributed to impressions that New York seemed less American than other cities with large percentages of native-born residents.3 As the city flourished during and after the war, it maintained its political commitments to generous social welfare benefits to help its poorest residents. Jews advocated for these policies, supporting efforts to establish a liberal urban legacy. In modeling a progressive and prosperous multiethnic twentiethcentury American city, New York demonstrated what its Jews valued. Versions of Jewish urbanism played not just on the political stage but also on the streets of the city’s neighborhoods. Its expressions could be found as well in New York’s centers of cultural production. By the middle of the twentieth century, no city offered Jews more than New York. It nourished both celebration and critique. New York gave Jews visibility as individuals and as a group. It provided employment and education, inspiration and freedom, fellowship and community. Jews reciprocated by falling in love with the city, its buildings’ hard angles and perspectives, its grimy streets and harried pace. But by the 1960s and ’70s, Jews’ love affair with the city soured. For many of the second generation who grew up on New York’s sidewalks, immersed in its babel of languages and cultural syncretism, prosperity dimmed their affection for the working-class urban world of their youth. Many of them aspired to suburban pleasures of home ownership, grass and trees that did not have to be shared with others in public parks. Yet New York City remained the wellspring of Jewish American culture for much of the century, a resource of Jewishness even for those living thousands of miles west of the Hudson River. Jews had not always felt free to imagine the city as their special place. Indeed, not until mass immigration from Europe piled up their numbers, from the tens of thousands to the hundreds of thousands, had Jews laid claim to New York and influenced its politics and culture. Its Jewish population soared from five hundred thousand at the turn of the twentieth century to 1.1 million before the start of World War I. On the eve of World War II, Jews, over a quarter of New York’s residents, ranked as the largest ethnic group.4 Demography both encouraged many outsiders to perceive New York as a Jewish city and underwrote local cultural productions, such as a thriving theater scene, a

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flourishing popular music business, and extensive publishing in several languages. Jews were used to living as a minority in Europe and the Middle East. New York offered life without a majority population — without one single ethnic group dominating urban society. Now Jews could go about their business, much of it taking place within ethnic niches, as if they were the city’s predominant group. When and in what sense did New York become a city of promises for Jews? Certainly not in the colonial era. During that period, seeds for future promises were planted, most importantly political, economic, and religious rights. While New York’s few hundred Jews lived in the shadow of far more prosperous Jewish communities in London and Amsterdam, New York Jewish men enjoyed citizenship rights and responsibilities that their peers in London could only envy. These rights gradually led New York Jews to emerge from a closed synagogue society and to participate with enthusiasm in revolutionary currents sweeping the colonies. Jews in New York absorbed formative ideas regarding human rights; they tasted freedom and put their lives on the line for it during the Revolution. In the decades that followed, they incorporated ideals of the American Enlightenment into their Jewish lives. Sometime during the nineteenth century, these changes attracted increasing attention from European Jews. New York began to acquire a reputation as a destination in itself. Arriving from Europe at Castle Garden, increasing numbers of Jewish immigrants decided to stay. New York’s bustling streets enticed them, so they put off riding west or south to peddle or settle. Sometimes, older brothers made that choice, as did Jonas and Louis Strauss, who sent their younger brother Levi to the West Coast via steamship in 1853 to open a branch of their New York City dry-goods firm. Levi Strauss did better, perhaps, than they expected when he went into manufacturing copper-riveted denim work pants after the Civil War.5 But such a move into garment manufacturing from selling dry goods and, especially, used clothing had already taken root in New York prior to the war. It formed the basis of an industry that became the city’s largest, and more than any other, it made New York the city of promises. In 1962, the historian Moses Rischin published his pioneering book, The Promised City: New York’s Jews, 1870 – 1914. Rischin aimed to “identify those currents of human and institutional vitality central to the American urban experience that converged on the Lower East Side in the era of the great Jewish migration just as New York emerged as the nation’s and the world’s most

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dynamic metropolis.”6 The interlocking themes of Jewish immigration from eastern Europe and the rise of New York as a “city of ambition” led Rischin to cast his account as a “revolutionary transformation” not only in American urban history but also in Jewish history.7 Rischin saw a universal paradigm of modernization unfolding in the very particularistic experiences of New York Jews. His vision of democratic urban community remains relevant to contemporary scholars. What did the city promise? First, a job. Close to half of all immigrants sewed clothing in hundreds of small-scale sweatshops that disguised an everburgeoning industry that soon became one of the nation’s most important. Second, a place to live. True, the overcrowded Lower East Side bulged with residents, even its modern tenements straining to accommodate a density of Jewish population that rivaled Bombay. Yet by the early twentieth century, bridges to Brooklyn and rapid transit to Harlem and the Bronx promised improvements: fresh air, hot and cold running water, even a private toilet and bathroom. Third, food. Jewish immigrants had not starved in Europe, but New York’s abundance changed their diets and attitudes toward food and its simple pleasures. In New York, a center of the nation’s baking industry, Jews could enjoy a fresh roll and coffee each morning for pennies. Fourth, clothing. It did not take long, especially laboring in the garment industry, for Jews to trade their old-world clothes for the latest ready-made styles. Thus properly attired, they looked and felt like modern men and women, able and willing to make their way.8 Such promises might be quotidian, but they opened Jews’ eyes to other more important ones. Young Jewish immigrants embraced the city’s promise of free public education, from elementary school to secondary school, all the way through college. Only a handful of Jewish immigrants in the nineteenth century and years before World War I ever managed to take advantage of such a magnificent offer. Although a family economy that privileged sons over daughters when decisions about post-elementary education had to be made and costs of forgoing income from teenaged children often required Jews to go to work and not attend school, increasingly Jews flocked to the city’s free schools. Some immigrants, especially women, thought the city promised freedom to choose a spouse, though matchmakers also migrated across the ocean. Still others rejoiced in what they imagined was a promise of uncensored language: written and spoken, published and on stage, in Yiddish, Hebrew,

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German, Ladino, and English. Some conceived of the city’s rough democracy as holding a promise of solidarity among working men and women, while a significant number demanded extension of civil and voting rights to women. Then there were more ambiguous promises. Did New York offer Jews a chance to live without a formal, legally constituted Jewish community? Did it suggest that Jews no longer needed to practice Jewish rituals or observe the Sabbath? Some Jewish immigrants thought they could leave behind old-world ways of thinking and acting; they secularized their Jewish lives, often starting the process in Europe even before they emigrated. Others fashioned ways of being Jewish, both secular and religious, in tune with New York’s evolving cultures. Both groups identified their own visions of what it meant to be Jewish in America with New York itself. That New York City bloomed with such promises would have been hard to anticipate in 1654. Then the ragged seaport only reluctantly welcomed its first contingent of miserable Jewish migrants. In fact, not receiving permission to settle, Jews had to petition to stay, to live and work in the outpost. They agreed to practice their religion in private even as they participated in civic culture. When the British turned New Amsterdam into New York, they accepted these arrangements, giving Jews unprecedented legal rights. Here lay hints of future promises. Gradually the British increased opportunities for public religious expression and extended to Jewish men civil rights, including citizenship, the right to vote, and the right to hold office. When Jews founded their first congregation, they called it Shearith Israel (Remnant of Israel), an apt name for the handful living in a colonial town far from European centers of Jewish life. Yet during the eighteenth century, Jews integrated into the fabric of New York life. They faced challenges of identifying as Jews within a free society. As the first to enjoy such political freedoms, they struggled to balance assimilation with Jewish distinctiveness. By the time of the Revolution, many New York Jews felt deeply connected to their city and fellow American patriots, enough to flee the British occupation for Philadelphia. The end of the war marked a new democratic consciousness among New York Jews who returned to rebuild their city and community. A democratic ethos pervaded Jewish urban life in the new republic, opening possibilities for individual and collective ambition as well as cooperation. This republicanism changed how Jews organized themselves religiously and how they imagined their opportunities. Shearith Israel incorporated and

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drafted its own constitution, modeled on the federal example. Republicanism animated women, inspiring them to establish charities to help succor the poor. Once Jewish immigration brought sufficient ethnic and economic diversity to New York in the 1830s and 1840s, Jews started to build a different type of community. They forged bonds based on intimacy, gender, shared backgrounds, common aspirations, and urgent necessities. Jewish religious life became increasingly diverse, competitive, and strident. Democracy without an established religion fostered creativity and experimentation. Congregations multiplied in the city, but most Jews chose not to join one, despite variety ranging from Orthodox to Reform. The city saw a fierce battle between proponents of orthodoxy and advocates of reform. These debates engaged Jews deeply but did not lead the majority to affiliate. Still, increasingly synagogue buildings formed part of the cityscape, an indication of Jewish presence. Democratic freedoms permitted a new type of urban Jewish life to emerge. Lacking formal communal structures, Jews innovated and turned to other forms of organization as alternatives. They established fraternal orders and literary societies, seeking a means to craft connections in a rapidly growing and bewildering city. Yet soon they multiplied these activities as well. Pleas for charity and education, hospitals and libraries, mobilized Jewish New Yorkers. With the extension of the franchise, more Jewish men acquired the right to vote, irrespective of their economic situation, encouraging them to enter political debates with enthusiasm. They paid attention to events overseas affecting fellow Jews, especially examples of anti-Semitism, and tried to convince the president to help. New York Jews mastered the arts of petition and protest. They took sides as individuals in election cycles, first between Federalists and Jeffersonians, later between Democrats and Whigs, and finally between Democrats and Republicans. Domestic issues divided Jews; even the question of slavery found supporters and opponents. Rabbis debated the subject in pulpit and press until the Civil War ended their polemics and both sides rallied to the Union cause. Politics necessarily pushed Jews into public consciousness; non-Jews noticed them. Prejudice began to appear in social life, and stereotypes started to circulate in the press. Yet Jewish New Yorkers were hardly the retiring sort, and many gave as good as they got. Jewish immigrants readily found employment, entering the city’s expanding economic marketplace as they carefully tested its promises of personal fulfillment. Although the Panics of 1857 and 1873 threw thousands out of work,

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during normal times, Jews coped with capitalist volatilities. Many gravitated to small-scale commerce and craft production. Men and women both worked and drew on family resources, especially the labor of their children, to help make ends meet. Jews saved regularly to withstand seasonal swings in employment. Within the city’s diversifying economy, they located ethnic niches that became occupational ladders of advancement for many. Some of the merchants trading in old clothes around Chatham Street initiated manufacturing of cheap goods. A garment industry took shape; it received a big boost with demand for uniforms in the Civil War. As the industry grew, its need for workers increased steadily, employing an ever-greater proportion of Jewish immigrants to the city. Small shops and a competitive contracting system continued to dominate the industry. Despite miserable conditions, the system tempted many workers with a promise of self-employment. Taking a risk, some immigrants borrowed money, often from relatives and fellow immigrants from the same European town, to supplement meager savings. Then they plunged into contracting, trying with a new design idea to secure prosperity. As often as not, they failed, falling back into the laboring class. But success stories trumped failures; they stood as reminders that the city had fulfilled its promise. Merchants and peddlers, who occupied another popular Jewish economic niche, viewed the rise of department stores as an urban achievement. These commercial emporiums proffered a magical array of goods under one roof and represented the pinnacle of success for local hardware-store owners or dry-goods shopkeepers. Retail establishments proliferated around the city as it grew; Jewish entrepreneurship flourished on local shopping streets in the Bronx and Brooklyn. Pitkin Avenue in Brownsville and Fordham Road in the Bronx could not rival Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue or even Fourteenth Street. But they provided a measure of prosperity and independence to Jewish merchants, enough so that they could enjoy some of the perquisites of middle-class living, such as sending one’s sons and even one’s daughters to high school and college. Mobility came in many forms, and often immigrant Jews achieved economic and social mobility first through business and then through education. New York’s explosive growth at the turn of the twentieth century produced radical social movements based on class struggle and politics. For many Jewish immigrants, becoming a small manufacturer paled beside a larger vision of a just society, one without workers living in overcrowded, filthy tenements, exposed to disease, and wracked by despair. Hedging their bets, they dreamed of

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becoming capitalists even as they sought in socialism better living conditions, fair wages, and reasonable working hours. Socialism as a utopian ideal promised equality, an economic system that took from each according to his or her ability and returned to everybody whatever he or she needed. Even some Jewish capitalists subscribed to such an ideal. But on a pragmatic level, socialism appealed to Jewish workers for its alternatives to unrestrained capitalist exploitation. Paths to socialism led through union organizing, the polling booth, fraternalism, and even cooperative housing. Jewish immigrants embraced them all. They forged vibrant garment-workers unions, as well as unions of bakers and plumbers, teachers and pharmacists. They voted for Socialist candidates, sending Meyer London in 1914 to represent the Lower East Side in Congress. They organized the Workmen’s Circle, initially in 1892 as a mutualaid society and then in 1900 as a multibranch fraternal order in which they could socialize with fellow workers and receive health and social welfare benefits not provided by a wealthy but stingy city government. And after World War I ended, New York Jews pushed for legislation that would allow them to build cooperative housing projects, so that they could enjoy living in decent apartments together with other Jewish workers. These examples of democratic community radically reshaped the city and contributed to its progressive commitments even as Jewish struggles for social justice empowered them both individually and as a group. For several centuries, until the beginning of the twentieth, most New York Jews lived in Lower Manhattan, with smaller numbers residing in Williamsburg and Bedford, in the city of Brooklyn. The consolidation of New York with Brooklyn and the creation of a city of five boroughs, including the Bronx, Queens, and Staten Island, stimulated construction of subways and bridges which expanded opportunities for Jewish immigrants to leave the constricted quarters of the Lower East Side. Once they started to move, only the Great Depression, discrimination, and wartime constraints made Jews pause. New neighborhoods held out hopes of fresh beginnings. Adjusting to the strangeness of a neighborhood invited ways to reimagine one’s relationship to New York City. Jews adopted different perspectives on themselves and their city as they exchanged views out kitchen windows. Modern tenements, with steam heat, hot and cold running water in the kitchen sink, and an icebox, proclaimed a sense of accomplishment worth the pain of dislocation produced by immigration. Modern apartment buildings with parquet floors, windows in

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every room, and the latest conveniences announced a form of success. It did not matter that these apartments were rented; home ownership did not rank high on Jewish New Yorkers’ requirements for either the good life or economic security — better to be able to catch the express train and in ten minutes travel two stops on the subway to reach the Midtown garment district than to own a house in the suburbs with a commute of an hour to work each day. And renting let Jews move as their finances fluctuated, freeing funds for other purposes. New York Jews committed themselves to a wide array of neighborhoods, reflecting different desires. Did one wish for a neighborhood filled with modern synagogues and kosher butcher shops, bakeries, and delicatessens? There was a range of choices based on how much rent one was willing to pay. Did one seek a lively center of radicalism where socialism was considered “right wing” in comparison to “left wing” communism, an area filled with union activities, cultural events, and places to debate politics? A slightly narrower number of neighborhoods fit the bill. Did one yearn to speak Yiddish or German or Ladino or Russian, to find traces of the old home in familiar styles of shopping and praying? Neighborhoods, not just a block or two but a cluster of them, catered to those who yearned for what they had left behind in Europe or the Middle East. Did one seek a yeshiva for sons and eventually for daughters, as well as intimate congregations for daily study and prayer? New York made room for these as well. In all of them, Jews had neighbors who were not Jewish, but that mattered less than the neighbors who were Jewish. Jews lived next door to other white ethnics, as well as to African Americans, and, after World War II, Puerto Ricans. While most Jews tolerated their non-Jewish neighbors, economic competition, national and international politics, and religious prejudice ignited conflict. An uneasy coexistence among neighbors characterized many New York neighborhoods. Despite this diversity of residential neighborhoods, Jews stayed in an area usually only for a generation. New neighborhoods beckoned constantly; children moved away from parents; parents lost money or made money. Primarily renters, unlike other groups, Jews did not remain committed for long to a neighborhood. They were ready to move elsewhere in the city, to try something different. Such was New York’s promise of community for Jews. New York Jews began to leave their city in the 1960s, a process that continued for the rest of the century. The largest decline in Jewish population occurred in the 1970s when the city’s fiscal crisis arrived, just in time to welcome

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Abe Beame, New York’s first Jewish mayor. As Jews departed, African Americans and Puerto Ricans moved into the city in ever-greater numbers. By the mid-1950s, a million African Americans lived in New York. After liberalization of immigration laws in 1965, an increasingly diverse array of immigrants from Asia, especially China, and also from the Caribbean, Latin America, and Africa arrived in New York. Jewish immigrants figured among them, most prominently from the Soviet Union; these new immigrants brought some of the same drive and energy that had made New York a city of promises a hundred years earlier. At the start of the twenty-first century, New York still lacked a majority population. In contemporary ethnic calculus, Jews made up a significant percentage of white New Yorkers. But whites constituted a minority in the city, hence Jews’ overall percentage of the population declined. Most Jews were college educated; many had advanced degrees. Having overcome occupational discrimination that endured into the 1960s, Jews held jobs in real estate, finance, publishing, education, law, and medicine in this postindustrial city. They still congregated in neighborhoods, but Queens attracted more Jews than the Bronx did. They still worked in commerce, usually as managers of large stores rather than as owners of small ones. New York Jews still debated how to observe Jewish rituals and holidays. Most declined to join a congregation, yet many retained a consciousness of being Jewish. Often awareness of Jewish differences grew out of family bonds; for some, their sense of Jewishness flowed from work or neighborhood or culture or politics. A visible minority rigorously observed the strictures of Judaism, and their presence gave other Jews a kind of yardstick by which to judge themselves. Despite Jews’ greatly reduced numbers, the city still honored Jewish holy days by adjusting its mundane rhythms. New York Jews knew they lived in American Jews’ capital city; the cluster of national Jewish organizations announced this fact. These organizations, able to mobilize effective protests or to advocate for a cause, focused on problems facing Jews throughout the world. Jewish cultural creativity also endured along with effervescent, experimental, multiethnic commitments to new forms of democratic urban community. City of Promises portrays the history of Jews in New York City from 1654 to the present. Its three volumes articulate perspectives of four historians. In the first volume, Howard Rock argues that the first two centuries of Jewish presence in the city proved critical to the development of New York Jews. He

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sees an influential template in communal structures created by colonial Jews and elaborated in the nineteenth century by Jewish immigrants from central Europe. Rock emphasizes the political freedom and economic strength of colonial and republican Jews in New York. He shows that democratic religious and ethnic community represented an unusual experiment for Jews. Using American political models, Jews in New York innovated. They developed an expansive role for an English-language Jewish press as a vehicle for collective consciousness; they introduced fraternal societies that secularized religious fellowship; they crafted independent philanthropic organizations along gendered lines; they discussed the pros and cons of reforming Judaism; and they passionately debated politics. They were the first American Jews to demonstrate how political and economic freedoms were integral to Jewish communal life. Although many of them arrived as immigrants themselves, they also pointed a path for future migrants who confronted the city’s intoxicating and bewildering modern world. In so doing, these eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Jews laid the foundations for the development of a robust American Jewish community in New York. In the second volume, Annie Polland and Daniel Soyer describe the process by which New York emerged as a Jewish city, produced by a century of mass migration of Jews from central and eastern Europe as well as from the Middle East. Focusing on the urban Jewish built environment — its tenements and banks, its communal buildings and synagogues, its department stores and settlement houses — the authors convey the extraordinary complexity of Jewish immigrant society in New York. The theme of urban community runs like a thread through a century of mass migration beginning in 1840. Polland and Soyer revise classic accounts of immigration, paying attention to Jewish interactions in economic, social, religious, and cultural activities. Jews repeatedly seek to repair fissures in their individual and collective lives caused by dislocation. Their efforts to build connections through family and neighborhood networks across barriers of class and gender generated a staggering array of ethnic organizations, philanthropic initiatives, and political and religious movements. Despite enormous hardship and repeated failures, Jewish immigrants in New York developed sufficient institutional resilience to articulate a political vision of social solidarity and reform. New York Jews also stepped forward into national leadership positions by establishing organizations that effectively rallied American Jews on behalf of those still suffering in Europe.

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New York City became the capital of American Jews in these years and the largest Jewish city in history. In telling the story of twentieth-century New York Jews in the third volume of the series, Jeffrey S. Gurock looks to the neighborhood, the locale of community and the place where most Jews lived their lives. Jews liked their local community and appreciated its familiar warmth. But New York Jews also faced demands for political action on behalf of a transnational Jewish world. During the crucial decade from 1938 to 1948, New York Jews debated what course of action they should take. How should they balance domestic needs with those of European Jews? World War II and the Holocaust demonstrated the contrasts between Jews in New York and Jews in Europe. Gurock shows how Jewish neighborhoods spread across the boroughs. He describes Jewish settlement in Queens after World War II, illuminating processes of urban change. Ethnic-group conflict and racial antagonism left deep scars despite efforts to overcome prejudice and discrimination. New York Jews were found on both sides of the barricades; each decade produced a fresh conflagration. Yet Jewish New Yorkers never ceased to lead movements for social change, supporting women’s rights as well as freedom for Soviet Jewry. New York City retained its preeminence as the capital of American Jews because of deep roots in local worlds. These urban neighborhoods, Gurock argues, nourish creative and unselfconscious forms of Jewishness. Each volume contains a visual essay by art historian Diana L. Linden. These essays interpret Jewish experiences. Linden examines diverse objects, images, and artifacts. She suggests alternative narratives drawn from a record of cultural production. Artists and craftspeople, ordinary citizens and commercial firms provide multiple perspectives on the history of Jews in New York. Her view runs as a counterpoint and complement to the historical accounts. Each visual presentation can be read separately or in conjunction with the history. The combination of historical analysis and visual representation enriches the story of Jews in New York City. In the first essay, Linden emphasizes the foreignness and loneliness of being Jewish in the colonial and republican periods, even as Jews integrated themselves into Christian society. They were the first to create a new identity as “American Jews.” The second visual essay chronicles the challenges of navigating a rapidly expanding city. It explores contrasts of rich and poor. Jews in immigrant New York fashioned new charitable, educational, and cultural institutions as they established the city as the capital of the

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American Jewish world. The third visual essay takes as its theme New York Jews in popular American imagination. It presents many meanings and identities of “New York Jew” over the course of the twentieth century and the beginning years of the twenty-first century. These different viewpoints on Jews in New York City situate their history within intersecting themes of urban growth, international migration, political change, economic mobility, religious innovation, organizational complexity, cultural creativity, and democratic community. Jews participated in building the Empire City by casting their lot with urbanism, even as they struggled to make New York a better place to live, work, and raise a family. Their aspirations changed New York and helped to transform it into a city of promises, some fulfilled, some pending, some beckoning new generations. Deborah Dash Moore

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GENERAL

EDITOR’S

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

All books are collaborative projects, but perhaps none more than this three-volume history of Jews in New York City. The eminent historians directly involved in the project, Jeffrey S. Gurock, Annie Polland, Howard Rock, Daniel Soyer, and art historian Diana L. Linden, have devoted their considerable skills not only to their own volumes but also to evaluating and enhancing each other’s work. Editorial board members helped to guide the project and served as crucial resources. City of Promises began during my term as Chair of the Academic Council of the American Jewish Historical Society, and I owe a debt of gratitude to David P. Solomon for making a match between Jennifer Hammer of New York University Press and the Academic Council. Good ideas have legs, but they require the devotion and support of influential men and women. City of Promises fortunately found both in William Frost z”l of the Lucius N. Littauer Foundation and Jennifer Hammer of NYU Press. Bill Frost generously underwrote the project when it was just an idea, and I think that he would have treasured this history of a city he loved. Jennifer Hammer worked prodigiously to turn vision into reality, never faltering in her critically engaged commitment despite inevitable obstacles. I am indebted to both of them for staying the course, and I greatly appreciate the opportunity to work with Jennifer, an excellent, flexible, and insightful editor. City of Promises received additional important financial support from individuals and foundations. I want to thank the Malkin Fund, The Marian B. and Jacob K. Javits Foundation, Hugo Barreca, David P. Solomon, and an anonymous foundation donor for significant support, as well as several other individuals including Judd and Karen Aronowitz, David and Phyllis Grossman, Irving and Phyllis Levitt, Irwin and Debi Ungar, and Rabbi Marc StraussCohen of Temple Emanuel, Winston-Salem, North Carolina. All recognized the importance of this project through timely contributions. I appreciate their generosity. Several students at the University of Michigan provided assistance that helped to keep the volumes on track. Alexandra Maron and Katherine Rosenblatt did valuable research, and I am grateful for their aid.

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general Editor’s Acknowledgments

These volumes are dedicated to my family of New York Jews. Without their steadfast encouragement, and especially that of my husband, MacDonald Moore, City of Promises would not have appeared. Dedicated to my grandchildren, Elijah Axt, Zoe Bella Moore, and Rose Alexa Moore, authors of future chapters Deborah Dash Moore

AUTHOR ’S

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

It is a pleasure to thank the many people who encouraged and assisted me in the writing of this book. At the outset of my academic career, some thirty-five years ago, I was intrigued with the question of Jewish neighborhood persistence and migration within the great metropolis of New York. As these interests were refined in examining Jewish movement into and out of Harlem, I became keenly aware that there was a concomitant internal communal life worthy of detailed exploration. How did Jews of different economic and social classes and varying political and religious orientations define and live their lives, many miles and subway rides removed from the hub of the Lower East Side? In the decades that followed, I moved away from my Harlem story but took what I learned there to other projects, articles, and books. Innovative institutional activities in Harlem helped me understand how different religious Jewish movements throughout the United States worked to cope with disaffection from faith traditions. In retrospect, development of these strategies may have been Harlem Jews’ greatest contributions to American Jewish life. I now have received the opportunity to revisit these essential elements in New York neighborhood history: movement within and without localities, life on the streets, and institutional contributions that transcend time and place that made up Jewish city life. Three years ago, after writing a book-length study of Orthodox Jews in the United States, I began to pick up the metropolis’s Jewish story where I had left off in the 1920s and have followed its saga into the new millennium. I am very grateful to Jennifer Hammer, editor at New York University Press, and to my colleague Professor Deborah Dash Moore for inviting me to walk with New York Jews through my home city’s streets over the past ninety years as I joined the team of scholars who have worked assiduously on this multivolume history, City of Promises. Both Jennifer and Deborah challenged me in a firm but friendly way to broaden the scope of the book’s dimensions. I also feel privileged to have shared my work and learned from the labors of Diana Linden, Anne Polland, Howard Rock, and Daniel Soyer, who are illuminating earlier and other dimensions of New York Jewish history. Likewise, my thanks to the several readers of the manuscript for the

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time and effort they devoted to refining and expanding my arguments. My friend Professor Benjamin R. Gampel of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America was, as always, of great help on technical, practical, and above all, scholarly issues. Dr. Jack Ukeles taught me much about the demographic resources available to quantify Jewish movements and persistence in New York over the past half century. As with all literary endeavors, all advice and criticisms were well taken, but any errors of fact or judgment that appear in this work are mine alone. In my search for sources and materials, I was assisted, as in the past, by the outstanding library staff at Yeshiva University, including John Moryl, Zvi Erenyi, Zalman Alpert, and the indefatigable Mary Ann Linahan. At my home institution, I am always heartened by the encouragement of its president, Richard M. Joel; chancellor, Dr. Norman Lamm; and provost, my “rabbi,” Dr. Morton Lowengrub. I am also grateful to the archivists at several distinguished New York institutions for their kind assistance, beginning with Yeshiva’s own Shulamith Z. Berger and Deena Schwimmer and including Laura Tosi at the Bronx County Historical Society and Joel Rudnick at the Division of Archives and Special Collections at the City College of New York. I am extraordinarily appreciative of the efforts of my research assistant, Zev Eleff, a budding historian in his own right, who fulfilled the arduous job of digging up many of these resources. I am likewise thankful for the work of Audrey Nasar, another outstanding student, who uncovered many important primary sources. At the technical end, Peter Robertson of Yeshiva University’s public affairs department was a great help in preparing photos for publication. All of my family members are—or should be— avid readers of my books. At least that is the demand that I have imposed on my children, Eli and Sheri, Rosie and Dan and Michael. Two of my granddaughters, Audrey Sofia and Mira Abigail, may prefer to read Harry Potter, but they also like seeing their names in print. Our three newest additions, Zev Jacob, Margot Harper, and Hannah Leah, are not quite ready to check out this acknowledgment. But it is an immeasurable pleasure to dedicate this book to them. As always, Pamela shares with me the joy of another completed project and the boundless pride we have in our children and grandchildren whether or not they now, or ever, fulfill their filial obligation to read my work. Jeffrey s. gurock

Jews in Gotham New York Jews in a Changing City, 1920 – 2010

The Borgenichts’ brownstone and block in a gentrified Harlem, 2010. (Peter Robertson)

Prologue: Neighborhood Dreams and Urban Promises

Shoshana and Yoel Borgenicht believe deeply in the promises that New York City offers young Jews in the twenty-first century. They feel comfortable in their safe and secure neighborhood, where they are earning their livelihoods, raising their children, and living among Jews while sharing with others the best the metropolis has to offer. Their successful search for such a wholesome environment began in 2006 when they embarked on the quintessential Jewish New York journey, a common quest by families dating back generations, to find the right place to live in close proximity to the city’s major financial, commercial, and cultural centers. Initially the couple resided in a cramped Midtown Manhattan apartment, but they desired a home with a backyard along streets where their youngsters might eventually play. As they contemplated their move, Shoshana was pregnant with their first child. They found their dream house, at 341 West 122nd Street, between Manhattan and Morningside Avenues in the western reaches of Harlem, just one block from Morningside Park, down the hill from Morningside Heights and Columbia University. They quickly closed the deal. Their aging three-story brownstone, built in 1889 at the cost of $16,000, was originally an elegant single-family dwelling, a well-appointed abode with hand-carved wood-paneled walls, polished grained floors, beveled glass mirrors, ornate fireplaces and fancy crown molding, a receiving room and a formal dining room, and servants’ quarters set aside for its live-in help. The house and its surroundings remained quite the stylish location during Harlem’s pre – World War I heyday as a predominantly Jewish community. That section of uptown was especially attractive to upwardly mobile eastern Europeans. Rising

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out of the poverty of the Lower East Side, they melded with the well-established German American Christians and Jews who had migrated uptown in the early 1880s. After World War I, the building, like the larger neighborhood, declined. Harlem became the metropolis’s first and most famous black slum. As of the 1960s, comparable buildings on that block were valued at $10,000, less even than the 1889 market value without adjustments for inflation. For close to sixty years, 341 West 122nd Street was a single-room-occupancy rooming house, home to the poor and transient. As late as the 1990s, some ten people shared the living space. The Borgenichts retained, for a while, one artifact of 341’s prior history, a pair of lights outside of the brownstone house that when illuminated had told potential customers that rooms were available. When the Borgenichts moved in, they worked hard to make the residence livable according to twentyfirst-century middle-class standards, including updating the hundred-year-old plumbing and constructing a modern kitchen. Still, this family of five — Rex came along in 2006, Theo in 2008, and Delia in 2009 — would be happy on a street that has become increasingly gentrified.1 The Borgenichts did not seek out Jewish neighbors when they bought the building, but they were pleasantly surprised to find them. One Saturday morning, Yoel encountered what he described as two Orthodox Jews walking down Manhattan Avenue. A neighborhood street encounter is perhaps the most time-honored Jewish tradition in this city. After stopping to greet them, Yoel discovered that they were part of a newly created Chabad (Lubavitch) Hasidic outpost on Manhattan Avenue and 118th Street. This renowned Orthodox Jewish outreach movement had recently set up shop in the community. Jewish religious life was returning to Harlem after more than half a century. Like most other New York Jews, Shoshana and Yoel appreciated having a congregation near them, though they did not plan to attend the synagogue. As young parents, their prime issue was finding the right kind of Jewish-multicultural preschool program for their older boy. While the Borgenichts enjoy their circle of Jewish friends, they get along well with their African American neighbors, including a couple they describe as “elderly, sweet,” who have lived on the block for forty years. As Yoel and Shoshana relate their neighbors’ story, “back then” — that is, in the 1960s — “if you got a good deal in the neighborhood, [you] never left, due to public transportation,” coupled with the draw of “a strong [African American] social community.” If the Borgenichts did not live in the most salubrious of personal settings, they still felt comfortable and relatively safe on essentially a dead-end

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block, even if Morningside Park, notorious during the 1960s – 1970s as a crimeridden, veritable no-man’s-land, was a block away. For Yoel Borgenicht, Harlem was much more than just a great place to raise a family; it was an open field for investment. He is the principal of Harlem Partners, a real estate development company. Yoel believes that “Harlem has a unique opportunity in terms of long-term real estate promise for two reasons: .  .  . [its] architecture is magnificent [and] access to public transportation.” His company’s website asserts that “Harlem today, with its beautiful tree lined streets and rich cultural heritage, is inhabited by a diverse mix of young professionals, growing families and longtime residents. All share in a sense of excitement and community that comes only when a neighborhood experiences an extraordinary renaissance.” Yoel also relies on word of mouth to exude his enthusiasm. “On the weekends,” he has related, “friends [from other parts of the city] come up and say, ‘Wow, this is nice!’ and one person brings two people and two people bring four people.”2 The Borgenichts acknowledge that “there exists some resentment among people who do not own property in Harlem to this process” of gentrification, which Shoshana and Yoel attribute to some people’s “bitterness or frustration at their economic situation.” They recalled, “At first when we moved into the neighborhood, some of the old-time residents were a little suspicious of us as newcomers.” “Whose Harlem is it?” asked New York magazine in July 2008. Its cover story spoke candidly about perceptions among “the average AfricanAmerican in Harlem” that gentrification means “nonblack people are moving in and we’re being forced out.” However, the article did not name Yoel and his associates as the focus of communal ire. Rather, “the most successful and reviled real-estate broker in Harlem” was reportedly a black woman who over the past decade or so had “almost single-handedly pushed up sale prices on many Harlem homes to ten, twenty, even 40 times what they were previously worth.”3 Notwithstanding some floating animosities toward change makers, back home neighborliness prevailed on the Borgenichts’ own block as folks “look out for each other.” Often neighbors knock on their door to remind them to move their car across the street during alternate-side street-cleaning days, sparing them costly tickets from the sanitation department police. Amidst a bustling city, there is a mood of calm and serenity on 122nd Street. Possessed of a strong sense of Harlem’s Jewish history, the Borgenichts recognize that they are players in a remarkable reversal of fortune within a neighborhood whose Jewish heyday ended three quarters of a century ago.4 In the

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1930s, young, upwardly mobile Jews were leaving Harlem en masse. An anonymous Yiddish writer recounted in 1938 that “the removal is voluntary and the reason is not gloomy. Jews on the road to bettering themselves and making life more convenient . . . moved from Harlem up to the Bronx.”5 The young couple is also keenly aware that Yoel’s entrepreneurial efforts are akin to turn-of-thetwentieth-century Jewish real estate endeavors that brought “all-rightniks,” that is, eastern European Jewish immigrants on the make financially, to invest and to settle in Central Harlem. Then, as now, advertisements and word of mouth drew aspiring Jews in a chain migration to a region of Manhattan that was earning a reputation for its tree-lined, wide thoroughfare streets, situated close to Midtown and downtown work places. At the same time, severe overcrowding on the Lower East Side, exacerbated by downtown gentrification and urban renewal, pushed poor, working-class immigrant Jews to East Harlem. That region became “El Barrio,” the Latino ghetto, in the 1930s.6 There is, however, even more historical resonance to the Borgenichts’ settlement within their new neighborhood. The extensive trail that led this family to Harlem, notwithstanding some idiosyncratic twists and turns along the way, mirrors the life experiences of many New York Jews. Yoel’s family saga extends back more than a hundred years. Yoel is a fifth-generation New Yorker: his mother’s family immigrated in the mid-nineteenth century from central Europe. His maternal grandparents owned a cigar shop on Lower Park Avenue. By the time Yoel’s mother was born, in the mid-1930s, they had prospered and moved uptown to 116th Street between Morningside and Amsterdam Avenues, one of the regions of Manhattan that absorbed Jews from Harlem. Borgenicht’s father’s family hailed from German-speaking Poland and Austria. They settled on the Lower East Side in the late nineteenth century and peddled herring. In time, they too prospered enough to settle in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn. Yoel’s father, a women’s dress manufacturer, subsequently moved to the Upper East Side, where he and his wife began raising a family. But in the 1970s, due to financial reverses, they “gave up on the city,” as Yoel put it, and relocated to a farm in rural New Jersey. At age fifteen, Yoel, with his elders’ consent, made a very unusual personal move. Feeling a lack of Jewish identity, as where he lived, he said, “was predominantly Christian,” he migrated to Israel, where he served in the Israeli army before earning a law degree at the Hebrew University. Still, he said that as much as he “fell in love with Israel,” he also “loved New York” and ultimately the city’s “endless opportunity” enticed him to return to this city of promises.

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Shoshana, by contrast, is a full-fledged immigrant. Her embrace of New York points to the metropolis’s enduring character as a Jewish immigrant city. Her family, originally from Romania, lived in Montreal for four generations. But they left Quebec during the difficult times for Jews following separatist agitation. Her parents landed in Florida, where she attended college prior to exploring what New York’s horizons offered. She settled in Midtown Manhattan, found employment, and met Yoel. The Borgenichts’ story highlights a central focus of this book, namely, the role of neighborhoods in the history of New York Jews in the twentieth century. This volume explores Jewish life on the streets of the city, seeking to explain how men and women, native born and immigrants, earned their livelihoods, raised their children, and related to those who shared their backgrounds in Jewish spaces that they called their own. It considers how Jews, as they sought comfort and stability, interacted and negotiated boundaries with other religious, ethnic, and racial groups who also occupied urban turf. In so doing, it details the complex dynamics that caused Jews to persist, to abandon, or to be left behind in their neighborhoods during critical moments in the city’s history. And it focuses on the forces that convinced some Jews who gave up on Gotham during its most difficult times eventually to return. Throughout close to a century of transformations, declines, and revivals within New York City, there was never just one but many Jewish stories. Neighborhoods in every borough approached, each in their own differing ways, the opportunities and challenges that this city of promises presented and posed. Beyond these accounts of daily Jewish life in New York over close to a century stands a complementary saga of men and women who believed and acted on the faith that their city could be the incubator of great ideas and the center for transformative movements. While for most Jews, in each generation, the neighborhood was solely the realm of ongoing life experiences, a minority imagined it as a place where they dreamed dreams of their blocks building new realities far and wide from their homes. Starting out in the streets of their birth, or attracted to energized enclaves, some of these activists believed that they and their comrades could fundamentally alter human destiny. Jewish radicals, for example, in a heyday of the 1920s – 1930s, sought to galvanize masses to end injustices that stemmed from what they damned as an evil economic system. Other activists battled with no less vigor for specifically Jewish concerns, responding to crises on streets often thousands of miles away. Threats to the very survival of their people, whether in Warsaw during the

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tragic Holocaust period or in Moscow in the midst of the 1970s – 1990s struggles for Soviet Jewry or in Jerusalem throughout the triumphant and threatened rise and history of Israel, became consummate neighborhood concerns. Within this city of multiple Jewish stories and possibilities, there were also those who resolved to challenge patriarchy, most notably, feminists who found their voices beginning in the 1970s. But at the same time, they influenced a cadre of their sisters to transform Jewish ways of life in New York and across the country and around the world. Such political activism ultimately elevated the New York Jewish story above the neighborhood nexus and centered it squarely within contemporary Jewish and American history. Jews with transcendent objectives petitioned and protested against the backdrop of the massive metropolis itself, with its unparalleled communications, intellectual, and cultural hubs. Beginning with their friends and relatives living in the world’s largest Diaspora Jewish city, they determined to harness the power of all New Yorkers. If properly roused, citizens of America’s most populous city could also join as their causes’ foot soldiers. But for activists to fulfill their missions, they had to overcome the often frustrating apathy of those very people among whom they lived — mostly fellow Jews but Gentiles too — who strolled blithely past their neighborhood demonstrations concerned with mundane matters. On the streets, the daily and the dynamic competed constantly. Radicals were frequently disconcerted when potential comrades joined in solely when the cause of the day served their personal or family needs. The many that showed tepid allegiances riled them more than the minority who would stop to harangue the protestors for promoting ideas and projecting an image of their community perceived as out of step with American values and specific Jewish needs. As skilled debaters and dialecticians, activists relished intellectual combat, but they also understood that winning a verbal contest was one thing; convincing audiences to stay for the long struggle was another matter entirely. Feminists, for their parts, not only struggled to enlist their own committed followers to contest strident patrimonies. But, on occasion, they also had to deal with those around them who gave lip service to the cause but did not judge the liberation of women as a highest priority in creating a new society. For street advocates of Jewish causes, beyond the constant challenge of raising hues and cries, there was their own dilemma of dealing with a collateral dynamic, as what happened in New York was so special within twentieth- and

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twenty-first-century Jewish history. Midtown Manhattan was, and continues to be, American Jewry’s political capital. While a myriad of Jewish organizations were on the scene in the heart of the nation’s media center and, for the past sixty years, close to the United Nations, Midtown acquired a reputation as a headquarters district for those who claimed — and frequently possessed — privileged access to powerful local, national, and international leaders. Outside activists seeking to lead “grass-roots” groups — to use their own self-designation — asserted that their strength stemmed from the power of Jewish neighborhood people and opposed organizations branded as a domineering Jewish “establishment.” It was a loaded term full of opprobrium for those deemed to be circumspect in their response to crises and, perhaps, all too concerned with their reputations. On all Jewish issues, it was said, the rarified, comfortable in their wood-paneled suites, arrogated to themselves the right to speak as the representatives of the Jewish community to governments neither with the assent nor reflecting the views of the men and women in the streets. If local activists had a Manhattan address, it was usually little more than crowded office space strewn with reusable demonstration placards. Over the generations, disputes have recurred over whether the neighborhoods or the headquarters best understood how to prosecute the most weighty concerns. Memories of heated disagreements in one era fired up confrontations in later periods. Although the primary battles were over intense foreign matters, fundamentally different perspectives that often boiled down to how comfortable and trusting vying spokespeople were with the larger world, at some local flash-point moments also roiled controversies over how New York Jews themselves might live their own lives and share the city with others. Meanwhile, back home in the neighborhoods, over the years and from among the masses that simply searched for calm and serene space in the city, another elite arose that harbored its own transformative dreams. These New York Jewish style setters were determined to move beyond the precincts of their streets and enclaves with the élan that the city embodied, in order to influence their nation, if not the world. They would be doyens and doyennes of the ways millions far and wide dressed, ate, entertained themselves, and even appreciated the finer things in life, partaking from a distance much of the best that this metropolis had to offer. It is to the delineation of these different visions of New York’s promise — its multiple stories — and to the intersection of these varying dreams and realities that we now turn our attention.

Grand Concourse: view south from Mosholu Parkway, July 1932. (Courtesy of the Bronx County Historical Society, New York City)

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Building and Sustaining Common Ground

New York had always been a walker’s city. Strollers loved passing friends on neighborhood avenues. Window shopping, a favored pastime, drew crowds during holiday seasons. Customers journeyed by foot in and out of stores across wide expanses of commercial districts in search of bargains. Residents and visitors enjoyed perambulating as they took in the sights and sounds of the metropolis’s entertainments even if a bus, trolley, or in more recent decades, a subway had brought them close to their destinations. But, in 1919, a disgruntled New Yorker told state officials that “her shoes had been worn out” beating the pavement in a totally unsuccessful quest. She had marched all around town in search of decent housing for her family and was “unable to find better quarters.” Her husband, children, and so many others were stuck together “crowded in dark, ill-smelling apartments.”1 At the close of World War I, New York — so often renowned for its excitement, advantages and opportunities — teetered on the brink of failing to fulfill a most basic promise to its citizenry: to provide decent and safe places to live. Housing authorities reported dolefully that “over twenty thousand of the worst dwellings in the city that were not in use in 1916 were back on the market” because there were “practically no unoccupied apartments” that were “fit for human habitation.” Even apartments in the better class of buildings were “unobtainable” as “rents . . . were rising and families were ‘doubling up.’ ” War industries had attracted hundreds of thousands of workers, many of them African Americans from the South, and governmental restrictions during the European hostilities on all but essential construction had severely constricted new housing starts. Both new settlers and immigrants who arrived right under

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the restrictionists’ wire as quotas became the law in the early 1920s struggled with Gotham’s longtime residents for limited space. From 1915 to 1920, the population within the five boroughs rose by 600,000. Overcrowded Manhattan acquired an additional net growth of 146,000. Squeezed within tight residential quarters, the metropolis might have shared the fate of twenty-five other American cities during the so-called Red Summer of 1919 where tensions boiled over into race riots. Living cheek to jowl on heated streets and coming into close contact at crowded beaches and other public accommodations, whites and blacks violently confronted each other.2 Fortunately, New York legislators — with a discerning eye on what had happened elsewhere — spared their city calamitous outbreaks. In 1921, the Board of Estimate passed a tax-exemption ordinance that galvanized new safetyvalve construction. The law, extended several times during the 1920s, basically freed “all new buildings planned for dwelling purposes” from ten years of real estate taxes. Attractive neighborhoods soon rose in Manhattan and the outer boroughs. This far-reaching solution to New York’s most pressing dilemma profoundly affected how its Jews lived, worked, and in many cases prospered during the next two decades.3 Energized by this mandate, local builders and real estate operators, with Jews prominently among them, immediately sprang into action. In Brooklyn alone, during the first nine months of 1921, plans were filed for 6,303 new multiple dwellings with 22,338 apartments. Many of the buildings differed little from prewar construction of four- and five-story “walk-ups,” even if promoters said that they were “up-to-date . . . with spacious interior courts for light and air.” But in the Bronx in 1922, the first “million dollar apartment house” signaled a new era of housing. This nine-story edifice on Kingsbridge Road and the Grand Concourse boasted “modern, fire proof apartments arranged so that each living unit occup[ied] an entire wing of the structure, equipped with high speed elevators, intercommunication system, [and] a steam laundry in the building.” Such construction set a pattern for new developments for the entire decade in the city until the Great Depression. The previously underpopulated borough of Queens sprouted new neighborhoods in Long Island City, Astoria, and Jackson Heights. While Manhattan, in the 1920s, lagged behind in the number of new housing starts, its relatively few new luxury apartment houses were usually more expensive than those built elsewhere in the city. Riverside Drive, Central Park West, Park Avenue below

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Ninety-Sixth Street, and to a lesser degree, Washington Heights emerged as elegant communities.4 Prospective tenants — with Jews again heavily part of the mix — appreciated these houses’ location within “subway suburbs.” The mass movement of New Yorkers to suburbia beyond the city’s legal limits was still a generation away. The notion that a merchant, a manufacturer, or even a worker could relocate the family to a wholesome setting and commute quickly and cheaply to Manhattan offices, factories, or stores represented a promise fulfilled — that is, if they possessed the economic wherewithal to make a move. And in the goodtimes decade of the 1920s, “labor was never as prosperous as it is today,” reported one tenement-house official. He continued, “The American worker has always been desirous of bringing up his family in the best possible surroundings. He has tried to get away from the sordidness and the present prosperity has afforded him an opportunity of which he has taken full advantage.” Sometimes, children convinced parents to seek these better neighborhoods. The impressionable would “go to school and visit the homes of their classmates and see how much better they are living in the Bronx, Brooklyn and Queens, with all modern improvements at a little more rent.” They would then persuade their parents to move to apartments with “electric light, bath rooms, hot and cold water and clean rooms.”5 But the ability to commute every workday easily and inexpensively from home to job was critical. As “long as dwellings are within the 5 cent zone, such as new rapid transit routes afford,” a real estate journal observed early in 1921, “tenants are willing to go to the [outer] boroughs.”6 Whole new communities coalesced within walking distance of the rapidtransit lines. The South Bronx had elevated railroad links to downtown as early as the 1880s, and in 1906, the Lenox Avenue subway was extended under the Harlem River. However, after 1917, Bronx Park, White Plains Road, Jerome Avenue, and Pelham Bay Park lines made much larger regions readily accessible. In the late 1910s – early ’20s, subway lines were constructed over and under the East River, bringing Brooklyn and Queens neighborhoods into close contact with Manhattan. By the same token, locales just beyond the subway’s reach, such as Forest Hills, Queens, experienced much less growth. Only when the Independent Subway line (IND) was built in the 1930s, providing fifteenminute service to Manhattan, was the neighborhood transformed.7 As backers, beneficiaries, and builders of a refashioned New York, Jews in the 1920s continued longstanding patterns of group economic, industrial, and

“The Authentic New York Transit Map.” (Published for the Universal Jewish Encyclopedia, circa 1939)

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social behavior in the city. In Abraham Cahan’s famous novel The Rise of David Levinsky, the renowned Yiddish newspaper man and downtown man of letters described the real estate fever that had gripped the Lower East Side at the turn of the century, when ambitious immigrants hoped to make their fortunes in that neighborhood and on Harlem properties. He wrote about how a “boom” was “intoxicating a certain element of the population” of “Jewish carpenters, house-painters, bricklayers, or installment peddlers,” emerging, in true ragsto-riches style, as “builders of tenements or frame dwellings.” His central character, Levinsky, depicted as a real estate aspirant, spoke of “huge fortunes . . . growing like mushrooms”: “I saw men who three years ago had not been worth a cent and who now were buying and selling blocks of property.” Real-life success stories, such as those of Harry Fischel and David A. Cohen, emerged as major communal figures. In Cohen’s case, this erstwhile housewares peddler from Suwalk, Russo-Poland, rose to the presidency of Gold and Cohen Realtors. As owner of several large parcels in Harlem, he even harbored the fantasy that the uptown neighborhood to which he and his family relocated in the early years of the twentieth century would replace downtown as the foremost center of Jewish religious life. When he died suddenly in 1911, he was battling to have his former home synagogue, Kehal Adath Jeshurun of Eldridge Street, shift from the Lower East Side of Manhattan to 113th Street to be part of a communal complex that would include elementary and secondary schools, a Talmud Torah, and a yeshiva.8 That same era of widespread construction also provided important employment opportunities for Jewish skilled laborers. To gain a foothold in those industries, painters, plasterers, paperhangers, and decorators worked as scabs, agreeing to salaries considerably less than those of other tradesmen. Predictably, these maneuvers earned Jews the enmity of the Irish-dominated construction-trades unions. But then again, the ethnically exclusive labor brotherhood denied membership to Jewish construction workers. Meanwhile, once upscale apartments were available, Harlem attracted “a great Jewish bourgeoisie made up entirely of East Siders who ha[d] outgrown their station.” The quest for “greater privacy and larger quarters” had begun. Conventional wisdom claimed “the further uptown” the Jew moves, “the larger, one may be sure is his bank account.”9 Now, in the 1920s, Jewish realtors and laborers capitalized on even greater opportunities. At the same time, their upwardly mobile coreligionists settled

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where fellow Jews built and worked. The ethnic connection that largely determined where those capable of moving to new neighborhoods would live was stronger than ever before. A historian of New York Jews in the 1920s has explained that “the bonds of ethnicity supported ethnically separate construction industries catering to an ethnically distinct housing market.”10 Once more, aggressive Jewish entrepreneurs “ran lustily when they heard the bell of opportunity tolling its promise.” A contemporary observer of a new generation of real estate speculators further reported that “aflame with schemes, plans and ambitions for bigger things,” they had “grown rich, prosperous, financially independent, . . . strutting in front of their skyscrapers and breathing freely with their chests out.”11 To get the job done, through informal networking, Jewish builders typically turned to a Jewish architect to draw up plans and relied on a mix of Jews and other ethnic groups to perform the construction. Once the building was ready to rent, the entrepreneurs who owned and operated the apartment houses got the message out to fellow Jews — either through word of mouth or local advertising — that some of the most commodious housing going up in the city was available. For an advancing class of Jews who had risen out of factory work to owning a small business, an apartment on the Grand Concourse in the Bronx or on Eastern Parkway in Brooklyn or even on the Upper West Side of Manhattan signaled success in America. Economic and social calculi called for them to invest heavily in their shop or industry while setting aside enough money to rent an appropriate home. Buying a house appealed neither as a personal desideratum nor a measure of achievement. A spacious apartment would more than do. Once word got back to friends and relatives in older neighborhoods, a chain migration began.12 Very often, the children of Jewish immigrants led their parents on the exodus out of the old environment. A longtime downtown resident told a survey taker, “I lived on the east side all those years which was very uncomfortable because my earnings were too small to afford a higher rental.” But then, fortunately, when “my children started to work,” the family was able to seek out an “apartment with at least the toilet in the apartment and also steam heat and a bath tub.”13 The resourceful flocked from densely populated Jewish enclaves, including not only from the Lower East Side. As late as 1917, that renowned neighborhood still housed approximately 300,000 Jews, but some 200,000 departed in

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less than a decade. Their destinations included the Bronx and newer parts of Brooklyn, such as Boro Park, Flatbush, and Bensonhurst; some even migrated across the Hudson to sections of northeastern New Jersey. But Jews also moved rapidly out of Central Harlem, once the home of the rising Jewish bourgeoisie. Tens of thousands, possessed of considerable means, escaped the uptown area’s overcrowding for the Grand Concourse and for the Upper West Side of Manhattan, settling as far north as Washington Heights, as poor African Americans moved in. Left behind were aspiring African Americans, Harlemites too of long standing. The city extended its promises discriminately. They who once lived among Jews were trapped in this ever-deteriorating neighborhood either by their own lack of comparable economic mobility or by racist conventions and covenants. A federal study concluded in 1931 that while the children of immigrants possessed the “possibility of escape, with improvement of economic status to more desirable sections of the city,” among “Negroes . . . certain definite racial attitudes favorable to segregation interpose difficulties to .  .  . breaking physical restrictions in residential areas.” Such was the case in Washington Heights, where Jews could settle but a Neighborhood Protective Association pressured landlords, many of them Jews, to sign racially restrictive agreements. Meanwhile, as blacks, regardless of class, were “jammed together” in Harlem, many Jews from the Lower East Side who had spilled over into working-class areas of prewar Williamsburg in Brooklyn set their sights on new Brooklyn enclaves. By 1930, Brooklyn’s 800,000 Jews constituted a full one-third of that borough’s population. Less commanding, though certainly noticeable, was the new presence of Jews in sections of Queens, such as Jamaica, Astoria, Whitestone, Woodhaven, Laurelton, and Forest Hills. Its newly successful residents came from older sections of Brooklyn, such as the poorer areas of Brownsville and East New York. By the end of the 1920s, the Bronx housed some 585,000 Jews, up from the some 200,000 who lived there in 1917.14 During this decade of extensive relocations, working-class Jews moved to their own substantial, if less elegant, locales in the city. In the Bronx, particularly, Jewish labor unions and radical organizations built cooperative apartment complexes for their members. In the case of the Amalgamated housing development, home by 1931 to some seven hundred families in the Van Cortlandt section of the northwest Bronx, workers benefited from another important piece of state legislation. The Limited Dividend Housing Companies law

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of 1926 granted tax breaks to builders who limited dividends to 6 percent, established moderate rents, and opened their doors to tenants with low incomes. The Amalgamated Clothing Workers Union, among the largest predominantly Jewish labor groups in the 1920s, with a rank and file of some 175,000, secured mortgages from the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, the YiddishSocialist newspaper the Jewish Daily Forward, and its own Amalgamated Bank. When the Amalgamated’s cooperative doors opened around Thanksgiving of 1927, a family could occupy an apartment in a six-floor walk-up, for a modest $500 investment per room — $150 down payment with monthly installments spread out over the next ten years — and a carrying charge of $11 per month. By contrast, that same year, just to rent a three- to five-room apartment on the Grand Concourse near Tremont Avenue cost $55 – $85 a month. The luckier co-op residents lived on the lower floors, with “a view of Van Cortlandt Park, the waters of the city reservoir, and the palisades of the Hudson,” as well as access to the “tennis courts, ice skating and other outdoor recreation made available by the park facilities.” Subsequent construction completed from 1928 to 1931 offered the added convenience of elevators. Everyone enjoyed the “landscaped gardens” around the buildings and took full advantage of the “new subway and elevated lines [that] provided a quick and easy commute to jobs in Manhattan’s garment district.”15 The 1920s also witnessed more ideologically committed Jewish laborers, such as the Jewish Communist garment workers, find homes together in the United Workers’ Houses, a few miles east from the Amalgamated in the Bronx Park East section. This radical project found its financial footing not from government incentives but through loans extended by its party’s Yiddish newspaper, the Morgen Freiheit. Still, through pooled resources, the cooperative offered deals to its residents comparable to the Amalgamated’s. Concomitantly, and also in the Bronx, on Sedgwick Avenue, Yiddishists established their Cooperative Heim Geselschaft, which bore the popular name of the Sholom Aleichem Houses. Socialist Zionists gathered within the Farband Houses on Williamsbridge Road in the Bronx. In each project, developers did more than provide housing. They built libraries, auditoriums, day-care nurseries, classrooms, and gymnasia all aimed at creating and nurturing an ideological community.16 Elsewhere in the Bronx, other Jews of limited means relied not on union or political group initiatives but on pooled family incomes to pay rents that were

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only slightly higher than those charged by Manhattan tenement landlords. For example, Jews of East Harlem realized that while the Grand Concourse was economically beyond them, for just a bit more money than they presently were paying, they could relocate to the Morrisania or Hunts Point sections of the Bronx. There were eastern European synagogues in those less pricey sections as early as 1914. These Jewish immigrants and their children abandoned East Harlem in the 1920s, setting the stage for it soon to become “El Barrio,” housing the first wave of Puerto Rican migrants to the city.17 Though the majority of Jews on the move were the children of eastern European Jews, parallel peregrinations occurred among Sephardic and Mizrachi families. In the period before World War I, some fifty to sixty thousand Jews from the Ottoman Empire entered the United States. Like their Russian, Polish, Romanian, and Hungarian counterparts, this variegated group, which included Ladino, Greek, and Judeo-Arabic speakers, settled primarily on the Lower East Side, largely on Christie, Forsyth, Eldridge, Allen, Orchard, and Essex Streets. The more affluent, but with some working-class Jews too, relocated to Harlem during the 1910s. Like so many other New Yorkers, their second generation took advantage of the building boom in the 1920s and moved to the Bronx and to Brooklyn. A substantial community of Syrians found homes in Brooklyn’s Bensonhurst and Flatbush. New Lots too acquired Sephardic newcomers.18 When eastern Europeans and Sephardim arrived in their new neighborhoods, they caught up to central European Jews who had made the Bronx and Brooklyn their homes when these boroughs were still remote outlying districts. But cultural divides persisted. Although there was room in the Reform sanctuaries established by American Jews of long standing, those who may have prayed as youngsters in immigrant Orthodox synagogues hesitated to join. The Tremont Temple, for example, on the Grand Concourse and Tremont Avenue at 180th Street, boasted that it was the “Temple Emanu-el of the Bronx.” A new member would have to be comfortable with the “dominant [synagogue] culture of the Germans,” complete with its organ and mixedgender choir but no cantor. The rabbi, in his “frock coat,” led the devotions. As late as a generation after the 1920s, the synagogue still prided itself on its “dignity, stature and formality.” It also contravened traditional Jewish practice, passing a charity basket at Friday-night services, admonishing male worshipers if they dared to cover their head by wearing a yarmulke, a basic traditional

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Jewish custom. Second-generation synagogue-goers of eastern European Jewish background preferred the Concourse Center of Israel, a different commodious congregation directly across the Grand Concourse from Tremont Temple and three blocks north at 183rd Street, where they could find Orthodox rituals. After Sabbath services, as these Concourse Center members sauntered past the temple, they might comment derogatorily about those “chazzer fressers” (those who ate pork) who opted for Reform Judaism. One memoirist, who “lived next door to the Tremont Temple,” recalled, “it was reform [sic] and the attendees were more elegantly dressed and more impressive than those at the Concourse Center.” But then again, some of the Tremont Temple’s members who were in the neighborhood when “the Grand Concourse was really grand, . . . [when] there were only private homes, no apartments,” occasionally reciprocated, referring to the newcomers as “not our kind of Jews.”19 While so many New York Jews of the 1920s associated with their own kind, some ventured into emerging Christian preserves and were frequently rebuffed. Particularly invidious were the actions of Edward McDougall, principal of the Queensboro Corporation, who conceived of “a completely planned and largely self-contained community” in Jackson Heights, Queens. He built what has been characterized as “the nation’s first garden apartment suburb .  .  . for upper-middle-class New Yorkers.” Like Jewish builders in their sections of town, the Protestant McDougall capitalized on the extension of rapidtransit links into the neighborhood that arrived late in the 1910s. By 1919, he was hatching a plan wherein his customers could buy, rather than just rent, their own apartments. Quickly, some six hundred families took up his offer. But none of these residents were Jews. Catholics and dog owners — the other two-thirds of the common troika of whites who were unwanted in supposedly “elite” neighborhoods — also had applications rejected. These exclusions did not approach the discrimination that African Americans faced but were nonetheless insulting to those who were denied entrance.20 McDougall hardly hid his intentions. His real estate code words — “Restricted Garden Residential Section” and “Social and Business References Required” — advertised who should not apply. Such admonitions not only appeared in Queensboro’s promotional literature but were also posted on city buses, unquestionably to the chagrin of Jewish straphangers, including those who had no interest in Jackson Heights. If some determined Jews did not get that implicit message, they were curtly told at the rental office what were the

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unbridgeable realities. Such was the experience of “more than twenty-five prospective tenants of the Jewish race, of a class and character equal to that of people residing in Jackson Heights and with the financial means to carry out their contracts,” who “applied . . . for acceptance as tenants . . . and were excluded upon the sole ground that they were of the Jewish race.” The tension-laden scene unfolded as follows: “a man went there and applied for an apartment and would be then taken by the agent on the way to be shown the apartment. . . . He would give his name and if it was a Jewish name he was immediately notified that there was no use looking any further that they would take no Jews.” That was just one of the revelations that became part of the public record when, in 1927, McDougall sued a Gentile contractor for his company’s failure to fulfill a mortgage obligation. James Conforti’s defense against foreclosure was that Queensboro’s “act arbitrarily or capriciously in the selection or rejection . . . of tenants” had limited his requisite pool of applicants. Judge Burt Jay Humphrey sided with McDougall and affirmed his right to keep out “persons of Jewish name, origin or parentage who were otherwise desirable . . . and financially solvent.” That decision and McDougall’s and his counterparts’ unending prejudices kept Jews out of Jackson Heights until the 1950s.21 Just a few miles from Jackson Heights, in the Forest Hills Gardens section of Queens, residential discrimination against Jews was subtler and less comprehensive. At its inception, this neighborhood was also envisioned as a “planned residential community.” As early as 1907, the Russell Sage Foundation, an organization of Progressive reformers with seemingly the best of intentions and possessing a “broad mandate to improve social and living conditions in the United States,” promised to build “attractive facilities in the suburbs for persons of modest means who could pay from twenty-five dollars a month upwards for the purchase of a home.” Robert de Forest, an authority on city planning and tenement-house life, and Frederick Law Olmsted Jr., son of the architect of Central Park, were among its most distinguished officials. However, cost overruns pushed the foundation by the end of the 1910s to sell its finished garden-style apartments and one- and two-family houses to upscale customers. In the 1920s, its advertising emphasized that “lest confusion . . . exist as to just what Forest Hills Gardens is, . . . charitable and philanthropic objects . . . are not the aim. Forest Hills Gardens is a high-class suburban residential community.” At that point, Forest Hills, utterly distant from the city, was enhanced by limited transportation consisting of railroad connections and a

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streetcar line that ran along Queens Boulevard to the Queensboro Bridge and on into Manhattan. Forest Hills did not become a “subway suburb” for people of more modest means until the mid-1930s, when the IND made its way from the city, sparking additional construction. In the meantime, Forest Hills Gardens’ preferred clientele did not generally include Jews and Catholics. The foundation required that applicants provide references regarding their “character and business” — suggestive code words to deter the unwanted.22 Despite undertones and overtones of exclusion, some Jews broke into the restricted Gardens. In 1929, Lillian and Harry Mesard moved to 9 Archway Place, just a few blocks from the West Side Tennis Club and its stadium, the neighborhood’s best-known landmark, even though “a neighbor hired a private service to investigate the new homeowners; the report stressed that they were of Hebrew extraction.” More typically, Jews resided on the outskirts of the most desirable section. By 1930, some well-to-do Jews, including “businessmen and professionals” who had previously lived in older sections of Brooklyn and parts of the Bronx, settled just over the northern border of Queens Boulevard, within walking distance of the Mesards.23 Some of the wealthy were builders, such as Leo Wolosoff, who constructed a stately private home for his family and comparable accommodations for other Jews who could afford them. By a similar token, architect Benjamin Braunstein designed elegant apartments on the periphery of Forest Hills made to “resemble the .  .  . Gardens architectural pattern.” Buildings with classy names like Devon Hall, constructed in 1927, boasted “Doric front columns, arched windows and colonial revival pediments.” Braunstein bragged of his design at Holder Place with oak-paneled interior lobby walls and marble main lobby flooring. By contrast, local homeowner and entrepreneur Harry LeFrak focused his attention — when he was not concentrating on larger-scale projects in Brooklyn — on constructing apartments that middle-income and workingclass families could afford. This family company’s policy was magnified after World War II within LeFrak City.24 Some prosperous businesspeople and professionals stayed on the Lower East Side, while tens of thousands of their friends and relatives exited to the outer boroughs. Culture frequently influenced such decisions. Some who had succeeded economically may have not felt quite as comfortable any place other than downtown. Men of significant means also liked to be honored as patrons of some of the landmark immigrant synagogues that they could stroll to on

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Sabbaths and holidays decked out in cutaway suits and top hats. The desire to walk to their jobs, yet another dimension of New York as a walking city, also had much to do with persistence. Even as many of their fellow New York Jews were comfortable with commutation, some of the well-heeled saved time and energy by living near their downtown places of employment.25 However, these better-off Jews who remained in the old neighborhood did not reside in the tenements that continued to billet the poor. Rather, those on the way up, but not out, benefited from new construction initiatives that changed the face of their surroundings. The walk-to-work scenario certainly applied to the occupants of the Ageloff Towers on Third Street and Avenue A, an eleven-story apartment building, built in 1929 at a cost of $2.5 million by Samuel Ageloff, who, with government assistance, also was building Brooklyn housing. This brick structure, with its ornate art-deco exterior designs, attracted “clerks, professionals and other white-collar workers,” who held jobs both inside and outside the Lower East Side. Some even walked briskly to Wall Street employments, south and west of their homes.26 “Jewish” businesses similarly persisted in the old quarter. Starting in the 1920s, many of those who had moved away from the Lower East Side began to wax nostalgic about the streets they had left behind and returned on occasion to savor the sights, sounds, and products of their still-recent past. The special Lower East Side experience remained embedded in Jewish memories for several subsequent generations. This tendency led to throngs of Jews who reportedly had “not lost their taste for bargaining” to patronize — most notably on Sundays in blithe violation of city blue laws — “men’s clothing stores on Stanton Street, women’s clothing stores on Clinton Street, furniture stores on First Avenue.” Those seeking religious articles also headed downtown to well-known spots on Essex Street. Purveyors of kosher provisions, such as wines and matzos, did particularly well before the Passover holiday. While kosher delicatessens thrived in local Bronx, Brooklyn, or Queens neighborhoods, for some Jews nothing quite matched a meal in an authentic “immigrant” restaurant.27 Second Avenue continued to entice crowds to matinee or evening Yiddish theater performances. The venerated venue continued to be the theater’s “sacred grounds,” even if there were “branches in Harlem, the Bronx, and Brownsville which presented melodramas, musicals, variety acts, and performers remaindered by Second Avenue.” On occasion, these satellites “managed to entice a real star who had overplayed his hand in bargaining over

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terms and at season’s opening found himself without a contract.” Nonetheless, loyal fans preferred to attend a famous downtown playhouse, especially since theater producers, hoping to retain devoted patrons, constantly upgraded the artistic quality of presentations. During the 1930s, actor, director, and producer Maurice Schwartz, for example, brought to the Yiddish Art Theatre not only “Yiddish works of high caliber” but the oeuvre of Shaw, Tolstoy, Ibsen, and Shakespeare. In time, one of Schwartz’s protégés, Muni Weissenfreund, moved on to Broadway and ultimately to Hollywood, where as Paul Muni he starred in such film classics as The Good Earth, The Life of Emile Zola, and Scarface. Molly Picon and Stella Adler similarly “crossed over to Broadway from the Yiddish stage.” With the Yiddish theater still very much alive — albeit past its prime — as many of the younger generation preferred to go “uptown to American shows,” it made sense for those who profited from fans’ persistent allegiances to remain in the neighborhood so long as they could live in modern apartment buildings on Second Avenue. Decades later, “the playwrights, poets, journalists and publishers” who “lived and worked there too” would be remembered as a community of sorts, as “in the evening” they would “gather at one of the local cafes for a glass of tea,” sharing smoky tables, reading the latest reviews, and critiquing the most recent performances.28 In 1931, just two years after the opening of Ageloff Towers, entrepreneurial Jews and their white-collar brethren found additional upscale housing near them in buildings supposedly designed for the neighborhood’s laboring people. They eagerly snapped up apartments in the Amalgamated Clothing Workers Cooperative. The union headed back to the Lower East Side, its place of origins, to engage in early efforts in slum clearance and gentrification designed to help working-class New Yorkers. When two square blocks were cleared on Grand Street and the complex emerged, “it was as if,” said one enthusiastic city reformer, “a fairy wand had been waved for there .  .  . stood a modern six-story elevator apartment building right in the midst of one of the worst tenement districts.” For this observer, “a large central court which formed a charming garden, . . . a fountain in the center and shrubs everywhere, . . . represents the East Side of Tomorrow.” But the cost of living there turned out to be beyond the meager means of downtown factory workers, who were worse off than other New York Jews. Soon, the endeavor that was open to all comers was critiqued as “too ambitious” for the poor. A New York Times article suggested that “there ought to be some middle ground between the old dumbbell

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rookeries east of Allen Street . . . and Park Avenue standards.” The accoutrements of “garden courts, communal libraries, swimming pools, electric refrigeration are not essential.” Still, they were important for civil servants, teachers, and especially the professionals and “businessmen” who could pay their carrying charges and made up half the tenants when the building opened.29 But did it make sense for owners of needle-trades factories who liked the downtown lifestyle to stay in the neighborhood when the industry that supported them moved out? In the 1920s, the Garment Center industrial mecca rose on the west side of Manhattan. The foremost New York Jewish line of work was now situated apart from its Lower East Side roots. Some thirty-eight large producers of women’s clothing took over streets bounded by ThirtyFourth and Fortieth Streets and Sixth and Ninth Avenues. Until the Garment Center Realty Company made its mark, this section of town was part of the notorious Tenderloin District, with its disreputable night clubs, saloons, and brothels. Now, every block acquired its own respectable niche in the readyto-wear business. Coats and suits could be found along Thirty-Seventh to Thirty-Ninth Streets between Seventh and Eighth Avenues. For sportswear, the places were situated on Thirty-Eighth to Thirty-Ninth Streets between Sixth and Seventh Avenues. With the industry removed from its Lower East Side origins, this new area boasted “fancy showrooms in which to display its merchandise for the buyers,” as the trade combined its manufacturing and sales components. Certainly purchasers from out of town — attracting them, along with local agents, was critical to success — appreciated the venue’s proximity to Midtown hotels, short walks from where they entered the metropolis either at Grand Central or Penn Station. On their return trips, they took New York styles and collections all over the country. For several succeeding generations, this “place of trucks and bulky buildings, bolts of fabric, racks of dresses, drawing boards, sewing machines, showrooms and innumerable people in a hurry” made this Jewish creation in New York “a fashion headquarters second to no other city, with the possible exception of Paris.”30 What this movement and excitement meant personally for the boss who patrolled both the new glass-enclosed display area up front and the reassembled production site in the back was that although he was not on the job as many hours as the hired help, he too would have to be a straphanger. If he remained downtown, the uptown-bound subway tacked on an additional half hour of riding to his workday. Perhaps, an Upper West Side residence — just

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a short fifteen-minute commute from work, one or two stops on an express train — offered the best solution, even if that relocation involved relinquishing past cultural comforts. One sample of Jewish West Side heads of households in 1925 revealed that half of them were “manufacturers of clothing or the sundries used by the garment trade.” Ten years earlier, only 3 percent of the people in that section of Broadway, West End Avenue, and the adjacent side streets were such Jewish entrepreneurs. Such considerations, including daily transportation, where families chose to live, and more generally, what it ultimately meant to reside within sections of the city remained part of Jewish decision-making processes for generations to come.31 However, in these decades relatively few differences separated apartment interiors, whether they were located in better buildings on the Lower East Side, the Bronx, Brooklyn, or Queens. A promising young couple just starting out in the 1920s with abundant hopes and dreams, Solomon Novogrodsky and his wife, Sarah (née Lifschitz), wanted the best possible accommodations that they could afford. As high educational achievers, with attainable professional career horizons ahead, Ageloff and then Grand Street addresses were not beyond their reach. The Bialystokborn Solomon had been brought to the United States as an infant and had attended DeWitt Clinton High School before studying at the New York College of Dentistry. He had just hung out his shingle downtown when he proposed to Hunter College graduate Sarah, a botany major and education student, about to become a public school teacher. Born in Kaidenow, White Russia, her family had come to America when she was seven, and they settled initially on Monroe Street on the Lower East Side. The Novogrodsky’s first homes — where Solomon grew up — were in tenements on East Third, East Fourth, and Henry Streets. With the couple intent on improving their residential lot, upon their marriage in 1929, Solomon and Sarah were among the first residents in Ageloff. Two years later, they moved into the Amalgamated on Grand Street, where their first child, Esther, was born. Shortly after a second child, David, arrived in 1933 and needing even more space for their growing family, they relocated to an apartment on Attorney Street in a house that the Lifschitzes owned. Solomon and Sarah, who both lived close to a hundred years, never left the Lower East Side and raised three children in a series of comfortable neighborhood apartments. At the end of their lives, they resided in a threebedroom, one-and-a-half-bath co-op apartment in the Seward Park Houses on Grand Street. Solomon and Sarah’s religious values had much to do with

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their persistence downtown. They both possessed uncommonly strong religious training. As a young boy, Solomon had attended the Rabbi Jacob Joseph School, a yeshiva on Henry Street. Sarah had a Talmud Torah education, which was more than most girls of her era received. She studied conscientiously in this afternoon Jewish school that met after the public schools let out. Although successor Jewish neighborhoods produced comparable Orthodox institutions, the Novogrodskys preferred their downtown community. Family lore has it that toward the middle of the 1930s, when little David was ready for school, Sarah checked out the Flatbush Yeshivah. His enrollment would have caused the family to resettle nearby. But they decided to stay on the Lower East Side. Neither Solomon nor Sarah liked the idea of Solomon having to commute to his practice. The walk-to-work scenario carried much weight in a family’s decision to remain downtown. While the dentist and teacher disdained out-migration, Solomon’s parents moved to the Bronx in the late 1920s or 1930s. Shimon Novogrodsky’s job as an organizer of the Schohet’s Union (kosher slaughters) took him, his wife Chanah, and the four younger children from East Broadway initially to Berretto Street in a working-class section of the Bronx. Many years later, in the early 1960s, after a thirty-year sojourn in that borough, when the union that Shimon helped organized forced him to retire and he and Chanah found it increasingly difficult to climb to their upstairs apartment on Topping Avenue, they returned to the Lower East Side. They were welcomed home by Solomon and Sarah, who helped take care of them. They were already looking after Sarah’s widowed mother, yet another reason for these respectful grown children to stay downtown.32 The sentiments of filiopietism, familiar surroundings, and convenient access to the workplace that long influenced the Novogrodsky’s decision to stay put were common concerns among many of those who could have left but who chose to remain in their area of first settlement. For all of the Lower East Side’s persistent miseries amid overcrowded streets and despite the exodus of some two-thirds of its Jewish population as of the 1930s, this urban enclave preserved a measure of intimacy for longtime downtowners. They lived in a comfort zone of friends and family and the culture around them, even if in their professional lives they had become very Americanized.33 At the same time that second-generation Jews and some of their parents too were deciding whether to leave downtown, and if so, where to settle elsewhere

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in the city, thousands of new immigrants entered the United States. Despite the discriminatory quotas of the immigration laws of 1921 and 1924 that ended the unregulated flow of Jewish immigrants, approximately seventy to eighty thousand arrived in the late 1920s to begin their own American sagas. Many started out in the slum areas of the Lower East Side. In the first postwar decade, most fled persecutions facing Jews in newly reconstituted Poland. Though agreements signed in the wake of the Versailles treaty conference promised Jews protection, they suffered grievously as the Polish majority systematically reneged. While Marshall Josef Pilsudski, who ruled Poland from 1926 to 1935, opposed anti-Semitism, Polish Jewry, impoverished and oppressed, sought to migrate. In 1930, a typical year, of the roughly ten thousand European Jewish immigrants to the United States, forty-five hundred hailed from Poland. Over a thousand Jews from Romania similarly fled a country with a long history of Jewish persecution. Just like their predecessors who came in the years of mass migration, seven out of ten sought out New York’s promised opportunities.34 The Lower East Side was not alone in housing the foreign-born and the poor; Williamsburg and Brownsville in Brooklyn and the South Bronx held many recent arrivals. In Williamsburg, 40 percent of the population were foreign-born, a similar percentage to the South Bronx. In Brownsville, the most predominantly Jewish section of town, close to one-half of all residents were immigrants. We cannot say for certain whether these Jews came directly from Europe to these outer-borough neighborhoods or tarried first in the Manhattan hub. Nonetheless, in each of these older Jewish neighborhoods, newcomers both supplemented and replaced those of longer standing in America, some of whom moved up to better sections of their boroughs.35 After 1933 and Hitler’s rise to power in Germany, even as tribulations continued for Polish and Romanian Jews, German and Austrian refugees came to the United States. In the year ending in June 1938, after the Anschluss but five months before Kristallnacht, of some 20,000 Jews who gained admission to the United States, approximately 12,000 came from “Germany (including Austria).” By contrast, only 1,650 Polish Jews received visas to enter. Still, New York City remained the most popular destination for immigrant Jews, irrespective of national origins. However, Germans did not settle on the Lower East Side or in any established immigrant area but chose Washington Heights.36 As of 1923, a decade before these refugees’ arrival, this northwest section of Manhattan was a solid middle-class community. Jewish population in the neighborhood

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of 30,000 spiked with the building boom of the early 1920s. By 1930, the community held some 65,000 Jews, mostly the adult children of Russian and Polish immigrants. The transplantation from the Lower East Side in 1929 of the Yeshiva Rabbi Isaac Elchanan, with its newly established Yeshiva College, to the Heights signaled its emergence as a second-generation enclave.37 This established Jewish presence beckoned the 1930s German Jewish immigrants despite linguistic and cultural differences that set them apart from their American-born brethren. Washington Heights contrasted with less welcoming and more threatening Yorkville, Ridgewood, and Woodside, Queens, where German could be heard on the streets and where sympathies were sometimes openly expressed for the pro-Nazi German-American Bund. However, the availability of affordable housing in an unblighted area of town, as “the parks nearby and the cool breeze of the Hudson in the evening carried vague reminders of the bourgeois section of German cities” of their past, ultimately directed their settlement.38 Arriving at the depth of the Great Depression, these newcomers took advantage of a glut in the real estate market. Speculators had not properly gauged demand in the neighborhood and built too many apartments for too few middle-class occupants. Landlords desperately courted tenants with attractive prices. Some even tendered a month’s free rent. Responsive to this offer, and using a classic working-class housing stratagem reminiscent of the South Bronx scene in the 1920s, German immigrants pooled the incomes of several breadwinners to pay the rent. Often, they were all members of an extended family, or they brought in boarders who occupied a part of the dwelling and shared food expenses. Once a foothold was secured, in typical fashion, a chain migration ensued.39 One young man recalled that when he and his parents arrived in America in 1936, they settled first in Marble Hill, just over the Harlem River in the Bronx. But his mother felt, situated as they were in a predominantly Christian section of town, that the family was missing out on Washington Heights’ German Jewish environment. When they eventually moved and his mother was able to fit comfortably with her own kind, “at that time,” she would say, “life began.” Indeed, by the late 1930s, Washington Heights had acquired the moniker of “The Fourth Reich,” speaking to the visible presence of German Jewish refugees.40 The economic catastrophe of the 1930s also transformed the way Jews lived

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in other neighborhoods. For most children of eastern European immigrants, the Depression ended that second generation’s wanderlust. During this era of trials and “uncertain promise,” they stayed where they were in the apartments that they had coveted in the 1920s — that is, if they could afford rents that had previously been manageable. The only significant exception to this pattern of inactivity took place in Forest Hills in the late 1930s. There, near the newly constructed IND lines, six-story apartment buildings with room for up to one hundred families each, attracted Jews — evidently those still of significant means — to a new “subway suburb.” Some of the neighborhood’s older, Gentile residents resented the newcomers and banded together as the Forest Hills Property Owners Committee in 1938; they said they wanted to “stop the unrestricted erection of apartment buildings which has grown so visible in the last year.” One protestor complained to the press, “The streets don’t present quite the same peaceful, suburban atmosphere they did when we bought property here.” The ever-contentious Robert Moses, New York City’s omnipresent parks commissioner, did not help intergroup relations much when he predicted that the community would soon resemble the Bronx, a borough with a majority Jewish population. Although he did not mention Jews by name, he agreed with the Owners Committee that the northern borough had been “despoiled by greedy apartment house builders who crammed buildings on every square foot of land that they could get away with.” The quest among the majority of Jews and, for that matter, among most New Yorkers for the best possible physical environs for their families did not resume until after World War II.41 In the meantime, residents of the Grand Concourse or Eastern Parkway or Flatbush, not to mention the affluent Jews of Forest Hills or Manhattan’s Upper West Side, did well to maintain their standard of living during the Great Depression. Generally, those with steady jobs survived financially, such as the “manufacturers and tradesmen, doctors, dentists, lawyers, engineers, school teachers, salesmen and minor executives” who lived in the better apartments of the Central Bronx. But on the other end of the financial spectrum, the 1930s exacerbated conditions for the poorest of downtowners who had suffered even during good times. In the Depression, the Lower East Side was second only to African American Harlem in the number of people on the federal relief dole. Concomitantly, many Jewish working-class families in the outer boroughs who had risen a few rungs up the economic ladder fell back down and were often unable to pay their rents in their Bronx and Brooklyn neighborhoods.

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A popular family stratagem to cope with threatened evictions involved moving regularly to take advantage of landlords’ offers of thirty to ninety days’ free rent.42 Families in distress also looked to neighborhood merchants for credit to help tide them over stretches of unemployment. Those without resources appreciated when a landlord permitted them to fall months behind in their payments. However, Jews heaped scorn on real estate owners who put their neighbors out in the streets. Frequently, attempts by the police to evict those in arrears sparked protests. In Brownsville, one group of protesters kicked ash cans into the street to cause “a general ruckus” and to draw the police’s attention. Meanwhile another group “would help the families put the furniture back.”43 Fighting evictions at times mobilized a neighborhood. But what should a leftist Jewish “landlord” — seemingly an oxymoronic term — do with a comrade who could not keep up the rent? The Jewish cooperative movement of the 1920s struggled during the Depression’s early years. For all the movement’s excitement and emphasis on community, when the difficult days hit, these establishments could not pay their bills. But to pressure unemployed workers from their homes ran counter to every ideological teaching cherished by co-op leaders. An eviction, one resident warned as she “simply refused to pay her rent, would cause too much of a scandal if the [Jewish Socialist] Daily Forward found out.” Some co-ops tried stopgap measures such as tendering several months’ interest-free loans from their coffers to help those who were unable to handle carrying charges. But ultimately the national financial crisis engulfed their entire operations. One by one, these cooperatives descended into receiverships and were sold to independent landlords. The Sholom Aleichem Houses went first, going bankrupt in 1929 and under private ownership in 1931. Only the Amalgamated Houses survived the Depression untransformed.44 The demise of these housing ventures for workers only amplified the voices of those who were most dedicated to class justice. Even as their buildings fell into the hands of capitalists, Jewish Socialists and Communists on Sedgwick Avenue and on Bronx Park East redoubled their efforts to prevent evictions and force landlords to roll back rents. The aptly named “Great Rent Strike War of 1932” in the Bronx was the strongest of such citywide protest efforts. The Communist Upper Bronx Unemployment Council spearheaded battles that began on Olinville and Allerton Avenues and Unionport Road in the East

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Bronx. With their foot soldiers drawn from the United Workers Houses, they rallied tenants to stop paying rents until landlords agreed to cut charges by 15 percent, to acknowledge tenant committees, and to make necessary repairs. When landlords responded through eviction notices, street struggles broke out. Mobs of protestors in the thousands fought pitched battles with police to prevent neighborhood people from being put out into the gutters. Comparable scenes took place that same year in the Morrisania, Melrose, and Crotona Park sections of the borough, and the movement spread to Boro Park and Williamsburg in Brooklyn. In each instance, Communist leadership attracted the support of fellow Jews who harbored no great partisan loyalties. The thousands of men and women in the streets simply empathized with suffering Jews.45 Whether rich or poor, advancing, struggling, or just surviving, New York Jews of the 1920s – 1930s lived largely in distinctive, identifiable neighborhoods. In fact, this generation of immigrants’ children was even more tightly ensconced in their multiple ethnic enclaves than were their newcomer parents, who settled predominantly on the Lower East Side and a few successor immigrant quarters. In 1920, just as the building boom began and new neighborhoods emerged, “only 54% of New York’s Jews lived in neighborhoods that were at least 40% Jewish in population.” Five years later, some two-thirds resided in their own ethnic areas. This era of profound intracity migration “produced the seeming paradox of concentrated dispersal,” as “the process of migration intensified Jewish residential segregation.”46 When given a choice, most Jews stuck with their own kind, though restrictions denied them opportunities in Jackson Heights and Forest Hills, in Park Slope and Brooklyn Heights, in Riverdale in the Bronx, and in some “fashionable Park Avenue” Manhattan buildings.47 Yet Jews did not live totally apart from others in this ethnically and racially diverse city. Continuing an earlier downtown pattern in which Jews resided next door to Italian immigrants and Irish Americans, second-generation Jews concentrated near Germans, Irish, and Italians on the edges of a variety of neighborhoods. These groups often did not get along. During the Depression, economics and pressing world events exacerbated tensions that spilled over geographical borderlines, pitting “neighbors in conflict.” Jewish difficulties with the Irish, and vice versa, were the most acute and of the longest standing. Both groups harbored mutual resentments over job opportunities that dated

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back to the arrival of masses of eastern Europeans in New York. In the 1880s – 1890s, Italians and Jews also clashed over jobs in the garment industry, especially when Italians scabbed against incipient Jewish unions. But rapprochements gradually occurred, due largely to the efforts of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union to organize across ethnic lines. By the 1920s, Italians and Jews frequently saw themselves as allies in recurring economic fights with the Irish.48 The election of Yiddish-speaking Fiorello La Guardia as the first Italian American mayor built bridges between Jews and Italians. But one of his major governmental policies heightened tensions between Jews and the Irish. Born of a Jewish mother and a lapsed Catholic father, he was very much at home in Harlem and garnered support from Jewish voters. La Guardia proved his multiethnic bona fides best during his 1922 campaign for the House of Representatives when he was accused by his opponent, Henry Frank, of being “a pronounced anti-Semite.” Offended, while at the same time understanding how it might be used to his political advantage, La Guardia called for a debate over his alleged “Jew-hatred.” The battle would be conducted entirely in Yiddish. His Jewish Democratic adversary could not speak his own people’s vernacular. Soon a Yiddish newspaper chimed in on the “Little Flower’s” behalf, characterizing the Italian American as pro-Zionist, knowledgeable of Jewish history, an enemy of anti-Semitism, and a friend who “speaks Yiddish like a true Jew.”49 As mayor, La Guardia transformed government hiring practices. The reform of the civil service system was not explicitly designed to assist Jews, but they benefited from the alterations, much to the resentment of their Irish neighbors. Under many prior administrations, political appointments of police, firefighters, city-hired lawyers, and teachers went mostly to the Irish through the patronage of Democratic Tammany Hall. Jews, Italians, and African Americans lacked political clout. When La Guardia entered office, patronage provided almost one-half of the civil service jobs. The new mayor changed the system completely, championed competitive exams, and required candidates to possess a high school education even to sit for the entrance test. Jews, with their diplomas in hand, were first on line for these jobs, at the expense of the more poorly educated Irish. By 1939, three out of four civil service jobs were awarded competitively.50 Irish women felt this shift most profoundly within the public schools,

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where for generations they had predominated. In the 1930s, under the new rules and with fewer posts available, Jews applied for these secure jobs in large numbers, displacing the Irish. Losing jobs to Jews fostered bitterness and anti-Semitism. Some Jews, especially men, turned to public school teaching because quotas at the nation’s universities and academic anti-Semitism prevented them from seriously contemplating college teaching positions. By a similar token, quotas limited Jewish access to medicine and law. School teaching, especially in the newly expanded public high schools, offered a viable alternative for those who were marginalized. Jewish career frustrations garnered no sympathy from the Irish, who mourned their loss of control over school jobs, both a real and a symbolic part of the larger unemployment crisis that gripped their community.51 Such resentments contributed to neighborhood tensions and even street violence in areas where Jews and Irish lived near each other. Within Washington Heights, both groups controlled certain streets, with Broadway the boundary dividing Jew from Irish. On the east side of Broadway, Christian Front orators at their street-corner rallies made clear to angry Irish listeners that “the Jews” had all the good jobs since they controlled the American economy. On occasion, local vandals responded by retaliating against Jewish businesses and synagogues, and they attacked vulnerable youngsters who found themselves on the wrong side of the street.52 Father Charles Coughlin, the infamous anti-Jewish, anti-Roosevelt, radio priest, spurred on the Christian Front, an aggressively anti-Semitic group. He preached to millions, on a weekly basis, from his national radio pulpit in Royal Oak, Michigan. Beginning his attacks in 1934, his animus peaked in 1938, and despite censure from the Catholic Church, he continued even past December 7, 1941, when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. Coughlin alleged that the Jews dictated the financial fortunes of America, controlled the government of the United States through their co-conspirator, FDR, and were leading the country to Socialism through the New Deal. Coughlin saw the Jews in the vanguard of spreading international Communism. He warned in the late 1930s that through Jews’ internationalist and interventionist stances and propaganda, they were moving a reluctant America toward involvement in an unnecessary and ruinous European war on their own behalf. Energized by this rhetoric, resonating particularly to Coughlin’s gut economic arguments, Christian Front activists and an even more violent group called the Christian

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Mobilizers, with whom the Front had a tenuous alliance, applied these teachings enthusiastically to the mean street situations around them.53 So, in the South Bronx, where Jews and Irish lived in disharmony with one another, youngsters from hard-hit Irish families attacked Jews and their businesses. Some Jewish tough guys defended their people. When one Irish offender was arrested for his misdemeanors, he no doubt spoke for many when he complained that the Jews “seem to be taking everything away. . . . Most of the stores are owned by Jews. Practically everything is Jewish.” Although this youthful miscreant did not explicitly reference a teacher contretemps in his neighborhood, possibly he recognized an ethnic anomaly in one school in the South Bronx that stirred antipathies. In Public School 9, off Brook Avenue, 75 percent of the teachers in this predominantly Irish district were Jewish. Most were, as the Irish saw them, recently appointed beneficiaries of new civil service protocols.54 As a citywide movement, the Christian Front and the Mobilizers sought to sink roots deep in every neighborhood where intergroup hostilities existed. The first steps toward the rise of the Front can be traced to meetings of agitators in Flatbush. In Brooklyn and elsewhere, Jewish groups responded with harsh words, bricks, and bats of their own. In 1938, the Jewish War Veterans chased their enemies off Flatbush streets.55 But, neither the Front nor the Mobilizers gained much traction in Yorkville. At first glance, this section of Upper East Side Manhattan should have been prime territory. By the late 1930s, it was already one of the hotbeds of the German-American Bund, a rabidly antiSemitic organization that from the rise of Hitler angled to be recognized as the Nazis’ foreign-based representatives. However, its support emanated primarily from a circumscribed segment of the German American community: immigrants who had left after World War I due both to their country’s economic calamities and their disaffection with Weimar democratic policies. Still closely tied to Germany and its anti-Semitic traditions, they embraced the ideology and practices of a revived Reich under Hitler. They were ready and willing to spread Nazism’s messages in America.56 These newcomers agitated within Yorkville and petitioned for the right to march in full uniform regalia through the streets of Manhattan in 1937. This request troubled La Guardia personally and politically. Constitutionally, he could hardly deny these haters the right of free speech and assembly. Yet the Jewish community that long supported him pressured to have that basic

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guarantee revoked. To make matters worse, his mayoral opponent that year, Judge Jeremiah T. Mahoney, made much political capital of La Guardia’s dilemma. His Honor let the parade go forward but did not allow the Bundists to march in their uniforms or to belt out their odious songs. Through all of this, native-born Germans either stood at the sidelines or actively opposed the radical rightists. They too were proud of Germany for reviving itself after the cataclysm of World War I defeat. But, at the same time, they did not want their ethnic group’s good name associated with the bigotry of a foreign totalitarian power and as a potential threat to the United States, especially as America and Germany in the late 1930s seemed to be moving toward war footing.57 Senator Robert F. Wagner Sr., a long-term friend of Jews, personified that alternate and tolerant point of view. As a nine-year-old in 1886, Wagner had immigrated with his family from Nasttatten, Germany, and had gained first elected office in 1904 as a state assemblyman from Yorkville’s own Sixteenth District. In 1926, New Yorkers elected him to the U.S. Senate. In that post, he championed the cause of Jewish refugees, most notably through his introduction in 1939 of the Wagner-Rogers Act, which attempted to admit, over restrictionist opposition, ten thousand German and Austrian Jewish children beyond the established quotas. But perhaps more important than Wagner’s persona and these patriotic impulses, Yorkville’s German American rank and file did not see Jews as intent on taking over the neighborhood. No matter the stresses of the Depression, they perceived their neighbors as fellow middleclass citizens. Not so the local Irish, who resented the Jewish minority in that community’s midst and joined Yorkville’s branch of the Christian Front. Decades later, in the 1970s, Joseph H. Lookstein, perhaps the neighborhood’s most important rabbi, suggested that in the 1930s, his community had more problems with the Irish than with the German anti-Semites. He certainly was in a position to know. His synagogue, Congregation Kehilath Jeshurun, situated a mere block away from a Bundist stronghold, the New York Turnverein, never suffered from pro-Nazi vandalism.58 New York Jews had a different neighborhood relationship with African Americans. The 1920s – 1930s marked an end to an era of residential proximity that had begun at the turn of the twentieth century when each group settled in its respective enclaves of Harlem. The Jews congregated primarily north of Central Park, from 110th to 125th Streets. Blacks predominated north of 125th Street, a major commercial thoroughfare that housed many Jewish businesses.

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Except for economic interaction, with blacks proving to be steady customers for Jewish merchants, the two groups stayed largely to themselves, as Jews, Irish, Italians, and Germans did in other sections of the city. However, there was less intergroup tension in uptown Manhattan than elsewhere, though initially in their encounter, the West Side Improvement Association, which a black newspaper said was “composed in the main by Jews,” attempted to keep African Americans from the western regions of the neighborhood.59 Reportedly, the rationale for such behavior was not “prejudice against the race” but fear that “their presence in a neighborhood would cause the value of property to deteriorate.” However, once Jews were settled, they avoided significant conflict with blacks because the two groups were situated on different rungs of the economic ladder and rarely competed over jobs. Upwardly mobile Jews did not jostle with blacks in day labor shape-ups, and African Americans did not work in large numbers in the garment industry.60 In the 1920s, Jews left Harlem but not because of any special aversion to living near or among blacks. Jews did better than most of their counterparts and possessed the means to move to new neighborhoods. Meanwhile, exclusionary racism of a kind that was far more pervasive than the anti-Semitism Jews faced in Jackson Heights or Forest Hills kept striving African Americans from leaving Harlem as it deteriorated. Still, if Jews in the 1930s no longer lived in Harlem, their economic influence remained strongly felt and was often resented. For African Americans, the practices of Jewish owners of large local department stores were especially galling. Most notably, Blumstein’s, on 125th Street, constantly courted black customers but did not employ black workers except for the most menial jobs. In 1934, African Americans initiated a boycott movement that focused on this store, the largest local retail establishment. The Citizen’s League for Fair Play, which united black churches and women’s organizations such as the Harlem Housewives League, along with community social, fraternal, and political clubs, energized by street-corner orators, impressed on its economically oppressed rank and file that it was critical not to patronize stores where their people could not work. An “honor roll” of picketers, up to over one hundred on some days, soon forced Jacob Blumstein to employ fifteen African American saleswomen and to promise to hire twenty more the following fall. However, this street victory did not endure. A year later, in 1935, the Citizen’s League reported ruefully that Blumstein had not hired the promised

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additional employees and that, in fact, seven of those first hired had been laid off.61 These real economic concerns provided ammunition for neighborhood anti-Semites who magnified the tensions. Demagogues such as street-corner Muslim preacher Sufi Abdul Hamid and hate organizations such as the Harlem Labor Union shouted about Jewish economic control over Harlem, asserting that “Jews are the exploiters of the colored people” and that “Jews and leprosy are synonymous.” Hamid and the Union also made rousing capital out of another tense, emotional point of black-Jewish economic interaction. African American domestic laborers, unable to find work in their own community, often traveled to the Bronx to what was called a “slave market” where Jewish housewives often hired them for pittances. When Hamid was interrogated by black writer Claude McKay about his sounding like a Nazi, he retorted that he had made himself aware of Mein Kampf to better comprehend the nature of anti-Semitism and that the allegations against him came from those same Harlem Jewish store owners who “did not want to face the issue of giving” his people “a square deal.” The Harlem Merchants’ Association, made up of Jewish business owners, refused to accept Hamid’s apologia and denigrated its enemy as “Black Hitler.” Concomitantly, a black organization, the Negro Labor Committee, averred that the Harlem Labor Union, its own longtime enemy, was instigating a “terroristic attack in Harlem against Jews” as well as against whites and the legitimate trade-union movement. Two eminent black newspapers, the Amsterdam News and the New York Age, supported the allegations against Hamid.62 Fortunately, harsh rhetoric and street demonstrations did not degenerate into intergroup violence. Perhaps the voices of responsible black journalists and sensible community organizers militated against physical neighborhood confrontations. When African American rioting that threatened local white businesses, including those that Jews owned, rocked Harlem in 1935 and 1943, explicit anti-Semitic sentiments did not fuel the core frustrations sparking the riots. After World War II, Jewish-black tensions in Harlem abated, due in significant part to the decline in neighborhood economic interaction. Many Jewish businesses relocated elsewhere, reflecting postwar economic upward mobility. But Jacob Blumstein did not. In 1949, the Amsterdam News praised him as one of the Jewish store owners who stayed, calling him one of Harlem’s “top ten” leaders, the only white so honored. A generation passed, until the late

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1960s, before a range of social and economic conflicts pitted African Americans and Jews against one another.63 Jewish journeys across the city brought them to new homes in neighborhoods that combined modern living with ethnic-group competition. In the prosperous 1920s, aspiring Jews managed to acquire a piece of New York City’s expanding economy, together with other ethnic and racial groups that made up the city’s diverse population. But the Great Depression strained families’ economic resources, intensified competition for jobs and political influence, and provoked sporadic conflict between Jews and their neighbors. Such conflict dimmed the city’s fabled promise, encouraging Jews to seek comfort among their own kind.

Antiwar rally at the City College of New York, circa 1938. (Courtesy of Archives, City College of New York, CUNY)

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Friends or Ideologues

Born in 1928, Adolph Schayes grew up on Davidson Avenue and 183rd Street, off Fordham Road and near Jerome Avenue in the West Bronx. For “Dolph,” the son of Romanian immigrant parents, his neighborhood turf was the local asphalt-covered playgrounds. There he honed basketball skills that brought him honors at Mosholu Parkway’s DeWitt Clinton High School and earned him a scholarship to New York University. He stayed at home because NYU’s uptown campus was merely a short bus ride away at University Heights. After graduation, he capitalized on his athletic prowess in the early postwar years, becoming one of the great early stars of the National Basketball Association. Decades later, Schayes recalled, “As a kid I thought everyone was Jewish.” He had good reason to feel that way. Though in 1930 and 1940 Jews constituted approximately 45 percent of the “Fordham” section of the borough, “sharing” the neighborhood with the Irish, everywhere Schayes turned he saw Jews and Jewishness around him.1 As a child, Schayes accompanied his mother to the Jewish-owned “little stores” in the neighborhood. They went to Kasowitz’s fruit store, Israel’s meat market, and Efron’s bakery, with a stop at Zelesnik’s candy store. As he got older, his peer group the “Trylons,” an informal neighborhood street club named for the 1939 World’s Fair centerpiece, consisted almost entirely of Jews, “with a token Irish” (youngster). They proudly walked through their streets wearing their dark-blue jackets with the club’s name lettered in orange on the back. When they were not playing kick-the-can or stickball, these fellows simply hung out together, “meeting and talking.” Though an intrusive beat policeman might on occasion suggest with his nightstick under his arm that they

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move off the corner, they were not a crowd of hoodlums in the making. They found their competitive edge in sports, not control of the streets. Dolph graduated into a successor club as a teenager, another all-Jewish contingent called the “Amerks,” that played more organized games against other Jewish teams and opponents from other ethnic groups. Schayes, who grew to be six foot eight and an outstanding athlete, recalled that the most challenging matches pitted them against Catholic teams at the St. Francis Xavier tournament. There he and his compatriots “suffered slings and arrows . . . [and] things thrown” at them by hostile crowds. But with Schayes leading the attack with his deadly set shot and hook shot, “the Jews always won.” Dolph Schayes also felt at home in his neighborhood public schools, with their large Jewish student bodies and many Jewish teachers. When in 1934 he entered PS 91, located on Aqueduct Avenue, only four blocks from his parents’ apartment, most of the pupils had foreign-born parents, with those from eastern Europe, like his own, constituting the overwhelming majority. By contrast, there were but forty youngsters in the school from Irish and Italian immigrant families. Most of the Catholic boys and girls went to local parochial schools. Schayes found a similar ethnic student body at Creston Junior High School, PS 79, and one block east of the Grand Concourse. There, of the 1,087 children of the foreign-born enrolled, 666 (60 percent) came from Russian, Polish, and Romanian backgrounds. Only 67 Irish and Italian kids were in the halls and classrooms, a minuscule 5 percent of the students. In high school, Dolph found it easy “to hang out with Jewish guys,” since there were over 1,500 students from eastern European immigrant homes at Clinton, four times as many as those of Irish and Italian extraction.2 The third dimension of Schayes’s Jewishness, beyond the streets and schools, was his extended family. Aunts and uncles met once a month at his parents’ home, or his folks trekked to visit the clan in Brooklyn. The elders played cards, enjoyed his mother’s Romanian delicacies, and spoke of their affection for the “liberal” New Deal policies of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. None of Schayes’s Jewish connections, however, derived from formal Jewish organizational life. He knew, as a youth, of the existence of the “large” Concourse Center of Israel and of other “store-front synagogues” in his neighborhood where some kids received religious training. But neither he nor his club friends ever set foot in these sanctuaries and schools. He “never even went to someone else’s bar mitzvah.” His neighborhood friends, schools, and family

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provided him with all of the Jewish identification that he needed or wanted. Schayes acquired a rich Jewish identity rooted in New York City itself. During this same era, William Poster, future author and poet and dance and film critic for the New York Times, the New York Herald Tribune, and a variety of literary periodicals, similarly felt that his world, centered on Brownsville’s Pitkin Avenue, was essentially Jewish. He later reflected that “up to the age of twelve,” Brownsville boys like him “never really felt that the Jews were anything but an overpowering majority of the human race.” So insular was their vision that they even believed that such great American heroes as “George Washington, Nathan Hale, Tom Mix, Babe Ruth and Jack Dempsey” had to be Jewish too. Within that intimate atmosphere, Poster’s tightest ethnic circle revolved, as it did for Bronx boy Schayes, around his neighborhood club, another victimless street gang. Interwar Brownsville, the home of Murder, Inc., and such infamous criminals as Bugsy Siegel, possessed more than its share of Jewish toughs who preyed on the area. But within Poster’s group, his friends, with such monikers as Yookie, Doodie, and Abie Kabbible, not to mention Irv, Joey, and Dave, all adhered to an informal network with “rules, aims and standards,” none of which was outside the law. Both social and athletic clubs only included males. Neither Schayes nor Poster wanted girls as street companions. The Brownsville kids aimed to maintain sports supremacy over their block against all comers, Jewish and non-Jewish clubs alike, that invaded their space. Street competition was intense. Punchball games, on which they bet “with every cent [they] could muster, . . . were the gala events of the block.” As these youngsters grew, athletic encounters became more organized. Like the Amerks of the Bronx, Poster’s gang put together “half-uniformed athletic teams that participated erratically in interborough competition, though nearly all sports and social organizations were short-lived, breaking up in bitter conflicts over questions of power, privilege and obligation.”3 Poster’s buddies held stronger Jewish religious values than did Schayes. Although Poster reminisced that “many religious percepts were flouted with next to no concern,” they drew the line when it came to “chalking up boxball boundaries on the Sabbath” because devout Jews would not write on the holy day. However, keeping that commandment “became amalgamated with [their] more fundamental preoccupation with prestige.” To keep the game going, they usually “bullied . . . Cockeye Sidney, the lowest ranking member of the gang,” into marking the boundaries and then “excluded him from the game he had

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made possible.” For unfair good measure, they put him in his place, “if necessary, with a few kicks in the seat of his pants.”4 Of course, if poor Sidney just wanted to play ball on the teeming Jewish streets of Brooklyn, all he really had to do was to get off his tenement stoop. As Gerry “Sheiky” Lenowitz recalled, “Back in Brownsville when you stepped out of your house there were forty or fifty kids on a corner. There were always some friends. You were surrounded by kids. You could round up fifteen at your beck and call for punch ball or stickball.” For entrepreneurial-minded youths, the sidewalks also offered modest economic opportunities. During the Great Depression, when few families had phones in their homes, an ambitious kid could “hang around the corner drugstore and when there was a phone call . . . find the person, . . . get a nickel, three cents. If they were rich, . . . get a dime.”5 At about the same time, another Brownsville boy, Alfred Kazin, who achieved far greater renown in the world of letters than Poster did, saw that same neighborhood as a part of town whose cultural borders set it apart from the larger metropolis. As he put it, “we were of the city, but somehow not in it.” Kazin experienced Brownsville as an embracing home where everywhere he turned “men would stand around for hours smoking, gossiping, boasting of their children, until it was time to go home for the great Sabbath mid-day meal.” But he also “saw New York as a foreign city”: “that the two were joined in me I never knew.”6 Eventually, Jewish boys started to pay attention to girls. During the 1930s, Crotona Park was the place to be for Irving Fier. It not only boasted of handball courts where Jewish men would “grunt, battle, sweat and curse” while Italians pitched their bocce balls along with their own epithets, but it was also a romantic preserve perfect for liaisons with the opposite sex. When Irving was not working in his father’s dairy business, the teenager relaxed in one of the Bronx’s great parks, on “a big lawn that thousands shared.” Fier took his first date there. “If you wanted to make out, you walked through the park to Tremont Avenue, got a soda and then walked back.” In time, the young man regularized his romantic routine, but so did other amorous Jewish boys and girls. Privacy, still a scarce resource, ultimately brought Fier and his dates to the semipublic intimacy of her apartment-house lobby.7 The Jewish neighborhood dating scene in Jamaica, Queens, remembered fondly as “stronghold of the Jews,” had its own popular hangouts. A Saturday

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night might find teenagers lining up outside movie theaters such as the Hillside or the Savoy or the Merrick near Gertz’s, a large Jewish-owned department store. Young men who went “stag” on those evenings might find entertainment at the Jamaica Arena, where for sixty-five cents they could enjoy a boxing or wrestling card, roller skating, or the roller derby. Afterward, Jahn’s or Grossen’s ice cream shops or the Concord Cafeteria tempted them for snacks and socializing. Jahn’s offered a massive “Kitchen Sink Sundae,” with a dozen scoops of ice cream, enough for the whole gang to devour. Those who had less money but much to talk about might buy a cup of coffee and a roll at the Concord and sit in its booths until closing time. Occasionally, as when The Jazz Singer played at their local movie theater, popular culture spoke directly to their personal concerns. How were they, as the sons and daughters of Jewish immigrants, to balance their ambitions with their parents’ values?8 Fortunate youths who did not have to work on Saturday to help support their families could take advantage of the afternoon Sabbath promenade to socialize and hatch plans for the evening. Jews enjoyed seeing and being seen; it was part of urban life. Broad tree-lined avenues such as the Grand Concourse provided a perfect setting for this city pastime. The major Jewish holidays, most notably the fall High Holidays, intensified pedestrian traffic, turning Wilkins Street, near Crotona Park, into “the Rosh ha-Shanah gathering place for the neighborhood.” A comparable parade convinced young Lillian Elkin that “the entire world was Jewish.” When she was growing up in Brownsville, she “used to feel sorry for [her] Polish janitor because he did not share [her] holiday.” At that juncture, she “did not realize that [she] was a minority and he was the majority.”9 During the summer months, public beaches beckoned Jewish crowds. In 1934, Orchard Beach, in the northeast Bronx, opened for swimming, land sports, and socializing. It rivaled the Rockaways in Queens and Coney Island in Brooklyn as an uncommonly popular destination. One contemporary survey indicated that “on a normal hot Sunday or holiday these public beaches hold more than a million and a half persons. It is by no means stretching the probability to say that more than half of those come from the Jewish quota of the population.”10 In each of these comfortable city spaces, this generation of Jews experienced what it meant to be members of a majority group. In this multiethnic city, the multiple ethnic groups inscribed their divisions on the streets. Beyond

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the metropolitan pale, Jews struggled for acceptance in America as a minority group. But within their home New York precincts, Jews owned their parts of town. Daily street interactions reaffirmed fundamental Jewish ties linking friends and family within urban boundaries and uniting a generation. As New York Jews routinely encountered each other on the block, a comfortable sense of belonging prevailed. Possession meant that the sounds, smells, and sights of their own natural ethnic bonds abounded naturally and radiated joyously from the streets. On their own turf, they answered unselfconsciously to no other voices or commands. They spoke their own language, usually unaccented English flavored with Yiddish idioms, told their own insider jokes, relished their favorite foods, and socialized with friends who understood their idiomatic New York culture. For youths of this era, a most popular topic of the day concerned what was going on in a very different type of Jewish neighborhood, one where no one actually lived. Ethnic ties and community pride in cultural and entrepreneurial achievement enhanced the day and night business comings and goings on Manhattan’s west side, north of Forty-Second Street, the new home of Tin Pan Alley. The popular music writing and publishing business relocated in the 1920s from West Twenty-Eighth Street to be in concert with the expanding theater district. At a time when musical theater was the lifeblood of that entertainment industry, the talk of the town was how song writers interpolated ragtime tunes into Broadway hits. Irving Berlin — operating out of the Strand Building on Forty-Fifth Street, where he opened his publishing firm in 1919 — knew that one or two first-rate songs could make a show. Residuals from the publication of his sheet music provided him with steady income long beyond the run of the theater production. In 1931, music publishers, both large and small, with similar aspirations, filled the upper floors of the Brill Building on Forty-Ninth Street. Morris Brill had his clothing store on the ground floor. Ambitious songwriters knocked on one door after another, eager to sell their wares. “The publishers were there, and if you had to be someplace else, you always wound up back at the Brill Building sometime during the day.”11 By the end of the 1920s, some of the stars of Tin Pan Alley expanded its reach beyond New York. For generations, Jewish popular music composers and publishers had provided songs for the nation. At the turn of the century, Harry Von Tilzers, arguably “the most prolific song writer in the annals of Tin

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Pan Alley,” wrote “Wait Til the Sun Shines, Nellie.” A parody of this ballad titled “Wait Til the Sun Shines, Frisco,” was sung by relief workers hoping to cheer up the citizens of San Francisco after the 1906 earthquake. In 1911, Harry’s brother Albert wrote the anthem of the national pastime, “Take Me Out to the Ball Game,” though he had never attended a baseball game. Now, Hollywood lured some of the best talent. By the mid-1930s, renowned New York composers and lyricists George and Ira Gershwin, Jerome Kern, Richard Rodgers, and Lorenz Hart, along with Irving Berlin, had joined the movie scene, though they frequently returned to their homes on Broadway. Their fans, sitting at Jahn’s and tapping out their favorite tunes, using silverware as their instruments and plates as their tin pans, rhapsodized about what successes these fellow Jews had made of themselves. Walking through Crotona Park, a young man and his date fantasized that they were Fred Astaire and Ginger Rodgers, “dancing cheek to cheek,” a song that they knew Berlin wrote for the 1935 hit movie Top Hat. Most did not know that his most famous song, “God Bless America,” was written before World War I. But Jews swelled with pride when Kate Smith belted out Berlin’s alternative national anthem, at both major political conventions in 1940. It remained an enduring example of Jewish affection for America, “the land that I love.”12 Ambitious, bright Jews next encountered each other in the classrooms, cafeterias, and alcoves of the city’s colleges and universities, particularly its free, municipal-run institutions. For most of these first-generation college students, a combination of prejudice and penuriousness brought them to local schools of higher education. But friendly associational ties, rooted in enduring neighborhood relationships, ran deep even as the intellectual foment and political influence of the most outspoken among them pervaded undergraduate life. Informal and formal quota systems severely limited the numbers of Jews who attended the nation’s elite schools. The paltry and declining numbers of Jewish admissions to Ivy League colleges in the 1920s – 1930s chilled the dreams of many high school valedictorians. Even if a youngster changed his name on his application and fibbed in answering other personal information questions, his Eastern Parkway address, a photograph that revealed to closelooking admissions officers his “semitic features,” and his Boys High School transcript were dead giveaways that he was Jewish. Even at Columbia, the Ivy League school in New York City, discrimination reduced the percentage of Jewish students from 40 percent in the early 1920s to 22 percent ten years later.

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Communal pressures kept 20 percent of Harvard’s student body Jewish, far above the 10 percent at Yale.13 Other, less prominent schools accepted Jewish students. Land-grant universities such as Pennsylvania State or Ohio State University opened their doors, as did, remarkably, the University of Alabama. Infamous for segregationist policies that it maintained against African Americans into the 1960s, the University of Alabama has been described as “the most noticeable southern shelter for beleaguered potential Jewish university students in the 1930s with Tuscaloosa the most popular destination for both men and women.” But it took both an adventurous, self-confident, and perhaps most importantly, sufficiently affluent young man or woman to seek these frontiers of learning, far away from the neighborhood. When New York Jews did arrive on these campuses and walked up fraternity or sorority roads in search of friends, they found that Jews from other parts of the country rarely welcomed them. Other Jews considered New Yorkers “undesirable.” They were deemed “loud, unrestrained, poor (or “new rich”), lower-class, un-American, . . . and either too traditionally religious or politically radical” to fit in. Still a combination of overcrowding, competition, and quotas prompted one out of every ten New York college aspirants to enroll out of town.14 Back home in the city, New York University, taking cues from Columbia, tendered a mixed reception to Jews. Actually, that school “represent[ed] probably,” said two journalists who surveyed anti-Semitism in the 1920s to early 1930s, “the most striking dualism, a house divided against itself, to be found in the academic world.” The school possessed a bucolic Bronx campus, a preserve on University Heights set apart from the larger city; it was founded in 1894, before the borough became so Jewish, “as a men’s country college, with the good old American collegiate spirit.” Women were not admitted to this enclave until the late 1950s. However, the so-called old guard at NYU saw their “quiet, retired hill-top” world changed and, to their minds, undermined in the 1910s when “aliens,” many of them Jews, began to attend. Not only did they lack proper breeding — renowned racist sociologist Henry Pratt Fairchild was a faculty eminence — but these Jews espoused unpatriotic radicalism. At least, that was the opinion of student and alumni groups who made the newcomers feel quite unwelcome during the 1919 Red Scare. Anxious to restore the school’s presumed racial-religious balance, school officials in the early 1920s instituted “personal and psychological” tests to weed out Jews. Quickly, Jewish

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percentages at the College of Arts and Pure Science dropped “from nearly 50 percent to less than 30 percent .  .  . during the early and mid-1920s.” When Dolph Schayes applied in the mid-1940s, receptivity toward Jews had improved. The exigencies of Depression economics helped, as NYU, strapped for funds, looked to attract more tuition-paying students, with less regard for their origins. But then again, Schayes also was an ideal candidate, a fine student and an outstanding athlete. One of the persistent critiques against Jewish students was that they lacked the good old American collegiate spirit because they were not varsity men. Dolph Schayes became an All-American basketball star.15 The “other” NYU — particularly its undergraduate Colleges of Commerce and Education and its Washington Square College — in Greenwich Village, where the school first began back in the 1830s, extended a more hospitable welcome to Jewish men and women. In the 1920s, James Buell Munn, dean of the liberal arts college, Washington Square, spoke warmly of a mission to provide children of immigrants of both genders with “natural cultural opportunities” within his school. He wanted it to be a “laboratory” for inculcating American values while pupils strived to fashion productive careers. Whether or not Jewish undergraduates resonated to this assimilatory message, they understood that they were accepted downtown. They flocked to the commercebusiness curriculum, for teacher training, and for liberal arts educations. Friendly relations between Munn, a wealthy descendant of Mayflower Americans, and his poor Jewish students has been celebrated, perhaps hyperbolically, as “an episode in the emergence of an ethnically-diverse, cosmopolitan, largely urban intelligentsia in the United States.” Munn facilitated that process not only with his vision but with the money he invested in his charges from his inherited fortune. As of 1931, approximately 64 percent of Washington Square College students were Jewish, from the “East Side, Williamsburg, Brownsville and the Bronx.” Downtown residents had a particularly easy commute to the Greenwich Village campus since it was less than a mile away from the Lower East Side.16 These downtown undergraduates felt at home among their own kind, though occasionally Jewish fraternities blackballed some Jewish undergraduates of eastern European heritage because they “looked too Jewish.” Between classes, they clustered within the “Jewish cafeteria, .  .  . three delicatessen shops whose chef d’oeuvre [was] hot pastrami and two street vendors of halvah and Indian nuts.” Still, most college-bound Jews of this era aspired to gain

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acceptance at the city’s own competitive municipal colleges, especially the City College of New York (CCNY), “the Cheder [Jewish school] on the Hill,” in St. Nicholas Heights in Upper Manhattan, north of Columbia University.17 These “sturdy sons” — as the school’s alma mater described them — did not care that anti-Semitic rhetoric had it that their school’s acronym stood for “College of the Circumcised Citizens of New York.” City College was their “Proletarian Harvard.” In the interwar period, close to 90 percent of the student enrollment at CCNY was Jewish. Those who got in understood what it meant to be beneficiaries of their school’s century-old tradition of free tuition. Future New York Times editor A. M. Rosenthal may have captured the decision-making processes of most of his City College contemporaries best when he recalled, “When I was a senior at DeWitt Clinton High School,” six years before Schayes, “I had absolutely no conversations with any of my classmates or with my parents about what college I would enter or try to enter.” For this Depression-era youth seeking to get ahead, “there was only one choice. You either got into City College or you looked for a job in the Post Office.”18 At no other place in America did the total daily cost of college attendance reach “about 30 cents, . . . 10 cents for the round trip subway ride and about 20 cents for food.” One luncheon staple, a “generous and highly seasoned chopped liver sandwich,” cost fifteen cents, leaving a nickel for a soda or coffee.19 During the Depression, the financially strapped municipal government seriously contemplated imposing tuition at CCNY. In 1932, there was talk of charging fifty dollars per year or, perhaps, two dollars and fifty cents per credit. Such exigencies actually led to the closing, at least temporarily, of city colleges in other municipalities whose low tuitions attracted the children of the poor. But CCNY remained open and free largely due to the efforts of a galvanized student body that rose as one to protest the city’s attempt to “save $1,500,000 at the expense of the City College students.” In a most impassioned plea, they argued that the “establishment of fees would seriously cripple” the school’s “enviable reputation” for “intellectual vigor,” transforming a college renowned for the “mental ability” of its students and bringing it “a step nearer to some of our country club establishments.”20 The best CCNY students more than rewarded their alma mater for its uninterrupted largesse. A year after the tuition threat passed, three young men from poor Jewish families enrolled who subsequently won Nobel Prizes in the sciences. Herbert Hauptman and Jerome Karle shared the award for chemistry,

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and Julius Axelrod won in medicine. They were among seven CCNY men who were so honored for scientific research during the generation that spanned the Depression and the early postwar years. Kenneth Arrow, class of 1940, received his prize in economics. But perhaps Jonas Salk most epitomized how New York City through its distinctive educational promise to its people benefited the nation and the world.21 The research physician who ended for millions the scourge of polio entered the St. Nicholas Avenue campus as a high school student at the age of twelve. He had skipped several grades in elementary school, a common leap forward among New York’s gifted public school youngsters, before gaining admission to Townsend Harris High School, essentially a publicly funded prep school. Every year, thousands applied for the two hundred coveted spots. If a student survived the pressures to succeed there, where four years of secondary training were crammed into three, he was virtually assured a seat at CCNY. Salk did just that and started college just after his sixteenth birthday, initially aspiring to be an attorney. But poor grades in the humanities and pressure from his domineering mother moved him to the premed program, where he excelled. The only “science” course that he struggled with was “hygiene” (gym). While an undergraduate, Salk was the consummate “grind.” A biographer noted that he focused intently on “class work, preparation and exams. . . . He joined no clubs, held no offices, won no honors, played no sports,” and unlike most CCNY fellows, “made no life long friends.” But upon graduation in 1933 at age nineteen, he had prepared for medical school. More than two decades later, when his vaccine first became available, New York City’s Mayor Robert F. Wagner Jr. crowed, “We are all quite proud that Dr. Salk is a graduate of City College.”22 The tenor of seriousness that students such as Salk brought to the campus resembled the mien of most classmates intent on graduating, desiring to secure decent employment during these difficult times. Living at home and commuting to school, they rushed back to their part-time jobs in the neighborhood with no time for undergraduate hijinks or even more serious extracurricular activities. “Around C.C.N.Y.,” wrote one chronicler of college life at the start of the Depression, “there flock no romantic legends. There are no dormitories here. . . . No voices group under a moonlit elm to sing the glories of the College and the bullfrog on the bank.” The reality was, he observed, “students are here a few hours and they are sucked back into the city from which they come.

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The boys at City College do not even drink, as all hilarious college cut-ups do. The reason is simple. . . . They just can’t afford it. Three-quarters of them work to keep themselves in school.”23 Jewish women at Hunter, like their brothers at CCNY, found college life highly “transitory.” During the Depression, Jews made up 80 – 90 percent of the student body at Hunter.24 A college report in 1938 revealed that such “girls spend more than half as much time in their underground campus — the subways — as they do in classes, lectures and laboratories.” A student who lived in Brooklyn “puts in forty minutes in trains, buses and trolleys for every sixty minutes she attends classes.” The quantification added “to the 89.2 twentyfour hour days of class room attendance during the four years at college 1,650 hours, or 68.75 full days of traveling.” During such journeys, female students at Hunter and at Brooklyn College, which opened as a coed institution in 1930, perfected “the art of studying while straphanging.” Good manners were not alive and well beneath the city streets. “Even with the help of an armful of books and a weary countenance,” none of the Hunter coeds interviewed “could remember having had a seat offered her more than twice.” But while these women chafed at the lack of chivalry, they knew that they were themselves a privileged minority. In other families, sisters sacrificed their chances at higher education to afford their brothers the opportunity to work only parttime while attending school. They contented themselves with jobs as bookkeepers, salespeople — “salesgirls” as they were then called — or secretaries. A 1935 study determined that Jewish male high school graduates were twice as likely as females to continue on to college. Jewish men attended graduate and professional schools at a ten-to-one ratio to Jewish women.25 Returning to their neighborhood daily after dark, the men and women of the city college system might occasionally come back to school as daters on “Saturday night in December and [walk] across the cement campus” on St. Nicholas Heights to hear “the Allegaroo” (CCNY’s idiosyncratic cheer, “baffling to etymologists”), urging on the basketball team to “yet another victory.” To this day, no one has precisely defined what an “Allegaroo” is. These fans applauded their own student-athletes from their neighborhoods who spent their own meager extracurricular time perfecting their sports skills and taking off time from their own part-time jobs to give the lie to allegations about Jewish lack of American athleticism. As one memoirist put it, “Our victories were important beyond the actuality of the score; immigrants or (mostly) sons

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of immigrants, we triumphed over the original settlers . . . whose forebearers (some of them, anyway) had landed on Plymouth Rock.”26 For all of students’ efforts to satisfy academic requirements — and the dropout rate for economic reasons was quite robust — those who attained degrees did not necessarily rise above their fellows or move beyond their neighborhood and friends. Once again, a combination of poverty and prejudice told the tale. During these difficult times, it was not necessarily “CCNY or the post office” but perhaps CCNY and then the post office. After completing four encumbered years, a college alumnus might line up against high school graduates in competition for a coveted civil service post. La Guardia’s meritbased appointment system may have benefited Jews in their battles for city jobs against the Irish who lacked academic credentials. But with Depression cutbacks, neither a high school diploma nor a college sheepskin guaranteed employment. A Jewish Brooklyn College graduate who became a policeman recollected, “Back . . . in the 1930s, when there was a Depression on, the biggest factor in anyone’s life was job security. So I guess it was everyone’s duty at that time to take every civil service exam that came along.” In his case, he became one of twelve hundred appointees out of thirty-eight thousand who sat for the exam.27 Even professional degrees did not promise prosperity. A Jew with a law degree, having passed the so-called character hurdle to gain admission before passing the bar, could not aspire to a high-paying post in a prominent law firm. Those positions were off-limits to most Jews. Those who broke through even more difficult barriers and became physicians and dentists, similarly, did not get coveted and lucrative positions. Often these professional practitioners relied on an informal network, as Jews turned to other Jews as clients, patients, and customers. Solomon Novogrodsky, for example, had very few nonJewish patients.28 Jonas Salk, brilliant and lucky, gained admission to NYU’s School of Medicine, where “tuition was comparatively low; better still, it did not discriminate against Jews.” This exceptional talent secured an internship at Mount Sinai Hospital, where “out of 250 who sought the opportunity, only a dozen were chosen.” But anti-Semitism almost denied him more advanced research opportunities. Rockefeller University turned him down. A non-Jewish former mentor, Thomas Francis, secured him a position at the University of Michigan, thanks to a National Research Council fellowship. To get his disciple the grant,

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Francis had to refute the contention that Jews did not possess the bedside manner required of physicians. Francis affirmed, “Salk is a member of the Jewish race but has, I believe, a very great capacity to get on with people.” Francis’s admiration for Salk’s abilities directed his young colleague to his initial work in combating infantile paralysis. From 1942 to 1947, Salk worked under Francis at the University of Michigan, “moving up the academic ladder — too slowly he felt — from a research fellow to a research associate to an assistant professor of epidemiology.” In 1947, he left for the University of Pittsburgh to direct its new viral research program. Eight years later, his merit and perspicacity rewarded, he won international acclaim as “the man who saved children.”29 What of the trying career paths of men and a few women who pursued graduate education in the humanities and social sciences? CCNY was also proud of the disproportionate number of its alumni who earned doctorates. During the 1920s – 1930s, Jewish students saw in philosopher Dr. Morris Raphael Cohen a consummate academic role model. However, few of the young men whom he challenged in class to dedicate themselves, as he did, to “the full-blooded life of the mind” could hope to follow in his professional footsteps. There were few posts available even at “Jewish” schools such as CCNY, Hunter, and Brooklyn College. A 1938 Jewish communal survey reported that “while Jews constitute a considerable proportion of the student body in the colleges and universities, .  .  . they represent but an insignificant proportion of the faculties. . . . The belief is universal that it is folly for any Jew to strike out for an academic career.” Discriminatory policies only changed after World War II. For career opportunities, these best of the Jewish brightest looked to secondary school teaching. Such realities also connected Jews with other Jews despite competition for scarce opportunities.30 While most young people saw their neighborhoods as secure places to articulate personal aspirations or to express nagging frustrations, a vocal and highly dedicated minority of Jews dreamed that the streets of Jewish New York and its college campuses could become ideological strongholds. Each in their own ways, religious leaders of the faith’s several movements, radicals of differing stripes, and Zionists anxious to strengthen their footholds in America wanted those among whom they lived to share their deep concerns. They engaged in quests to alter fundamentally the destiny of their people, if not the direction and fate of all humankind. But the masses that they hoped to lead were only episodically interested in the activists’ messages. More often than

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not, most Jews tendered tentative, intermittent assent to the campaigns when the arguments and agitations touched their gut needs and emotions. In many ways, second-generation youth continued patterns of halfhearted allegiances that characterized New York’s immigrant Jewish community. In the religious realm, for example, back at the beginning of the century, downtown appeared so devout on the High Holidays, when Jews in the tens of thousands flocked to synagogues. The demand for seats often exceeded capacity, leading to the emergence of a cottage industry of “mushroom” or “provisional” synagogues. To the great consternation of many neighborhood people, too many of these “Temporary Halls of Worship” contributed to “the abuse of religion,” as “self-styled, . . . irresponsible . . . Holy-day Rabbis,” often bereft of credentials, rented “halls and sold tickets of admission.” These abuses capitalized on a seasonal demand among “customers” wrought by a combination of nostalgia, awe over the days of judgment, and a desire to be among their fellow Jews and to be seen in the best finery they could afford. But these temporary allegiances also underscored the reality that even if synagogues were open for prayers three times a day, seven days a week, they were often half filled Saturday morning because so many potential worshipers went off to work.31 Similarly, most immigrant families demonstrated a lack of commitment to Jewish education. The “one room school house” in the tenement hovel, manned by a poorly trained but also often abusive melamed (teacher), did little to inspire ongoing interest in its students. Community-run Talmud Torahs that emulated public school pedagogy while teaching traditional Jewish ways emerged as early as the 1890s. But by World War I, after nearly a decade of modernization efforts, “less than 24% . . . of Jewish children of elementary school age” received any form of Jewish education, including the “private teachers” and the “one teacher schools, or ‘Chedarim.’ ” If these youngsters were touched at all by religious life, it occurred when they showed up outside synagogues on the High Holidays and conversed with fellow Jews who had their same low degree of interest in their faith.32 Early twentieth-century Jewish radicals had no sympathy for the problems rabbis and other religious communal figures faced. Those on the left frequently launched disparaging barbs at the values and practices of the devout, attacks that were returned in kind. Although these ideologists never acknowledged a common dilemma, they too struggled to strengthen the uncertain allegiances of masses that were rarely steadfast in their support. The most committed

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considered the transplantation of revolutionary thoughts and actions an act of secular faith. Radicalism thrived on sweatshop abuses, long hours, paltry wages, and unsanitary conditions. But even when Jews joined the Socialist Party, they often avoided full-fledged ideological commitment.33 Despite these difficulties, radicals and unionists dominated much of the street culture downtown. They succeeded in mobilizing workers, putting strikers out in the streets in legendary proportions. Yet the 1909 “Uprising of the 20,000” shirtwaist makers and the 1910 “Great Revolt” of sixty thousand cloak makers rarely translated into electoral success.34 Some of the most supportive immigrants out in the streets could not vote. Male newcomers had to wait at least five years before gaining that right. Immigrant women, often the most committed demonstrators, did not possess the franchise until 1917. In addition, Jewish workers wanted to act like other citizens and so refused to vote for Socialist or Socialist Labor candidates. Republicans and Democrats courted Jewish voters, sending an implicit message of acceptance and a promise of integration.35 Radicals could not count on steadfast support. As historian and Socialist Irving Howe has pointed out, Jews attended meetings, lectures, and rallies that highlighted the problems they faced. They read the radical press regularly, if not religiously, and gratefully accepted the fraternal benefits, mutual aid, and emotional succor of the Arbeter Ring (Workmen’s Circle). But, like Jews who in the small downtown synagogue found homes and companionship amid the trials of immigrant life, those at the Workmen’s Circle meetings came to fraternize and to contemplate but not necessarily to act on their secular movement’s ideology. “To be active in a Socialist branch,” Howe has written, “to pay dues, attend meetings, hand out literature,” all required a “disciplined commitment” from the Jewish worker. It was a degree of “intens[ity]” that “even left-leaning immigrant workers” would not dedicate to radical agendas.36 Second-generation Jews continued this pattern of unrequited allegiance to both the religious and the radical. On the religious front, boys and girls evinced more disinterest than disdain for synagogue life. The “eighty-three synagogues . . . and dozens of Hebrew and Yiddish schools” that were crowded into a “less than two square mile” section of Brownsville usually stood empty. Few boys “continued their Jewish education or frequented synagogues past the age of thirteen.” A 1940 neighborhood survey confirmed these impressions. It determined that “only nine percent of adult males in Brownsville attended

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a synagogue with any regularity.” We do not know if that paltry percentage might have included some members of William Poster’s posse, who did not write on the Sabbath but forced poor Cockeye Sidney to do so. While the High Holidays witnessed closed stores and empty public schools and thousands promenading in the afternoon, more Jews stood outside the synagogues than prayed within.37 This phenomenon of “attending synagogue on the holidays, sometime” (emphasis mine), held true citywide. A study of metropolitan young adults also published in 1940 indicated that 72 percent of Jewish men aged sixteen to twenty-four had not attended any religious services that year. Five years earlier, in 1935, another survey showed that attending religious social activities — not to mention services — ranked dead last among some fifty leisure-time activities for Jewish teens, males and females, and those in their early twenties. Many enjoyed simply “walking or hanging around,” presumably on their Jewish blocks.38 Although religious leaders of all Jewish movements bemoaned the empty seats in their sanctuaries, Rabbi Mordecai M. Kaplan proffered the most creative solution to this dilemma. Although he was not the first to hit on the concept that young people could be attracted to sanctuaries through a variety of ancillary portals, his Synagogue Center idea popularized the strategy that those who came to play might in time be convinced to stay to pray. His initial home base, The Jewish Center, was founded in 1917 within the emerging community of the Upper West Side. Kaplan’s formula called for the “translat[ion]” of the synagogue into “a synagogue center . . . where all the members of the family would feel at home during the seven days of the week. There they could sing and dance and play.” The method was to sustain that social momentum, using it to make participants more religiously committed Jews. Israel Levinthal, a Kaplan disciple and, beginning in the 1920s, rabbi at the Brooklyn Jewish Center, believed there was “magic” in this methodology. It would come into play when a “young man, entering the gymnasium class, would notice the announcement on the bulletin board that on the next evening a meeting would be held in the interest of Jewish refugees or for relief.” With his “interest aroused,” he would then come to a weekday Forum lecture. “The chairman would announce that on the coming Friday eve, the rabbi would speak on this or that subject. . . . He would come to the services. If the services appealed to him, he would come again.”39

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This pray-through-play posture became the communal calling card of a string of interwar synagogue centers in New York, from the Jacob H. Schiff Center and Temple Adath Israel in the Grand Concourse region of the Bronx to the Brooklyn and Ocean Parkway Jewish Centers, all of which were tied either personally or ideologically to their teacher and leader. Kaplan divorced himself from the Orthodox Jewish Center in the early 1920s, publicly separating himself from traditional faith, and founded the Reconstructionist movement. However, The Jewish Center and the Orthodox Institutional Synagogue, located in Harlem until the late 1930s, maintained gyms and/or pools in their shuls.40 For all of Kaplan’s and his followers’ enthusiasm, this endeavor fell short of inculcating staunch religious allegiances in many members. The naysayers who questioned, from the outset, whether athletes or artists or dancers or music lovers would ever find their way from the synagogue’s gym, studio, or auditorium to its sanctuary had a point. Brooklyn rabbi Harry Weiss believed that those who attended the fun and games part of Jewish life were likely to “feel that . . . [their] duty towards a Congregation is fully performed and the Friday night and Saturday morning services are of necessity neglected.” Statistics that Rabbi Alter Landesman offered in 1928 supported Weiss’s impressions. From his post at the Hebrew Educational Society in Brownsville, Landesman’s survey of national trends in “synagogue attendance” revealed that “experiences with synagogue centers thus far have been negative or very slight . . . in augmenting attendance in religious services.” If anything, during the 1930s, with so many people with time on their hands, synagogue centers became even more popular as secular Jewish retreats. From 1931 to 1935, “more than four thousand new members came to use the gymnasium” at the Brooklyn Jewish Center, and others flocked to its manifold other recreational and cultural activities. Singers such as Sophie Tucker and Belle Baker performing at a congregational benefit packed the house and contributed toward filling strapped coffers. But such events that “blurred the boundaries between the world of Broadway and the world of the synagogue” did little to increase regular religious attendance. In the Bronx, Schiff Center officials spoke of four thousand Jews attending High Holiday services, not to mention those who, as always, congregated outside. But during the year, it was the same old story of half-empty sanctuaries.41 These realities were not lost on Kaplan, who in 1935 allowed, “At first I thought if the synagogue were transformed into a center that would house

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the leisure activities of our people, the problem of Jewish life in this country would be solved.”42 But such had yet to be proven the case. Throughout the interwar period, his initiative really only produced yet another comfortable venue for Jews to interact with each other. They took their strong neighborhood ties indoors. Radical groups held greater expectations that their efforts would garner sustained allegiance to their causes. They did not have to seek out the neighborhood masses. Their several Bronx cooperative apartment endeavors brought potential comrades into daily contact with those who preached world-changing ideologies. But here too most Jews did not become political activists unless a campaign touched them personally, even those who believed in the causes and appreciated what the unions, Socialists, and Communists promised and delivered. House painter Louis Myerson and his wife, Bella, exemplified this reality. Among the original owners within the Sholom Aleichem co-ops on Sedgwick Avenue, they purchased their five-room apartment in a four-story walk-up in 1926 for $1,000. Nine other family members — siblings and in-laws — joined them in this close family circle. As working-class Jews, they imbibed radical rhetoric, distrusted the capitalist system, and inculcated these values in their three daughters. Helen, Sylvia, and Bess attended the two Yiddishist schools on co-op premises after the neighborhood public schools let out. One of the “schules” was Socialist, the other Communist, but the girls hardly learned the differences. They received little clarification at home, as Louis Myerson’s “political policy was to participate in everything and commit to nothing.” Bess once quipped that her father joined “the IWO” (the Communist International Workers Organization) because of its “excellent burial program.” He stayed clear of the great debates that roiled the co-op, such as the battle royal between the Communists and Socialists, particularly the Labor Zionists, over the 1929 Arab riots in Palestine. The Stalinists backed the Arabs; the Zionists supported the Jews. A biographer of the Myerson family considered Louis’s position “common among thoughtful moderates,” individuals whom Irving Howe described as “non-party leftist[s] engaged in cultural activities.”43 If hard-line neighborhood radicals were disappointed with the tepidness of the Myersons’ involvement, less doctrinaire Yiddishists, who strove to perpetuate that Yiddish language and culture, welcomed the family’s willingness to teach its daughters the Jewish vernacular. Many American Jewish families

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disdained their ancestral tongue, fearing that it smacked of unpatriotic radicalism and posed a barrier to becoming true Americans. Some worried that speaking too much Yiddish would make youngsters sound like immigrants and retard their integration. Even Abraham Cahan, the formidable editor of the Yiddish Daily Forward, advised in 1931 that since “young college-educated men and women are being disqualified as teachers because they speak and conduct themselves like foreigners,” it was an “absolute necessity” to raise youngsters with “thoroughly American pronunciation, intonation and gestures.” A Jew could do well in the civil service exam and then fail the oral exam for public school teaching because of accented English. Cahan opposed such Yiddish schools. But the Myersons’ middle daughter, Bess, did not suffer for her attendance at the Sholom Aleichem schools. In 1946, when she became Miss America, she spoke perfect English to the judges in Atlantic City.44 There was, however, one gut issue that hit home with the Myersons. In 1932, a year after the co-op went bankrupt and was sold to private investors, forty tenants were tossed out of their apartments for nonpayment of rent. The three sisters, surely with parental assent, worked the picket lines as a rent strike, championed by radical leaders, erupted on Sedgwick Avenue. Beyond that, leaders and youngsters alike helped their neighbors, assuring that “no co-op member ever wandered homeless.”45 There were certainly youngsters who rose out of these same Bronx streets who were fully swept up with the excitement and promises of left-wing movements and dreamed of influencing their peers and ultimately changing the world. One of the most iconic of these youths, having grown up in the “Jewish slums of the East Bronx,” Irving Howe recounted, “I wandered into the ranks of the Socialist youth and from then on, all through my teens and twenties, the Movement was my home and passion, the Movement as it ranged through the various left-wing, anti-Communist groups.” Here, too, ideologically committed Jews felt secure amid their own kind, as children “from immigrant Jewish families.” Howe recognized, “the Jews still formed a genuine community reaching half-unseen into a dozen neighborhoods and a multitude of institutions, within the shadows of which we found protection of a kind.” Only on occasion did they venture beyond their home base to preach their gospels to other, often unreceptive groups, such as to the tough Irish kids on Fordham Road. They did better talking up social justice issues to poor blacks in Harlem. Notwithstanding this “protective aura,” street bona fides still had to be earned

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among real laborers of their parents’ generation. “You might be shouting at the top of your lungs against reformism or Stalin’s betrayal,” Howe recalled, “but for the middle-aged garment worker strolling along Southern Boulevard, you were just a bright and cocky Jewish boy, a talkative little pisher.”46 The young Daniel Bell, the future social theorist and later professor of social sciences at Harvard, first learned of socialism at home. His mother joined the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union, always voted the Socialist Party line, and read the Forward “religiously.” By thirteen, her son was ready to tell the rabbi who had trained him for his bar mitzvah, “I found the truth. I don’t believe in God. I’ll put on tefillin [phylacteries] once in memory of my dead father, but that’s all.” The rabbi apparently retorted, “Yingle [literally “little boy,” a cleaned-up version of pisher], you don’t believe in God. Tell me, you think God cares.” Though divorced from the faith, Bell later admitted that he gleaned much from Jewish tradition. Soon, he was applying “the same kind of thinking you learned” in analyzing the Bible or Talmud to Karl Marx’s “torah” as a teenage member of YPSL (Young Peoples’ Socialist League). He and his comrades went from “corner to corner” on the streets of his Lower East Side neighborhood preaching. To gain attention, they used “a sort of stepladder” and began “gathering a crowd until [the] main speaker would come along and talk.” Bell “was usually the first one up the ladder.”47 Howe, Bell, and those of comparable keen political persuasions reached their majority as CCNY students. Gathered in the alcoves of the school’s cafeteria, these doctrinaire advocates did their best to convince others of the rightness of their cause, hoping to recruit followers for on- and off-campus campaigns. CCNY’s indoor Jewish street possessed many kiosks, each manned by competing ideologists who engaged in legendary debates with Jewish spokesmen for different brands of radicalism positioned provocatively in the next alcove. One memoirist has recalled that Alcove #1 was the province of a mix of “right-wing Socialists” and “splinters from the Trotskyist left wing” and an even more “bewildering” array of “Austro-Marxists, orthodox Communists, Socialist centrists, . . . etc.,” not to mention “all kinds of sympathizers, fellow travelers, and indeterminists.” When these peripatetic debaters were not battling among themselves, starting out with a civil call — “let’s discuss the situation” — they engaged in intellectual combat with those in Alcove #2, the home of the pro-Stalinist Young Communist League, headed by Julius Rosenberg.48 For those who took up the cudgels for their deeply felt convictions, the

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alcove arena mattered more than any class. Irving Howe showed his priorities through a “device of checking in at the beginning of a class when a teacher took attendance . . . and then slipping out to the bathroom and coming back at the end of the hour and meanwhile spending that hour in the alcove.”49 Howe and his confreres — who included, among others, Daniel Bell (’39), Irving Kristol (’40), and Nathan Glazer (’44) — honed skills as debaters and dialecticians that shaped their lives as major American Jewish thinkers. These self-assured men in the postwar era became renowned political thinkers and cultural arbitrators, characterized as the “New York Intellectuals.”50 In their college days, they “declared themselves citizens of the world,” cosmopolitans who set themselves apart from parochial sympathies and patriotic American realities. In the postwar years, their consciences raised by Communist aggression, by Soviet anti-Semitism, and most profoundly by the horrors of the Holocaust, which reminded them of their ancestral ties, they refashioned themselves as loyal Jews. Some of them, most notably Irving Kristol, refocused completely as intellectual cold warriors and formative influences on American neoconservatism, whose influence was yet so powerful within turn-of-the-millennium American politics.51 While these advocates were still in their radical phase, however, holding forth from their cafeteria soapboxes, they were voices to reckon with on campus. They attracted many students who gravitated to the alcoves to listen in on a point well struck. “When that happened,” one veteran of these battles recalled, “a crowd gathered around the contestants, the way kids do, waiting for a fight to explode. But there were no fist fights, even when the provocations seemed unbearable.” However, when the noise and excitement died down, as debaters were known to engage one another “at the top of [their] lungs,” listeners who did not share the depth of the alcove spokesmen’s concerns, drifted away to their worldly pursuits, their classes or part-time jobs.52 Occasionally the call of the classroom interfered with students in the maelstrom of intellectual combat. In one unforgettable contretemps, at least for Nathan Glazer as he described it, one of his colleagues in Alcove #1 “held forth for something like six or eight hours as various people” from the Communist Alcove #2 “rose up against him, then had to go to class. He decided to drop his classes, I suppose. And people would come and go and he was still holding forth, he was still going hammer and tongs.” Yet Irving Kristol has noted that, on the one hand, “because of the kinds of kids that went there, .  .  . at

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least eighty-five to ninety percent Jewish,” from working-class backgrounds, possessed of some degree of radicalism in their families’ traditions, “the entire student body was to one degree or another political.” On the other hand, “most were passive politically”: “the active types numbered in the hundreds.”53 This endemic passivity frustrated radicals seeking to take their fights out of the alcoves and into the streets beyond CCNY. The thousands on campus were potential shock troops for revolutionary change. If harnessed, they could do more than debate the world; they could change it. How grand would it be if hundreds of students might be convinced to put down their books and pressing personal concerns to trek to Kentucky in 1932 to support striking miners and to protest police brutality? Such an expedition promised an ideal opportunity to “expose capitalism at its worst” and to demonstrate how young people “could act effectively on behalf of those victimized by the Depression.”54 Future renowned Marxist economist Harry Magdoff was one such instigator. This Bronx-born house painter’s son came from a home “environment in which class problems — unemployment, seasonal unemployment, negotiations, problems of the union” — were the talk around the kitchen table. His first formal exposure to radical teachings took place at his local Sholom Aleichem school, where he read the literature of the European Left in Yiddish. Daily reading of the Yiddish press fostered these beliefs. As a high school student, he struggled to convince his classmates to take class conflict seriously. Looking ahead at the college scene, he chafed over “the indifference of U.S. college students to poverty and politics,” while there were “student riots over social issues in Hungary, maybe Romania.” When he enrolled at CCNY in 1931, he immediately joined the Alcove #2, Communist, Social Problems Club and edited the organization’s magazine, Frontiers. A year later, in 1932, he went off campus to be part of the inauguration of the National Student League and the Youth League Against War and Fascism. All of his efforts, starting with editing an unauthorized magazine and culminating with leading a rally against autocratic CCNY president Frederick B. Robinson, ultimately led to his expulsion. He finished his bachelor’s degree at NYU.55 However, Magdoff admitted that he and his comrades often stood alone. While many students sympathized, the vast majority focused on preparing for careers at a school that was, as this campus activist once put it, “horrendously competitive, terribly competitive in terms of class work.” One historian has explained that “City College’s low-income students responded to the Depression

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not by embracing radicalism, but by buckling down in their academic work, hoping that by performing impeccably at college they would improve their chances for employment in the dismal job market.” Moreover, many impoverished students, even those who understood the issues as Magdoff saw them, simply did not have spare time to hang around for rallies and protests when part-time job responsibilities hung over their heads. Magdoff recalled the pressure to secure any job, no matter how menial: “When an announcement was posted stating ‘Jobs available-Part-time for Chemical Engineering Students,’ . . . everyone was envious.” The employment was only “to shovel snow. There was a heavy snow fall in New York. They knew that if they announced snow shoveling jobs they’d have a thousand guys applying.” To keep the numbers down, they limited the offer to chemical engineering students. Still, men like Magdoff soldiered on. As one of his non-Marxist contemporaries at CCNY later observed, with some degree of admiration, “Communists in the student body, although only a handful, .  .  . were the most dedicated and aggressive missionaries challenging teachers and deans whenever the occasion presented itself but concentrating especially and relentlessly on skeptical and or indifferent fellow students.”56 Women radicals at Hunter College similarly endured disappointment with their rank and file’s inability or unwillingness to commit fully to their causes. The most dedicated members of its Young Communist League (YCL) endeavored to do it all. They traveled long distances back and forth from home, held part-time jobs, distributed party literature, solicited names on petitions, sold the Daily Worker on Manhattan street corners, and attended interminable political meetings on campus. For Lucy Schildkret — the future historian of the Holocaust Lucy Dawidowicz — and her “circle,” she recalled, “the YCL took precedence over our classes especially required courses which we cut a lot.” She “was in search of a utopian solution to earthly ills,” and her “goal was nothing less than a secular version of the eternal Jewish striving for a Messianic world.” Schildkraut’s “particular vision was colored red, the color of blood and of revolution”: “We believed that the future was ours.” But she also recognized, to her dismay and chagrin, that she and her comrades were “a tiny minority among the student body.” Most other Hunter students “kept their noses in their books and tried to have some fun.” Schildkraut especially dismissed as “frivolous, even irresponsible” activities such as “Senior Hop and SING,” sports teams, and the college’s eighteen sororities, “surprisingly for a public college

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with a subway student body.” There were also some who agreed with activists’ feelings about changing society and who might have taken to the streets but feared that if word got out that they were troublemakers, they might lose their part-time jobs. A student-librarian knew that if she were arrested at a demonstration, she would forfeit her position. Aspiring teachers understood that if the Board of Education’s Board of Examiners designated them as a “potential threat to the school system,” they would be denied their coveted pedagogue’s license. Challenged and conflicted, the majority of Hunter students remained on the sidelines at critical protest moments.57 Socialist Hal Draper first spoke out at Brooklyn College and remained with radical movements long enough to link up with New Left operatives in the 1960s. Looking back at his and his comrades’ efforts to create ideological strongholds in New York City colleges in the 1930s, he has suggested that where and when he was a student, only 1 percent joined the student groups. But their impact, he proudly believed, extended to “concentric rings of influence embracing different portions of the student body” around them. Some supported particular campaigns when the issues touched home; others would have become more involved had they the time. The National Student League and other such leftist organizations found their widest and staunchest support at CCNY, Hunter, and Brooklyn College in 1932, when they championed the student bodies’ ultimate gut issue, the aforementioned crusade to maintain free tuition. Draper has also argued that even those who never showed up at meetings and kept solely to their books and jobs “could not help absorbing the climate of ideas which pervaded the political life of the campus as a part of the larger society.” For him, even the masses of students who did not break with their daily routines to take part in the National Student League’s “National Scottsboro Week” teach-ins in 1934 had their consciences raised. They learned not only about this specific travesty of justice in Alabama, where nine young black men were convicted and sentenced to death on trumped-up charges of raping two fellow hobos on a freight train, but also about “all that was wrong with the Jim Crow system everywhere,” even on their own campus.58 Notwithstanding these claims of cultural suzerainty, many CCNY students ignored the radicals’ causes, such as “partisans” of the sports fans’ alcove who “fought over the relative merits of the Dodgers and the Giants” baseball teams. Others actively opposed the leftists on campus.59 The most aggressive opponents enrolled in the Reserve Officers Training Corps (ROTC). Like all

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organizations at the school, ROTC consisted predominantly of Jews, who hailed from the same Jewish neighborhoods as the Socialists and Communists.60 These students opted to take two basic courses in military science as part of their college curriculum. From 1917 to 1928, such training had been imposed on all students because CCNY president Sidney Mezes deemed it “beneficial to the students’ health and patriotism,” part of a national move toward uniformity that grew out of the era of World War I. By the mid-1920s, however, widespread student opposition led to the abandonment of this requirement. From 1928 on, students could take two semesters of hygiene instead. Still, a CCNY man could enroll in ROTC, continue with the program throughout his four years in school, and upon graduation earn a commission in the U.S. Army. The corps — a competing campus community of its own — also had its extracurricular component, including its band, its own monthly, The Lavender Cadet (a reference to the CCNY school colors), and a rifle team, and it conducted review parades through campus.61 Some students signed up because grading was apparently higher in military sciences courses than in hygiene. In 1931, the student newspaper noted “the remarkable eagerness” of enrollees and bemoaned the “disparity” that “impels students fearful of low grades and rigid requirements” to don the uniform on campus. But others became student soldiers because they agreed with the administration’s social and political values. They also shared common cause with CCNY’s athletes, another highly visible segment — mostly Jews too — members of the College Athletic Association and its Varsity Club. Two hundred lettermen of the Varsity Club, fellows such as baseball players Lou Trupin and Arthur Koenigsberg and lacrosse stars Cohen, Gottfried, and Rosenberg, vigorously applauded the proposal of Major Herbert M. Holton, associate professor of hygiene, at a sports dinner that “City College athletes organize a vigilance committee to eradicate ‘rowdyism’ ” on campus. In the 1930s, CCNY, the renowned radical campus, had “the largest voluntary [ROTC] unit in the nation.”62 Radicals saw the presence of ROTC at CCNY as a major provocation. They opposed participation in any future capitalist- or fascist-inspired war. On this issue, Magdoff and his National Student League found allies within more moderate campus elements, such as the student editors of the Campus. In May 1935, for example, the editors spoke of their own efforts “to combat the forces making for war and fascism.” Their sentiments aligned with those

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sixty thousand young men and women who, less than a month earlier, had signed an American version of the Oxford Oath during a national daylong student strike for peace. In 1932, several hundred pacifist members of the Oxford Union had foresworn fighting for “King and Country.” They promised not to fight in another war. Radicals frequently disrupted military reviews, turning them into antiwar demonstrations. Protesters at what they called the “Jingo Day” event in May 1933 ended up in a melee with the police who had been called in to break up the battles between students. Those arrested — only the leftists were incarcerated — accused President Robinson of personally joining in the struggles, wading in with his umbrella as a weapon. Subsequently, Magdoff, his Social Problems Club, and their newspaper were all suspended. This first major infraction of college rules eventually led to his expulsion. But protests continued. In 1935, fifty adamant protesters broke up a Charter Day event commemorating the founding of CCNY. The Campus editorialized that “the ROTC is a disgrace to a liberal institution of higher learning and that a color guard composed of ROTC men is distinctly out of place in the Charter Day exercises.”63 However, in May 1940, when three hundred student protestors carried signs into Lewisohn Stadium that read, “Down with ROTC” and “To Hell With War,” they received a mixed reception on campus. It was one thing to continue to reject the American military’s presence at CCNY and quite another to oppose the European war, with the Nazis overrunning western Europe and ghettoizing Jews in eastern Europe. Such antiwar sentiments smacked of the isolationism of the right-wing America First Committee, a movement that attracted more than its share of anti-Semites. But most committed Socialist and Communist students held true to their beliefs, following their parties’ lines even if Alcoves #1 and #2 vigorously debated justifications for the Hitler-Stalin pact of 1939, which cleared the way for the Nazi invasion of Poland. The beginnings “of the war in Europe” contributed to an increase of 154 students in ROTC over the previous semester, and enrollment reached 1,204. Perhaps, these Jewish student volunteers anticipated what Hitler’s war would mean both to America and to the Jewish people. Preparedness could be considered a virtue since eventually the United States too might have to fight for democracy. An uncompromising evil warranted military readiness.64 Four students, Bronxites Irving Cohen and Milton Miller, Fred Bloom of Brooklyn, and Fred Brooks, who lived on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, were

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arrested for their disorderly efforts attempting to break up field-day events. Their remonstrations did not deter the twelve hundred cadets who marched that day. That predominantly Jewish parade of students included Milton M. Wiener, also of the Bronx, who was honored with a gold medal from his home borough’s Reserve Officers Association. ROTC identity led to recognition for fellows with Jewish-sounding names from such groups as the national society Daughters of the American Revolution, a nativist group that often portrayed Jews as radicals. These explosive contretemps between students demonstrated that New York’s Jewish neighborhoods produced young men who matriculated at CCNY with either strong revolutionary or “patriotic” proclivities, though most of their classmates observed from the sidelines and kept their political views to themselves.65 Committed Zionists focused their efforts to construct their own ideological strongholds primarily in Brooklyn. They built on an early heyday around World War I. Initially, the Jewish national movement experienced great difficulties gaining traction. Its European predicates, that the bounties of emancipation were ultimately illusions and that Jews could only be free and secure in their ancient homeland, did not resonate with immigrant Jews. They had chosen America over Palestine and had found both liberty and opportunities for individual advancement in the United States. However, around World War I, under the auspices of the Federation of American Zionists and subsequently within the Zionist Organization of America, a new attractive definition of Zionism evolved, spurred on by the advocacy of the famous Jewish jurist Louis D. Brandeis. Often referred to as “Palestinianism,” it emphasized the obligation of American Jews to assist their European brethren who were settling in the home land. This philanthropic ideology provided Jews who were estranged from Judaism with a new ethnic identity congruent with the American values of cultural pluralism. Articulated by the Jewish philosopher Horace Kallen, cultural pluralism emphasized the importance of maintaining a group identity in the United States. It thus behooved American Zionists to study their people’s history, to learn modern Hebrew, and to attend rallies that glorified heroic Jewish pioneers in Palestine, similar to America’s own legendary frontier settlers.66 Palestinianism crested during World War I, especially after the Balfour Declaration of 1917. It served as the basis for the British Mandate over Palestine. With the guarantee of a national home in place, committed Zionists faced

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the challenge of sustaining the movement’s momentum. They aimed to create a strong and enduring modern Hebrew culture within second-generation communities. Children ideally imbibed these lessons in a number of all-day Jewish elementary schools that sprung up in several Brooklyn neighborhoods. At the Etz Hayim-Hebrew Institute of Boro Park or the Shulamith School for Girls or the Crown Heights Yeshiva or the Yeshivah of Flatbush, families enrolled their sons and daughters in modern Jewish educational settings dedicated “to engender[ing] in them a love of their people and its cultural heritage and a strong attachment to the Zionist way of life,” while upholding Americanized versions of religious Orthodoxy. Neighborhood supporters of these schools, primarily the parents who paid tuitions, hoped that they would become “a training ground for future leaders in Jewish life both in America and Israel.” Some of these youngsters did find their destiny ultimately in the State of Israel. Others joined the American Zionist movement. They spoke modern Hebrew, read Hebrew books and magazines, promoted Jewish nationalism as a means of group identification in America, and passionately supported the Jewish settlement in Palestine.67 Intensive Jewish elementary education inspired a handful of young adults to become rabbis and educators. They turned to Yeshiva College and its Teachers Institute, which proffered staunch religious Zionism. Others, men and women both, enrolled in the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, which offered similar careers of service to the Jewish people. However, women could not aspire to be rabbis.68 The fictional character Reuven Malter, one of the heroes of Chaim Potok’s novel The Chosen, exemplifies this cohort. Malter, the son of a noted Hebraist and Judaica scholar, learns cultural Zionism at home and as a student in a modern Jewish day school in Brooklyn. Dedicated to the Jewish national cause, he strives to help the endangered fledgling Jewish state. Eventually he decides to study for the rabbinate at a fictional college depicted as a hybrid institution combining educational and theological elements of both Yeshiva and the Jewish Theological Seminary of America. One can imagine an older Reuven Malter becoming a Modern Orthodox or Conservative rabbi in the postwar period, emphasizing Zionism and Israel as a major building block of Jewish identity.69 However, without gainsaying the involvement of real-life versions of Malter — Potok was quite like him, though he grew up in the Bronx — most neigh-

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borhood youths were neither intrigued with nor engaged in this expression of Jewish politics and culture. American Zionism in Brooklyn and elsewhere in the city received an additional boast in the 1930s when the public school system, in a remarkable turnaround from its long history of undermining Jewish identity, countenanced Hebrew as an accepted Regents foreign language. A supporter of cultural pluralism, John Laughan, a principal at Christopher Columbus High School in the Bronx — presumably a Gentile — welcomed the move. In introducing Hebrew into his school, he stated, “Young people should be urged to preserve their racial heritage particularly when, as Hebrew, that heritage is culturally valuable and historically important. Our American democracy will be enriched and strengthened by the perseveration of this cultural heritage.” In 1940, thirty-two hundred junior high and high school students chose this course of study, yet they constituted less than 5 percent of Jewish enrollment in city schools. And both the Hebrew course and the twosemester overview of Jewish history proffered at Boys High School were not restricted to Jews.70 For all the efforts of those who were engaged in promoting Jewish ideologies on the streets of New York, “very few Jewish youth,” a survey in 1940 concluded, “belong to clubs connected with their religion.” The same held for affiliation with radical groups too. “Although the Young People’s League of the United Synagogue,” the report continued, “is reported to have 10,000 members in New York City, the Youth Zionist movement other thousands, and there are smaller groups of Jewish youth organized to promote understanding of Jewish traditions and religion, the total number of members hardly makes an impression on the estimated nearly one-third of a million young Jews under 25 who live in New York.”71 Throughout this era, the most successful ideologues were groups of strictly Orthodox Jews who maintained staunch enclaves in their parts of Brooklyn. A remarkable set of first- and second-generation Jews, they had avoided the lures of Americanization and calls for cultural change that had captivated most others. Instead, they maintained a strictly separatist social profile that stood out on the neighborhood scene. Within Williamsburg in Brooklyn, amid the “dance halls and poolrooms for the young,” lived an aggregation of “really baale-battishe [religiously upstanding] Jews and many talmidei chachomim [truly learned individuals].” In this milieu of the meticulous, Sabbathobservant families dominated. According to a scholar of that time and place,

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a “representative” family was headed by a father who “did not let a day pass without praying with the minyan in the synagogue” and who “attended a regular shiur, a Talmud study class after his hard, long hours in the sweat shop.” His wife kept a house that “was a model of kashruth, [where] the Sabbaths and holidays were celebrated with the proper ceremonies.” More important, their children followed suit. A comparable pocket of piety existed in Brownsville as well as in East New York and Bensonhurst.72 These strictly Orthodox Jews focused their efforts on their yeshivas, most notably the Mesivta Torah Vodaath on Bedford Avenue, the most comprehensive of five borough schools for boys and young men. It placed the highest premium on the transmission of traditional Torah and Talmud learning, showing only marginal interest in modern Jewish subjects, such as the study of modern Hebrew, and frowned on the teaching of Zionism. A similar mission motivated the leaders of the Yeshiva Chaim Berlin, situated in neighboring Brownsville. It too “aspire[d] to reproduce in this country, the old type of observant Godfearing Jew devoted to the ancient ideals of learning and piety [who would] exhibit the diligence, sincerity and other-worldliness of the traditional yeshiva bochur [along the] model of the yeshivoth of Poland, Lithuania and Jerusalem, . . . extreme and uncompromising in its Orthodoxy.” These schools discouraged students, as far as was possible, from pursuing secular education beyond the high school years mandated by state law. If their disciples really desired a college degree, to help them earn more money, they attended Brooklyn College at night. There they endured fewer challenges to their faith, and most evening students had no time for secular protests. Nowhere else in the United States, not even on the Lower East Side, were there so many young Jews studying more of the Torah and less of the secular world than in Brooklyn.73 These religious hubs did hold on to many of their youngsters, but they were limited enclaves. Despite efforts at isolation, some young people drifted away from their parents’ worlds. Some made common social cause with the equally small day-school crowd of young men and women, to the chagrin of yeshiva officials. Others chose to cross bridges into Manhattan and beyond to study secular subjects. Still others left to prepare for careers of service to modern Jews, enrolling at Yeshiva College or the Jewish Theological Seminary. These moves resembled the peregrinations of Potok’s other fictional character in The Chosen, the yeshiva student Danny Saunders. Potok’s novel takes him from his rabbi-father’s roots to encounter the world of psychology at Columbia

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University. Though Potok dressed up the conflicted rebbe and son as Hasidim at a time when, historically speaking, they were a small minority of the extremely devout in Brooklyn, contentions over what secular subjects might be studied, not to mention debates over Zionism, roiled these religious realms.74 Finally, other scions of the borough’s faithful Jews broke almost completely from traditional religious values. One bittersweet dynamic took place within that aforementioned “representative” pious Williamsburg family in which the father and mother personified unfailing devotion to old religious ways. One son and a daughter followed in parental footsteps, as “good and upright” second-generation Jews. But a second son wanted to “become a man of the world.” As his still-observant brother later told an investigator, “[After] his return from the wars [World War I], he began to mock some of our customs and criticized our rigid observance of the traditional laws. . . . It was only a question of time till he would go his own way.” After marriage to a Jewish woman from Brownsville, who evidently shared his declining religious commitments, and then blessed with financial success, the young couple left the neighborhood and Orthodoxy. They headed to a “swanky neighborhood in Forest Hills,” Queens, where he became, according to his saddened brother, “what we at our Shul call a ‘high-holiday Jew.’ ” Thus, he anticipated that large cohort of former Orthodox families that expanded after World War II.75 But while these separatist communities suffered attrition, their numbers grew exponentially during and after World War II. Their neighborhoods’ commitment to resistance was intensified. Survivors of the Holocaust and refugees from Soviet domination of eastern Europe — many, but not all, of Hasidic stock — made their way to the United States and gravitated to these indigenous Orthodox enclaves. There they began their American experiences as Jews who endeavored to live socially and culturally apart from secular and irreligious Jews. In time, their values and perspectives, preserved and protected within their ideological strongholds, reverberated both in the tenor of Brooklyn life and on American Jewry well beyond their immigrant hubs. New York Jews transmitted and transmuted their neighborhood experiences beyond the boundaries of the city through intellectual creativity, political radicalism, and Jewish activism. Although only a minority of New York Jews established reputations outside their local milieu, they drew sustenance from the ethnic worlds of their youth. Emboldened by experiences on the city’s streets and nurtured in the city’s free schools and colleges, they honed

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their intellectual, political, cultural, and religious commitments through conflict with other Jews. New York City provided just this blend of intimacy and opportunity, fashioning multiple forms of Jewish and American identity. Looking back, many who succeeded even beyond their dreams recognized the debt they owed to the city’s ethnic neighborhoods.

Red Cross Surgical Bandage Division of the Jewish Community House of Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, February 6, 1945. (Courtesy of the Sephardic Community Center of Brooklyn)

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During Catastrophe and Triumph

Jews of New York lived at the center where American Jewish responses emerged to the cataclysmic events that decimated their people in the decade of the Holocaust. Their location placed them in the midst of decisions leading to the rise of the State of Israel. More than any community in America, New York was the hub of national Jewish organizational life. Hundreds of Jewish political, social, and religious groups, across the broadest of spectrums, had offices in the metropolis. Although the seat of American government was 250 miles away, seemingly all major deputations to influence leaders in Washington, D.C., originated in New York. Between 1938 and 1948, Jewish organizations spread within Midtown across Forty-Second Street, east to west, were positioned to garner public attention. Two major defense organizations, the American Jewish Congress and the American Jewish Committee, with often polar-opposite approaches to Jews’ monumental problems, stood at opposite sides of the famous New York street. The Congress, a Zionist massmembership organization that advocated public remonstrations to its government to champion Jewish plights, made its headquarters off Eighth Avenue. The Committee, a bastion of elite leadership, prized quiet diplomacy and commanded space on Lexington Avenue. They did, however, walk together in harmony on those occasions when they were given the opportunity to speak to government. Jews who set foot among the powerful, they believed, had to do so with respect and dignity. The offices of the Joint Distribution Committee and the American section of the Jewish Agency for Palestine faced each other across the street between Park and Madison Avenues. The Joint acquired renown for securing or

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secreting supplies to Jews in eastern Europe before, during, and after the war. The Zionist organization’s most dynamic publicity arm, the American Zionist Emergency Council, and its primary fund-raising group, the United Palestine Appeal, shared space with its parent organization, the Jewish Agency, the prestate Jewish government in Palestine, first at 41 East Forty-Second Street and later a block or so away at 342 Madison Avenue.1 Future leaders of American Judaism’s movements also located in Manhattan. Rabbis and religious teachers in training at the Orthodox Yeshiva Rabbi Isaac Elchanan and its undergraduate school, Yeshiva College, studied in Washington Heights. Sixty blocks south in Morningside Heights, the men and women of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America prepared either to become Conservative rabbis or, in women’s cases, to graduate as Hebrew teachers. On Sixty-Eighth Street, off Central Park West, stood the Jewish Institute of Religion, a Reform rabbinical school led by Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, who was also president of the American Jewish Congress. Volunteer workers and advocates for Zionist organizations with very different strategies for how Palestinian Jews should fight for their freedom, and varying visions of what sort of state Jews might create, passed one another daily on the way to their offices on Twenty-Sixth and Twenty-Seventh Streets in the Chelsea section of Manhattan. At lunch time, Madison Square Park, off Fifth Avenue between Twenty-Third and Twenty-Seventh Streets was a fine location for unscheduled waxed-bag debates between supporters of the David Ben-Gurion – led Histadrut, the “umbrella framework of the Labor Zionist movement in Palestine,” and the confrontational New Zionist Organization. In the critical first postwar days of 1945 – 48, the backers of the Histadrut pleaded that the British could be convinced through diplomacy and cooperation to exit Palestine. Their interlocutors, Revisionist Zionists, sought to drive out the English through violence and intimidation. For longtime observers of these ideological conflicts, this Palestine debate represented but a continuation of wartime disputes between Wise’s Congress, allied with Ben-Gurion, and the Revisionists over how to approach the government to rescue Jews. The transcendent disagreement was over whether the Roosevelt administration had Jewish concerns at heart. Wise believed in and trusted FDR; the Revisionists did not. If the Congress spoke to the powerful with respect and regard, the Revisionists — who rarely could get audiences with government — harangued and condemned.2

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In another part of the park, Mizrachi members spoke passionately to those who might listen about the glories of a future Jewish state rising in “the Land of Israel, for the people of Israel, in the spirit of the Law of Israel.” These Religious Zionists munched on sandwiches from home or foods purchased at Lugee’s Kosher Restaurant, located four bocks north of Madison Square.3 Yet aside from a common Jewish background, they shared little with comrades of the Jewish People’s Committee, a Communist organization that also worked in offices in 1133 Broadway on Twenty-Sixth Street. Although both were Jewish groups, they held uncompromising divergent views of their people’s destiny. The antireligious and antinationalist Communists dreamed that Jews would join an international workers’ revolution, even if in the meantime, the organization religiously observed directives sent from Moscow.4 A mile or so south on Lower Broadway, near Washington Square, the Agudath Israel, representative of Orthodox rabbinical refugees and their followers who had recently established themselves in the city, also operated on its own. They did not share the Mizrachi’s vision of the role Orthodox Jews had to play in the restoration of their people to its ancient homeland. But they certainly were attuned to the tragedy unfolding in Europe and were deeply committed to saving remnants from the Nazis’ hands. As the nation’s media center, New York was critical to American Jews for disseminating information and for molding sympathetic public opinion first about terrifying news about the Holocaust and then of compelling reports about the birth of the Jewish commonwealth. These efforts began with gaining space in the city’s newspapers, its weekly and monthly magazines, and through its radio outlets. America’s information capital published nine English-language dailies, from the popular tabloid the Daily News, with close to two million readers, to the “newspaper of record,” the vaunted New York Times. Borough-based organs such as the Brooklyn Eagle, the Long Island Press, and the Bronx Home News had their own loyal subscribers. David Sarnoff ’s National Broadcasting Company (NBC) — the country’s largest radio outlet, with twenty-five affiliates from coast to coast — operated out of Manhattan, as did its competitor the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS). NBC’s listeners tuned into its Blue Network for the most up-to-the-moment information. Entertainment was the medium on its Red channel. Scores of periodicals, from the news weeklies Time and Newsweek to the photojournals Life and Look, published out of the metropolis. Jewish media followed suit.

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The city housed the all-important Jewish Telegraphic Agency at Park Avenue and Fortieth Street. It fed reports to the four Yiddish dailies and a myriad of journals and the Anglo-Jewish periodicals. Operatives of the Jewish Labor Committee, which before and during the war was one of the most aggressive Jewish organizations dedicated to “fight Fascism and Nazism” and “to prevent the spread of Fascist propaganda in America,” did not have to go far to hear the most important reports. Its offices rented space in the Forward building on East Broadway, home of the most renowned Yiddish daily.5 The city, particularly Manhattan, also provided a prime venue for Jews to speak out publicly. Madison Square Garden became the ideal place for protest rallies with its approximately twenty thousand seats within the main arena and room for thousands more under its famous rotunda and out on to Eighth Avenue. There, in March 1938, the Jewish Labor Committee and the American Jewish Congress joined forces to brand “Hitlerism” as “the gravest menace to peace, civilization and democracy.” At that mass meeting, the two groups renewed their pledge to keep the economic pressure on the Third Reich. They had been cooperating since 1935 in prosecuting, with the help of sympathetic longshoremen, a boycott of German products and services at the port of New York. In November 1938, in the aftermath of Kristallnacht, “more than 20,000 persons paid 25 and 40 cents each” to attend “a mass meeting that unified a varied group of organizations,” Jewish and non-Jewish, the “majority of them from the side of the working class,” to “protest Nazi outrages.” The side streets were filled with thousands who listened through loudspeakers. At the podium, representatives of the World Zionist Organization and the Jewish People’s Committee stood shoulder to shoulder with those from the American League for Peace and Democracy, the Transport Workers Union, and the International Labor Defense, among others who called for the end to persecutions. Two years later, in December 1940, after the Nazis had overrun all of western Europe, the Labor Committee and the Congress engineered another ecumenical gathering as Christian and Jewish leaders declared their opposition to both “Nazi terrorism and Soviet aggression.” However, the Communist Jewish People’s Committee would have no part of that pronouncement since the Hitler-Stalin pact was still in effect. In 1942, as rumors of the systematic destruction of European Jewry in the death camps filtered into the city, the Labor Committee, the Congress, and the B’nai B’rith gathered even more solemnly to decry the murderous onslaughts and to hear a message from

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President Roosevelt, who promised that “the American people would hold the perpetrators of these crimes accountable on the day of reckoning.”6 On March, 9, 1943, a week after the Congress packed the Garden for a “Stop Hitler Now” rally that beseeched FDR to rescue Jews remaining in Nazi clutches, the Emergency Committee to Save the Jewish People of Europe took over the arena. There they staged a dramatic, emotional pageant titled “We Will Never Die.” For Revisionist Zionist leader Peter Bergson and his aggressive followers, this event, which was staged twice over successive days to sold-out audiences and with thousands more in the streets, represented the culmination of a yearlong media torrent designed to energize supporters to embarrass the American government into making saving European Jews a priority. Previously, the Emergency Committee had taken out full-page ads in the Times and elsewhere that proclaimed, “at 50$ a piece guaranteed human beings,” pleading with the Allies to ransom Jews. Now, the Committee presented a cantata that Hollywood screenwriter Ben Hecht wrote and Broadway impresarios Moss Hart and Billy Rose directed and produced. In its most evocative moment, child actors dressed as shadowy shrouded figures representing the doomed called out “remember us” to a hushed gathering. After the recitation of the Kaddish, memorializing the dead, attendees filed out silently as if they were leaving a cemetery. After the pageant’s New York opening, it carried its message nationwide to other venues, including the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles.7 The Garden provided a venue too for rallies of a very different sort, designed to send opposing messages to the American government and people. The most disturbing event, from a Jewish point of view, was the GermanAmerican Bund’s February 1939 “Americanism” rally and “Washington’s Birthday celebration.” Through the visual pageantry of uniformed marchers carrying swastikas and the Stars and Stripes together to the podium, these American Nazis projected themselves as patriotic defenders of the United States. A crowd of twenty-two thousand heard group leader Fritz Kuhn recite a list of Jewish leaders who he said controlled America, its media, and its president, all part of the Jewish conspiracy, “the driving force of Communism” in the country.8 As an international political center, Midtown Manhattan was also the site of turning-point moments in the Zionist endeavor to secure international recognition and ultimate guarantees for the establishment of a Jewish state. In

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May 1942, at a low point in the war, the Biltmore Hotel accommodated the Extraordinary Zionist Conference. There six hundred delegates from every American and world Zionist organization — with Wise in the chair and Chaim Weizmann, president of the World Zionist Organization, and David BenGurion, in his role here as chairman of the Executive Committee of the Jewish Agency, eminences in attendance — demanded that “the gates of Palestine be opened.” Three years had passed since the infamous British White Paper of 1939 limited Jewish immigration to Palestine. In anticipation of an Allied victory, which was then far from certain, the gathering proclaimed “that Palestine be established as a Jewish Commonwealth integrated in the structure of the new democratic world.” At that moment, Zionism reached its full maturity as its advocates articulated their movement’s ultimate goal of statehood. Less than a year later, in January 1943, as Allied armies made gains in North Africa, hundreds of delegates from virtually every Jewish organization in the United States descended on New York’s Waldorf Astoria Hotel to attend the American Jewish Conference. There, by an overwhelming vote of 478 – 4, an almost unified American Jewish community agreed to prod its governmental officials and members of the international community to support a Jewish commonwealth in Palestine.9 Through all of these activities to rouse co-religionists and fellow citizens everywhere in the nation to Jewish suffering, the city’s Jews were especially important. They were almost two million strong in number with the closest proximity to the scenes of action. They possessed the potential to fill the Garden, and perhaps to do much more, to prove that American Jews cared about the fate of European Jewry and the destiny of Jewish Palestine. In some cases, extraordinary measures were taken to emphasize how grave the situation was during the Holocaust. In January 1941, two Brooklyn Orthodox rabbis, emissaries of Agudath Israel’s Rescue Committee, known as the Va’ad ha-Hatzala, drove around the wealthier sections of Flatbush on a Saturday to solicit badly needed funds. Their seeming violation of Sabbath strictures was understood correctly as far from a transgression. They were acting appropriately, within the spirit and letter of Jewish law, to save lives in a critical emergency. The sight of these pious Jews in their cars on the holy day made clear how desperate the situation was for their doomed brethren.10 In autumn 1942, a group of students at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, shocked by public confirmation of the death camps and determined

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to do more than just attend Garden rallies, reached out to both synagogue- and churchgoers in the city and beyond. Under the auspices of their own European Committee, they organized, in February 1943, an Inter-Seminary Conference of Christian and Jewish Students. Meeting at the Seminary, these future leaders of many faith communities called on the United States to throw open the nation’s doors to Jewish refugees who had successfully eluded the clutches of Hitler and to create temporary internment camps within the United States. The students’ call for greater activism, published in The Reconstructionist, Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan’s publication, spurred support by the Synagogue Council of America, an organization of rabbis and lay leaders of all Jewish movements. The Council called on some three thousand synagogues and Jewish schools nationwide to use the Sefira period, the weeks between Passover and Shavuot, days historically associated with Jewish tragedy, to observe special memorial days and partial fast periods, to raise additional funds for relief organizations, and to curtail “occasions of amusement” during this time of contemporary tragedy.11 Subsequently, the European Committee called for a rabbinical march on Washington, a move that came to fruition in 1943 when five hundred Orthodox rabbis cried out on the steps of the Capitol. Rabbi Baruch David Weitzmann, who took part in the Orthodox rabbis’ march on Washington, acted on his own to issue a rabbinical ruling to his congregation effectively extending “Sefira-like” restrictions indefinitely. He determined, “because we have to feel the tsa’ar [pain] of the Jews who are being killed in Europe, there can be no festivities, no parties, no music.” This edict even extended to weddings in his community. Throughout the ages, traditional Jews have not held weddings during Sefira. Now similarly in Weitzmann’s shul in Brownsville, Brooklyn, “if someone wanted to get married, they came to [the rabbi’s house]; there was a little chuppah [wedding ceremony], some cake and soda, nothing more; no celebrations, no dancing.” Jewish life in America had to go on; there would be nuptials, but with none of the usual attendant gaiety. The rabbi decreed that “you cannot celebrate when other Jews are dying.”12 On Washington’s Birthday, 1943, the New York Jewish Education Committee conducted a “Children’s Solemn Assembly of Sorrow and Protest.” Some thirty-five hundred preteens, teenagers, their teachers and leaders from community Talmud Torahs, congregational schools, and religious Zionist day schools and youth movements descended on the New York City Center on Fifty-Fifth Street in Manhattan. Through a massive display of both grief and

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anger featuring children crying out about the calamities befalling their fellow Jewish youngsters in occupied Europe, melodramatic scenes, much like the Bergson group was to do in the Garden two weeks later, attempted not only to deepen the students’ and their parents’ awareness of the dimensions of the Holocaust but also to enlist the sympathies of all New Yorkers. The proceedings were broadcast live on WNYC radio, and the next day newspaper readers saw the participants’ anguished faces. This New York protest model was replicated subsequently in Chicago, Boston, Detroit, Philadelphia, Cleveland, Detroit, and Rochester.13 Rabbi Joseph Lookstein of Yorkville’s Kehilath Jeshurun, who presided at this impressive youth gathering, also determined to sensitize his congregants to the fate of European Jewry. In April 1943, at the traditional Yizkor (holiday memorial service) at the conclusion of Passover, he distributed “black ribbons” to his congregants, “who were asked to wear them during the period” of Sefira. Similarly, he called for increased contributions to the United Jewish Appeal — American Jewry’s “Community Chest” — and directed his followers to recite special prayers at “the close of the main meal in every home.” Passover 1943 was a particularly poignant moment because Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto had begun their courageous revolt against their Nazi oppressors. In May 1943, a “special meeting for prayer and intercession” brought more than five hundred Orthodox, Conservative, and Reform rabbis and over a thousand lay participants to his main sanctuary.14 Nonetheless, despite all of activists’ efforts, they failed to enlist consistent widespread support. Even the trumpeted Garden events were occasional, less than a score of nights in seven years (1938 – 45). A key stumbling block to galvanizing continuous community engagement was the unbelievable details and extent of the atrocities. How else to explain, in light of what the Nazis were actually doing, publication of a whimsical mock article in the Yeshiva College student newspaper in February 1942? Commentator writers poked fun at their administration, as they always did on Purim, that joyous feast day that commemorates the saving of Jews from Haman, an ancient evil Persian prime minister. The headline read, “Adolf Hitler Was Once Teacher Here.” The spoof continued with a report that “Professor Hitler was considered quite a man by many members of the faculty who tried to emulate him as best they could.” For “Dr. A Litmus,” it was said, “in many ways Adolf resembles my good

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friend Benny Spinoza,” the seventeenth-century Jewish heretic. A year later, all too many students still ignored the unfolding Holocaust. In March 1943, student leaders publicly deplored those fellow schoolmates whom they critiqued for their “seemingly frightful indifference to the unparalleled plight of their people.” Minimally, said these activists, letters should be written to elected officials calling on them to support rescue efforts.15 Retrospectively, alumni of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America “insist that despite reports most students did not really know about the mass murder until after the war.” During the war, even their own president, Rabbi Louis Finkelstein, it has been said, “probably had not yet internalized the reality of the assault, . . . did not have a clear sense that European Jewry would not be able to reconstitute itself,” and “misunderstood the reasons for the Nazi assault on the Jews, blaming it on Nazi animosity for the monotheistic idea.” Finkelstein “neither responded to direct appeals to participate in protest actions .  .  . nor involved the Seminary in any public activity about the Holocaust.” And this religious leader, his students, and their rank-and-file counterparts at Yeshiva College could be counted among the Jews of New York most deeply committed to their people’s destiny. Moreover, they were living in the American and Jewish media capital.16 But then again, while the New York Times published during World War II some 1,147 stories about the destruction of European Jewry, basically “a story every other day on .  .  . the Holocaust,” it never “presented the story of the persecution and extermination of the Jews in a way that highlighted its importance.” Laurel Leff, who waded through Times articles that appeared during the 2,077 days of the European war, has determined that “what was happening to the Jews was never the lead story even when American troops liberated the Buchenwald and Dachau concentration camps.” Accounts of the “discrimination, the deportation and ultimately the destruction of the Jews” appeared on the front page only twenty-four times and never “back to back . . . or over a span of a few days.” Perhaps, more important, the leaders of this newspaper that was then deemed to be to “U.S. journalism . . . what Harvard is to U.S. education and the House of Morgan has been to U.S. finance” only “intermittently editorialized about the extermination” and rarely highlighted it in the “Week in Review” or magazine sections. In other words, with Holocaust stories “often no more than a couple of paragraphs long” and tucked away “on

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inside pages amid thirty or so other stories,” all but the most acutely aware readers “would not necessarily focus on the stories because they were not presented in a way that told them they should.”17 More than most New York Jews, Seminary and Yeshiva students may have accessed Jewish media reports that placed the Holocaust front and center. From the very start of the war in September 1939, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency fed verified reports and eyewitness testimony that was consistently picked up by Yiddish dailies and not long thereafter by the English-language Jewish press. Still, seemingly for most students, even for those with these terrifying reports in hand, there remained a gap between hearing and reading and believing and acting.18 Meanwhile, theological and political disagreements among New York – based Jewish organizations and leaders who clearly understood the dimensions of the Nazis’ murders stymied unified communitywide efforts. While thousands of schoolchildren, including pupils at Religious Zionist schools, assembled at the City Center, those who attended the Brooklyn yeshivas did not. Their schools’ leaders affiliated with the Va’ad ha-Hinuckh ha-Haredi (Council of Orthodox Jewish Schools) refused to cooperate in an event that included non-Orthodox and nonreligious Jewish schools. The organizers of the gathering harbored their own political prejudices. The Revisionists, whose political affect was always confrontational, were, early on, disinvited from participating, as they were deemed “embarrassing” to the organizers.19 Religious antipathies, likewise, undermined the May 24, 1943, interdenominational prayer meeting at Kehilath Jeshurun. It was the third venue considered by the Synagogue Council and its local supporting organization, the New York Board of Rabbis. Some members and officials at the West Side Institutional Synagogue and the Spanish-Portuguese Synagogue, sites originally considered, chafed at having “non-Orthodox rabbis” such as the Reform Wise or the Conservative Israel Goldstein address the gathering. They “would have preferred to have the convocation a purely Orthodox service.” The Lower East Side – based Agudath ha-Rabbanim, solidly in league with the Agudath Israel, explicitly rejected participation. Just like the Va’ad ha-Hinuch ha-Haredi, an aligned organization, theological scruples prevented them from assenting “to the proclamation of the Sefira days as a period of mourning and to the summoning of a rabbinical convocation” if Reform and Conservative rabbis would be participating and sharing the pulpit with them.20

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While these difficulties contributed much to uncertainty among New York’s Jews about what they should or could do — and how, and with whom, to remonstrate — they knew for sure their obligations as loyal citizens. The United States demanded that they actively participate in the war effort, a commitment they enthusiastically assumed. As patriots, first and foremost, young men in the thousands signed up for the military, and some women joined the WAACs. Many more fellows responded affirmatively to their draft notices. In some families, volunteering created tensions between dedicated boys and their parents, who not only feared for their sons’ safety, as all American mothers and fathers did, but who also had yet to overcome a Jewish historical repugnance to army service. How many of these elders knew of someone, if not themselves, who had fled to America to avoid the terrors of Tsarist conscription? But for this new generation of Jewish men, this was an entirely different army and a very different war. While most non-Jewish soldiers were motivated primarily to defeat the Japanese for their attack on Pearl Harbor, Jews in the barracks wanted to take on Hitler. On the most visceral level, they saw themselves fighting for their people and against Nazism, and doing so as real American men. It was also their opportunity to answer canards that American Jews were slackers during a national crisis. One Yeshiva College student felt precisely this way, disdained the opportunity to garner a divinity student deferment, and enlisted. He did so despite knowing with certainty that his act would distress his widowed mother. Ultimately, however, most parents with lumps in their throats and tears in their eyes accorded these decisions “controlled silence,” even as perhaps they felt pride well up in their hearts.21 For some Jewish men who took up arms, the exigencies of the day trumped politics. One CCNY graduate, who as a left-leaning student in the late 1930s had taken the Oxford Oath, reneged on that pledge to take on a greater enemy than war: Nazism. Though he had a high draft-lottery number and an essential home-front job in the Army Signal Corps, he eventually forsook his potential exemption and was called up. Other, more doctrinaire former students, particularly the anti-Stalinist Trotskyists, who in the prewar years dominated their CCNY alcoves, bristled at these ready transformations. For the budding intellectual Irving Howe, the war was “the literal last convulsions of capitalist interminable warfare. . . . Both sides fight for the retention of their reactionary status quo.” The ideologue wrote these and other words against FDR, Churchill, Hitler, and Stalin for the radical journal Labor Action under the pseudonym

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L. Fahan, while serving as PFC Irving Horenstein, stationed for most of the duration in Alaska.22 Once in the army, Jewish soldiers, not unlike most GIs, received support from their families and communities. Publicists debate whether the owners of Katz’s Delicatessen on the Lower East Side’s Houston Street coined the ditty “send a salami to your boy in the army” when the Katzes’ own three sons were in the service. Another version has it that Louie “the Waiter” Schwartz of the Sixth Avenue Deli came up with the idea. In any event, this ad capitalized on the desire of Jewish folks on the home front to take care of their own. The arrival of such packages also helped their boys cope with culinary difficulties on military posts. Army rations did not include kosher food, and pork was a popular source of daily protein. Eating ham was a cultural taboo even for many young men who were not particularly concerned about the regimens of the kosher laws.23 When Jews on the home front were not focusing on their own husbands, sons, or brothers, they took part enthusiastically in neighborhood war drives. They bought war bonds, gave blood, rolled bandages, collected scrap metals, organized block observances memorializing those who had fallen, and attended first-aid and civilian-defense activities. A rabbi who worked in Brownsville during the war has emotionally recalled that “when the stars started to twinkle in the windows, denoting children in service, and flags bearing the names of servicemen began to appear in the halls of every organization, those left behind (particularly the mothers) could not rest.” They “left their homes to work for victory,” rallying in the community’s streets.24 Several local Jewish organizations used patriotic naming opportunities to fund-raise for America and to demonstrate to people around them how engaged they were in the war effort. In April 1943, five days after Treasury Secretary Henry W. Morgenthau called on all New Yorkers to “start digging down into their pockets” to raise billions for the war-bond drive, a chapter of the American Jewish Congress in the Parkchester section of the Bronx contributed its first $5,000 toward financing “a bomber bearing the name ‘The American Jewish Congress.’ ” In the Syrian Jewish community of Bensonhurst, members of its Magen David congregation demonstrated their loyalty by raising $300,000 to name a two-engine B-25 Mitchell bomber that carried the name “Spirit of Magen David” into battle. Its community organ, the Victory

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Bulletin, proudly exclaimed in October 1943, “This Is the Bomber Your Money Bought.” Their achievement resulted from a yearlong campaign that began on the anniversary of Pearl Harbor in December 1942. Congregants were admonished, “With every American city, every American church and every American synagogue .  .  . planning some sort of observance on that day .  .  . don’t you be the one person in our community who did not have the time to attend a rally during the all-out war.” In 1943, the Yeshiva College Student War Council Committee, cooperating with the Metropolitan Inter-Collegiate War Council, linking students from many local colleges and universities, set off to raise $100,000 for an army ambulance plane to be called “The Spirit of Yeshiva College.” The Committee did not quite meet that goal, but by 1945 it had raised $70,000 and had the satisfaction that it had solicited hundreds of pints of blood from students as part of its “Gallantry in Giving” program.25 Jews also challenged fellow Jewish neighbors to avoid any exploitation of wartime shortages. During Passover of 1943, peak season for kosher meat sales, “150 Bronx kosher poultry retailers” participated in a “selling strike” initiated “to force wholesalers into lower price levels.” On an ongoing basis, butchers showed awareness of wartime needs by collecting cans of fat from their willing customers. Now they closed their stores for three days, and “prospective customers [who] appeared were advised to stay away” to force “wholesalers [to] sell at prices” in accord with the Office of Price Administration (OPA) regulations, which monitored rationing of consumer goods during the war. The members of the poultry dealers organization also picketed the stalls of two operators who refused to cooperate. Eventually, Bert Weiner of Lydig Avenue in the Pelham Parkway section of the Bronx submitted and “reduced his prices and closed shop.” Jack Glicker, who worked a few doors over also on Lydig, “kept open but reduced his prices.”26 The local regional director of the OPA, with the assent of Mayor La Guardia, did his utmost that Passover to provide feasting Jews with as much meat as was legally possible to relieve what was called hyperbolically “a near famine .  .  . said to affect 1,600 of the 4,000 kosher butcher shops in the city.” Not that observant Jews of New York requested special consideration. In the fall of 1942, Rabbi Israel Goldstein, president of the Synagogue Council, made clear that “under present circumstances, . . . when nationally ordered, . . . indispensable and immediately essential Jewish personnel” were permitted to “work on

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holy days in aircraft war production.” To his way of thinking, such laborers resembled Jewish soldiers on the front lines in defense of the country who were excused from — if not commanded to dispense with — Sabbath and holiday work restrictions.27 Among New York’s Jewish neighborhoods, Brooklyn’s Syrian community actively threw its support for its young men and women in uniform and demonstrated unwavering patriotism. Their proud fund-raising for a bomber in Magen David’s name represented one type of mobilization. As a closely knit community, Syrian Jews sought anxiously to keep tabs on their soldiers, exalting in their courage and relieving any homesickness. Under the leadership of a remarkable women’s group, the Girls’ Junior League, the Victory Bulletin was created, and they led efforts to maintain lines of communication with the estimated one thousand of their boys, and some girls, in military service both stateside and overseas. Many of these young women discovered the transforming effect of their activism, perhaps “equal in impact to that of the boys who went off to fight a global war.” These activists broke out of longstanding and passive female roles and assumed leadership positions to a degree previously unseen within this traditional Jewish community.28 The activists did much to galvanize community support for their soldiers. Every issue of the monthly Victory Bulletin contained a “Roll of Honor” of combatants, and subscribers were implored to write to their heroes. Upon receiving the newsletter, service members who were posted far away also read comforting accounts of local communal activities, including street gossip. In August 1942, a Syrian Jewish GI stationed in Fort Jackson, South Carolina, wrote back, “Receiving the Victory Bulletins . . . has really pepped me up quite a bit not only for the news and gossip about our community but because it proves that our community is an American community doing all it can for us.” If he read the bulletin, three months later, in November 1943, soldier Joseph A. Cohen likewise would have been gratified to be informed about Esther Levy, who “decided to make good use of her idle hours” and “organized eight children . . . into a scrap-collecting Junior Commando group.”29 From the Victory Bulletin editorial desk, Girls’ Junior League leaders, speaking to readers in Bensonhurst, reminded them of their ongoing obligations as patriotic Americans to show unquestioning support for the war effort. There was no place among them, as there was no room in the Bronx among

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those Jewish butchers and their customers, for exploiters. “A consumer on the home front who patronizes the black market,” they declared, “is in effect helping the Axis. Any mother, father or friend of a man in uniform, who hoards one can, one suit or one anything (except War Bonds) is in effect stabbing that soldier in the back.” Through all the twists and turns in the priorities and conduct of the war, the Victory Bulletin expressed only total support for FDR and his administration. The president was lauded as “literally the only man in public life in whom the whole nation can confide leadership. Thank your lucky stars that the United States has a Franklin Delano Roosevelt.” When it came to controversial war policies, such as when and where to open a “second front,” an allied invasion from western Europe to complement the Soviet Union’s titanic struggle with the Nazis from the east, the Victory Bulletin instructed its readers to write to Roosevelt and tell him, “I am behind you in your efforts. . . . I am willing to sacrifice and do anything that is asked of me to help win this war.” Similarly, any American who questioned Washington’s war objectives, who, for example, “attempt[ed] to obscure the essential truths of the war” (i.e., total, unconditional victory), was deemed a “pettifogger,” borrowing the White House’s term. So conditioned, in the one article that during the war explicitly discussed the verified reports about the destruction of Jews under Hitler, the Victory Bulletin aimed no criticism at FDR or his subordinates. But it did pillory the Red Cross for its failure to “utilize their financial resources and power to their utmost.” And it called on the Allied nations “to threaten a terrible vengeance should such a crime” — the murder of an estimated four million additional Jews — “be perpetrated.” The Bulletin contended in March 1943, sounding much like the United States’ own war officials, that there was only “one sure way of averting this tragedy and at the same time insuring a speedy victory.” That strategic second front had to be opened. The Victory Bulletin did not call for extraordinary measures to rescue doomed Jews.30 The Syrian community’s unwavering support for the president paralleled the sentiments of most New York Jews. Although Peter Bergson’s group of Palestinian Jewish activists and American supporters relentlessly criticized the administration, they were an outspoken minority. Most American Jewish leaders, beginning with Congress president Stephen S. Wise, trusted FDR, as did many New York Jews. Indeed, a pervasive street tradition of belief, if not love, for Roosevelt flourished among them. When the president died, Wise

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eulogized him as “a beloved and immortal figure” who “felt the misery of the Jewish people in Europe” with “compassion” and with a “resolute will if possible to bring them healing and redress.”31 New York Jews had joined FDR’s bandwagon in the late 1920s, helping to elect him governor of their state. During this decade, American Jews entered the Democratic political column en masse and became loyal members of an emerging urban coalition of minorities that backed candidates who favored social welfare legislation. Many of them saw their politics as congruent with normative, American ways of acting. They continued to support policies championed by neighborhood Socialists for several generations without casting votes for a minority, radical party. Most Jews remained with the Democrats for the rest of the twentieth century. Support for FDR spiked even more after New Deal legislation became a reality. Roosevelt appointed unprecedented numbers of Jews to high administrative offices, further increasing support. Jews commended his courage in choosing financier Bernard Baruch, political adviser Samuel Rosenman, and Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau, among others, especially since their presence provided grist to anti-Semites who charged that “Jew Deal” operatives controlled Washington. By the early 1930s, even many longtime committed Socialists lined up with FDR. Abraham Cahan’s appeal to his comrades to “give up their theories and back Roosevelt’s specific polices” resonated in the streets and at the ballot boxes. And beginning in 1936, those who refused to vote the Tammany party ticket could support Roosevelt on the American Labor Party line. New York labor leaders David Dubinsky and Alex Rose, in consultation with Labor Secretary Frances Perkins, established this so-called Jewish third party to garner moderate leftwing backing for the administration. By the 1944 election, the ALP captured within one heavily Jewish Bronx neighborhood some 40 percent of the vote. The ALP contributed a substantial component of the 90 percent of New York Jewish votes for FDR. Only the most hard-boiled Socialists and doctrinaire Communists, as well as a staunch minority of Republicans, stood apart from this Jewish political alliance with the White House.32 Yet wartime anxieties as both Americans and as Jews did not erase desires to live as normally as possible under the circumstances. These trying concerns — worries about family, fear over what was really happening to Jews in Europe, struggles to cope with consumer deprivations, demonstrations of their loyalty to America, and eagerness to trust the administration — coexisted with

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mundane daily realities. In extraordinary times, New York Jews also lived ordinary lives. Jews of Parkchester displayed a mixed set of priorities, balancing wartime concerns with local community needs. In 1940, before the United States entered the war, some who contributed to Morgenthau’s government loan campaign also endeavored to create a new congregation in this section of the Bronx, the Young Israel of Parkchester. Although there were already at least three synagogues nearby, two that were Orthodox and one Conservative, the Young Israel’s founders felt the need for “a social center in Parkchester in a refined Jewish environment where .  .  . young men and women, boys and girls, and small children too, can find a source of recreation and relaxation as well as spiritual and cultural development.” To make the congregation’s social and religious objectives better known, in September 1940, after five months of “ardent activity,” the group sponsored a “Dutch Supper and Card Party.” To celebrate its first anniversary, in April of that year, organizers held a “Mah Jong and Card Party.” Successful in its initial efforts to gain neighborhood traction, in November 1941, the synagogue acquired its first permanent home on White Plains Road, on the outskirts of a large apartment-house development.33 Less than a month later, when America entered the war, these Parkchester Jews embraced the patriotic mood along with their neighbors. Two days after Pearl Harbor, board members decided to call off their planned New Years Eve Affair at the Hotel Capitol both because of “bad outward appearance of a gala affair in these times of emergency” and as “precaution for air-raid.” They also recognized, “Wardens may be asked to serve that evening and a number of our members are wardens.” Their decision was facilitated by the information that “the Hotel may refund” their deposit and by their acknowledgment that “from a practical side, hardly any tickets ha[d] been sold.” That same New Year’s morning, January 1, 1942, the congregation heeded FDR’s proclamation of a “day of prayer” for the nation. In June 1942, sixteen members volunteered to assist the USO in its “house-to-house-canvass,” ringing bells on every floor of the Parkchester project’s apartment houses, requesting donations. Similarly, the synagogue took part in the United Victory Committee of Parkchester and participated in 1942 in a communitywide United Nations Victory rally at the local public school. Like the Syrians in Brooklyn, these Parkchester Jews did their utmost to keep in contact with their valiant boys and girls in uniform. The War Work Committee wrote personal letters to GIs not only informing them of local gossip but also reporting excitedly about war-bond sales

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achievements. The Committee forwarded election ballots, reminding service members to “take advantage of this privilege.” The young men and women in uniform were constantly asked to write back to their “anxious” community. At war’s end, in 1945, the congregation reviewed its “war effort” and proudly reported that its “first concern [to] help the war effort” had led to selling more than $75,000 in war bonds.34 But notwithstanding these efforts to be part of a patriotic American community, on balance, this religious group focused primarily on building their congregation as “the happiest Jewish community in New York.” When in 1942 the synagogue’s financial secretary contacted members who had “not been attending . . . meetings,” he emphasized the need in Parkchester for “a militant Jewish group.” But for him, militancy meant people “dedicated to [their] faith in a true community spirit.” He specified, “We need a model synagogue, a Talmud Torah, a social center, a club house for the men and a meeting place for the women. Our young boys and girls want dances, handicraft, ping pong, etc.” This local social militancy did not translate into Jewish political involvement. Although the shul’s newsletter spoke of its desire to keep informed of events beyond Parkchester’s border, there was but one terse and statistically inaccurate mention, in December 1945 — six months after V-E Day — of the calamity that had befallen European Jewry. In an article titled “Did You Know That . . . ,” mention was made that “over 1,300,000 Jews fought in the armies of the United Nations. Four million Jews were murdered in Europe during the Nazi siege.” And throughout the war, there was no call for Young Israelites to leave the neighborhood to participate in rescue protests and projects of any sort.35 Comparable sets of concerns about the community’s soldiers, the war front, and the progress of institutional life also characterized a sister congregation on the Lower East Side. At the Young Israel of Manhattan on East Broadway, home of that movement’s first affiliate, the dual page 1 headlines of its January 1942 bulletin announced the congregation’s organizing a “defense unit” and reported on the success of its “30th Anniversary Dinner reunion.” When it came to “sale of bonds and stamps” and first-aid and knitting classes, the bulletin crowed that the “name of ‘Young Israel’ is synonymous with that of ‘Young America’ and it is to the interests of all Americans to ‘keep ’em rolling’ as well as flying.” With religious concerns at heart, the monthly proudly printed two letters from servicemen who were successfully navigating military experience

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while retaining a strict fidelity to Orthodoxy. One navy man wrote back from Charleston, South Carolina, reporting, “Thus far, I haven’t eaten any trefus [unkosher foods] and I haven’t missed a single day of davening [praying] or putting on tefillin [phylacteries], no matter whether I was on a train, a truck, camp, tent or barracks.” He prayed that such remain his fate: “in keeping up with my past orthodox habits.”36 During the war years, the Young Israel’s organ, Viewpoint, reported to its predominantly Bronx, Lower Manhattan, and Brooklyn readers about Nazi atrocities primarily within a column called “Recent News of Jewish Interest.” However, the horrific stories were intermingled among other items of a very different moment. In November 1941, a report about pogroms in Lithuania in which four thousand Jews were killed in Kovno, Vilna, and Shavli was mixed into a long column that spoke also of the relief that New York police were according Sabbath-observing merchants hurt by blue laws. The Viewpoint only rarely headlined the destruction of European Jewry. In October 1942, it deviated from its usual pattern to inform readers, under the headline “Death over Europe,” about the seven hundred thousand Jews starved to death in Warsaw. It detailed as well the doomed who were marched off to their deaths in the Belzec death camp. Perhaps the editors surmised that their readership was current about the ongoing devastation from the Yiddish press’s stories and from other Jewish media.37 In June 1943, the president of the National Council of Young Israel, J. David Delman, submitted a thirty-two-page annual report to delegates at their convention at the Pine View Hotel in Fallsburg, New York. The lead item, the group’s “war effort,” occupied a full eleven pages of his activity summary. Delman particularly enthused over two soldiers and one sailor who had written to him about conducting services for their fellow Jewish comrades. The Young Israel president had far less to say about and was decidedly downbeat in discussing organizational support for “emergency committees like the Vaad Hahatzalah [sic] to movements for the building of Eretz Yisroel, and particularly to two recently-organized communal endeavors, .  .  . the Vaad L’Pekuach Nefesh, and the American Jewish Conference.” This Vaad Pekuach Nefesh, he explained, was an Orthodox group dedicated to “rendering all possible financial and diplomatic aid on behalf of thousands of Jews in Germany and in German-occupied countries who have not yet succumbed to the fate of the more than two million Jews who have been cruelly slaughtered.”

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These remarks were subsumed, however, within a long paragraph item titled “Young Israel in Its Relationship to the Jewish Community.” The group’s rescue activities mostly entailed “preparing certain memoranda to be presented to officers of the State Department and to members of the House of Representatives and the Senate.” While Delman promised, “Our attempts at rescue will not cease until something definite materializes,” he acknowledged with frustration, “The trend of events in the war has made action along these lines extremely difficult. We have seen . . . how ineffectual many of our petitions have been.”38 Delman did not mention the Council’s motivating its members, most of whom were New Yorkers, to turn out en masse for Wise’s or Bergson’s protest meetings. In fact, only once, in February 1943, did the Viewpoint even note that one such rally was in the offing. Then among its “Council Jottings” feature, it observed that “ ‘action not pity’ is the slogan of the committee” — most likely the Bergson group — “sponsoring a rally at Madison Square Garden. . . . The purpose is to further the campaign for a Jewish army.”39 If anything, Delman had his own personal problems with the tenor of street demonstrations, even with the 1943 Orthodox rabbis’ march on Washington. Subsequent to this emotional outpouring by leaders whose religious authority he revered, Delman wrote in his monthly “President’s Column,” “It is true that many of our greatest Orthodox rabbis participated, . . . but yet we feel that in a great measure this incident is yet another sign of chaos in Jewish community life in this country.” He noted, “The rabbinical group, acting independently, decided upon this march [after] three different delegations [had] already been to Washington and [had] spoken to our highest authorities.” And although “when so many lives are at stake, no stone should be left unturned in the attempt at rescue,” still, he said, “we honestly feel . . . that the method chosen in this instance was not the proper or dignified one.” As he saw it, “Washington has enough turmoil at the moment without the confusion caused by a mass march on the White House.” He felt “certain that President Roosevelt and Vice-President Wallace would have received a delegation of five or six rabbis, . . . even if they were not backed by 500 or a thousand additional rabbis on the spot.” Delman “prefer[red] that the world understand” that in their demands, they were “not represented by individuals or individual groups who act at will.”40

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The ambiguities of communal life — the mixed priorities of commitment to weighty Jewish rescue concerns and addressing the realities of an American war while attempting to maintain institutional equilibrium — appeared as well at Congregation Kehilath Jeshurun. There, as noted, on Passover 1943, Joseph Lookstein impassionedly summoned his congregants to wear black arm bands and to pray daily for the salvation of European Jewry. It is not known how many men and women in the pews heeded his call. Nor do we know if any of those so deeply moved turned out for major city-based rallies. Congregational organs did not tell them to mark their calendars and show up. However, there is one indication that his message did not sink into the hearts of many of those who heard him. Two years after his outcry, Lookstein publicly upbraided his flock for its tardiness in responding to his Passover 1945 appeal on behalf of the Va’ad ha-Hatzala, “the one organization that is effecting the rescue through heroic underground methods.” He was deeply chagrined that his call was “very disappointing in its results”: “Only $1,400 have been raised out of the badly needed $5,000.” The rabbi minced no words when he observed, “Delay at a time like this is hazardous. Neglect is sinful.”41 What is certain about life at Kehilath Jeshurun during the war is that its rabbi’s pleas and reminders of Jewish exigencies did not cast a mournful pall on synagogue life. Its for-men-only “Annual Smoker” of January 1944 went off as scheduled. The assembled enjoyed “smokes, drinks, refreshments” and heard “a three man team” of “famous radio funsters.” The next night, couples attended “a sellout” theater party at the Alvin Theatre on Broadway. Such events, not to mention the congregation’s annual dinner and Purim and Chanukah parties, followed emphases its synagogue president articulated back in 1941. As the congregation made plans to celebrate its seventieth anniversary, Max J. Etra asserted, “Our common prayer should be that neither personal sorrow nor universal hardship may mar our proposed celebration and that it may be observed amidst a world enjoying the blessings of peace.”42 Although the Agudath ha-Rabbanim never accused its followers of complacency, in February 1945, weeks before Lookstein unburdened himself, it requested of the faithful to seriously contemplate how well they were performing as “their near and dear ones fell victims in the gas chambers through the brutality of the enemy.” In declaring Wednesday, March 14th, “as a Fast day for Jewry throughout the world,” the sponsoring body of the Va’ad ha-Hatzala

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called on Jews, “Gather in our places of worship to meditate and to search our hearts and souls” to ascertain “whether we have fulfilled the great responsibility to our unfortunate brethren.” Specifically, the rabbis asked, “Did [we do] enough to save those who pleaded to us? . . . Did we give maximum support to organizations such as their Emergency Committee?” Beyond “seek[ing] our God and implor[ing] his forgiveness,” the “Rabbinate call[ed] upon all members of the Jewish race to give the traditional ‘Tithe’ or ten percent of their income . . . for work of rescue, relief and rehabilitation.”43 During World War II, Sylvia and Jack Goldberg harbored no strong Jewish organizational ties. Perhaps the story of what concerned them and how they coped, more than the saga of activists and of those with conflicting communal priorities, ultimately exemplified the quintessential New York Jewish homefront narrative. Residing on the outskirts of Parkchester, their local religious involvement consisted of Jack’s accompanying his wife’s stepfather on the High Holidays to one of the older Orthodox synagogues in the neighborhood. In thinking about those days more than half a century later, Sylvia insisted, “We had absolutely no idea [about the Holocaust]. The press did not write about it and we read the papers every day.” Nor were they aware of Wise’s or of Bergson’s public efforts. Their issue during the war was not even the war effort, although they surely were patriotic. Rather, they wanted Sylvia to live a normal life raising their infant child, Linda May, while Jack, drafted in 1943, served in England and then in France and Germany with the Third Army. He did not see his daughter until he was discharged in 1945.44 Fortunately, Sylvia lived with her doting mother. More important, she participated in an informal support circle of eight Jewish couples from the neighborhood who helped each other out. In addition to keeping daily tabs on each other while three of the husbands were in the service, they met, as they had done before the war, on a monthly basis at each other’s homes. Their friendship had blossomed in the 1930s on the handball courts of the Castle Hill Pool, a blue-collar Jewish swim and sports club. Many of the men and women had competed there against one of the greatest star Jewish athletes of the time, “Hammerin” Hank Greenberg, the future Hall of Famer first baseman for the Detroit Tigers. Jackie Goldberg, who also was a fine athlete, alleged, years later, that Greenberg was a “bit of a klutz” (uncoordinated player) when he was still a Bronx boy. Yet they, like most American Jews, were proud

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that Greenberg, a guy from the neighborhood, had stood up strongly for his faith, when he absented himself from an important game in the 1934 pennant race because the matchup against the New York Yankees took place on Yom Kippur. (Thirty-one years later, in 1965, another transplanted New York Jewish athlete — this time a fellow from Brooklyn named Sandy Koufax — sat out the first game of the World Series because it took place, likewise, on the holiest day of the Jewish year, to the acclaim of both Jews and Gentiles alike. But then again, the L.A. Dodger hurler played during an era of much greater tolerance toward Jews and their holidays than did Greenberg.)45 Beyond the home gatherings, the Castle Hill Pool couples occasionally repaired to the Catskills for a weekend of rest and recreation. It helped them to cope with their daily cares and floating anxieties about their loved ones at war. They obtained a group discount by calling themselves “The Sylvia Goldberg Association,” since she made the reservations. Sylvia paid her bill because she lived rent-free in her parents’ apartment and received an army family stipend. Sylvia recalled that despite wartime shortages, “times were not bad, . . . much better than the Depression.” Then she had been the prime breadwinner, working as an office manager in a textile firm, while Jack struggled from “job to job” before finally securing a forty-dollar-a-week position in the post office. Comfortable in this upstate bucolic Jewish space, as they ate to their hearts’ content from a Borscht Belt menu, they put their cares behind them. At least temporarily, they did not worry about the fate of their loved ones in uniform. One of the Goldbergs’ friends was fully conscious of how they had found personal normalcy during these extenuating times. She took as a souvenir a dinner menu from the hotel that listed a mélange of Jewish delicacies and wrote a comment that found its way into a family picture album. It read, “Would you believe this is war time?” After the war, activists in New York focused on achieving Zionist demands articulated at the Biltmore and American Jewish Conferences for the establishment of an independent Jewish commonwealth in Palestine. The first priority was to secure and sustain the American public’s and its governmental officials’ support for the cause. The American Zionist Emergency Council, energized after the American Jewish Conference and headquartered within the nation’s media capital, took the lead in highlighting Palestinian Jewish aspirations, denigrating British opposition and linking these issues to the now

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commonly recognized dimensions of the horrors that had befallen European Jewry. From this metropolitan base, the Council reached out and organized hundreds of local emergency groups all over the country. It enlisted sympathetic Christian groups and together advocated with national and local political parties for resolutions calling for Jewish statehood. It also squelched any oppositional voices among American Jews. Though the Council had some internal ideological and tactical disputes, it integrated both the American wing of the Jewish Agency and the Bergsonite Revisionist Zionists. One barometer of their successful propaganda was that from 1945 to 1948, “twice as many — and later three times as many — Americans sympathized with the Jews as with the Arabs.”46 As Palestine convulsed with violence, with the British mandate unraveling and Jewish and Arab forces battling for territorial control against each other and against the British, American activists sought to arm Zionist fighters with funds and weapons. The wealth of the city’s Jewish population and its location as the foremost East Coast port made it the prime venue for fund-raising and surreptitious paramilitary operations. Far less unity of purpose and conduct existed in this work because militant groups often skirted American laws. American friends of the Haganah found ways to ship weapons and materiel to troops loyal to the Jewish Agency and future prime minister Ben-Gurion. U.S. backers of the Irgun, the Revisionist Zionist strike forces, did their utmost to support these irregulars loyal to Menachem Begin. Both groups canvassed Jewish neighborhoods to solicit funds. The Revisionists used a “Fighting Zion” sound truck to belt out their message, and when the sound died down, they appealed to passersby to drop their dollars and cents into their charity baskets. These activists also took their message to the Catskills Jewish hotel region to induce those on vacation to donate their monies to the cause. A particularly striking event was a third Passover seder held in April 1948 at Manhattan’s Paramount Restaurant, where for fifteen dollars those interested could participate in a “freedom seder.”47 In 1946, Haganah operatives fashioned an “Institute” that held weekly briefings on developments in the Middle East for New York Jewish businessmen, first at the Hotel Astor and then at the McAlpin Hotel. The waiters who set up the buffets before retiring thought these gatherings little more than standard men-only luncheons where entrepreneurs could make their deals “with-

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out the distractions of their wives, relaxing among men they could feel were their equals.” In fact, after receiving their insider updates, participants were not only asked to contribute their own monies but also were cajoled to become fund-raising leaders in their fields. The Institute recruited “key men in industries previously untapped, dairy products, radio, sewing machines, advertising.” Those who desired to do more “arranged bank credit, office and warehouse space, meetings with ship brokers, .  .  . or they transferred funds through their own accounts.” In direct competition with Bergson’s American League for a Free Palestine, the Institute also established its own Americans for Haganah. This advocacy group “rounded up celebrities and held its own mass meetings.”48 In providing Jewish fighters with weaponry desperately needed to hold off their enemies, both American Haganah and Irgun supporters violated the U.S. embargo. They manufactured or purchased all sorts of military materiel from former War Assets Administration stockpiles and then smuggled arms to the Middle East. The road to Haifa began at the docks and warehouses of New York, with its 771 miles of water frontage and two hundred piers. To ease their way through this maze of laboring humanity, each of the pro-Palestinian groups formed alliances with longshoremen and their bosses. Both payoffs and appeals to Irish dockworkers, who harbored their own anti-British feelings, brought results.49 Eager for support irrespective of its sources, Revisionists welcomed the help of some unconventional contributors to their efforts. At one point in their campaign, the Manhattan office of the American League was surprised and pleased to receive a check for $25,000 from crime boss Meyer Lansky. (There is also a story that Ben “Bugsy” Siegel, Lansky’s colleague in crime, once volunteered to “bump off ” Ernest Bevin — an opponent of the Zionist cause — when the British foreign minister visited the United States in 1947. The Jewish Agency quickly dispatched the young Conservative rabbi, and future major American Jewish religious thinker, Arthur Hertzberg to Los Angeles to talk Siegel down.) Reportedly, when Lansky turned philanthropic, it was not the first time the New York – born mobster showed some strong Jewish colors. In the 1930s, elements of Murder Inc., Lansky’s so-called commandos, had broken up German-American Bund rallies in Yorkville in Manhattan, Ridgewood in Queens, and Staten Island and extended their fight to Hoboken

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and Bergen County, New Jersey. To Lansky’s great chagrin, he later recounted that he received no credit from respectable Jewish leaders for his stand. “They wanted the Nazis taken care of but were afraid to do the job themselves. I did it for them. And when it was over they called me a gangster. No one ever called me a gangster until Rabbi [Stephen S.] Wise and the Jewish leaders called me.”50 Now more than ever before, rank-and-file New York Jews unabashedly identified with their people’s heroic aspirations. Formal affiliation with the Zionist movement peaked between 1945 and 1948. Local Jews could be accounted as a major component among the more than seven hundred thousand who enrolled in Zionist organizations in America, compared to less than four hundred thousand at the end of the war and well under one hundred thousand before 1941. For many new members, “interest in Zionism [took] on a greater sense of urgency during those years.” It offered partial consolation for what Jews had lost during the Holocaust. It answered the frustrating problem of the hundreds of thousands of displaced persons still adrift and suffering in Europe. America’s gates remained largely closed to survivors and refugees. These mixed emotions of trauma and triumph, tragic memories and immediate concerns, swirled around the reported twenty thousand ticket holders who on May 16, 1948, packed Madison Square Garden and the fiftyfive thousand others who stood out in the rain during New York’s inaugural “Salute to Israel” rally. They were moved beyond words when they heard the Hatikvah, the Israeli national anthem, sung; they responded with a heartfelt “Amen” to the traditional Jewish blessing of thanksgiving to God for having “kept us alive and having brought us to this day.” They also rejoiced in proclamations of support for Israel that emanated from a range of government officials who called for an end to the arms embargo to help Israel survive and for the quick admittance of the Jewish state to the United Nations. They left the Garden that night understanding, as more than one Jewish leader emphasized, that they had witnessed “the culmination of 2,000 years of exile and anguish for the Jewish people.”51 While these cathartic crescendos energized many within New York’s Jewish community, the early postwar years were also, on a mundane level, a time for personal readjustment and planning. Like millions of their fellow Americans, a generation of Jews who had been veterans of Depression and war began a

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quest for stability in their lives for themselves and their future children. They sought a place in the sun within a changing and expanding U.S. economy and society. Often that meant migration to new suburban locales. But to do so required their leaving the world and culture of the metropolis behind them. This decision proved to be quite challenging.

“For the First Time in Queens . . . at Fashionable Forest Hills . . . Elegance Comes of Age,” real estate ad for Parker Towers. (New York Times, April 12, 1959)

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Élan of a Jewish City

Jewish GI Eddie Zwern grew up on the Grand Concourse, but World War II found him stationed briefly in California en route to the Pacific theater. Zwern discovered a new land of promise in a sun-bathed milieu far removed from the harsh New York winters of his youth. He vowed to return should he survive military service. Upon discharge, true to his word, he hustled back to the Golden State. His wife, Pauline, soon followed, and quickly they became boosters of life in Los Angeles, a city bursting with economic opportunities for ambitious entrepreneurs. Although the couple initially settled in a modest furnished apartment, they also knew that Eddie could take advantage of the benefits of the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944, which assisted former soldiers to purchase homes. Six months after making his move, Eddie reappeared on the old Bronx streets to settle up with his former landlord. Proud of his risky decision, he talked up the bounties of a new and better life three thousand miles away. The young couple’s word-of-mouth up and down Fordham Road sparked a chain migration. When relatives subsequently came “out to visit, next thing you know, they’re making plans. You’d come out in January, and you’d leave snow-filled streets of New York.” Eddie and Pauline proudly claimed that they enticed more than 250 fellow Jews to L.A. Still, it took a measure of boldness to strike out for this new locale. Migrants were bidding farewell to their comfortable Jewish neighborhoods. To mitigate homesickness, some of these erstwhile New Yorkers, acting in classic migrant fashion, created social societies to ease adjustment to the foreign culture around them. Los Angeles may have been part of the United States, but it felt strange and different. So CCNY and public high school alumni associations sprung

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up in Los Angeles and also in Miami, the other popular Sunbelt destination for Jews. Eventually, the Amerks, Dolph Schayes’s old group, reassembled in Florida and retold tales of the Bronx, even if their most famous member chose to live out his life in snowy Syracuse, New York. Dolph and Naomi Schayes would reconnect with his friends on their trips down south.1 Tastes and smells of the old neighborhood also nurtured connections among displaced New York migrants. In L.A., the owners of Lax’s Delicatessen on Hollywood Boulevard and Joseph’s Delicatessen in western Hollywood knew that there was something distinctive about the Jewish delicatessen that those from back east still relished. Catering to their customers’ wishes and memories, they advertised their restaurants as featuring “choice Eastern delicacies.” Longtime Angelinos also flocked to this New York contribution to local culinary diversity. Eating in the deli became a ritual: “Jews could celebrate being at the forefront of popular culture and yet also eat the foods they loved from childhood.”2 However, on balance, most Jews chose suburbia, a more modest move within commuting distance to the city and not far from their parents’ urban neighborhoods. The suburbs of Nassau and Suffolk Counties on Long Island and Westchester County north of the city, characterized in 1959 as “bedroom boroughs,” beckoned New York Jews: 329,000 Jews settled in Nassau County, more than a quarter of its population. Levittown, situated just twenty-five miles east of Manhattan, was the best-known community. With government assistance, through the GI Bill or with a Federal Housing Authority loan, young couples purchased a Cape Cod – style house for $7,900 or a ranch for $9,500 in “the largest housing development ever put up by a single builder.”3 Across the Hudson River in New Jersey within Bergen County, Jews found new homes in townships such as Englewood, Fair Lawn, Teaneck, and Fort Lee. One local rabbi discussed why Jews moved to his community in Fair Lawn — though he was unquestionably speaking for other places as well — explaining that those “who take up residence in the suburbs . . . were seeking a more wholesome environment for their children.” Many had “chosen to move to a suburban community primarily because friends and relatives, who preceded them, recommended suburban living” — another instance of chain migration.4 For a few suburban-seeking Jews, the welcome wagon stopped short when they approached the Westchester community of Bronxville. In a distant replay of the 1920s era of residential anti-Semitism, local residents perpetuated

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into the early 1960s a social covenant that dated back generations to keep their town free of those who “may have different views on religion.” Jews were “unwelcome, except as visitors or customers.” But where most New York Jews sought to sink their roots, they were quietly tolerated.5 Acceptance, however, posed new social threats to Jewish suburbanites. Although many New York Jews established strong, informal relationships with each other within these suburban developments, they did not congregate, as they once had, in tightly knit Jewish neighborhoods. Their worlds were no longer totally Jewish, particularly since they now perceived their non-Jewish neighbors as friends and not as enemies. They wondered how they could still express to their children, in an agreeable way, a sense of Jewish difference from those with whom they lived. One 1950s parent, writing from his home in a village in mid-Westchester, articulated his family dilemmas: “Somehow,” he wrote, “we do not worry so much in the city about the problem of children’s identifying themselves with the Jewish community.” Thinking back on his own youth in the city, he continued, “On the street, in the school, among their friends — and even in the home — they found out who they are and what it means.” But “when your street, counting both sides, has twenty houses, twenty families and only one other than your own child is Jewish, you wonder and worry.”6 Such apprehensions, fear of loss of Jewish street ties and connections, caused tens of thousands of other New York Jews, no less able economically to make the break to suburbia, to think twice about migration. They ultimately stayed within the city’s limits, but they moved to new neighborhoods. As a perceptive Jewish social scientist explained, even if in “the mass-produced Levittown-type suburbs . . . their neighbors were still close by, . . . on the other hand, there were no hallways, or lobbies, as in apartment houses, for chance meetings, no elevators for quick exchanges of gossip and news, no corner luncheonettes for ready sociability,” in short, “no street life to speak of.” Jews, who still “look[ed] for urban virtues” and suffered “a real deprivation . . . of the Jewish urban scene,” considered the elegant and convenient sections of Queens, sometimes referred to by real estate promoters as “suburbs,” as an ideal destination. Between 1940 and 1950, Queens’ Jewish population jumped from 115,000 to 223,000. In the succeeding seven years, 1950 – 57, it almost doubled again. By that decade’s end, 100,000 more Jews lived in Queens than in Manhattan. As of 1950, in some neighborhoods, such as Rego Park and newer sections of Forest Hills, Jews

Map of New York City showing the population distribution of Jews. (From C. Morris Horowitz and Lawrence J. Kaplan, The Jewish Population of the New York Area, 1900 – 1975 [New York: Federation of Jewish Philanthropies, 1959]; reproduced with permission from United Jewish Appeal – Federation of Jewish Philanthropies of New York, Inc.)

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constituted more than 40 percent of the total residents. Seven years later, Jewish density increased: two out of three residents were Jews. Meanwhile, by the end of the 1950s, similar proportions of Jewish residents characterized Bayside, Whitestone, and Hillcrest, as well as within Douglaston, Little Neck, and Bellerose, situated on the very end of the city line.7 Reminiscent of the earlier interwar period, real estate operators, many of them Jews, played a crucial role in building these new urban landscapes. Queens Boulevard joined “the great boulevards of Brooklyn [and] the Bronx” as “essentially ‘Jewish’ avenues, built by Jewish developers for a Jewish clientele.” As early as 1942, the New York Times reported on “suburban apartments which provide open-air balconies or terraces .  .  . and garage spaces for tenants’ automobiles,” not only on Long Island but within Queens. Owners Herbert Kronish and Harold V. Kalikow took particular pride in the “Normandy” on Queens Boulevard, Forest Hills, “near the Continental Avenue [subway] station.” This six-story structure, for 130 families, boasted beyond the balconies and parking spots, “suites . . . in size from two to five and a half rooms” with the “land around the building .  .  . beautified with gardens and lawns.” Concomitantly, work was almost complete at Flushing’s Murray Hill Terrace Apartments, “built about a central garden court below which will be a tenant garage, being constructed for use as an air raid shelter.”8 In 1947, builder Max Levine boasted that his Parkmore Realty Corporation set a “postwar record” in completing a six-story elevator apartment house in only four months. Financed in part from sale of his DeWitt Homes in the Bronx, Levine and his associates constructed the Rhoda House (probably named for his wife) on Booth Street in Forest Hills. Each of the fortytwo apartments was outfitted with “new postwar household appliances, such as refrigerators and modern kitchen ranges.” Builders lured well-heeled migrants to Queens with residential improvements comparable to “luxury-type apartments on Park Avenue” without paying Manhattan prices. In 1948, Sam Minskoff and Sons conceived of just this type of attractive option for some two hundred families at their Park Crest Terrace, a “multi-family development” at Booth Avenue, in Forest Hills. Close by, the developers of the Parker Towers on Yellowstone Boulevard pitched their enterprise in the mid-1950s as offering “many improvements used in luxury type apartments on Park Avenue” and other elite neighborhoods in Manhattan, but with only a brief subway ride “to the office, the Fifth Avenue shops, the theatre.” When the development was

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completed in 1962, they described their “three luxurious 21 story skyscrapers” as “an entire suburb within a suburb” but without the hassle of commuting. Sagaciously, they capitalized on the prime flaw of suburban life, the daily trek of breadwinners to work in the city. Parker Towers, located just “16 minutes from midtown,” evoked “the distinguished tradition of East End Avenue, Sutton Place, Beekman Place,” highly coveted addresses in Manhattan. It advertised “78% of the land given over to landscaped private grounds, malls, fountains!” — accoutrements reminiscent of locales outside of the metropolis. All apartments possessed “unobstructed views, . . . covered balcony terraces, . . . Westinghouse air conditioning,” and “uniformed doormen.”9 Residents “marked their upward passage by moving from elevator buildings to so-called ‘luxury apartments.’ ”10 Each item — balconies, views, air-conditioning, and uniformed doormen — signaled status within reach of middle-class Jews, much as elevators, windows in every room, light, and air promised modern American living for aspiring immigrants and their children in the 1920s. If Jewish builder Jack Parker sought to attract the most affluent customers to his sections of Forest Hills, the Muss family built on their Jewish family tradition, dating to the 1920s, of constructing small, affordable homes in other sections of Queens for working- and lower-middle-class people. In the years before the Depression, immigrant Isaac Muss and his sons Charles, Alex, and David had constructed Independence Homes in Bayside, a community of approximately fifteen hundred six-room, three-bedroom houses. After falling on hard times in the 1930s, the family reentered the industry in 1947 with one hundred modest two-family homes in Bayside. Two years later, they put an additional four-hundred single-family units on the market in Whitestone and College Point, Queens. Looking to suburbia simultaneously, in 1952 they opened a 360-unit garden-apartment complex in White Plains.11 A decade later, in the early 1960s, the LeFrak family built extensive construction projects in Rego Park for, as advertised, “the masses not the classes.” They, too, drew on a heritage dating to the early years of the century, when immigrant father, Aaron, and his son, Harry, focused on housing for working-class Jews, first on the Lower East Side and then in Brooklyn. Their most ambitious early effort was the construction of “small houses and walkup apartment buildings” on De Kalb Avenue in Brooklyn. After the war, the family, now headed by Harry and his son Samuel, shifted their attention to Queens, starting off in 1951 with a 136-family complex named the Colorado,

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on Yellowstone Boulevard. With the rise of LeFrak City — construction began in 1960 and concluded by decade’s end — the family acquired a reputation of “giving the people what they wanted, at a price that they could afford to pay.” Monthly rents of “$40 a room or $120 for a one-bedroom apartment” provided tenants with “total facilities for total living,” which included shopping, tennis, and swimming, amenities reminiscent of suburban locales.12 While the growth of Queens did not halt a Jewish march to suburbia, by the early 1960s, the city’s dynamism and the borough’s attractions and convenience to work actually lured back some families who had tried suburban living. In 1962, a group of families, who had once lived in inner-city apartments, rattled off for a reporter why they “had given up their own homes” in places like North Plainview or Oceanside or Bethpage on Long Island “to move into six-story apartment houses” in Queens. They spoke of “convenience, more relaxation, transportation problems, inadequate facilities for teenagers and loneliness.” The Rabinowitzes explained, “Suburbia was fine while our children were growing up, it turned to a nightmare when they reached their teens. There just wasn’t any place for them to go unless they had their own cars.” The Joel family, late of Bethpage, said it was their sense of loss of the best of city life that had moved them “back home.” They complained that for eleven years they “had to forego attending the theatre” in Manhattan.13 Nonetheless, the neighborhood culture of Jewish Queens, characterized in 1955 as a “midway point” between “the Big City and suburbia,” was still not the Bronx or Brooklyn. Jewish identification did not radiate as naturally from these streets. In a section such as Hillcrest, Jews, mostly business people, “manufacturers and wholesalers, .  .  . a number of lawyers, physicians,” lived in suburban-like homes, “neat rows, each exactly the same distance from the sidewalk, with little space between, looking very much alike,” but “only a five minute ride to the last station on the Independent Subway” line. For many families who “came from Brooklyn and the Bronx” with concerns about group persistence, “settling .  .  . involved a new adventure in Jewishness, expressing itself in formal affiliation, for the first time in their lives, with a Jewish community institution.” Like those in suburbia, Hillcrest Jews lived in a tolerant environment, where they watched a strengthening of social ties between their children and their Christian friends. Anxiety that “the kids marry properly” (i.e., with other Jews) lurked in the back of many parents’ minds. Concerned adults trusted in a burgeoning Hillcrest Jewish Center to entertain

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their children. They hoped that rather than congregating with a mixed crowd “at the neighborhood movies or ice-cream parlor, hanging out on the corner or even in the basement playrooms of one another’s homes,” Jewish boys and girls would gravitate to the Center. Borrowing a page from Mordecai Kaplan’s book, Rabbi Israel Moshowitz strategized, “If we can get the young people here for one reason, the dances and the sports, they’ll start coming for religious reasons as well.” A sympathetic reporter thought in 1955 that his game plan was gaining traction. “On Friday nights and Saturday mornings,” the rabbi noted proudly, “several hundred persons usually are present. At these times, the services include Bar and Bas Mitzvahs, of which there are almost always three or four.” He carefully avoided activities in the sanctuary or elsewhere on the premises that smacked in any way of “the store cheders of the Bronx and Brooklyn,” venues that so many congregants had stayed away from as youths.14 Increased synagogue affiliation, growing out of a search for sustained group conviviality, also characterized postwar experiences of Jews in Forest Hills, although many of these residents experienced the intimate ambiences of apartment-house life. That neighborhood’s foremost touchstone institution, the Forest Hills Jewish Center, dated to the 1920s, when Jews, then a small minority, kept a low social profile. The Center’s heyday began right after World War II, with the emergence of Forest Hills as a distinctively Jewish area. Still, a residue of “unfriendly and biased attitude[s]” endured among non-Jewish neighbors. In response, Rabbi Ben Zion Bokser expanded the Center, between 1949 and 1952, to include a commodious sanctuary, an auditorium for social activities, and a youth center. Some thirty social clubs and basketball, swimming, and boxing leagues attracted almost seven hundred children to its Hebrew school, with many bar and bat mitzvahs every week.15 While Conservative congregations relied on a synagogue-center model to reach youth, Orthodox Jews in Queens addressed identity issues less through their synagogues than through an emphasis on modern day schools. These differed from the elementary yeshivas and day schools of the interwar period. In 1937, the day school movement moved beyond its core constituency of parents committed to Jewish identification and largely bound to traditional religious observance. With the opening in Manhattan’s Yorkville section of the Ramaz School, concerted efforts recruited youngsters from families that were not particularly concerned with rigorous ritual performance. Ramaz convinced them of the value of daily separatism, which was explicit in attending even the most

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upscale Jewish parochial school. One of the impressions that had to be overcome was that notwithstanding the bounties of Jewish knowledge and identification offered, in the end such institutions left their charges socially and culturally disadvantaged.16 Four years later, the Yeshiva of Central Queens brought this type of Jewish education to Queens. Samuel Spar recruited six youngsters from observant families, starting with his son, to a fledgling school situated at Rabbi Solomon Gordon’s Talmud Torah Mishkan Israel synagogue. The school offered a modern religious Zionist orientation similar to that of Shulamith School or Flatbush Yeshivah of Brooklyn. The school grew slowly, and by 1948, when it acquired its own building on 150th Street in Jamaica, it had seven grade levels. Initially, the yeshiva relied to a great extent on the enrollment of children of Orthodox refugees from Hitlerism or survivors of the Holocaust who had settled in Queens. Soon they were joined by pupils from “non-Orthodox” homes or from families that were once quite observant but were no longer so inclined. In 1954, principal Rabbi Bernard (Baruch) Charny told a Jewish magazine correspondent, who happened to be a school parent, that “most of the children in his institution came from homes of young parents, between thirty and forty, who are not particularly religious or observant.” Charny also publicly allowed that the “majority of students” hailed not from Orthodox but “from Conservative congregations.” The Jewish religious diversity at the Yeshiva of Central Queens spurred the founding in 1953 of the Yeshiva Dov Revel in Forest Hills, which attracted a larger percentage of its pupils from observant Orthodox homes. Four years later, “with classes from the nursery through the eighth grade,” Dov Revel enrolled some 450 students, who came “from all types of neighborhoods in Queens.”17 The religious heterogeneity created tensions within the Yeshiva of Central Queens. The school day opened with recitation of morning prayers from the siddur, the Orthodox prayer book; grace was recited after meals; boys wore yarmulkes and tsisith. However, Conservative families objected strenuously when in the late 1950s the school administration “introduced segregation of the sexes . . . not only in the class room, but also in the dining room and playground.” Temporarily, “the resistance of the parents was so great” that it led to the abandoning “of the policy of segregation in the school.” Ultimately, those who “desire[d] a more liberal approach to Jewish education” determined that they had to have a school of their own. Guided by Rabbi Bokser of the Forest

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Hills Jewish Center, whose son had been a student in Central Queens, they established the Solomon Schechter Day School of Queens in 1957, “under the sponsorship of nine Conservative congregations in the area.”18 Bokser sought to provide his movement with “an important reservoir of intensively educated men and women who will become the informed Jewish lay leaders, the teachers, the rabbis and scholars of the future.” He reaffirmed that the “strength of Conservative Judaism has been the Synagogue Center,” and he asserted, “The afternoon religious school will remain our basic educational agency for the great majority of children.” But he placed his ultimate faith — just like the Orthodox — in “the development of the vital field of Jewish education which the day school represents.” Subsequently, Conservative day schools all over the country turned to this New York Jewish educational initiative as a model.19 As postwar migrants to Queens adjusted to new conditions and identity concerns, the textures of Jewish life did not change in the Bronx. These Jews saw no reason to leave their neighborhoods. It is true that some of the neighborhoods were getting older and were somewhat run-down, but memoirists reflected warmly on continuities in lifestyle and street culture. For Ruth Glazer, who in 1949 was doing research and editorial work for the Amalgamated Clothing Workers Union, there was “more life, vigor and excitement in one single Bronx apartment house at six o’clock in the evening than in a thousand elm-lined Main Streets on a Fourth of July.” She described the West Bronx as a “community whose residents seem occupied full time in discovering the wonderful things produced in the world that can be had for even the moderate amount of money at their disposal.” Like those who rhapsodized in the 1920s about all that was right in their neighborhood, Glazer wondered “what streets anywhere can match them in their sheer number of food stores, ice-cream parlors, delicatessens, restaurants, specialty shops for women and children.” In these venues, neighbors enjoyed sociability. In the butcher shops, “a leisurely, almost club-like atmosphere” flourished among women, especially on Thursday mornings, when Sabbath shopping began. “Then the butcher holds court, announcing his opinions on the world, commenting on departing customers.” Just as in the past, “the role of the Concourse in Bronx life, like its geographical location is central.” While “its once aristocratic buildings have become shabby and it no longer has its former prestige,” still “it is a name to conjure with.” For “at one end of the Concourse there is a small but

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intricate park, complete with bandstand and Sunday afternoon concerts.” And “there is the middle section where one may see and can be seen.” Ultimately, for Glazer, “the present generation is only the continuator and the embellisher of the Bronx style. It does not revolt against the given. It does not seek for new modes of expressions in its domestic arrangements.” Glazer concluded, “The younger generation . . . has not exhausted the present pattern.”20 Writer Vivian Gornick evoked similar streets scenes within the West Bronx. Everywhere she turned there “was Jewishness in all its rich variety. Down the street were Orthodox Jews, up the street were Zionists, in the middle of the street were shtetl, get-rich-quick Jews, European humanist Jews.” She did not stop to reflect on how committed these segments of the community were to each of these expressions. In any event, “Jewishness was the leveler.” Gornick recalled that “observance” was looking at other Jews on the avenue on Passover and Yom Kippur. “The whole world shut down, everyone was dressed immaculately and a sense of awe thickened the very air we breathed; the organic quality of the atmosphere told us who we were; gave us boundary and idiomatic reference, shaped the face of the culture in which each one of us assumed a vital albeit, primitive sense of identity.” When Gornick was ready for college, she followed the generation that preceded her to CCNY. The college became fully coeducational in 1951. She took the standard oath of allegiance: “For us, it was City College or nothing.” And “on the surface,” attending City, as it had been for thousands before her, was hardly a journey away from the “working class immigrant neighborhood in New York City” where she was born. “You still used the subways, still walked the familiar city streets between classes, still ate in grubby luncheonettes, returned to the old neighborhood each night, talked continuously to your high school friends on the block who had not gone on to college, felt the steady flow of the city’s current running through the dailiness of your life.” But Gornick refused to assume the occupation after college that her parents had envisioned for her. As an English major, she dreamed of becoming much more than just a teacher. The Jewish aspiration, “my daughter, the teacher,” seemed to Gornick’s mother appropriate for “a girl child sent to school.”21 Gornick’s Bronx contemporary Ralph Lauren (né Lifshitz) spent his class time daydreaming at CCNY’s night school about his own distinctive career path, a vocation for which there was no training offered within the business school’s curriculum. While still a high school student at Clinton, where he

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publicly fantasized in his senior yearbook that his life’s goal was to become a “millionaire,” the future fashion designer already aspired to dress like one. He haunted Paul Stuart and Brooks Brothers, among the most upscale haberdashery stores in the city, sampling suits, jackets, ties, and other accessories traditionally fit for the British aristocracy. Finding the styles wanting, he began to sketch his own clothing lines. At age twenty, he dropped out of CCNY to pursue his ambition, catching on initially as a salesman at Brooks Brothers and later at A. Rivetz and Co., another stylish menswear establishment. In 1964, his “professional touch” attracted initial media attention. The Daily News Record wrote enthusiastically about his corduroy riding pants, suits, and doublebreasted jackets. Though it took several more years before Lauren earned his first million, he was heading up and away from his Bronx origins.22 Unlike Gornick and Lauren, most Jewish students at the “proletarian Harvard” saw their alma mater as an accepted vehicle for achieving more than their working-class parents had. In 1962 – 63, five years after Gornick graduated and three years after Lauren dropped out, Jews still predominated at CCNY. They made up almost 60 percent of the twenty-nine thousand total enrollees, even if New York Jewish children of “middle class rank” increasingly chose “education away from home.” They matriculated either in the moderately priced, growing state university system or in private institutions that once discriminated against Jews. NYU was still the city’s second-largest Jewish school, with its sixteen thousand Jewish students uptown and downtown, 40 percent of the forty-thousand-member student body. Columbia enrolled some sixty-five hundred Jews, 25 percent of its undergraduates.23 In 1960, Fortune magazine featured this palpable sense of calm and continuity among Jews and within their longstanding neighborhoods. Noting the “Jewish élan” in New York that still contributed “mightily to the city’s dramatic character — its excitement, its originality, its stridency, its unexpectedness” — the article emphasized a “condition of non-crisis” among postwar Jews, “occupying as they frequently do in a residential area or in an industry, a majority position and exercising such wide influence.” Persistence was visible almost everywhere. The Grand Concourse remained “the only place in the world where . . . you can pick up a girl by whistling a Beethoven quartet at her.” Within that “main artery” of the Bronx, Jews constituted 48 percent of the population, within “a solidly middle-class society,” comfortably “inhabiting large old-fashioned apartments in large, old-fashioned buildings.”24

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Focusing on stability within that middle-class enclave, the article did not note comparable residential continuity within the longstanding co-ops. They had moved solidly into their second generation, despite the anti-Communism of Cold War America. Some vociferous, if ultimately passive, Jewish Communists still held forth on Bronx Park East, “arguing the fine points of Marxism” on park benches across the street from the buildings on Barker Avenue. But others still deeply committed to the cause did more than just talk. In 1953, they mobilized to save two of their own through the National Committee to Secure Justice in the [Ethel and Julius] Rosenberg Case, even if advocacy marginalized these radicals from other New York Jews. Most New York Jews, and especially major Jewish organizations, distanced themselves from the Rosenbergs and their defenders. “Opposition to Communism [became] a criterion of Jewish communal membership,” at a time when the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith willingly shared its documents on Communists with the House Un-American Activities Committee. In fact, in this city of many Jewish voices and opinions, some Jews even celebrated at a block party on the night of the Rosenbergs’ execution for conspiracy to commit treason. In Bensonhurst, Jews sitting among their Italian friends, as a television set “faced the sidewalk so all could watch the live broadcast from Sing Sing prison,” felt a palpable sense of relief as “they put aside the painful case that separated them from their neighbors” and had threatened the good name of American Jewry. Watching as closely as anyone this “Jew against Jew” dynamic while sitting in the jury box — as the judge, the prosecutor, the defendants, and their lawyer were all Jews — the foreman, a Gentile, observed, “I felt good that this was a strictly Jewish show. It wasn’t the Christians hanging the Jews.” And if dedicated radicals, long after the executions, continued to revere the Rosenbergs as “icons, big-eyed, tragic victims,” other erstwhile Jewish Communists in this highly charged political atmosphere, intimidated by the wide scope of McCarthyism, lowered their profiles. At that point, the Bronx Park East co-op library, “which already had a remarkable collection of radical books, .  .  . found itself with sudden donations from people who did not feel safe with a collection of Lenin’s works in the apartment.” Indeed, many “coopniks,” from oldsters who “remained factory workers” to the younger breed, “teachers or lawyers or operators of small businesses,” became “Democratic voters” not unlike Jews raised “in the apartment house of a capitalist landlord in Brooklyn.”25

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At the same time, new building construction added depth to Jewish neighborhoods. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, the Van Cortlandt section of the Bronx welcomed two large-scale, high-rise additions to its Amalgamated coop section. Government aid and union activism reminiscent of the scene in the 1920s spurred co-op construction. Builders willing to put up with “the annoyances and hazards of bureaucratic FHA [Federal Housing Administration] supervision” were assured a “builder’s profit” on their investments. Workers in search of affordable housing relied on the United Housing Federation headed by Abraham E. Kazin, “a former garment union employee who [had] lived and breathed cooperative housing for the last 32 years,” since the start of the coop program in 1927. The Federation was “ostensibly . . . a clearing house” for “labor unions, neighborhood associations, fraternal organizations and other nonprofit groups interested in developing middle-income co-ops.” Endeavors such as these received an additional boost in 1955 when the New York State Limited Profit Housing Company Act, better known as the Mitchell-Lama law, was passed providing for “forty per-cent tax abatement on city-approved middle-income co-ops or limited dividend rental projects.” Jews as builders and residents took advantage of these new regulations and helped their city maintain its reputation as “the unrivaled co-op housing capital of the nation.”26 Occupationally, Fortune found that while citywide Jews were approximately one-quarter of the population, they made up “45 percent of the proprietors and managerial category and 33 percent of the professional and semi-professional categories.” An additional 15 percent worked as civil servants, ranging in occupations from teachers to minor city officials, such as clerks in municipal departments, and including police officers and firefighters. The “enterprising garment industry” continued to carry a Jewish stamp, even if fewer Jews were involved in making clothing on Seventh Avenue. “Merchandising of products, . . . retailing,” was part of the “Jewish élan in the principal class merchandising streets of the city,” from Fifth Avenue department stores to Fifty-Seventh Street specialty shops to cut-rate operations on Union Square. “In high fashion, most of the city’s leading designers [were] Jewish.” It did not take an overabundance of capital to gets one’s start as an entrepreneur, just a modicum or courage and/or gall (i.e., chutzpah). Jews had those requisites. Social critic Daniel Bell mused in 1961 that it was still possible to survive and advance through “ingenuity, ‘shmearing,’ cutting a corner, trimming a margin, finding some other way to make a fast buck in the swift race.”27

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At that point, Bell surely had heard neither of the young Ralph Lauren nor of Calvin Klein, who attended the same Bronx elementary school as Lauren. But a combination of talent and cutthroat business aggressiveness applied to their entrepreneurial initiatives. Unlike Lauren, Klein aspired to design women’s clothing. His maternal grandmother, a seamstress and later an owner of a notions store in the Bronx, was his role model. Predictably, the young man’s unconventional occupational desires did not play well on Mosholu Parkway streets among neighborhood boys who thought of becoming doctors, lawyers, or civil servants. His effeminate mannerisms also did not garner much in the way of street credits, though his homosexuality was fully closeted, a common lifestyle choice for gay men in the 1950s – 1960s. Klein abandoned his neighborhood, at least by day, when he enrolled in the High School of Industrial Arts in Manhattan and subsequently matriculated at the Fashion Institute of Technology on the Lower West Side. Each evening, however, he endured catcalls that he was a student at the “Fairy” Institute of Technology. While often restless, Klein developed a more sophisticated appreciation of styles, fabrics, and colors that helped him in his future career. Upon graduation, Klein hooked up with the Millstein outfit, one of the top “cloak and suit houses” in the fashion district of Seventh Avenue. After two unsatisfying and financially unrewarding years, he moved on to the even more prestigious Halldon Ltd. There he met another former Millstein employee, a patternmaker, Abe Morenstein. They temporarily joined forces. According to Klein’s biographer, Morenstein shared Klein’s ambition of creating his own firm but had been deterred by his sense that “his thick Polish-Jewish accent and lack of cosmopolitan air would defeat him in the image conscious marketplace.” Calvin Klein “was the perfect front man.” Neither man had sufficient capital, however, to fulfill their dreams. So Klein returned to the Bronx. He turned to a Jewish boyhood friend, a supermarket owner who had given him part-time work when he started out with the penurious Millsteins. With Barry Schwartz’s money, Morenstein and Klein established an unofficial partnership. In return for Schwartz’s backing, he desired a large piece of the enterprise. In 1967, Calvin Klein incorporated Calvin Klein Ltd. with Schwartz as a 50 percent “silent partner.” He cut Morenstein out, a move not unprecedented in the highly competitive world of Seventh Avenue. Less than a year later, Schwartz became far more than a disengaged investor. When his Sundial Supermarket in Harlem was ransacked in the riots following the murder of Dr. Martin Luther

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King Jr., Schwartz directed his energies to the Jewish garment industry. Ten years later, both men were annually drawing salaries in excess of $4 million.28 Jews made their presence felt throughout the city’s cultural worlds. They owned or managed “perhaps a third of the city’s art galleries”; Jewish “owners, producers, playwrights and actors” kept Broadway booming. One proud New York Jew asserted that “the city could still be intrigued by the flavor of the East Side when recaptured by playwrights, novelists, and musicians.” He considered it ironic that while “immigrant parents and Jewish garment workers have almost vanished from real life, sentimental portraits of their idiosyncrasies and relations with American-born children and grandchildren have become more common.” What he dubbed “matzo-ball soup operas” achieved Broadway success, with a dozen plays reaching the Great White Way in the late 1950s and early 1960s. “American-born Jewish audiences and large numbers of nonJews too” had “made these productions great successes.”29 Perhaps Paddy Chayevsky’s The Tenth Man, which from 1959 to 1961 ran on Broadway, with more than six hundred shows, resonated most with Jewish audiences. Many connected and mused knowingly about the premise of this updated version of the “dybbuk” story, a staple of the Yiddish theaters that either they or their parents had attended years earlier on Second Avenue. The direct linkage between downtown and Broadway existed through casting Jacob Ben-Ami, long a star of the Yiddish Art Theatre. In Chayevsky’s modern incarnation of the folk drama, a demon invades the soul of a young woman who lives in Mineola, Long Island, and must be exorcised. A tenth man to fulfill the quorum for prayer has to be found within this suburban community. That mystical religious quest provides the Bronx-born Chayevsky with an opportunity to sympathetically contrast the values of old-timers in that congregation — characters drawn from men he knew in the old neighborhood — with the vacuous and materialistic attitudes of younger members of the synagogue and their “go-getter” rabbi. “This conflict between older, devout Jews and a younger generation in whom faith has grown dim,” as one critic described the play’s ultimate theme, portrayed suburban versus urban Jewish ways of looking at life.30 Jews continued as leaders in radio and the growing television industry. But they were far more than just owners. Through these media, Jewish actors in shows on Jewish themes both entertained and educated Americans coast to coast about Jewish social life. The most popular of these, the Goldbergs, starred

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Gertrude Berg as the irrepressible Molly Goldberg. The television version, which premiered in 1949, represented the third incarnation of this saga of an immigrant Jewish family making their way in New York City, adjusting to the promises and challenges of America. The radio series began in 1929 with the Goldberg family already settled in their East Tremont apartment home in the Bronx. Often scripted discussing upcoming major Jewish holidays, they acquainted listeners with some of the basic rituals and customs of Judaism. Several times, the television show placed the Goldbergs in a synagogue on Yom Kippur, treating viewers “to an elaborate liturgical service.” In 1948 and 1949, a Broadway production, Me and Molly, flashed audiences back to 1919, with Molly assisting her husband to establish himself in the garment industry. The packed houses saw how perceptively and perspicaciously she hit on the idea of producing half-size dresses “for neighbors with the same problem she had.” Viewers of the television treatment went back to 1038 East Tremont Avenue, where they immediately grasped the informal community life still part of the Jewish Bronx. Every episode opened with Molly rolling down her kitchen window and unselfconsciously calling out her hello (“Yoo hoo, Mrs. Bloom!”) to her neighborhood friend. In 1954, toward the end of the show’s run, the Goldbergs moved to suburbia, at the behest of apprehensive network executives who wanted the series to be more reflective of the emerging American scene. The Goldbergs moved to Haverville — as in “have it all.” Still, in those episodes, the newly arrived family addressed, in its own comedic way, one of the weighty dilemmas of the decision to leave the city. One student of the show’s approach has explained that “inherent in the Goldbergs” is the idea “that even though a family has moved to the suburbs, it’s still possible to have good neighbors and be a cohesive family.” That medium’s message was a “reassuring” one “for a recently-mobile populace anxious about the advantages of moving to the suburbs and breaking ties with extended family members.”31 In New York City, an ongoing nexus existed between Jewish business spirit and Jews’ willingness to consume culture. One leading sociologist emphasized that “large symphony orchestras, the theatres, trade-book publishing, the avant-garde magazines, the market for drawings and paintings, all have as their principal audience and consumer, the Jewish middle-class.” This was made possible largely by “the entrepreneurial wealth of small-unit firms.”32 From dress circle seats at Carnegie Hall — and as of September 1962, also at Lincoln Center — Jewish subscription holders not only enjoyed the New York

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Philharmonic’s performances, but they also took pride in its Jewish conductor and music director. Professional promises and opportunities had drawn the Boston-bred Leonard Bernstein, son of Russian-Jewish immigrants, to the metropolis. When in 1943, the Harvard University and Curtis Institute of Music maestro ascended the stage and tapped his baton for his inaugural concert at Carnegie, as a last minute substitute for the ailing renowned German Bruno Walter, newspapers noted that this was the first time an American-born conductor had reached such an august position. Bernstein represented an American Jewish success story. He brought to the Philharmonic’s performances dynamism and even an athleticism that captivated audiences. One local newspaper wag who reported on Bernstein’s surprise first appearance depicted it in competitive sports terms as “a shoestring catch in center field: . . . make it and you’re a hero, muff it you’re a dope. . . . He made it.” The morning after his opening triumph, glowing reports reached the front page in several New York newspapers. Years later, Burton Bernstein, looking back on his brother’s achievements, suggested that Leonard’s elevation to music director in 1958 was “a watershed moment in American history, . . . [a] singular cultural, sociological event,” comparable — as he saw it — to Jackie Robinson’s joining the Brooklyn Dodgers eleven years earlier. Hyperbole aside, it was a signal moment not only in his life but also in the city’s cultural history.33 While Bernstein’s philharmonic concerts consistently thrilled New York regulars, from his start he played to national audiences. A longstanding New York Philharmonic radio network hookup broadcast his inaugural concert, and many subsequent performances were heard across the country. In the 1950s, he turned to television to reach audiences. At a time when critics of the tube, such as Federal Communications Commission chairman Newton N. Minow, characterized the medium as a “vast wasteland,” Bernstein frequently contributed to the best television had to offer. For close to a decade, Bernstein used the ninety-minute award-winning Omnibus series not only to present his music but also to instruct his viewers about the nuances of classical music. Beginning in 1958, the New York – based teacher turned to educating the nation’s children through the first of fifty-three Young People’s Concerts, live from Carnegie Hall. Adult viewers, wherever they lived, brought their youngsters close to the set and closer to high culture; together they watched Bernstein patiently explain to enraptured New York children “What Is a Concerto” or “Humor in Music” or “The Sound of an Orchestra.” In time, the series was broadcast to

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twenty-nine countries, a major New York contribution to the world of the performing arts. In turn, this American cultural mecca made Bernstein “a household name even to people who only dreamed of visiting the city, who never set foot in a concert hall or went to a production on the Great White Way.”34 Like so many immigrants, Bernstein, the New York newcomer, gave much back to his adopted city. On Broadway, this multitalented composer entertained his public with depictions of the metropolis’s postwar promises. In 1944, he collaborated with writers and lyricists Betty Comden and Adolph Green and choreographer Jerome Robbins, three other children of Jewish immigrants in the midst of establishing distinguished careers in the performing arts, to stage On the Town. The musical celebrated the excitement, vitality, and opportunities of New York through the adventures of three sailors who careen through the city during their twenty-four-hour shore leave. Though the play ends on a serious note, since the young men have to return to war duty, audiences remembered from the production that opened on December 28, 1944 — at a time when Americans were intensely focused on the Allies’ breakout of the Battle of the Bulge — that New York was “a helluva town with the Bronx up and the Battery down, with people rid[ing] in a hole in the ground.” That image of a “fun, . . . gay” city that “takes neither itself nor the world too seriously” ran for over four hundred performances on Broadway. In 1949, On the Town found its way to the Hollywood screen and reminded a national audience how dynamic was New York City.35 However, Bernstein recognized that prejudice tarnished New York’s promises. In 1957, he collaborated again with Robbins and two other New York Jews, playwright Arthur Laurents and a newcomer, lyricist Stephen Sondheim, in producing West Side Story. Through a retelling of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet in contemporary New York ethnic terms, the four men tried to raise public consciousness about the blight of youth gang warfare in the city, tinged with racial overtones. In its original iteration as East Side Story, it focused on the conflict between a Catholic and a Jewish family on the Lower East Side, with anti-Semitism directed at a Jewish gang by the Italian American “Jets” as a central theme. However, the initial collaborators, Bernstein, Robbins, and especially Laurents, ultimately felt that such tensions had already been portrayed theatrically. Laurents noted in his memoir that as early as the 1920s a long-running Broadway show, Abie’s Irish Rose, had dealt with family tensions over a Catholic-Jewish intermarriage. The prescient Bernstein considered

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racial more than religious tensions as the future problem. He referenced newspaper reports of the late 1940s to the mid-1950s about marauding youth gangs on the West Side and in L.A.’s barrios, to emphasize the need for “an out and out plea for racial tolerance.” The play’s protagonists thus became a Puerto Rican young woman and her ultimately doomed Italian boyfriend, victims of senseless animosities. That warning about New York’s present and future ran on Broadway for over seven hundred performances. In 1961, a movie version of West Side Story appeared. Ironically, it was filmed on location in a tough working-class West Side neighborhood just before its tenements were torn down to make way for Lincoln Center, where Bernstein would long be the consummate star attraction.36 Notwithstanding suburban migration, the first two decades after the war witnessed much continuity between generations of New York Jews. Ensconced in their old Bronx neighborhoods or living in other long-term enclaves in the city, Jews continued the style of life inherited from their parents. Although pre – World War II interethnic tensions, especially with the Irish, diminished, definable turfs within and among neighborhoods endured. Youth gang warfare, however, largely occurred in other parts of town. Jews were neither prime antagonists nor victims. They kept to themselves. One study has shown that a dozen years after the end of World War II, “more than one of every four New York Jews lived in a neighborhood that was over half Jewish in composition.” In fact, these figures may even underestimate the extent of Jewish selfaggregation, “as residents of larger neighborhoods tended to cluster in smaller areas by ethnicity.”37 Racial segregation likewise characterized New York City. At least it possessed that feel for most Jews. As of 1957 on the Grand Concourse, African Americans constituted only 3.5 percent of its population, even if their numbers, in the prior seven years, had grown fivefold, from approximately 1,400 to around 6,700. Jews made up still two-thirds of the neighborhood’s population. A comparable story could be told in Brooklyn, where almost no African Americans lived in Boro Park, only 200 or so in total, when 63,000 Jews constituted 55.2 percent of the neighborhood. Similarly, in Flatbush, where some 123,000 Jews resided, only 3,000 blacks also lived. By contrast, in Bedford-Stuyvesant, 166,000 of its 253,000 residents (66 percent) were black, while only 11 percent of the population in that very poor neighborhood were Jews. Despite a population divided between Jews (40 percent) and African

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Americans (24 percent), Crown Heights appeared to harbor few black residents in Mark Naison’s memories. This historian recalled that “there were only a sprinkling of black families in the fifteen blocks between Eastern Parkway and Kings County Hospital,” his key neighborhood landmarks, “most of them seemed solidly-working class.” He frankly allowed that most blacks in Crown Heights were seen only by day as domestics, “girls” who “arrived in a group on the Kingston Avenue bus from Bedford-Stuyvesant and left by the same route in the evening.” To the extent that there were subsurface racial issues in the neighborhood, he added, they “did not have much impact on my early childhood.”38 Jewish children growing up in New York City in the 1950s lived in a multiethnic city, but most of them remembered instead a secure childhood in largely Jewish neighborhoods. New York Jews, comfortable where they were and among whom they lived, took the cheap and quick, if often crowded, subways together to work, as their parents had before them. Researchers in the late 1950s observed that these residential areas “linked to the central business district by the extraordinarily rapid transit facilities” were “the real ‘bedroom communities,’ . . . even more so than the classic suburban county of Westchester.” As late as 1948, a single ride cost but five cents, and the fare rose above fifteen cents only after 1966. Bronx subway commuters — cutters, pressers, or finishers — could leave their homes at 7:30 a.m. and be certain to punch the clock in the Garment Center by 8:00. They returned home to shop and socialize on their Jewish streets. On occasion, they might go back to Midtown to enjoy the metropolis’s cultural spots. An inexpensive night out on a warm summer’s evening might take a couple or a family to a free open-air concert at the hard stone seats of CCNY’s Lewisohn Stadium. The New York Philharmonic performed outdoors during those months. Alternatively, local movie theaters offered double features in air-conditioned comfort. Or Jewish New Yorkers might “gather in groups on weekday evenings to watch their favorite shows.” Brill Building artists still churned out popular tunes to sing on the streets and “platters” to buy at local record stores. Careful listeners to one of Brooklyn-born Carole King’s early records might have noticed that “Pleasant Valley Sunday” critiqued suburban life in what she called “status-seeker land,” even if she was not a year-round city dweller. This daughter of a New York school teacher and firefighter had a summer bungalow in Connecticut within a community founded by the Ner Tormid Society, the Jewish firefighters’ fraternal organization.39

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During the school year, King’s parents and other Jewish adults watched their youngsters learn in the public schools, usually taught by Jewish teachers. The highest achievers passed entrance tests for the elite High School of Music and Art, Hunter College High School, the Bronx High School of Science, Stuyvesant, and Brooklyn Tech. In the late 1950s, Jews constituted as much as 70 percent of those schools’ student bodies. From there, it often was a natural and convenient step to CCNY, the school their fathers might have dropped out of during the Depression. Music and Art was located within City’s St. Nicholas Heights campus. Some of these parents gave their children a more extensive supplementary Jewish education than they had received. A 1954 report revealed that the overwhelming majority of Jewish youngsters who went to a Jewish school, irrespective of neighborhood, attended either Sunday school or afternoon Hebrew schools for at most four hours a week. Despite the growing popularity of day schools, they enrolled only a small minority of Jewish children. Most New York Jews celebrated but did not strictly observe the major holidays, when they saw and were seen with other Jews inside and outside of the city’s synagogues. Attendance figures in these houses of worship for 1960 read very much like those of the 1920s and 1930s, despite a decision by the New York City Board of Education to cancel classes on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, due to the large numbers of Jewish teachers in the public school system. Yet more than half of all New York Jews only went to synagogue “a few times a year,” and 19 percent completely ignored organized Jewish religious observance. This survey included newly arrived immigrants, many of whom were highly observant.40 In the early postwar years, these immigrant newcomers, refugees from diverse lands of oppression and survivors of the Holocaust, carved out their own niches in the city. Following in the footsteps of millions of their fellow Jews, they established themselves within this metropolis of promises. Close to half of all Jewish immigrants to the United States from the late 1940s to the mid1960s settled in the city. Their presence contributed to Jews continuing to constitute 30 percent of New York’s population. But more than just replacing those second- and third-generation Jews who opted for suburbia, these new arrivals brought new attitudes and practices to their neighborhoods. Five years after the war, the foreign-born constituted a full one-third of the city’s Jewish population. The overwhelming majority, 450,000 of these 700,000 immigrants, hailed initially from Russia, Poland, and other eastern

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European states; as survivors of the Holocaust, tens of thousands of them obtained their visas while billeted in displaced persons’ camps in Europe. Many more eastern Europeans would have settled in America if not for immigration laws that continued to discriminate against applicants based on country of “national origins.” Though some special legislation was passed in the late 1940s to ease a fraction of the pain and frustration of the victims of Nazism, not until the administration of Lyndon B. Johnson in 1965 did the quota laws change. Soviet policies locked the doors in Russia as well as satellite countries behind the Iron Curtain, preventing additional numbers of Jews anxious to seek American shores from leaving.41 Ironically, immediately after the war, survivors from Germany and Austria found their own paths to America hindered by legal and bureaucratic definitions that included them as among unwelcome refugees from a former enemy state, even though these so-called German expellees had had their citizenship stripped from them by Nazi edicts. Only in 1950 did the United States ameliorate this patent mischaracterization by amending displaced-persons legislation to allow approximately 55,000 of these unfortunates to enter on a nonquota basis. Many of them gravitated to New York and made up a large proportion of the some 130,000 German and Austrian Jews in the city.42 Anti-Semitism of a different sort brought thousands of Sephardic Jews to America and especially to New York in the late 1940s and 1950s. Popular animosities and governmental policies driven by Arab anger and frustration over the rise and successes of the State of Israel forced Jews from Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, and Egypt — particularly during the regime of President Gamal Abdul Nasser — to flee. Special congressional legislation passed in 1957 to help “victims of persecution” — designed to assist Hungarian victims of Communism — eased the way for Egyptian Jews to enter the United States.43 Upon arrival in America, these Jewish newcomers, like so many immigrants before them, sought out familiar faces, essentially those men and women who shared their ethnic, social, and religious sensibilities. Orthodox Jews from eastern Europe gravitated to Brooklyn neighborhoods. The co-ops of the Bronx welcomed those who espoused socialist traditions. German Jews reconnected with refugee establishments in Washington Heights, while others settled on the west side of Manhattan and Jackson Heights in Queens. Sephardim moved into other Brooklyn enclaves, especially Flatbush and Bensonhurst, and a limited number found homes in Forest Hills. Most noticeable

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of these newcomers were the varying sects of Hasidic Jews. They established themselves in Williamsburg, where they intensified Orthodox Judaism in that settlement.44 One observer of that postwar transformation observed that rather than conform to existing mores, these newcomers “preferred to adjust the standards of the community to their own particular pattern of religious life.” Following their rabbis’ commands, they not only “established their own new religious and communal centers” but “changed the appearance of the neighborhood by their insistence on maintaining . . . the habits and customs” of their European traditions. One sign of the changing times was the conversion of local movie theaters into store-front yeshivas. These devout Jews disdained secular amusements, and they needed space for their growing educational network. Under Hasidic sway, the streets filled daily with “men with long beards, kaftans, and all varieties, types and sizes of black hats, and women with wigs or kerchiefs and dark stockings.” To the uninitiated, all of these Hasidim looked pretty much alike. But discerning observers noted that while the Satmar from Hungary were the largest new group in Williamsburg, the neighborhood now housed more than a dozen sects from different parts of eastern European, each proud of and eager to maintain its own distinctive customs and clothing. Propinquity heightened another European tradition: disputes and rivalries among different Hasidic groups, each loyal to its own religious leader’s ideologies and practices. The leaven for controversy rose out of the city’s ecology; “members of [Hasidic] courts,” be they from Klausenberg or Belz or Munkac or Vizhnitz, among other vicinities, “that had once sprawled from Bratislava to Odessa were now located a few streets from one another or only a brief car ride apart.”45 As these newcomers changed the neighborhood’s character, they hastened the relocation of many erstwhile Jewish residents of Williamsburg, including those who were quite observant themselves, to other parts of the city and suburbia. Certainly those “who had been forced to stay on during the years of the war housing shortage” eagerly packed their belongings for new homes in Queens or Long Island or even just a few miles away in Boro Park or Crown Heights in Brooklyn. Eventually these Americanized Jews relocated again, after Hasidim from Williamsburg settled en masse in Boro Park in the 1960s. While they might have looked back with some disdain at an enclave that they now referred to derogatorily as “refugeetown,” their exodus opened up the neighborhood to even more Hasidim, who flocked to newly vacant

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apartments, precisely to be among their fellow sectarians and under their rabbis’ wings. By the mid-1950s, this new Williamsburg was “a different neighborhood.” One former resident, who came back to visit “after years of living in Boston,” saw an endearing vitality to the neighborhood. “Life, Jewish life,” he remarked, “seems to be bubbling over in these streets. And one feels good to see all this, after one has been away from any kind of concentrated community life as long as I.” While acknowledging that Williamsburg had lost its “calm, dignity,” he appreciated something special about the “lower-class type of activity that fills the street, louder and full of hustle.”46 In the early postwar decades, Crown Heights also become a Hasidic hub, home to the most renowned sect, the Lubavitchers. whose influence on Jewish life extended well beyond their neighborhood. Here, too, a transfer of Jewish populations occurred but at a slower pace than in Williamsburg. While Lubavitchers flocked to the neighborhood with the arrival of their leader, Joseph Isaac Schneersohn, in 1941, through the 1950s they still shared the streets with Americanized Jews and other ethnic groups. The neighborhood even absorbed some Jews from a changing Williamsburg who opted for the still middle-class section of Crown Heights. As the Lubavitcher presence expanded during the 1960s, Crown Heights became a mecca for Jewish visitors. Both the faithful and the intrigued came to hear and see Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneersohn. Upon assuming the helm of his sect in 1950, he transformed the farbrengen, his public lectures, into popular staples of his inspirational message to his followers and of his outreach efforts to all Jews. Thousands crammed into the headquarters at 770 Eastern Parkway to listen and be inspired. Eventually the world became his neighborhood, as he broadcast his discourses first on radio and then on television.47 But back home, by the mid-1960s, there were major problems within the neighborhood that threatened the continuity of the community. For a variety of social, economic, and political reasons, Crown Heights was racially transformed. Its Jews eventually found themselves entangled in the city’s emerging crises as their postwar era of continuity and cachet dissolved into times of strife and conflict. Jewish concerns, immersed in a larger urban malaise, ultimately clashed with African American aspirations and anger. It is to the bitter battles of the 1960s that we now turn our attention.

Confrontation between the members of the United Federation of Teachers and the Ocean Hill – Brownsville Community, 1968. (Photograph by Sam Reiss; Sam Reiss Photographs Collection, courtesy of Tamiment Library, New York University)

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5

Crises and Contention

When Molly Berg wanted America to feel the vibrancy of New York Jewish neighborhood life, she projected 1038 East Tremont Avenue as the quintessential windows-open, door-unlocked, Bronx apartment-house community. Helen Lazarcheck, who really lived in that area, felt that warm embrace. “Everyone seemed to help one another. If there was trouble, everyone would do something for you if they could. They were always coming in and sharing what they had.” Not that the Jews of East Tremont agreed on political issues. “The Yiddishist and Hebraist each had his following, with a supporting system of cultural clubs, bookstores, debating societies,” as did the hard-core radical, the Socialist and Communist. And the rabbis of the neighborhood’s seven synagogues competed for the allegiances of the religious. Jews debated competing worldviews on weekends or on Jewish holidays at the crowded park benches of Crotona Park or Southern Boulevard. But a palpable feeling of belonging united the neighborhood. Patterns of street life reassured everyone. Continuity characterized this place where they had grown up and were raising their children and where they expected to grow old among friends. That was, until the all-powerful city official Robert Moses set his sights on a one-mile strip of territory that cut through their homes.1 While most New York City Jews in the 1950s lived securely and comfortably among friends and family in their own enclaves of long standing, residents of that targeted area felt the tremors of crisis. A massive city project, destined to change the face of the entire metropolis, was to obliterate their neighborhood. For Moses, who at one point reigned simultaneously as head of some dozen city and state offices, from chairman of the Triborough Bridge Authority to

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New York City parks commissioner, this land was an essential link in his master-builder road plan. He aimed to construct the Cross Bronx Expressway, connecting the city with New Jersey, Long Island, and New England, later known as the “I-95 corridor.” He had been at work on this megaproject, beginning the digging in the late 1940s, in less populated sections of the East Bronx and had been frequently chafed that federal, state, and municipal dollars had not materialized as quickly as he desired. Now, he refused to hear alternatives on how and where work in East Tremont might proceed. His foremost argument was that “every time a project was delayed by hearings and rerouting, funding was also delayed and costs increased.” Accordingly, in December 1952, in dictatorial fashion — his customary mode of operation — Moses, from his post as city construction coordinator, curtly informed 1,530 families housed in some 159 buildings that they had but ninety days to move out of their condemned buildings. This edict ignited a half-decade battle between neighborhood activists and this metropolitan mogul. Ultimately historians have argued that because the city, under Moses’s decisive hand, undertook massive public works projects, including an “arterial highway system,” New York in future decades was able to claim — as it always had — “that it was the capital of the twentieth century, the capital of capitalism and the capital of the world.” But during the strident and sometimes ugly skirmishes of the 1950s, no one in East Tremont was looking so far ahead, at a master builder paving the way for the future. Rather, they were focused on an autocrat who could resort to cutting off heat and hot water in some protestors’ buildings. In the end, as was the case in most of Moses’s fights, “city hall” won.2 The removal of these five thousand displaced people, most of them Jewish, marked the beginning of the end of the neighborhood. As construction of “Heartbreak Highway” ensued, starting with noisy, dirty, and toxic excavation work, some ten thousand additional East Tremont residents moved out. Those with more money, mostly the younger generation, looked for housing in the suburbs or the suburban-like community of Riverdale. That enclave in the northwest corner of the Bronx began earning a reputation as an up-andcoming Jewish neighborhood after World War II, particularly after Fieldston, its most expensive private-home section, dropped its anti-Semitic restrictions. By 1957, there were eight thousand Jews in the neighborhood — approximately 20 percent of the residents — and religious institutions were established.3

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As Jews vacated East Tremont’s apartments, many of the city’s poorest of the poor, mostly African Americans, moved into the increasingly dilapidated buildings. Families on welfare found shelter in the neighborhood, having been sent by social welfare agencies. Fears and realities of muggings, robberies, break-ins, and violence reverberated through the neighborhood, sparking a chain migration out of the area. As each additional group of Jews left a building, word spread next door and then around the corner. By the mid-1960s, the community’s Jewish era had ended. The luckier ones found refuge in the borough’s “decent areas,” as one former East Tremont resident put it. Co-ops and other middle- and lower-middle-class developments absorbed those who could flee. But the poor and elderly remained trapped in what was later described as “ravaged hulks,” with residents “barricaded in their freezing apartments.” Ultimately, other sections of the Bronx replicated the East Tremont template of turmoil — physical deterioration, initial departures, arrival of minorities, fears, and sometimes the realities of criminality, further evacuations, and intensified deterioration of the neighborhood, leaving behind only the most disadvantaged. East Tremont produced a compelling formula for the next decades of urban crisis.4 By the late 1950s, similar distressing scenarios began to trouble Jews in Brownsville. They, too, started to move out of their apartments, similarly adumbrating future citywide neighborhood predicaments. Never an elite economic enclave, Brownsville, as previously explored, was always rich in Jewish population and street culture. In the early postwar years, those with money departed for suburban Long Island and New Jersey. Or they took the intracity migration route, settling in Queens or filling in new areas in Brooklyn such as Canarsie or Mill Basin, out “in the boon docks” along Jamaica Bay. One satisfied settler later claimed, “Once we made it to Canarsie, we finally had a little piece of the country.” Those remaining in Brownsville lived much as they had before the war, albeit with greater financial security. For some, a steady income allowed them to send their daughters to college and not just their sons. Brooklyn College, accessible and affordable, beckoned. When students returned home from day classes, they reentered the Jewish atmosphere that had long pervaded their safe streets. One woman memoirist recalled, “We spent our time in the streets. We went into the yard calling up to our friends. We didn’t have a telephone; we didn’t have to be formal.” Another remembered

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how “provincial” Brownsville still was: “Everything was in a small nucleus. I was taught in Brownsville, met a boy from Brownsville.” She married him and then faced intense separation anxieties when he received a fellowship to study at Duke University in North Carolina. “How could I leave my mother?” she recounted. “I couldn’t have a baby without my mother nearby.” Sounding much like those who lived in Brownsville during the interwar years, a spokeswoman for that group argued that in the 1940 – 1950s, “it was possible to think everyone was Jewish. They were not outsiders; the rest of America was made up of ‘the others,’ der anderers — the goyim — often to be ridiculed and often feared but usually just avoided.”5 However, as an area with the reputation and reality as a working-class and poor, deteriorating neighborhood, as the 1950s progressed, Brownsville was chosen for a massive incursion of the most indigent minorities. African Americans and, to a lesser extent, Latinos fundamentally altered the social chemistry of the community. Actually blacks lived in Brownsville as early as the interwar period, and particularly Socialist and Communist Jews accepted them, adopting an egalitarianism in contrast to other areas, where whites did their utmost to keep blacks out of their neighborhoods. As of 1940, 13,000 blacks lived among 145,000 Jews, and by the end of World War II, blacks actually predominated on some blocks. Studies showed that from 1940 to 1950, Brownsville’s black population doubled (to 24,000), and seven years later, their numbers stood at approximately 38,000.6 Many new African American arrivals settled in Brownsville after migration from the South during and after the war, in search of economic advancement and social and political equality. More than a million and a quarter African Americans made the city their home from 1945 to 1970. Initially, these newcomers migrated to longstanding black sections of the city, such as Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant, before coming to Brownsville. Caught in the web of dilapidated environs, they struggled to gain a financial foothold. However, they found that discrimination had followed them north. Men and women in search of employment encountered a declining market for their skilled and semiskilled occupations. Segregated unions denied them entry into existing jobs. Those domestic “girls” working in Crown Heights homes might have become “secretaries or sales clerks” if racial barriers had not forced them to slop pails and brooms. Unemployed or underemployed families doubled up in cramped quarters to pay their rents, contributing to further overcrowding

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and exacerbating neighborhood decline by straining local resources. Parental desertions, broken homes, and juvenile delinquency were also part of the unfavorable social mix.7 Champions of urban renewal urged the city to tear down the worst dwellings. But what of those who were displaced? Seemingly little, if any, thought was given to the time lag between the destruction of portions of neighborhoods and the construction of improved housing. Instead, urban renewal empowered city officials to increase residential segregation. The all-powerful Robert Moses, as head of the New York City Housing Authority, determined that the Brownsville “community would be a dumping ground for those displaced by the renewal of other [middle-class and white] areas.” He used the false promise of large-scale public housing.8 Ironically, back in the 1940s, when such ideas were first discussed, Brownsville’s Jewish residents had supported that type of housing initiative. They imagined public housing, such as the projects built across the East River on the Lower East Side, as better than the tenements that blighted the area. But the buildings turned out to be deficient in many ways. The contractors used cheap materials, providing for only small, narrow apartments devoid of many amenities and without sufficient recreational areas around the high-rises. Yet when the first large-scale developments, the Brownsville Houses, opened in 1948, they provided space for thirteen hundred families. Jews occupied the majority of the units; African Americans lived in the others. However, soon, these new apartments became launching pads for the “working poor.” In the years that followed, those Jews who ascended the socioeconomic scale moved out. Strict income limitations forced out the most successful. In their stead, a different class of blacks, who previously had lived in even worse conditions, settled in. The racial balances started to tip. City housing regulations contributed to additional imbalances, giving preference to those who were displaced elsewhere (i.e., indigent blacks), including many who were referred to euphemistically as “problem families.” Criminality, both juvenile delinquency and gang violence, was the most visible and fearful social pathology that gradually infected these “projects.”9 Prejudice also deterred those African Americans who might have acquired the economic wherewithal to create a stable middle-class presence in the locality. The same Federal Housing Administration programs that provided white former GIs with mortgages to live in a suburbia off-limits to blacks

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denied African Americans opportunities to purchase homes within existing neighborhoods. Through policies known as “redlining,” Brownsville and other comparable inner-city neighborhoods were foreclosed federal mortgage insurance, and new private investment or capital improvements were rendered impossible.10 For those Jews remaining in Brownsville by the early 1960s, a combustible combination of floating fears and realities of crime stoked yet another round of white flight. Crime numbers horrified many. Stories of attacks against Jews in the public housing units traumatized more than just the immediate victims. As in East Tremont, once word and fear spread, one family’s departure inspired others. In time, a crescendo of concerns motivated additional families to seek shelter elsewhere in the city. Again the elderly, who were often destitute, were left behind. With these spiraling dynamics in play, a community that in 1957 was 66 percent white and heavily Jewish became, in just five short years, 75 percent African American and Latino.11 By 1962, this compound of poverty, violence, fears, and flight, exacerbated by unscrupulous real estate operators who capitalized on these tensions, ended vibrant Jewish life in Brooklyn’s East New York, threatened continuity in Crown Heights, and over in Queens, changed Jamaica. “Blockbusting” by aggressive agents seeking to “flip” houses warned those who owned residential properties that it was essential to sell out before the entire neighborhood turned black and their life’s investments would be lost.12 Although these neighborhood transformations surely engendered strained relations between Jews and blacks, the absence of expressed, intense racial animosities tapped down their volatility and limited the spread of antipathies beyond local communities. Thus, whatever was then happening in Brooklyn stayed largely within circumscribed confines. A historian of the tenor of these times in Brownsville has pointed out that while Jews who remained in the area in the early 1960s “felt increasingly uncomfortable in a sea of black and Latino faces, . . . there were no race riots or significant confrontations.” Perhaps the hardest feelings that were exposed publicly emanated from the streets of Crown Heights. There in 1964, a local Hasidic rabbi, Samuel Schrage, organized the Maccabees, a Jewish street-patrol group. By that time, the once middle-class neighborhood was in the throes of change. Poorer blacks were migrating in large numbers from Brownsville and elsewhere in the borough. Blockbusting in a neighborhood where Jews often lived in private homes and

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not in apartments was prolific, and street crime escalated. But even as Crown Heights was changing, Rabbi Schneersohn told his followers that come what may, the Lubavitchers would not leave an enclave that they had labored to build up. They would not abandon its network of schools, shuls, shops, and other communal institutions. Rabbi Schrage, following his rebbe’s decision and anxious to protect fellow Hasidim, organized patrols, with their walkietalkies in hand, to create a neighborhood watch. But to many blacks in Crown Heights, the Maccabees’ activities smacked of vigilantism that targeted their people all too indiscriminately. Conversely, some Jews saw criminals as more than just a reprehensible underclass but as anti-Semites. It remained for a City Commission on Human Rights investigation to attempt to set that record straight. It determined that muggers, burglars, and other criminals were essentially opportunists — black and white — who had invaded the neighborhood. The commission’s analysis also made clear that street patrols included both Jews and blacks. Schrage eventually changed his group’s name to the Crown Heights Community Patrols, helping to calm angry community voices.13 Racially tinged skirmishes occurred elsewhere as well. The writer who rhapsodized about the late-1950s Jewish élan in town and its condition of “noncrisis” admitted “that there had been a number of ‘incidents’ ” that had made race relations “anything but easy.” He noted that in 1958, the Amsterdam News “denounced the Jewish principal of a Bronx school in a predominantly Jewish neighborhood for accepting five classes of Negroes from a nearby school, but isolating them on a separate floor.” This Fortune feature story also pointed to misunderstandings in Harlem, where the NAACP initiated a campaign against neighborhood liquor stores — most, they said, were owned by Jews — that were “closed to Negro salesmen.” Local residents expected more out of Jews than from the general white population, because “the Jewish attitude on integration [was] more liberal than Protestants and Catholics.” The article noted that in testifying before the city’s Commission on Intergroup Relations, a spokesman for the black group “expressed amazement” that given “the closeness that has existed between Jews and the Negro community,” Jewish store owners did not immediately accede to their requests.14 However, during the 1950s and early 1960s, blacks and Jews, living in a highly segregated city, largely did not confront or even engage one another. In most parts of town, few pressure points existed to produce conflagrations. Eli Lederhendler, a historian of postwar Jewish New York, in writing about his

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youth recalled, “I (and many others) lived in a kind of conditioned ignorance where black-white relations in our city were concerned. . . . Certainly nothing explicit was ever mentioned to me that was anti-black. In fact, as far as I could pick up from people of my parents’ generation (relatives, friends, teachers), there was an active desire to put things right,” that is, with regard to “principled politically sanctioned segregation between people of different backgrounds.” However, back then, the question of “just why basic services like public schools should have been inadequate to those [black] children’s own home environment, or why de facto residential segregation by color was a way of life in New York . . . would have taxed my limited powers of analysis and my limited awareness of racial thinking at that age.” Apparently it “only barely registered” on him at the time that his “own mixed Jewish-Catholic, middle- and lower-middle-class neighborhood constituted a pocket of relative privilege, at least in quality-of-life terms.”15 I grew up, at precisely the same time, in Parkchester, a working- and lowermiddle-class section of the East Bronx, just a few miles from where Lederhendler was raised. My experiences with blacks were even more limited. Like most New York Jews of the time, as Lederhendler has aptly described them, I was “blithely unaware . . . of others’ situations.” Parkchester, a complex with fifty-eight apartment houses that housed fifty thousand people, owned and operated by the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, was racially segregated. The Met maintained similar policies toward blacks in Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village in Lower Manhattan. A City Commission on Human Rights report charged in 1968 that from its opening in 1941 until 1963 not a single African American family rented an apartment in the neighborhood. From 1963 to 1968, only twenty minority families secured housing there. I can testify that as a child and later as a teenager (1949 – 1968), I never saw a young black face in the playgrounds. It was the Jewish minority against the Irish majority, with whom we played and against whom we sometimes fought. The ethnic composition of the area, we were told as kids, was “90% Irish and 10% Jewish and almost nobody else.” Actually, “Parkchester was 35% Irish, with heavy concentrations of Jews and Italians.” I did have one friend of German American extraction. A rather large fellow, he aligned himself with the Jews in pickup games and helped even out the score in the playground.16 As a student who commuted daily to a Jewish day school in Yorkville, I never saw a black student in my classes. They lived in the Soundview and

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Hunts Point sections of the Bronx and in East Harlem, serviced by stations that my “express” subway train passed on the way into “the city.” When we took the “local,” parents admonished us never to get off at stops in these “poor” neighborhoods. But even most of my Jewish playground teammates had only handfuls of black kids in their public elementary and junior high school classes. They were outsiders bused over from Hunts Point. For some Parkchester Jewish students, the racial calculus changed in high school. Depending on where they lived in the complex, they might have been assigned to the well-integrated James Monroe High School in Soundview, while others went to the predominantly white Christopher Columbus High School in Pelham Parkway, if they did not pass the entrance exams to elite public schools. Like the Lederhendlers, my family believed in social justice, but we never really acted on that viewpoint. We kept ourselves fully up-to-date about protest marches in Selma, Alabama, and efforts to integrate the South. We habitually watched it all on the evening news at dinner hour, applauded Dr. King’s efforts, took pride that Professor Abraham Joshua Heschel, the eminent Jewish philosopher and social activist, stood next to King on his marches and mourned the trio of martyrs Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney during the “freedom summer” of 1964 in Philadelphia, Mississippi. But we had little sense of any racial tensions between Jews and blacks in our city. Effectively, we were part of that last generation of New York Jews who believed in the existence of a special relationship and a commonality of fates that linked us with African Americans, even if our social and economic positions both in the city and nationwide differed radically and our commitments were never tested. In that same “freedom summer” of 1964 in Mississippi, race riots broke out in Harlem and in Bedford-Stuyvesant. The violence began on July 18, when New York City police lieutenant Thomas Gilligan killed a fifteen-year-old African American, James Powell. After a protest at the Harlem police station, thousands of angered residents became rioters as they “raced through the center” of the neighborhood, “shouting at policemen and white people, pulling fire alarms, breaking windows and looting stores.” This initial conflagration resulted in thirty arrests. Violence continued for two successive nights in Harlem. By the third day, Bedford-Stuyvesant erupted. In that poorest black neighborhood in Brooklyn, one thousand protestors gathered on Fulton Street and Nostrand Avenue, shouting “killer cops.” Soon “bottles began raining on the police,” and attacks occurred on local businesses. In the aftermath

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of the violence, white store owners in Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant tallied up their losses. The rioters seemingly targeted “only businesses owned by white persons.” In Harlem, the damages from the first night were estimated at $50,000, while in Brooklyn, owners of a looted furniture and appliance store put losses at more than $10,000. They sued the city and its police for failure to protect their property against the rioters.17 In the days that followed, instant analysts and more detailed examinations made clear that the root causes went well beyond neighborhood revulsion at alleged police brutality. Rather, the violence “reflected deep-seated grievances,” a litany of social and economic abuses that resembled those pushing Harlem residents into the streets in the 1930s and 1940s. As in the earlier conflicts, “squalid living conditions and barriers to employment” had “created . . . despair” that contributed mightily to anger and ultimately to attacks. New York Times editorialists minced no words when they opined that “the deepest reason for the rioting” was “the horrible ghetto condition, . . . stinking tenements, the lack of good schools, the inadequate recreational facilities, the shortage of job opportunities that condemn thousands to life on a near-animal level.” Just as in the past, high on the list of malefactors were rapacious landlords and storekeepers, “greedy white folks,” and “prejudiced employers.” All of these enemies were routinely characterized as part of the “white power structure” intent on “keeping us [African Americans] down.” Nonetheless, for all of the raw emotions that were then expressed, neither in the rhetoric of the rioters nor in the criticisms of the commentators did anyone suggest that the riots were directed against Jews, as opposed to whites, even if Jewish names abounded on lists of local entrepreneurs whose places were looted. “No observer at any of these first series of riots recalled hearing anti-Jewish slogans,” wrote a sociologist several years later. For her, such silence contrasted pointedly with the strident voices heard during the “troubles of 1965 – 1967” that began in the Watts section of Los Angeles and ended in Detroit. In these later encounters, “increasingly intermingled with the cries of rage against whitey were words of hatred reserved just for the Jew.” At no point during New York’s first “long hot summer” outbreak did a contemporary street-corner counterpart of Abdul Hamid project “the Jews” as Harlem’s problem.18 The Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA), in reporting on nights of violence in Brooklyn to its national Jewish readership, also detected no widespread anti-Jewish sentiments on the streets, even as it noted that some “anti-Jewish

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slogans [were] yelled.” JTA quoted Maccabee leader Rabbi Schrage alleging that “a number of Arab students . . . entered the area to stir up trouble against the Jews” but admitted that “the rioting did not appear to be directed at the stores because they were Jewish-owned, because the rioters also stormed and ransacked stores owned by Negroes in the section, which still had a heavilyJewish population.” The Brooklyn-based Jewish Press, an organ hypersensitive to any manifestations of anti-Semitism, shared JTA’s viewpoint. While four weeks earlier its headlines reported, “racial crisis in U.S. brings increase in anti-Jewish bias” — although the haters in that piece were the Klan and the American Nazi Party — and a week later it highlighted that boxer “Cassius Clay had pledged to fight with the United Arab Republic in any future war against Israel,” its July 31, 1964, edition simply reprinted the JTA’s release. Its editorialists, who in future strident black-Jewish confrontations were habitually outraged, did not comment on the 1964 riots. Nor did any of its readers care, in subsequent editions, to offer views on the outbreak of urban violence.19 The turning point in black-Jewish relations in New York occurred in 1968 as a battle ensued in Brooklyn over community control of the Ocean Hill – Brownsville public school district. Then the two groups first openly confronted each other on issues that not only hit home on the local neighborhood scene but also resonated throughout the city and beyond. The confrontations elicited vituperative anti-Semitic and racist sentiments from both sides. Angry feelings and misunderstandings that had previously bubbled beneath the city’s surface percolated up to large-scale consciousness. The prime combatants pitted the largely Jewish United Federation of Teachers (UFT) union against local black parents, even if neither group precipitated the dispute. In 1967, the president of the Ford Foundation, former Kennedy and Johnson administration national security adviser McGeorge Bundy, turned his attention to ameliorating the most pressing domestic issue of the day, racial inequality. Focusing on New York City, he was keenly aware that students in poor neighborhoods did not receive the same level of education as their white counterparts did elsewhere in the metropolis. Schools in these slums were underfunded and overcrowded, and their pupils were dispirited and underachieving. An advocate of community control of local neighborhoods and self-empowerment, Bundy authored a plan to turn control of schools in such areas over to local leaders and to parent groups in three sections of the city, including Ocean Hill – Brownsville. Mayor John V. Lindsay, anxious to tamp

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down racial tensions, welcomed Bundy’s involvement and the Ford Foundation’s financial support. Few issues provoked passions as much as the blight of inadequate schooling. As one impassioned mother put it, “I do not want my child to grow up in the same ghetto as I did.” For her, quality public education held the key to opportunity and mobility.20 Initially, the teachers’ union leaders supported decentralization plans that promised to revitalize depressed schools. Some even walked arm in arm with local parents to the 110 Livingston Street headquarters of the Board of Education to advocate for more funding. For UFT head Albert Shanker, who was soon pilloried by black activists and Jewish critics alike for harboring racist sentiments, these early protests reflected his past pedigree of support for civil rights. He had marched in Selma. However, when the Bundy plan was implemented in the Ocean Hill – Brownsville experimental school district, it immediately led Shanker’s unionized Jewish teachers into a confrontation with neighborhood people and with their advocates both within and without the district.21 District unit supervisor Rhody G. McCoy provoked the first emotional flash points. The word on both the black and Jewish streets was that McCoy was a follower of Black Nationalist Malcolm X and associated himself with black activists or provocateurs — that designation depended on what side of the racial divide an observer stood — such as Sonny Carson and Les Campbell. The former, head of the Brooklyn chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality, was renowned, or notorious, for his physical intimidation of white opponents. The latter led the African-American Teachers’ Association and spoke angrily of the “death for the minds and souls of . . . black children” due to “the systematic coming of age of the Jews who dominate and control the educational bureaucracy of the New York public school system.” McCoy, in accord with these radical sentiments and determined to assert his authority within the district, moved to fill administrative vacancies with blacks who shared his sentiments. The union quickly protested that he did so without following promotion guidelines. The union was also troubled by the decidedly antiwhite and frequently anti-Jewish rhetoric that permeated Ocean Hill – Brownsville schools in the days after the assassination of Dr. King in April 1968. But McCoy’s unilateral move of summarily dismissing nineteen teachers and administrators in May 1968 galvanized union opposition and greatly exacerbated racial tensions. All but one were Jewish, and many closely aligned themselves with the UFT.

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They had been deemed “unsupportive or ineffective” in meeting community needs. On their way out, McCoy threatened, “Not one of these teachers will be allowed to teach anywhere in the city. The black community will see to that.”22 The UFT initially prosecuted its defense of its members in the courts, which granted relief to the terminated teachers because of lack of “due process,” only to have the mayor refuse to implement the decision. Shanker, now at odds with both City Hall and his African American opponents in Brooklyn, called his rank and file out on the first of three strikes that effectively closed down the entire city school system for close to three months. During this time of troubles, spewed charges and countercharges of anti-Semitism and racism fouled the city’s air. An unsigned letter that found its way into the mailboxes of UFT teachers in one of the Brooklyn district’s schools exacerbated matters. It read in part, “It is Impossible for The Middle East Murderers of Colored People to Possibly Bring To This Important Task” of teaching “African American History and Culture . . . to our Black Children. . . . The Insight, The Concern, The Exposing Of The Truth That is a Must.” Shanker quickly distributed half a million copies of this letter, which angered Jews throughout the city. Jews picked up black anti-Semitism from two other local sources, one that was related to the school fight. Late in December 1968, on WBAI-FM radio, Les Campbell read a poem “dedicated” to Shanker written by a fifteen-year-old schoolgirl. The young author, reportedly “sick of hearing of [Jewish] suffering in Germany . . . and of the Jews’ hatred for black Arabs,” rhymed the following: “Hey, Jew Boy with that yarmulke on your head / You pale-faced Jew boy — I wish you were dead.” A month later, many New York Jews took deep offense at an introductory essay to a catalogue from a “Harlem on My Mind” exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The essay quoted another black teenager: “behind every hurdle that the Afro-American has yet to jump stands the Jew who has already cleared it.”23 Throughout the school ordeal, which only simmered down in the winter of 1969 when the school district in turmoil came under a state trustee, national and international developments intensified city-based black-Jewish tensions. Most critical was the impact of the Six-Day War on both communities. That anonymous letter writer’s referencing “Middle East murderers” and the young poet’s comment about the “Jews’ hatred for black Arabs” reflected a growing African American identification with the Third World and denigration of Israel as a colonialist state. Bringing these perceptions back home, blacks

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projected Jews as oppressors wherever they encountered them. For many New York Jews, by contrast, the Israeli victory inspired them to emulate their courageous brethren and to stand tall against all enemies foreign and domestic. Bringing that attitude back to their own urban realities, they “concluded that they could and must fight like hell for themselves” — specifically in the school teachers’ case, for their jobs and, more largely, against anti-Semitism — and they needed to “stop worrying if others saw them as pushy, rude or unreasonable.” Reading public opinion polls that found, in 1968, that “49 percent of African Americans in New York believed that ‘Jews are irritating because [they are] too aggressive’ [and] 39 percent thought Jews were ‘too ambitious for their own good’ ” only intensified their concerns. For Shanker’s supporters, “he was one ‘tough Jew,’ ” a battler for his people in New York civic life.24 If these late-1960s conflicts underscored the reality that while Jews and blacks lived in the same city, they lived largely in different economic, social, and political worlds, these tensions also revealed serious fault lines within the Jewish community. There were Jewish teachers who hardly perceived Shanker as a hero. Though their presence was barely noted, UFT opponents of long standing, erstwhile members of the far-left Teachers Union, identified with black aspirations. Many of the Teachers Union’s rank and file lost their jobs during the McCarthy Red Scare of the early 1950s for their alleged, or real, Communist affiliations. Some refused to sign loyalty oaths that were demanded of teachers. But others within this graying cohort soldiered on in the system even after their labor organization disbanded in 1964.25 More significantly, young Jewish teachers — 40 percent of the replacement cohort that McCoy brought into the district in 1968 — publicly denied that anti-Semitism pervaded Ocean Hill – Brownsville. A twenty-three-year-old recent graduate of Long Island University who secured one of those jobs characterized his group as “younger and better educated” than UFT stalwarts, “with less experience in working for the system and more in working against it, . . . nearly all .  .  . ‘committed’ to social change.” He thought the UFT had made “skillful use of the issue of . . . anti-Semitism . . . to intensify the fears of the liberal Jewish community.” Older strikers were offended by this youthful rhetoric of “social change” and rejected the allegations that the UFT was distributing hate literature. As they reviewed their own lives and careers, they contended that they were drawn back to a neighborhood that was once “theirs” to teach a new group of underprivileged youngsters. They had empathized with their

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charges because they, too, had been poor children of immigrant newcomers to New York, growing up in Brownsville and adjoining Brooklyn neighborhoods. In the spirit of egalitarianism that had long permeated these once Jewish streets, they had cooperated with responsible local black parents in attempting to improve students’ lives. Now, arrogant young colleagues chastised them while black anti-Semites pilloried them as racists.26 Ira Glasser, executive director of the New York branch of the American Civil Liberties Union, strongly seconded the younger teachers’ sentiments. As he challenged the UFT’s motives and methods, he pointedly “blamed Shanker for whipping up the anti-Semitism issue” in order to undermine the entire decentralization effort. As far as black anti-Semitism was concerned, the liberal organization alleged that the UFT’s evidences were “half truths, innuendoes and outright lies.” Concomitantly, Jewish left of center social commentator Nat Hentoff, from his desk at the Village Voice, not only “opposed the union stance and its supporters” but addressed the alleged volatility of the collateral incident at WBAI. As a civil libertarian par excellence, Hentoff upheld the station’s right to permit its shows’ hosts and guests to speak their minds. While the rhetoric was unfortunate, ultimately he expected that the discussion that ensued around the poem would make clear that Jews were not the blacks’ real enemy. Others in his office opined, “would the critics of WBAI prefer that we made a compact (or law) to pretend that anti-Semitism does not exist and let the virus spread in darkness and silence?”27 Meanwhile, operating out of a totally different Jewish space, Rabbi Meir Kahane, founder and leader of the Jewish Defense League (JDL), projected his people as under existential attack. Stimulated during the Ocean Hill – Brownsville difficulties, JDL initially followed in the footsteps of Rabbi Schrage’s Maccabees street patrols but with no ambiguity about their enemies. From his pulpit as managing editor of the Jewish Press, Kahane constantly argued that the anti-Semitism that emanated from the teachers’ strike was but the latest manifestation of black antipathies suffered by his Jews of Brooklyn. He ridiculed the “establishment” Jew as “a rich Jew who lives in Scarsdale or some other rich suburb” removed from the realities of city life and without any feeling for what the “grass-roots” was facing. Kahane viewed the city as “polarized beyond hope” with “anger, hate, frustration.” In the Jewish neighborhoods that he championed, “integration,” that liberal byword, had occurred because wealthy Jews had abandoned their lower-class and lower-middle-class fellow

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Jews, precisely those whom Kahane sought to mobilize. “Militant blacks there,” he said, “practice terror, extortion and violence.” To protect his own kind, Kahane and his paramilitary activists used every means to answer anti-Semitism both within and without Brooklyn. They picketed WBAI’s offices, calling on the Federal Communications Commission to revoke its license. They rallied on Fifth Avenue at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, demanding that the “Harlem on My Mind” exhibit be taken down. They even extended their fight in Manhattan to the steps of Temple Emanu-el, protesting this liberal Jewish congregation’s invitation to a member of the Black Panther Party to present his claims for reparations from whites for the exploitation of blacks. One of Kahane’s lieutenants warned that “heads would have been broken” if the event had gone off as scheduled. In his view, “if they could extort money from one synagogue, black extremists all over the country would do the same thing.”28 The Jewish Defense League also pilloried Leonard Bernstein and his wife, Felicia, when, in January 1970, they hosted a fund-raising gathering in their Park Avenue duplex in support of the (Black) “Panther 21” on trial for conspiring to blow up the Bronx Botanical Gardens. For Kahane, the maestro epitomized the elite and naive “radical chic” New York Jew at the center of “liberal and intellectual circles [who] lionize the Black Panthers.” While Kahane asserted that his organization defended “the right of blacks to form defense groups,” Bernstein and his friends, in his view, went “beyond this to a group which hates other people. .  .  . Bernstein and other such intellectuals do not know this, they know nothing.”29 Kahane’s rhetoric, and especially his methods, did not capture the hearts and minds of the vast majority of the city’s Jews. But his articulation of dichotomies of Brooklyn versus Scarsdale or, for that matter, Brooklyn versus affluent Manhattan reflected real disagreements among Jews. The splits actually measured the comfort level of Jewish groups and enclaves within the metropolis. All Jews seemingly agreed that black anti-Semitism was increasing. The Anti-Defamation League, which before the strike had proclaimed that there was no “organized anti-Semitism in New York” and that blacks generally were less anti-Jewish than whites were, now noted, “Raw undisguised anti-Semitism . . . is at a crisis level in New York City schools where, unchecked by public authorities, it has been building for more than two years.” But levels of anxiety over this threat varied. Depending on where Jews lived, they held fundamentally different views of the role the municipal government was playing, or

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abdicating, in addressing their concerns. One sociologist has argued that the Brooklyn school events of 1968 transformed “outer borough Jews” from “optimistic universalism” to “nervous parochialism,” while inner-borough cohorts maintained their longstanding personal equanimity and liberal equilibrium.30 A public opinion poll conducted half a year after the strike picked up an even more complicated and nuanced range of attitudes across the city. Every calculus of concern showed Manhattan and Brooklyn Jews in fundamentally different places. For example, the proposition that “blacks tend to be antiSemitic” was “emphatically denied by Manhattan Jews .  .  . but was solidly believed by Brooklyn Jews.” In similar fashion and degree, less than one-half of the Jews in Manhattan perceived a rise of “anti-Jewish feeling in the city,” while almost two-thirds of those in Brooklyn felt the increase in such tensions. The Brooklynites also “tended to deny that discrimination against blacks takes place . . . and tended to believe stereotypes against blacks, . . . while those who live in Manhattan . . . tended to disagree with their co-religionists.” Comparably, twice as many Manhattan Jews agreed that African Americans were “justified in [their] demands” than did their Brooklyn counterparts. While those in Manhattan expressed significant reservations about the state of their urban enclaves — 26 percent said that their neighborhoods were “going down” — a full one-third of them enthused about where they lived. They perceived that their areas were “getting better.” Almost no Brooklynites felt very good about where they lived. The most that they would say in a positive tenor was that the “trend was staying the same,” for better or for worse. On one of the fundamental questions that revolved around the crisis between the UFT and the Ocean Hill community, the perception that “white teachers discriminated against black youngsters,” more than a quarter of Manhattan Jews agreed with the allegation. Almost no Brooklyn Jews concurred with that provocative statement.31 This Louis Harris poll also ascertained that not all outer-borough Jews agreed on other compelling issues. Those in Queens generally mirrored the perspectives of those in Manhattan. They, too, rated the state of their neighborhoods favorably; in fact, they were the least likely New York Jews to worry about “going out on the street at night.” Similarly, fewer Queens Jews estimated a “rise in anti-Jewish feeling” citywide than did their coreligionists elsewhere. “Manhattan and Queens Jews were most agreed that anti-black discrimination does exist,” and the majority of Queens Jews felt that blacks in the city were “justified in [their] demands.”32

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Perhaps most interesting were the attitudes of Jews in the Bronx. On the one hand, they appeared to be the most apprehensive about the future of their residential areas. Even more than those in Brooklyn, “they expressed dissatisfaction with their neighborhoods,” seeing them as “going down.” Some 70 percent of those polled felt that way. This trend, it was surmised, stemmed from “a recent influx of blacks and Puerto Ricans.” In other words, as the 1960s ended, their sections were changing more rapidly than any other borough was. But when it came to attitudes toward these newcomers, on several questions, those in the Bronx responded much like their fellow Jews in Manhattan and Queens. Of all New York Jews, as an aggregate, those in the Bronx were the least pronounced in their estimate of “anti-Jewish feeling in the city.” Like those in Manhattan and Queens, their majority perceived that blacks suffered from discrimination and that they were “justified in [their] demands.” For the surveyors, the Bronx Jews were a major part of “the balance in the center of the Jewish community.”33 Ultimately Bronx Jews were of two minds because by 1969 there were two textures to Bronx Jewish life. In older sections such as the Grand Concourse, which was in the early throes of its decline — aging both in the length of Jewish presence in the area and of its inhabitants — Jews expressed concern about “inundation by recently arrived blacks and Puerto Ricans.” Those Jews pointed out that “affluent Jews who live in expensive apartments in Manhattan do not have to worry about the likelihood of a large-scale black influx.” But they could have said the same thing about the “under thirty-five,” upwardly mobile, “well educated” Jewish crowd that populated the growing Riverdale section of the Bronx. Though the surveyors did not break down attitudes by specific neighborhoods, this new generation of Bronx Jews identified with the social values of those in Manhattan and scored high on every quotient of tolerance. They might even respond affirmatively to the theoretical concept of blacks moving into their neighborhoods, assuming these newcomers were of the same socioeconomic class. Meanwhile, in a place such as Parkchester, there was no racial turmoil because as late as 1968, its owners kept it segregated.34 The diversity of Jewish opinions on where the city was heading and their place within the changing urban mix became even more apparent in the fall of 1969 when Mayor Lindsay ran for reelection. In 1965, New York Jews had split between those who voted for one of their own — Controller Abraham Beame would have been the first Jew to occupy Gracie Mansion — and those

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who voted for the young Republican John Lindsay, who was also the standardbearer of the Liberal Party. The major issues that time around had been “fiscal responsibility,” due to a significant budget gap left by the incumbent Wagner administration, “political extremism,” and “police misconduct.” Only the third consideration smacked of race, as it was just a year after the murder that led to the Harlem riots. Lindsay supported establishing a civilian police review board, while his opponents demurred. But that issue did not turn the election. Actually, more blacks voted for Beame than for Lindsay. As far as political extremism was concerned, that highly charged item related to the views and associations of the Conservative Party candidate, the widely quoted intellectual William F. Buckley Jr., whom Beame and Lindsay both linked to the John Birch Society, an anti-Semitic and racist organization.35 For Jews, the choice came down to ethnic heritage versus reform politics and a perceived new start for New York. Beame, who prized his independence, was unfairly cast as a relic of old-time city politics, though he had been elected controller just four years earlier as a “reform” candidate. Almost no Jews voted for the archconservative Buckley. In fact, as Election Day grew closer, Beame’s appeals to group pride, or even his failure to formally distance himself from such endorsements, fell flat among many Jewish voters, as the Protestant outsider picked up traction among portions of the controller’s natural constituents. Lindsay campaigned vigorously for Jewish support, his nylon yarmulke perched high on his head. When the votes were tallied, Jewish districts in Manhattan and Queens leaned toward Lindsay, while some Brooklyn neighborhoods, such as Williamsburg, supported Beame. One pollster declared that the Jewish Democrat was “clobbered . . . in upper-income professional Jewish areas of Reform Democratic persuasion.” But Beame held his own in “Jewish middle-income, non-professional neighborhoods.” While class-based distinctions appeared, this election was not a referendum on the place and comfort of Jews in the city.36 In 1969, the city’s exploding racial tensions lodged firmly in Jews’ minds when they went to the polls. Now, the incumbent faced Democratic challenger Controller Mario Procaccino and Republican and Conservative candidate John Marchi. Lindsay retained only his Liberal line. To so-called outerborough Jews, His Honor was no friend of theirs. Had he not sided with the blacks against the Jewish teachers, not to mention mayoral missteps and slights that seemed to reflect an anti-Jewish mien on the mayor’s part? His

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proposal to enforce alternate-side-of-the-street regulations on the High Holidays angered those constituents who would not move their cars on Rosh Hashanah or Yom Kippur. Many Jewish residents of Queens also felt that the administration failed to provide proper city services. Hundreds of thousands of them had been stranded during the winter storm of 1969 when sanitation department snowplows never made it to their homes and offices. The candidate’s every effort to apologize for his mistakes and to deny favoring blacks over Jews did not mollify this constituency. But Lindsay retained the allegiance of “Manhattan” Jews and their compatriots in other boroughs for whom Lindsay still stood for a progressive, compassionate, and ultimately optimistic vision of the city’s promise for all groups. The incumbent also wisely interjected a national-international concern into his campaign that appealed to young, liberal Jews. He spoke out strongly for an end to American involvement in the Vietnam War. Procaccino lampooned these Jewish voters and their Christian counterparts as “limousine liberals,” a caricature of those who it was said were insulated by wealth and position from the traumas of crime, neighborhood change, and racial extremism. That image of privilege and naiveté about the urban crises around them played well among Jews and others whom the mayor’s postures and policies had alienated. Jews divided their votes. Affluent Jews who resided largely in Manhattan and those “who lived in Brooklyn and Queens and still worked as schoolteachers, wholesalers, accountants, and dentists” made different choices in an election in which “for the first time in New York City’s history .  .  . racial conflict became determinative for the city’s politics.”37 These acute differences appeared when Jewish votes were analyzed. “Upperincome and [luxury] apartment-dwelling Jewish areas voted to re-elect Mayor Lindsay, while middle-income and [modest] home-owning Jewish areas tended to favor Mr. Procaccino.” The victor carried three-quarters of the predominantly Jewish vote on the Upper West Side and Upper East Side of Manhattan, including Yorkville, and ran well in Flatbush’s Forty-Fourth District, “with perhaps the best incomes for Jewish residents” in that borough. Similarly, “the well-to-do and largely Jewish [areas] of Forest Hills and Kew Gardens” went for the incumbent, but he lost the “middle-income and lowerincome” Jews in the Rockaways and elsewhere in Queens. In the Bronx, the two tenors of Jewish attitudes played out, as Riverdale, “the highest-income section” of the borough, chose Lindsay, while “middle-income areas” preferred

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his opponents. Ultimately, “an unusual combination of support from higherincome New Yorkers and low-income Negroes and Puerto Ricans” propelled Lindsay back into office. Better-off Jews, content with their lot in the city, lined up with blacks and Latinos, while their less affluent brethren voted with other white ethnic groups unhappy with New York’s direction and priorities.38 Just a few months after this hotly contested election, these profound attitudinal differences resurfaced as the crux of an intense internal Jewish debate over the future of Forest Hills. The controversy arose in reaction to a Lindsay plan to build low-cost housing in the neighborhood. The city proffered as its “moral imperative” the end of tacit racial segregation in the city, with access for all to improved educational, recreational, and social outlets. But opponents heard “projects” when the city contemplated a plan to construct 840 apartment units within three twenty-four-story buildings in their neighborhood. The government’s arguments that the new construction would also avail deserving elderly did not dampen objections. Nightmare fantasies imagined poor newcomers bringing crime and racial turmoil, elements it was claimed that had undermined other Jewish enclaves. Many of the protestors saw themselves as “refugees” from Bronx and Brooklyn communities that had “turned” due to governmental tampering with their streets. The leader of those who were outraged, for example, had been born and raised in Williamsburg. One of his supporters asserted, “Many of us come from formerly Jewish communities in the Bronx and Brooklyn where an influx of low-income people meant that our children could not play safely in the streets and grown men were afraid to go out after dark.” They carried those last memories from earlier happier times in their old neighborhoods. Now they perceived themselves as victims of an insensitive, if not cynical, Lindsay administration that had taken for granted their supposed unalterable Jewish liberalism. Had not most of the Jews of Forest Hills stood with the mayor in the election that had just passed? Notwithstanding his widely critiqued record on black-Jewish relations, he had garnered six thousand more votes than Beame had in that district. Those who now increasingly felt at odds with their city’s policies and its lack of concern about their needs also noted that Gracie Mansion had backed off from comparable initiatives in adjoining predominantly Italian enclaves because the politicos understood that that ethnic group would not stand for unwanted black incursion.39 But Rabbi Ben Zion Bokser, spiritual leader of the neighborhood’s largest

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congregation, stood apart from his community and absorbed much criticism for his liberal stance. In sermons and in essays in his synagogue’s bulletin, he consistently supported the Lindsay plan and forthrightly addressed its racial subtext. Sanguine about what changes would mean in improving Jews’ lives in Forest Hills, he once allowed, “The initial impact [of] more contact with Negroes in our places of business, in our schools, in our home neighborhoods will produce many incidents of tension, but in the fullness of time this will be a source of blessing to all of us.” He continued, “Integration . . . will give each of us unanticipated opportunities to widen our understanding of life.”40 As the debate continued, predictably both “Manhattan” and “Brooklyn” Jewry’s views were heard. The Midtown-based American Jewish Committee and the Anti-Defamation League of the B’nai B’rith echoed Bokser’s sentiments, although these defense organizations were appalled by the city’s racial polarization. However, the ADL did have a problem with its Forest Hills representative, who stood up at its annual meeting against the “overwhelming” majority of its “national chapters” that voted “to pass a resolution in support of the low-income project . . . and its goal of integration.” In response, the meeting’s chairman spoke of his Queens community having been “agitated out of all proportion into baseless fears.” On the other side of this debate, the Jewish Defense League prepared to fight forced racial integration. Kahane recognized how the political perspectives of Forest Hills’ Jews had been changed by crisis at their doorsteps, and he turned them toward militancy. He mused, “It’s easy for the Jew in Forest Hills to be liberal in Mississippi, [but] when a low-income housing project comes to Forest Hills, suddenly all these Jews that used to get up in the Forest Hills Jewish Center [Rabbi Bokser’s congregation] and say that JDL uses violence and they’re bad, come over to me and say, ‘Listen, if that housing project goes up, can you blow it up?’ ”41 Though not advocating violence, Rabbi Harry Halpern of Brooklyn’s Flatbush Park Jewish Center confided his fear to Bokser. “People have a right to be alarmed by the influx of such a large number of low income residents. I know that in schools where there has been considerable bussing there are numerous threats against children who will not yield their money to those who wield knives.” From a very different part of Manhattan, the racially changing Upper West Side neighborhood, came a warning from Rabbi Joseph Sternstein of congregation Ansche Chesed: “I have served . . . inner city temple[s], . . . and I was in the thick of many controversies . . . and had my family exposed to the

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conditions of the city. . . . If you do not want Queens Boulevard to be transformed to Upper Broadway, where Jewish women cannot walk down the street unmolested, you will reverse your opposition on this Forest Hills project.”42 Mediation efforts of Queens lawyer and future governor Mario Cuomo, together with intercession from the federal government, eventually transformed the project into a cooperative endeavor that stilled the angry voices.43 But as the 1970s began, New York Jews walked away from these disputes increasingly of several minds over how comfortable they were, unsure of whether promises or nightmares would be theirs in their city. In the decades that followed, Jews in each of the boroughs, indeed in every neighborhood, told varying stories, from how frightening to how exciting life was in the metropolis in an era of urban decline and revival.

Embattled Mayor Abraham Beame with famous New York Daily News front page: “Ford to City: Drop Dead,” November 3, 1976. (Bill Stahl Jr. / NY Daily News; reprinted with permission)

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With the eyes of millions of viewers coast-to-coast on the screen watching the second game of the World Series, commentator Howard Cosell looked beyond the diamond to the view outside Yankee Stadium: “Ladies and gentlemen,” he announced in his acerbic fashion, “The Bronx is burning!” A controversial Jewish sports commentator who saw himself as a transcendent social critic, Cosell prided himself on telling it “like it is.” So although he misidentified the source of the conflagration — he said it was an apartment building, but it was an abandoned school — Cosell, with a mien of extreme gravitas, pointed out to the nation that his native city was ablaze, a blighted, steeply declining metropolis under siege. Cosell did not pause to note the symbolism of the action on the field. The October 11, 1977, game pitted the Los Angeles Dodgers — that once-adored neighborhood-hugging franchise that had, in 1958, abandoned Brooklyn and contributed to a decline in the borough’s self-esteem — against the Yankees, long emblematic of the city’s power and dominance but presently rife with internal strife and controversy. For Abraham D. Beame, the city’s first Jewish mayor, New York City needed such negative publicity like a hole in the head. But Cosell’s pronouncement etched itself into national consciousness. Everyone now saw New York as a city of broken promises.1 Cosell’s stinging jab came just a few days after President Jimmy Carter had made a surprise visit to the South Bronx. Newspapers and television reported that “he viewed some of the country’s worst urban blight.” Carter delivered a powerful media blow to the city Beame led. Arriving by way of the southernmost part of the Grand Concourse, described as “a decaying remnant of

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a once fashionable boulevard,” he walked on Charlotte Street, near Crotona Park, “through two blocks of rubble that looked like the result of wartime bombing.” Less than two years earlier, a Daily News headline screamed, “Ford to City: Drop Dead.” While President Gerald Ford took offense at this tabloid’s characterization of his response to New York’s appeal to the federal government to “underwrite the city’s debts” to prevent municipal bankruptcy, Ford asserted strongly that the “people in New York have been the victims of mismanagement.”2 Beyond the injurious rhetoric lay unavoidable realities that a confluence of social, economic, and political crises had brought the city to the brink. Unlike earlier periods in New York history, in this century seemingly there was no escape. When Beame took office in January 1974, the explosive, explicit racial name-calling of the late 1960s had abated, but underlying tensions from longexisting problems of urban decline persisted. The compromising controller had won election after outlasting Herman Badillo, the first Latino to run for mayor, in a Democratic primary runoff and then defeated Republican John Marchi and Conservative Mario Biaggi in the general election.3 Under Beame’s watch, the “lag” ended on many interconnected fronts “between the time when destructive forces” began to work and “the time when the effects” became visible. The metropolis’s years as a light manufacturing center ended. Jews for generations found work and prospered in the city’s industries, but neither their children nor new immigrants managed to compete against cheap, nonunionized labor and tax incentives in Sunbelt states. New York’s garment trades, printing industries, and food processing migrated south, the first stop before leaving the country. Located near superhighways, these businesses had plenty of room to expand operations, and goods could be easily transported to, rather than from, old large-city markets. As the city’s revenue base declined due to out-migration of businesses, short-sighted increases in municipal corporate taxes on the firms that remained and the always annoying permit and inspections fees further exasperated manufacturers.4 A significant worldwide recession began in 1973, exacerbating matters. Many major commercial banks, concerned with their own liquidity, demanded that the municipality pay back loans that they had for years encouraged New York to assume. These lending institutions also pushed strongly for greater government responsibility, calling for diminutions in city services,

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freezes and reductions in city jobs, and the rolling back of longstanding municipal labor benefits. Attempting to respond, the Beame administration instituted a wide range of budget cuts that engendered hard feelings citywide. Several firehouses were closed. Police and teachers were laid off. In 1976, the City University ended its 129-year tradition of no tuition. The city found little sympathy in Washington, D.C., where there was a sense that the metropolis was being repaid for its longtime irresponsibility and arrogance, even if no one actually told the city to drop dead.5 The abandonment and destruction of housing in expanding poor neighborhoods was an even more profound example of how governmental “sins of the past” — and some very recent transgressions — were being visited on “the population of today.”6 For more than a generation, critics of municipal policies had warned of the unintended consequences of rent-control laws, initiated during World War II to keep landlords from capitalizing on the housing shortage. Observers raised concerns about “the rent control trap . . . that distorts its housing market and creates new slums.” Because landlords were blocked from garnering reasonable returns on their rent-frozen property, “a nibbling deferment of maintenance” ensued, as owners were “discouraged from repairing the leaky roof before it rots out beams and ceilings.” Predominantly white, working-class residents put up with these inconveniences while paying very low rents until the early 1960s, when the fortunate ones relocated to suburbia or other new urban neighborhoods. Jews, too, increasingly decided to leave the city, abandoning mostly their elderly. Jewish communal discussions ignored these indigents until the 1970s, when crusading journalists focused attention on their problems. In the meantime, those left behind shared these buildings in disrepair with the city’s poorest, if these Latinos and African Americans did not opt for the “projects,” which possessed their own problems.7 The collapse of the manufacturing job market brought massive unemployment to recent immigrants and African Americans. Those who had never shared equally in the city’s economic promises found fewer opportunities than ever within the depressed pool of entry-level industrial occupations. Many tenants were unable to pay their rents unless they were supported by the Welfare Department. People doubled up in apartments, as others had done during the Depression. Streets teemed with youth, and some turned to peddling drugs as addiction and crime rates increased. Landlords, seeking a way out

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of their financial holes, decided to take advantage of an ill-advised vacancy decontrol law of 1971 to extract whatever money they could from their poor tenants. The law allowed owners to hike rents every time there was a turnover in what were increasingly becoming transient populations. In each instance when a welfare family was moved in and out, fees and charges could go up without any improvements on the property. Yet if a landlord desired to upgrade the holdings, “redlining” by banks prevented the requisite extension of loans and mortgages.8 But after a certain point, landlords escaped this spiral of deterioration by abandoning their buildings to avoid real estate taxes. On the way out, the most unscrupulous were complicit in torching their investments to collect insurance. Nefarious “finishers” found lucrative opportunities to help complete the job. Before the suspicious fires, these criminals stripped the building of salvageable parts, while the destitute still lived there. The epidemic affected neighborhoods all over the city, from the Lower East Side to the Bronx, to Brooklyn’s Brownsville, Crown Heights, and Flatbush. As the housing problems spread, they often reached the outskirts of previously middle-class communities.9 Such was the fate of the wide expanse of the Grand Concourse. In December 1970, an aide to Bronx Borough President Robert Abrams complained to a reporter that while the media was keenly aware of housing problems elsewhere in the city, he “sure would like to dramatize the abandonments” in his borough: “But we can’t get the newsmen to come up to blocks like Charlotte Street.” Seven years later, he and his bosses and City Hall leaders had their fill of the writers and cameras. Then the news media chronicled how the economic and social distress of Charlotte Street and its South Bronx neighborhood was leaping north and west, consuming the once-elite Concourse and its side streets. New York provided the classic city-in-decline scenario: rentcontrol conundrums, white working-class exodus, job loss, drugs, crime, and abandonment of housing. By the mid-1970s, “the boulevard,” wrote one dismayed observer, “had become a major thoroughfare of a slum.” Then in the hot summer of 1977, physical decimation intensified beyond all limits. During a regionwide electrical-grid blackout, marauding gangs of youths, who were angrily characterized by some people as “vultures” or as “jackal packs,” looted much of the area’s remaining businesses. Several months later, when Cosell spoke out, the designation “South Bronx,” with all its negative connotations, applied to much of the Grand Concourse and its neighboring streets.10

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These years severely tested the faith of New York’s Jews in the metropolis’s promises. More than in any prior era of their history in the city, the issue centered on whether they still felt safe, secure, and comfortable. Differences in perspectives between optimistic “Manhattan” and pessimistic “Brooklyn” Jews, and their counterparts in other boroughs, appeared in the sharpest relief. Tens of thousands answered the basic existential question of whether they belonged in New York with an unqualified no. They joined and indeed constituted a significant component in the middle-class exodus of the 1970s – 1980s. The numbers show a net loss of one hundred thousand Jews from the five boroughs, with their prime destination nearby suburbia. Now, for the first time, Jews were as “equally suburbanized” as the general population was. The Bronx suffered the steepest decline. By 1981, fifty thousand fewer Jews lived there than ten years earlier. Congregations folded. The Tremont Temple ended its more than half century of service to the Grand Concourse community. As late as 1966, the congregation still had “200 families with 120 children in its school.” Nine years later, membership had evaporated “down to fifty — most of who live[d] north of area.” At that point, it merged into the Scarsdale Synagogue.11 Among the most dissatisfied Jews on the move were those with preteen and teenage children, who saw no future for the next generation in the old neighborhood. They worried about the education their youngsters would receive in city schools and with whom they would sit in classes. Longtime Jewish public school teacher and administrator Berl Sternberg recalled that in the 1960s, during his first decade as an assistant principal at Junior High School 45, located off Fordham Road, perpendicular to the northern section of the Grand Concourse, half of his students were of Italian ancestry, a third were Jews, and only 15 percent were black or Latino. By the early 1980s, only 5 percent of his pupils were white. School statistics verify shifting enrollments. As of the 1971 – 72 academic year, within District 10, where Sternberg worked, some 60 percent of the students were either black or Latino.12 The arrival of Jewish refugees from the Soviet Union and Muslim countries along with expatriates from Israel mitigated the substantial decline of New York Jews. Rough estimates suggest that from 1972 to 1984, fifty thousand Jews from the USSR, one-half of those allowed to immigrate to America, settled in New York. Approximately the same number of Jews came to the metropolis from Iraq, Syria, and most notably Iran, where Jewish life declined precipitously after the fall of the Shah in 1979 and the rise of the Khomeini regime. In

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addition, by the early 1980s, no fewer than fifty thousand and perhaps as many as one hundred thousand Israelis lived in New York. Such common immigrant impulses as “economic and professional problems or temptations” motivated their migration, as did interest in advanced educational training and a desire to “get out and see the world.” A minority emigrated because of concerns over Israel’s security and personal military obligations in a country constantly threatened by war. Each of these groups settled in Brooklyn and Queens and helped to maintain a Jewish presence. Starting out from their own enclaves, the newcomers began their quests to see what New York, even in decline, had to offer.13 Some Jews who stayed in New York City nonetheless shared their suburban compatriots’ pessimism about the destiny of the city. In the 1970s, many Canarsie Jews felt alienated from the metropolis, although their Brooklyn enclave had been spared much of the worst of urban blight. Those who worked in service industries among the poor or as city employees, social workers, and most notably, teachers encountered daily the economic and social problems just beyond their borders. Everyone seemed to know someone who had been victimized elsewhere in the city. However, though fears of African Americans pushed those with money to move to the suburbs, many more determined to stay. They decided to protect their neighborhood by forcefully limiting the numbers of blacks and Latinos around them. “We ran once but we have nowhere else to go,” one Jewish community leader explained. The earliest postwar Jewish settlers came to Canarsie from Brownsville and East New York during calmer times in the 1950s. But by the 1970s, the sense on the Jewish street was that they were part of a “Diaspora,” unwilling exiles who had been forced out elsewhere in Brooklyn. “Not rich” but fortunate enough to have found a refuge, “a sanctuary,” in Canarsie, they refused to surrender their piece of the borough.14 Jews struck alliances with their Italian neighbors, who occupied the vanguard of community backlash. Jews eschewed the vigilantism that some Italians resorted to and were often apologetic and circumspect when they explained their stance to family and friends who lived outside of their threatened neighborhood. But on key gut issues, the two white ethnic groups found common cause, even if they failed to “achieve a seamless identity.”15 In the critical housing arena, Jews and Italians worked on convincing those who might put their properties on the market — often the elderly with

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longstanding ties to the community — to sell only to the “right kind of buyers.” They implored these neighbors that advertising be placed only in “Jewish, Italian and Chinese papers” and not in the New York Times. In courting that Asian minority, they reasoned that if the neighborhood was destined to change its color, “Orientals” — as they were called — who “mind their own business, . . . respect you as an individual and their morals are good” were far more acceptable than blacks and Latinos were. Local residents created neighborhood buying services to bring customers to sellers. No one wanted “for sale” signs posted outside. Block associations patrolled the community to forestall panic selling, to fight blockbusting real estate agents seeking to “flip” houses, and to impress on those contemplating a move their continuing obligations to those who would remain. Some Jews turned to the nearby Brighton Beach community to recruit coreligionists from the former Soviet Union who had acquired the economic wherewithal to purchase their first homes in America.16 Defense of turf also spurred Jewish and Italian activists, with widespread support among their neighbors, to stand as one against the busing of even a limited number of black youngsters into a Canarsie junior high school. Parents boycotted during the 1972 – 73 academic year and succeeded in keeping 90 percent of the students out of school for more than two weeks. In asserting his community’s right to control its own public schools, one local rabbi reminded his public that just two years earlier, during the fractious New York City teachers’ strike, black parents had claimed just that right. His “what’s good for the goose is good for the gander” rhetoric resonated in a community where more than 10 percent of the Jewish residents in some sections were teachers, administrators, or paraprofessionals. An Italian resident spoke of an inescapable irony that “blacks wanted decentralization in Ocean Hill – Brownsville. But then 80 percent of the fired . . . teachers came to Canarsie and now the blacks want to come here.” Concerted efforts led the city school board to halt its busing initiatives.17 The Jews of Co-op City hoped that come what may to their old neighborhoods, they could live comfortably and securely in new environs in the city. However, that promise was only partially fulfilled. They had been lured away from their stable and affordable communities, most notably from the Grand Concourse, by a gigantic 15,400-unit apartment complex in a northeastern corner of the Bronx. The dream was to construct, in the spirit of the Amalgamated initiatives of decades earlier and under the name of the United Housing

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Federation, a bucolic residential environment “for friendly people living together.” Supported by Mitchell-Lama subsidies, these apartments included free electricity and air-conditioning. Previously Jews had sprawled on fire escapes or sat on park benches long into the summer nights, the best way to stay cool. The planned community for working-class people and their children boasted shopping centers, schools, parks, and abundant parking, in effect offering residents suburban amenities within the metropolis. Attracted by these offers and often frightened by African American and Latino migrations into their erstwhile neighborhoods in the late 1960s – early 1970s, between twenty-five and forty thousand Jews (estimated as 50 – 80 percent of the initial residents) made Co-op City their home. Moving there made abundant sense to “the salesmen and civil servants, the accountants and bakers,” many approaching retirement age, who perceived their new homes as “the only way station between the decaying neighborhoods they escaped and the affluent suburbs they cannot afford.” They hoped to re-create at least part of the friendly street culture of the old neighborhood. And indeed, when the complex opened, “long after night fall elderly men and women [would] stroll along the expansive greens or chat on benches.” On the Jewish holidays, residents promenaded in a style reminiscent of the Grand Concourse of old, even if one of the early arrivals described that street scene as not New York but “a little Jerusalem.” There were “no iron gates on the stores” and “no graffiti.” Co-op City boasted “one of the lowest crime rates in the city, second in the Bronx only to Riverdale.” A thirty-five-man “security force armed with night sticks” enforced an eleven o’clock weekday and midnight Saturday curfew, which annoyed youngsters but kept them in line. Occupants could pretty much have it all for “an average carrying charge of $31.71 a room (including utilities) after a down payment of $450 a room.” It appeared to be a Jewish working-class haven. An early resident who had paid “$83 a month rent plus gas and electric for four rooms” in the West Bronx now expended but “$130 a month utilities included.” Moreover, she, an office employee at Mt. Sinai Hospital, her postal employee husband, and their two sons had a terrace in an apartment that they owned with open spaces around them.18 Some older Jewish residents of Parkchester also moved to Co-op City, even though it represented but a half step up. Fear did not motivate their move. The youngsters chased by Parkchester private cops from locked playgrounds after

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closing time were their own. But while their buildings were well maintained, the prewar structures lacked air-conditioning. Sitting outside with friends until late at night during the summer was no substitute for the promises of Co-op City. Parkchester’s vacant apartments attracted some Jews who fled the South Bronx. They joined aspiring working-class blacks and Latinos, who now could rent apartments in Parkchester, and Irish and Italians in composing its new core constituency.19 The adult children of Parkchester residents who made it to Co-op City, having outgrown their mischievous moments with the neighborhood’s security force, did even better than their parents. They settled either in suburbia or in Riverdale. By the mid-1970s, Parkchester’s Jewish heyday had ended. If Jews chose Riverdale, they discovered an “island entirely of itself, . . . in the city yet not of it,” a new-era urban bedroom community tucked away from New York’s decline. They could even pretend to be, as one critic put it, “a rich nephew who doesn’t recognize his ragged old uncle.” In 1972, this articulate Bronx partisan who apparently lived in Kingsbridge, a few blocks east and down the hill from that “rocky escarpment,” wanted those privileged denizens to be more engaged in their borough’s concerns. He noted that while Riverdale “prides itself ” as a “cultured, progressive and liberal community,” it had “resisted, successfully so far, any attempts to build low-income and even Government-subsidized middle-income housing projects.” By the 1980s, whether they were socially committed, elitist, or apathetic, thirty thousand Jews lived in Riverdale.20 But while middle- and upper-class Jews sank secure roots in Riverdale, so that by 1991 they constituted a full third of the neighborhood and their percentage of the population grew steadily, poor planning plagued Co-op City. Both United Housing Federation leaders and government officials badly underestimated expenses in building and maintaining the state-assisted endeavor. Carrying costs, which included mortgage payments and rising fuel prices, became an increasingly onerous burden on residents who had qualified for apartments under Mitchell-Lama precisely because of their limited incomes. In the early 1970s, fifteen thousand (40 percent) of the occupants were over sixty-five years of age, and many of them lived “on pensions and Social Security.” However, although they were aging, these “cooperators” had not lost their combative spirit, honed for decades as unionists. In 1975, when

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the United Housing Federation board attempted to impose a 25 percent rent increase, residents took to their own streets and withheld monthly payments, setting off a thirteen-month rent strike. They demanded that the government increase its subsidies. This protest had some of the trappings of past consumer revolts. Reportedly 80 percent of the people joined in the protest. Driving around the complex, block captains, elected by a steering committee, boomed out announcements as bedsheets supporting the effort hung from windows. Strike leaders collected some $15 million in rent checks, which they kept secretly. There was even a sort of underground newspaper. With constituents showing their lack of confidence, if not outright contempt, the United Housing Federation directors resigned. In June 1976, an initial compromise solution was reached whereby a new resident-elected board would endeavor, with government help, to “seek to implement economies and find new revenues.” But without a program for ongoing rent stability, the cost of living in Co-op City remained a burden for many residents. Israel Schwartz, who moved into the complex soon after it opened late in 1968, in looking back on his experiences after ten years there asserted, “It’s a dud, a complete dud. We were taken in, suckered right from the start. We were promised the Garden of Eden, but they inveigled us to get us in and then started to pile the charges on.”21 By 1979, when Schwartz was interviewed by the New York Times, he and his elderly confreres also complained that their buildings were not aging well. Just two years earlier, there was a six-month dispute with the State over construction defects. These ranged from falling bricks to shifting land under the buildings that occasionally caused gas leaks. The word on Co-op City streets in the mid-1980s was that “ ‘CD’ does not mean ‘compact disk’ but ‘construction defect.’ ” By the end of that decade, naysayers described this neighborhood as “a dream gone sour.” As the citywide crack-cocaine epidemic entered its buildings, Co-op City lost most of its Jewish residents. Rabbi Solomon I. Berl, struggling to keep his Young Israel of Co-op City going, attributed the decline of his “once-vibrant congregation [to] the three Ms, mortality, move-outs and Miami Beach.” When he relocated from the East Bronx some twenty-one years earlier, his congregation had seven hundred families. In 1989, he ministered to less than two hundred. Among those who remained — as well as those who belonged to the complex’s four other congregations — were those who did not feel his acute sense of abandonment. They acknowledged that their numbers constantly were dwindling, but they lived harmoniously, in their relatively

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low-crime area, amid the new majority of African American and Latino families, whose aspirations reminded some Jewish old-timers of their own years earlier. The most contented among them even felt that gradually the upkeep of Co-op City improved. But no young Jewish families moved in.22 While Riverdalians felt right at home, Co-op City families wondered about their decisions, and Canarsie Jews struggled, other New York Jews in the 1970s evinced unbridled confidence that the city still possessed, as it always had, so much to offer. These upwardly mobile singles and couples without children scorned suburbia. They found both comfort and excitement in the metropolis. Even at the very nadir of New York’s decline, social commentators noted the beginnings of an alternate urban dynamic. “Behind the empirical city lurks another city, a city of wonders and dreams,” wrote one scholar in his 1977 paean to a New York that had “kept all of its promises” to him. Another sociologist concretely observed that “despite the exodus to the suburbs and changes in the ethnic configuration of the city,” it was home to “a sizable middle- and uppermiddle-class” that had decided that the “city’s amenities outweigh, or at least compensate for, its disadvantages.” Economist John Kenneth Galbraith explained that “the suburban movement was the response of the older city dwellers to the poverty and indiscipline of the new arrivals” and predicted, “As that shock effect loses its relevance, the superior quality of city life will naturally assert itself.” Members of this “new elite” made “the entire city their bailiwick.” Not tied to a specific neighborhood, they frequented chic cultural, culinary, and high-class entertainment throughout the metropolis. Still, when they ended their days and nights out, they returned to communities that benefited from their presence. In 1978, it was noted that “young people who two decades ago would have settled in a Levittown are gravitating towards neighborhoods like Soho and Brooklyn Heights.” In some cases, these “trend-setting gentrifiers” or “urban homesteaders” began to turn once dismal districts into “delightful neighborhoods.” Observers marveled that Manhattan’s Columbus Avenue, once run-down and dreary, possessed “colorful shops and restaurants.” With the right bottom-line bank accounts, and perhaps also the right pigmentation, they found banks ready and willing to extend to them the necessary lines of credit to assist their initiatives.23 Young Jews participated in the emergence of this other optimistic New York scene because so many of them had escaped the occupational downturn in their city. Part of a new generation, no longer working class, they possessed

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financial security. They had choices and could move around the city’s neighborhoods. They proved that the old adage about American Jews, romanticized as early as the 1920s, that eastern Europeans were “neither the sons nor the fathers of workers,” had now come true on a large scale.24 By the early 1970s, union by union, officials reported, as did the leader of the Knit Goods Union Local 155, “The Jewish parents used to send us their children and ask that we give them jobs. Now they no longer come.” This once predominantly Jewish garment industry had employed Jews as “pressers, cutters, knitters, finishers.” Now half of the union membership was black or Latino. Within the Amalgamated Clothing Workers Union, the only Jews in the factory were approaching retirement age. The same held true among those who worked in bakeries. Local 51 of the Bakers’ and Confectionary Workers’ Union noted “a steady decline in Jewish workers from about 70 percent to 35 percent.” Young Jews were also far less likely to seek civil service jobs, except public school teaching, or to stand behind counters in retail stores. As of 1970, only a quarter of the members of District Council 37 of the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees Union were Jews, mostly secretaries and supervisory clerks. Likewise, at large department stores such as Gimbels and Bloomingdales, only 25 percent of employees were Jews. A quarter century earlier, the figure approached 50 percent. These firms even saw a “decline in the number of Jews entering the executive ranks.” Citywide numbers confirmed these trends. As the 1970s opened, 55 percent of Jewish men were employed in “professional, technical, managerial or administrative” posts. Some 20 percent were in sales and clerical positions. Only a quarter of them were involved in any working-class occupation. If they were selfemployed, argued one demographer in 1972, they would be in “accounting, business advisory services, . . . law” and not in the “Mom and Pop store.”25 This younger generation had taken full advantage of the increasing openness of American society toward Jews. Academic achievers, they contributed to the statistic that by the close of the 1970s more than half of New York Jewish heads of households were college educated. In Manhattan, a borough described as home for over a decade to “an influx of socio-economic ‘upscale’ individuals,” more than one-third of Jewish men and 29 percent of Jewish women possessed graduate degrees. They had studied for their advanced degrees and elite professions not only at the City University but on campuses across the country.26

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In New York City, at Columbia and Barnard, as of 1969, rough estimates placed their percentage of undergraduate Jewish students at approximately 30 percent. These numbers included New Yorkers and others enrolled at these universities that recruited nationally. Fourteen years later, the percentage increased to a full one-half of the student body.27 Some of these Jewish students of the late 1960s and early 1970s became prime provocateurs of campus protest. It was as if the spirit of the 1930s alcoves and the locus of the student leadership in the National Student League had moved from CCNY to Columbia, where Jews played leading roles in such organizations as Students for a Democratic Society. When Nathan Glazer analyzed “the Jewish role in student activism” on college campuses, he noted Jews’ commanding presence at the University of California – Berkeley, the University of Wisconsin, and the University of Michigan, but not at his alma mater. When CCNY did erupt in protests, as so many campuses did during the Kent State – Cambodia crisis of 1970, some radical Jews shared the rostrums with other ethnic groups. But Jews were not identified as the most outspoken elements. Two years earlier, a Jewish physics professor at CCNY, described as “close to the radicals” on his campus, reflected, “Most of the kids here are, in some ways, like the parents of the Columbia students.” In his view, “their prime concern is mobility, to get a professional skill.” And, “as in past years, most of City College’s undergraduates climb into subways and return home by dusk.”28 But in the 1970s, this quintessential city commuter school lost much of its cachet among local college-aged Jews. Their percentages dropped precipitously from almost 75 percent of the student body in 1969, including both those enrolled at the main Harlem Heights campus and at its Baruch business school branch in Murray Hill, to only 20 percent of the uptown student population ten years later. By 1982 – 83, another informal study suggested that only 950 Jews (8 percent) attended an institution where they once predominated. These declines are attributable, at least in part, to a perception that the school no longer stood for academic excellence. In the spring of 1969, a city university systemwide fight over “Open Admissions” focused on CCNY. This policy granted a seat in any unit to all New York high school graduates regardless of grades. Those who objected to the plan argued that it meant bringing young men and women unprepared for higher education into advanced academic environments. While “Open Admissions” was mandated citywide, it did not deter Jews as much from attending a now freestanding Baruch

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College or Queens College and Brooklyn College. While the Jewish percentages at Queens dropped from an estimated 46 percent in 1969 to 36 percent in 1979, four years later, the Jewish presence on campus crested at 50 percent. Perhaps here, young men and women from less affluent Jewish families still gravitated to the promises of the city’s higher education system, even if tuition was imposed in 1976. But they no longer competed to enter CCNY in Harlem Heights. Many other New York Jews opted for moderately priced, academically respectable New York State system schools and the possibility of attending a college “away from home.”29 After graduation, these Jews obtained jobs offering more financial security than their parents had achieved. Such jobs opened doors to any number of attractive neighborhoods. Jews enjoyed their city, optimistic about its future. When queried at the start of the 1980s as to whether they were “very satisfied with the safety of the streets and with the cleanliness of their neighborhoods,” only a small minority of Jews in Manhattan, not unlike those in the outer boroughs, responded positively. But when further interrogated as to whether they thought their neighborhoods would be “better” within the next three years, 40 percent, twice as many as even those who lived in suburban Nassau and Suffolk Counties, answered positively. They planned to be part of the expected “neighborhood revival.” Less than one in seven were then looking “for a new place to live.”30 As these young people enthused about their prospects, more than one hundred thousand needy, elderly Jewish New Yorkers struggled to survive in “this huge concrete and steel and garbage city which consumes lives.” For them, wrote a sympathetic observer in 1973, “New York is an ambiguous lover. It promises riches. It steals them away. .  .  . It was a city that symbolized ‘the American dream.’ Now it is this city which typifies the American nightmare.” A full decade after economist and social critic Michael Harrington exposed the existence of an “other America, the America of poverty, . . . hidden today in a way that it never was before,” the plight of similarly afflicted “socially-invisible” New York Jews finally attracted public attention. The Federation of Jewish Philanthropies quantified the extent of their predicament. It reported that “272,000 individuals or 15.1 percent of the Jewish population . . . are poor or near poor.” Most of the seniors, 86,000 of them, lived in “15 of the city’s 26 designated poverty areas . . . frequently . . . in a religiously hostile environment.”31

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In many cases, these men and women were remnants of the Jewish laboring class. They were too old to continue working, or their jobs had evaporated as the city’s manufacturing base shrunk. Thousands of foreign-born Jews also possessed few marketable skills. Often these seniors were widows and widowers whose children or other relatives had left the old neighborhood. Some were socially and psychologically unable to leave their apartments in crimeridden environs, despite repeated family entreaties. These “holdouts . . . just put another lock on [their] doors.”32 Yet, occasionally, Jews remained for other reasons. One group of elderly South Bronx Jews stayed in their neighborhood not because they had no alternatives but because their perseverance provided “a sense of dignity and self-worth,” permitting them “to feel brave and resourceful when others [saw] the area as too dangerous to visit, let alone inhabit.” For them, “rejecting their children’s offer to house them or shunning homes for the aged” represented “a personal protest against passivity.” Anthropologist Jack Kugelmass discovered these staunch “hold-outs” within the Intervale Jewish Center, the last synagogue in the so-called Fort Apache section of the Bronx. By the time Kugelmass arrived in 1980, the area had risen somewhat from its mid-1970s nadir. “The fires had stopped. The gangs had disappeared. The drug addicts had died.” Still, these stalwarts said that even during the toughest times of the prior decade, when one member recalled that “the fumes [from fires] were so bad you couldn’t breathe at night,” they had been committed to keeping their minyan [prayer quorum] alive. What kept them going was “a lust for the ‘good fight,’ ” taking on “the challenge to overcome adversity by actively imagining reality and imposing their will on it.” Their “charismatic leader” and “acting rabbi” personified this vision. Moishe Sacks linked their fortunes and fate to a future messianic era, when the destroyed Holy Temple in Jerusalem would be restored. A gifted storyteller, he inspired the handful of neighborhood survivors to paint the building and fix the roof. Sacks, who earned his livelihood as a baker, once quipped, “When the Messiah comes, all of the synagogues will pick themselves up and be transported to Jerusalem. I want this place to look nice, and besides, we shouldn’t have leaks during the rainy season there.”33 Hasidim within their several Brooklyn settlements — the Satmar in Williamsburg, Lubavitchers in Crown Heights, and a myriad of other sects in those neighborhoods and in Boro Park — awaited the coming of the messiah

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far more reverently. In fact, so convinced were the Satmar that divine intervention alone would bring Jews back to their holy land that they violently opposed the return of Jews to the State of Israel. Their anti-Zionist stance set them at ideological odds with other Hasidism and the overwhelming majority of Jews worldwide. However, while the Redeemer tarried, Hasidim determined not only to fortify their enclaves in the Brooklyn Diaspora, even as some relocated within concentrated, insulated communities in Rockland and Orange Counties, but also to advance financially. Pursuit of New York’s economic promises while avoiding its secular culture required a strategy of engagement with New York politics. They formed a dedicated voting bloc to ensure that government would address their needs. Politicians learned quickly that a Hasidic rebbe’s endorsement meant that his followers would turn out at the polls for the chosen candidate. Soon a new urban rite of passage for those in search of votes emerged: the pilgrimage to be photographed with a nylon yarmulke on their heads next to Hasidic rebbes.34 Beyond the fear of crime, poverty plagued Hasidic communities. In the early 1970s, Hasidic indigents, “many of them with young families,” constituted “the third largest poverty group in New York.” Their problems stemmed from dilemmas that troubled all newcomers to the city, including the African American and Latino minorities among whom they lived. Many Hasidim possessed few marketable skills in a declining manufacturing center. Their resistance to American mores, which was highly esteemed in their community, severely limited their economic mobility. Often they acquired minimal secular educations. English was at best a second language. Their dress and demeanor and their high level of observance, including utter avoidance of work on the Sabbath, limited their attractiveness to employers. Fidelity to traditional bans on birth control led to large families with concomitant burdens of paying for yeshiva education. A 1972 statistic indicated that “the larger families” among the Hasidim — families of six or more — were disproportionately represented among “the poor or near poor. . . . About 25% of all such families are below the near poverty level.” There were also many unemployable elderly in these communities.35 Hasidim sustained a distinctive local economy that provided steady and sometimes lucrative incomes for owners and operators of kosher butcher shops, bakeries, restaurants, and Judaica stores. These businesspeople also

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served observant Americanized Orthodox Jews elsewhere in the city and nation, whose next generation was not interested in these occupations. Communication and confidentiality within families, coupled with international group connections with Hasidim in Belgium and elsewhere, helped others succeed in the diamond industry. Brooklyn Hasidim entered Manhattan’s FortySeventh Street, the heart of the city’s jewelry district, in pursuit of customers of all backgrounds and ethnicities. In the back of their stores, friends and relatives worked as cutters and polishers of gems. Satmar Hasid Israel Goldstein became a legend for his entrepreneurial acumen, not for selling jewelry but for electronics. By the late 1980s, Goldstein’s 47th Street Photo grossed more than $100 million annually and employed around three hundred of his fellow Jews. Most of his customers from all over the country who never set foot in his four stores probably were unaware that Jewish religious scruples governed his business hours, although he advertised that “47th Street Photo was closed Friday afternoon and all day Saturday.” Goldstein and other financially successful figures supported Hasidic institutions and the poor. Still, despite philanthropic generosity, Hasidic leaders sought government aid. Their pragmatism overcame the religious communal norm of Jews caring for their own without outside assistance or interference. Hasidim’s optimism or pessimism about New York’s future directions and their place within the city would not be tied to any citywide economic and cultural renaissance. Rather, their range of sentiments depended on the municipality’s ability to keep them safe and solvent.36 Syrian Jews, in their own sections of Brooklyn — Midwood, Bensonhurst, and Flatbush — also came to terms with the city. Their social mores did not appear to separate them from other New Yorkers. In their dress, speech, and public demeanor, they resembled those around them. Moreover, with entrepreneurial skills from Aleppo or Damascus, they carved out successful business niches and engaged customers of all backgrounds. Often relying on friends and relatives for start-up cash, a time-honored tradition, they achieved prominence in discount store operations. In the 1970s, Ezra Antar was their best-known success story, until he ran afoul of the law. Known around town as “Crazy Eddie” due to his wild television ads, in which an actor portraying him shouted at the top of his lungs that his low “prices were insane,” Antar became a discount electronics sales giant — that is, until sadly for him and his community, he was charged with a variety of securities violations, including schemes

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to “overstate company income and benefit from stock sales.” More typically, law-abiding Syrian Jews exploited New York’s economic promises while cultivating an “in-group and clannishness syndrome” to limit their engagement with New York’s wider cultural scene. A community insider noted how both older and younger generations largely avoided social intercourse with Gentiles and non-Syrian Jews. Gradually, these patterns changed in the 1970s. Young men and women broadened their social circles by attending colleges and universities. Many chose Brooklyn College close to home, but “the more venturesome went outside of Brooklyn and out of town.” Some aspired to professional careers. By the 1990s, Syrian Jews included a cadre of their own physicians, attorneys, and accountants. Some of these college-educated sons and daughters married a non-Syrian Jew and never came back to Brooklyn except to visit. Others sought advanced degrees in business administration to help them in the local family enterprise. Within the Midwood, Bensonhurst, and Flatbush enclaves, notwithstanding increased exposure to a more diversified social and intellectual world, social insularity reigned, maintained more by communal pressure than explicit religious edict.37 Differences in attitudes among New York’s Jews toward their city, and their sense of place within it, grew more striking during the recovery decade of the 1980s. Metropolitan fortunes began to change under the first administration of Mayor Edward I. Koch (1978 – 82). The new Jewish incumbent and his constituents rode the crest of an improving national economy and benefited from the energetic efforts of Governor Hugh Carey that started even before Koch took office. Albany marshaled a group of investment bankers to create regulatory agencies such as the Municipal Assistance Corporation and the Financial Control Board, which projected an aura that the city’s finances were secure. The mayor amplified practically and psychologically the city’s renewed cachet. When he appeared before congressional committees seeking financial assistance, he pointed to his aggressive posture in dealing with municipal unions, whose longstanding sweetheart contracts had burdened the city. As important, as the quintessential unmarried Manhattanite, he made a point of personally being out on the town. He personified the advertising slogan “I Love New York.” Frequenting upscale restaurants, night clubs, and athletic events, including those at Yankee Stadium, he constantly asked, “How am I doing?” Without waiting for a reply, he let anyone within earshot know that he and New York were doing just fine.38

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By the middle of Koch’s second term, 1982 – 87, his ebullience seemed to have rubbed off on his fellow New Yorkers. While harboring “an acerbic portrait of metropolitan life,” they were not “nearly as gloomy about the city’s future as in years past. . . . Fewer residents dream[ed] of moving to more placid places.” “A quirky pride in their city” was also palpable. Three out of four New Yorkers polled in 1985 “repudiated the notion” that their fellow citizens, including the mayor, who had a biting tongue, were preternaturally unpleasant to strangers. “It’s survival not rudeness,” retorted one interviewee who found the “attitude amusing and feisty.” The most upbeat people, such as His Honor, “explore[d] the city’s variety — attending plays, concerts and sports events, . . . museums, parks and libraries.”39 Indeed, New York was rebounding, with revenue streams flowing in because of “the post-industrial revolution.” While the metropolis continued to be “a headquarters city” for national and international firms, the city’s service industries rather than manufacturing or distributing companies generated the jobs and income. Between 1977 and 1988, New York lost 112,000 jobs in manufacturing but increased by 271,000 the number of spots in “telecommunication, air transportation and transportation services, commercial and investment banking, legal services, advertising, computer services, accounting and business consulting.” Manhattan became “the world’s largest shopping center” for such activities. People with proper training and motivation made their fortunes in these exciting, when not cutthroat, pursuits. When their long-beforedawn-to-postdusk workday ended, they repaired to their favorite restaurants and bars for respite, before perhaps returning to work into the wee hours. Working with clients and customers around the world, they transformed New York into a global city.40 Young associates at an aggressive law firm such as Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher and Flom never had a free lunch. Under the leadership of managing partner Joseph Flom, a Jewish CCNY night-school student with a Harvard law degree but without either the social graces or Christian faith, in the 1950s, to step into an established WASP “white shoe” law firm. Skadden earned a reputation for its high-volume work ethic as specialists in litigating hostile corporate mergers. One veteran of the booming 1980s, when this outfit grew to more than one thousand attorneys, recalled that when he “went out [with clients] for very fancy dinners and drank very expensive wines,” a boon in its own right to these restaurateurs, he always chalked it up to “billable time.”

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With a long work night still ahead of him after his expensive business meal — dinner at ten p.m., back to the desk at midnight — it made sense to live near the office, even if private car services also flourished in that labor-intensive environment. Gentrification crescendoed as former loft manufacturing space morphed into luxury residences to serve ambitious lawyers.41 In 1982, the New York Times advised people thinking of living in Chelsea that “rundown buildings that used to be single-room-occupancy dwellings are being converted into luxury cooperatives. . . . Seedy blocks once distinguished most noticeably by their derelicts now boast shops selling expensive cheeses, exotic coffee beans, pates and pasta salads.” The boom in real estate resonated beyond Manhattan. “The restless ranks of the ambitious but not yet affluent,” who could not yet afford Chelsea’s “skyrocketing rents,” were “colonizing fresh territories across the bridges.” But as “new districts of prosperity” were expanding, displacing underclass and working-class New Yorkers, pioneers of neighborhood improvement also had to move. Artists who initially had used these former manufacturing lofts as home and studio now fled upscale prices. “There’s always been room in this town for the dreamers and the poets,” complained one critic. “Sadly, it seems that the weavers of dreams are becoming expendable.” Some compared the potential departure of “the New York arts community into the arms of the Mayor of Jersey City” to the departure of the baseball Giants and Dodgers a generation earlier.42 While these young professionals were on the make, frustrations and foibles troubled them. These social pathologies garnered their greatest public exposure through the artistry of a filmmaker who shared their problems. Woody Allen was the “reigning auteur of yuppie angst, in fact of all varieties of urban angst, during the eighties,” even if his work focusing on this contemporary metropolitan scene had begun a decade earlier. Like many who were born in Brooklyn, the Bronx, or Queens, Manhattan was New York City. The “Manhattan” Allen satirized was “inhabited mainly by Jews and WASPs — there are few blacks, or Hispanics, Italians, Chinese, Irish or Haitians.” His city dwellers are affluent: “the people generally have income, a sense of style and good taste,” and his scene settings are often yuppie haunts, “all infused with [his] sense of excitement of the city and the reassurance that provides for ceaselessly varied life going on in all its urban permutations.” One analyst of the locations that Allen uses to tell the story of Hannah and Her Sisters notes that Allen’s 1986

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movie identifies no fewer than thirty venues. These range from a loft on Grand Street to the Carlyle Hotel on Madison Avenue, to restaurants in Soho, to the jogging track and Sheep Meadow in Central Park, places that his subjects, like Allen himself, frequented. The film Manhattan (1979) located the geographical hub of Allen’s central character, a semiautobiographical figure, on “the East Side extending from the forties to the nineties.” But many of these young men and women appear unhappy with their lives of material achievement. In these movies and in Annie Hall (1977) and Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989), Allen demonstrated how attuned he was to their, and his own, feelings of acute anxiety over “the competitiveness of their jobs, . . . guilt over their greed and meaningless acquisitiveness.” In their quests, as Allen portrays them, these “self-seekers” end up in troubled relationships with their backgrounds and families in the neighborhoods they had left behind. One critic lauded Allen as “the urban poet of our anxious age — skeptical, guiltily bourgeois, longing to answer the impossible questions.” Another observer credited him with possessing a keen sense for “some large philosophical dualities” that undermined the lives of these men and women who had broken from their pasts but were uncertain about their futures. Reflecting on his own cinematic achievements, and his own endemic frustrations, Allen has allowed that he was “sensitive to the reflectiveness of modern life, focusing upon inner tensions and anxieties exacerbated by the pressures of urban living.”43 There was, however, an even darker real-life side to “generation greed” when competitiveness for acquisitiveness crossed legal lines, leading the unscrupulous to commit high-profile white-collar crimes. In 1986, corporate takeover kingpin Ivan F. Boesky was fined $100 million for illegal stock manipulation based on insider trading. A man who, just a few months earlier, had told an eager young audience at the University of California that “greed is healthy, you can be greedy and still feel good about yourself ” was sentenced to two years in federal prison. While Boesky served time, fictional character Gordon Gecko borrowed the line “greed is good” in the 1987 movie Wall Street. Boesky’s fall from grace embarrassed several major Jewish charities that previously had courted his generosity. At a time when other rich Jews were showing how much they desired upper-class acceptance through identification with the philanthropies of high society, organizations such as the United Jewish Appeal and the Jewish Theological Seminary of America had been very pleased that

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Boesky had not forgotten his own people. He also sought to promote Jewish life at Princeton. The Seminary moved on after Boesky’s release, when “acting on his own request, [he] took his name off its $20 million library,” which he largely endowed.44 As with all ethnic and racial groups, Boesky and his ilk were exceptional notorious figures. Most young Manhattan Jews did not emulate the felon, even if during his rise his picture was on the cover of Time magazine. Rather, they fit the profile of those New Yorkers most energized and excited by a revived city who did so well within the law. In the early 1980s, this borough was deemed “the pre-eminent home of the never-married,” as “fully one half ” of young Jewish singles in the metropolitan area lived there. Substantial numbers of childless young marrieds joined them in their upscale neighborhoods. These were upper-middle-class professionals earning salaries far in excess of those in other boroughs, and only some older affluent Jews living in Westchester or Nassau Counties outstripped them financially. These young Manhattanites grasped “the opportunity to live near people in similar family circumstances,” handled high housing costs, and enjoyed “the proximity to expanding sources of business and professional employment and the cultural richness of the center city.”45 Some Jews struggled with personal difficulties, as captured in Allen’s movies, but did not emulate Boesky’s unbridled rapaciousness. More generally, they blended their success story with that of members of diverse ethnic backgrounds to create a new cultural texture to New York Jewish neighborhood life. This new Jewish generation did not sense that its whole world was Jewish or desire that it be that way. When surveyed, close to half indicated that their three closest friends were not Jewish. They did, however, maintain one longstanding tradition, widely observed years ago on the Grand Concourse and on Eastern Parkway. They shunned local synagogues eager to welcome them. In 1981, more than 40 percent of these young men and women never attended religious services, and another quarter appeared only on the High Holidays. Merely 16 – 18 percent attended any more than a few times per year. Perhaps, as in past eras, some of them could be found promenading around their neighborhood in their holiday finery on Rosh Hashanah. But their crowd likely included non-Jewish friends and, increasingly, relatives.46 Creative religious leaders attempted to use modern publicity methods to fill

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empty seats in their sanctuaries. In 1980, the Lincoln Square Synagogue of the Upper West Side initiated its “Turn Friday Night into Shabbos” program, with a plan that smacked of Madison Avenue’s advertising firms. Its pitch to those who frequented local singles bars was, “How about sharing red wine for Kiddush instead of white wine for cocktails?” Or “How about a $10.00 ticket for a Shabbos meal instead of a $40.00 ticket for the Theater?” The program that enveloped the liquor and tasty food offerings promised not a formal service but instead a “real Shabbos meal, . . . lots of singing, maybe some dancing” of the Jewish, and not disco, variety. Once those young “curious residents” were attracted, the congregation’s rabbis worked slowly and subtly to convince them to “usher in the Sabbath in the same way their ancestors have ushered it in for centuries.”47 Ten years later, perhaps due in part to these and similar efforts among all Jewish denominations, a discernible surge occurred in affiliation on the West Side and in other Manhattan neighborhoods. Approximately one-third of the families had “someone who is a synagogue member,” although regular attendance remained unmeasured. Changes in demography may better explain this partial turn toward the synagogue. These communities were still youthful: “persons living alone account[ed] for nearly half of Jewish households” in Manhattan, and some one-fifth were “married without children.” But increasingly young children appeared on neighborhood streets. Demographers suggested that “having children in the household correlate[d] with more extensive Jewish social ties, and with greater organizational affiliation.”48 During this same era in the West Village, homosexual and lesbian Jews who desired to affirm Jewish identity and spirituality but were alienated from synagogues that did not countenance their sexual preferences created their own alternative religious community. Beth Simchat Torah, founded in 1973, brought together for religious devotion and camaraderie a largely professional and artistic class of Jews who had helped to gentrify the area of town. For some, a gay synagogue reflected an attitudinal shift from a need to rebel against convention to a desire to belong. While sexual orientation united them, the shul remained primarily a spiritual space. Their congregation was more than a site where people came to see and be seen. Rather, said one founding member, “We wanted a shul. . . . Anything else, if it interferes with the service we say ‘No!’ Those who leave . . . say that we are too traditional, which means we are

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not a social center.” Congregation Simchat Torah grew from a few hundred members in the early 1980s to over one thousand by 1991 and inspired comparable gay religious efforts across the country and internationally.49 The excitement of the city scene in the 1980s and the new neighborhood dynamic of sharing space among others while deciding how and when to identify as Jews was largely lost on those who continued to be part of that “other” Jewish New York. The elderly poor, widowed, or divorced still struggled, though their numbers gradually declined. Throughout the 1980s and into the early 1990s, the Bronx (except Riverdale) remained the borough of Jewish seniors. Surviving stalwarts witnessed some improvement in their lives due to both the efforts of Jewish community social service agencies and the beginnings of a physical revival of their neighborhoods. Still, while a bit more comfortable where they resided, though always wary of their surroundings, with their days numbered, they did not expect to live to carve out new Jewish places for themselves if, and when, gentrification arrived.50 When Jack Kugelmass paid a return visit to the Intervale Jewish Center in the early 1990s, he found these actuarial, social, and attitudinal dynamics in play. Many of those whom the anthropologist “knew and cared about” were gone. Kugelmass reflected that whereas ten years earlier “death lurked in the background, showing its face now and then but always dispelled through blind determination,” now “death . . . parades itself haughtily,” challenging but not defeating the spirit of people such as Moishe Sacks. Those for whom the South Bronx would always be their homes lived in somewhat more salubrious conditions. Thanks to the infusion of billions of dollars in state and federal housing grants, 225,000 units of affordable housing were built. No foe of hyperbole, Koch crowed in 1989 that these endeavors constituted “the greatest construction program since the Pharaohs built the pyramids.” The reality was more modest. While the Bronx, south of Fordham Road, lost more than 300,000 residents in the 1970s, roughly 40 percent of its population, between 1980 and 1990, 26,500 people moved in, some of them Jews. Working- and middle-class families were resettling the neighborhood. Still, the South Bronx was a work in progress. Crime continued. The era of arson had passed, but the pathology of drug-sales-related violence endured. The Intervale group made the best of these shifting circumstances and persevered even as their “rabbi” died on January 12, 1995.51

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Hasidic communities in Brooklyn scorned the bright lights of a changing Manhattan. They preferred their traditional way of life, preserving the tenor of communal existence. Except for proselytizing Lubavitchers, most Hasidim evinced no interest in having other Jews join their ranks. Proud of their social insularity, they were heartened by their strength of numbers, which contributed to their borough maintaining its reputation as “a virtual demographic heartland of New York’s, indeed, the nation’s Orthodox community.” The faith of the devout in neighborhood continuity expressed itself in investments in educational and cultural institutions that under the sway of the community’s religious leaders kept more affluent Hasidim in the neighborhood, supporting the poor. Still, many families struggled to maintain an adequate standard of living. A survey of Jewish poverty in 1991 ascertained that while “there are fewer poor Jewish households in the New York area than there were ten years earlier, . . . they are heavily concentrated in Brooklyn because the average household size has increased (from 2.11 in 1981 to 2.8 in 1991).” These very observant Jewish families typically had far more than two children. While they were not among the poorest of New York’s indigent, in a neighborhood such as Boro Park, only one-half of Jewish families described themselves “as at least ‘reasonably comfortable’ financially,” as opposed to 45 percent indicating that they were “just getting along.” Committed to maintaining their enclaves, Hasidim demanded that the municipality secure and enhance their living conditions.52 The parochial agenda of Hasidim appeared in their political choices when they became the quintessential “Koch Democrats.” When Koch ran for reelection in 1981, the mayor faced no strong opposition since he received credit for successfully steering the city’s fiscal recovery. Only black voters questioned his sensitivity to their concerns. Still, they too voted for him, although not with the enthusiasm of his overwhelming white majorities. Flush with his triumph, Koch sought, a year later, to capture the statehouse. However, his complete and unapologetic identification with New York City’s ethos damaged his candidacy upstate and in the suburbs. He lost a hotly contested primary to Mario Cuomo, whom he had defeated five years earlier for the mayoralty.53 During Koch’s second term in Gracie Mansion, he remained popular, benefiting both from the positive tone he had previously set for city life and the reality that his administration had upgraded city services to pre-fiscal-crisis

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levels. There was much money around within government, and affluent New Yorkers were conspicuous in their consumption. Lost from view, but noticeable to those who walked the city, was the suffering of an underclass of homeless people, many of them African American. Their fate, said their advocates, little concerned the mayor. Race relations — the calmest critics spoke of economic disparities among groups; others shouted racism — became an issue in the 1985 campaign. As that political battle approached, blacks and this Jewish mayor also sparred over the rise of Rev. Jesse Jackson as a national political candidate. African Americans reacted excitedly to Jackson’s aspiration to capture the Democratic nomination for president. They resonated to his message that they whose ancestors “once picked cotton could now pick a President.” Koch heard Jackson differently, taking great umbrage at his earlier characterization of this most Jewish city as “Hymietown.” The mayor interpreted this remark as proof positive that Jackson was no friend of Jews. Never one to mince his words, Koch positioned himself on the other side of the political barricades as an unintimidated Jewish advocate. But when it came back to local politics in 1985, Koch’s enemies were unable to mount significant opposition to his reelection. In the Democratic primary, he easily defeated Manhattan Assemblyman Herman “Denny” Farrell, an African American, and a liberal opponent, City Council President Carol Bellamy. In the general contest, the incumbent easily trounced the Republican challenger, Diane McGrath. Like two of his predecessors, Fiorello La Guardia and Robert F. Wagner Jr., Ed Koch had been returned to Gracie Mansion for the third time. He did not win a fourth election.54 During the mayor’s final four years in office, a confluence of problems made him politically vulnerable. A series of citywide corruption scandals undermined his standing. The October 1987 stock market crash ended a period of unbridled optimism about the city’s progress, a mood on which he had capitalized. Ongoing racial tensions that he had not effectively mitigated were exacerbated by events that made New Yorkers angry and suspicious of each other. In 1986, a white mob in Howard Beach, Queens, killed a black youth and injured two of his friends. A year later, a black teenager, Tawana Brawley, constructed an elaborate hoax, aided and abetted by black militants posing as family “advisers,” asserting that she had been abducted to Dutchess County, where she was raped by a group of white men, including police. When a special prosecutor refused to indict the alleged perpetrators, strident voices in the

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black community warned that with “no justice” there would be no peace. Koch incited black-Jewish tensions in the summer of 1988, when the Democrats convened in his city to select their presidential nominee, saying that “Jews and other supporters of Israel would have to be crazy to vote for Jackson,” at a time when Jackson elicited pride among black New Yorkers.55 Two Jewish candidates arose to challenge Koch, arguing that his tenure had lasted long enough. They preached good government practices and pledged to clean up City Hall. Harrison J. Goldin, four-term controller of New York through good and bad times, projected himself as a calm, efficient alternative to the bombastic Koch. Businessman Richard Ravitch, a key figure in the city’s fiscal revival who also headed the Metropolitan Transportation Authority and was an ally of Koch in chairing a charter revision committee, spoke of himself as a city manager par excellence. But African American Manhattan Borough President David Dinkins mounted the strongest opposition to an incumbent prepared to take on all comers.56 Dinkins secured support in the African American and Latino communities. To white New Yorkers, Dinkins projected reconciliation and moderation, a stance that previously had held him in good stead. One election earlier, he had garnered one-half of the Jewish vote in the Manhattan borough president’s race as he roundly defeated a Jewish candidate. Dinkins spoke warmly of his city being made up of a “gorgeous mosaic” of peoples.57 In 1989, Dinkins emphasized to Jewish voters his outright condemnation of Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan. Moreover, Dinkins pointed out his long and enthusiastic support for Israel, his concerns for the freedom for Soviet Jews, and his own dramatic travel to West Germany to protest President Reagan’s wreath-laying ceremony for members of the Waffen SS. However, Koch’s supporters exploited Dinkins’s largely symbolic cochairing of Jesse Jackson’s primary campaign to question whether Dinkins’s election would free the city from future turmoil. To one interlocutor, Dinkins responded testily, “I’m not . . . asking you to vote for Jesse Jackson. What in blazes does that have to do with whether I should be mayor of the City of New York?” But the vision of Jackson’s influence in the city concerned many Jews. They feared that under Dinkins blacks would be favored over whites. When these voters approached the polls on primary day, their choices came down to those who felt “enough already,” who were “embarrassed by [Koch’s] constant ‘shtick’ ” (his idiosyncratic if not undiplomatic behavior), and those who worried about what was

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called “the Jackson factor.” Others opined that the election highlighted the differences between those on the “traditional liberal Upper West Side” and those “who have always voted conservatively,” protective of their turfs, such as “Orthodox Jews, who make up 12 percent of the city’s Jewish population (27% of Brooklyn Jews).”58 Primary results bore out these variances. Koch carried by very large margins “five hard-core Democratic Brooklyn and Queens” areas “with largely Jewish” and Catholic populations. But in “other predominantly white areas,” Dinkins did well enough among these constituents, who joined with his African American and Latino base to carry him into the general election.59 Fear of Jackson as a hovering presence versus the promise that New York under Dinkins would be a gentler, quieter, and more inclusive city divided Jewish voters during the general election campaign. Earlier apprehensions that had kept such voters close to Koch were now rearticulated forcefully by the Republican designee, Rudolph Giuliani. Brooklyn Jewish neighborhoods heeded his warnings, despite Dinkins’s repeated efforts to calm antagonistic Orthodox Jews. Dinkins made far more than just the expected courtesy calls on local rabbis to allay community suspicions. But his efforts did not avail him on Election Day. Giuliani swept heavily Hasidic neighborhoods of Brooklyn, such as the Forty-Eighth Assembly District, which gave him 20,494 votes and Dinkins a mere 4,049. Similarly, Jewish sections of Forest Hills and Kew Gardens went for the Republican by a three-to-one margin.60 But Dinkins won the election, albeit by the smallest percentage in the city’s history. His winning coalition included approximately 40 percent of the Jewish vote, primarily in liberal Jewish neighborhoods. In Manhattan, Dinkins won assembly districts that included Greenwich Village, Chelsea, Central Park West, and the Upper West Side and was barely bested in Sutton Place. The only heavily Jewish area in that borough that went strongly for Giuliani was the Upper East Side – Central Park South. Even there Dinkins garnered a full third of the votes. In the Bronx, Dinkins ran extraordinarily well in minority communities, capturing in some places eight to ten times as many votes as his opponent. But he also did well in the untroubled Riverdale section and in the racially harmonious Co-op City – Pelham Parkway region, winning almost 40 percent of the vote. Dinkins succeeded with an electoral coalition reminiscent of the groups that secured John Lindsay’s reelection some twenty

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years earlier: liberal, higher-income Jews, along with some similarly disposed, affluent Catholics and lower-income minorities. In retrospect, Dinkins’s victory revealed that “despite deep racial cleavages within New York City,” this town differed “from other older industrial cities,” due in part to its large, if variegated, Jewish population. An effective black politician on the scene where “racial mistrust was far from universal,” who articulated a “bi-racial rhetoric,” received a fair hearing. Dinkins appealed to “cosmopolitan white young professionals dwelling in places like Manhattan’s Upper West Side and Brooklyn’s Park Slope,” who proved to be critical.61 In those districts, Dinkins also may have tapped into a distinctive attitudinal trait that made these voters especially receptive toward his persona and message. More than any other city in America, New York housed nonprofit foundations, many attuned to “social and urban issues.” In fact, “one-third of the largest foundations in the United States” had offices in Manhattan, and “vast sectors” of those who worked for these organizations possessed a positive “orientation towards social justice and urban issues rather than merely economic issues.” Beyond casting their own votes for Dinkins, these liberal constituents, comfortable and confident about their place in the city, might have brought others out to the polls with them, including their corporatelawyer neighbors, who took off the legally allowed time to fulfill their civic duty before returning to their case loads.62 Dinkins’s promise to fashion a gorgeous urban mosaic was marred, however, and his reputation for fairness irreparably damaged in 1991 when Crown Heights erupted in a bloody black-Jewish confrontation. The violence began after the death on August 19 of seven-year-old Gavin Cato, a child of Guyanese immigrants, killed in a traffic accident by Hasidic driver Yosef Lifsh, who was part of an entourage escorting the Lubavitcher rebbe through neighborhood streets. Incited by local demagogues to avenge Cato’s “murder” — rumors quickly spread that Hatzolah, the Jewish-run volunteer ambulance corps, had rushed Lifsh to Methodist Hospital, where he received eighteen stitches, but had left the young boy to die — bands of enraged black youths rampaged through the night attacking Jews and police and destroying property. The mob caught twenty-nine-year-old Yankel Rosenbaum, who, though not a Lubavitcher, was identified stereotypically as an Orthodox Jew by his beard, dark clothing, and visible zizith (the ritual fringed undergarment). He was

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beaten and stabbed. He died at Kings County Hospital, the same place where Cato was pronounced dead. Rosenbaum’s death did not restrain the stilloutraged bands. This outbreak lasted for three days. Confederates from outside the neighborhood joined local rioters. Not just Cato’s death but a number of unmitigated points of tensions fueled the attacks. The Lubavitchers’ effective manipulation of the city’s political system chafed their neighbors. To help their own poor, the Hasidim had effectively gained control of a local community planning board and directed public funds their way, to the exclusion of needy blacks. Seeking to expand their presence in Crown Heights, Hasidim had used government monies to purchase and rent houses and apartments. Blacks resented when Lubavitchers literally knocked on their doors asking whether their houses were on the market. The angriest black voices spoke of “Jewish expansionist aggression.” Jews, on the other hand, worried about rising crime and laid the problem first at the doorsteps of their neighbors and then at the police for insufficient protection. But African Americans still thought that Jews engaged in racial-profiled vigilantism as they had during the early era of Rabbi Schrage’s Maccabees of the 1960s. They also resented apparent special treatment accorded the Lubavitcher rebbe. Though Koch had removed the police post from outside the rebbe’s international headquarters at 770 Eastern Parkway, the entourage that followed him through the streets on that fateful day in August 1991 had a police patrol-car escort. Ironically, this sort of protection, which began in 1981, reflected concerns over violence arising from intra-Jewish struggles between the Lubavitchers and their Satmar enemies from Williamsburg. Mayor Dinkins failed as a conciliator in this time of testing. While he distinguished between the youngster’s accidental death and the murder of Rosenbaum and called for restraint, many within the Jewish community claimed he intentionally delayed ordering the police to stop the rioting. Brooklyn’s Jewish Press, ever sensitive to anti-Semitism and protective always of the interests of its largely Orthodox readership, publicized widely a troubling alleged conversation between the mayor and Governor Cuomo. Dinkins purportedly intimated that he had accorded “a sort of day of grace to the mob” on August 19, the very day that Rosenbaum fell victim to its criminal intentions. At that critical juncture, through Dinkins’s inaction, it was said that he had shown his true colors as a coddler of black perpetrators and as unconcerned with the safety of Jewish constituents. His most virulent critics called him an anti-Semite.

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For the Jews of Crown Heights, the riot and perceived governmental indifference had a transcendent meaning beyond the immediate traumas of the days of terror and their sorrow over Rosenbaum’s murder. It spoke to them about their sense of place within this American Diaspora and questioned the most basic promise of New York. They called the attack a “pogrom,” because it reminded them of what their people had suffered elsewhere from mobs as police stood aside. It told them that wherever Jews might live, eventually they would be victimized. New York City was no different from Kishinev; America was just like Russia. Possessed of a totally different vocabulary for describing what had transpired, Crown Heights blacks characterized the violence after Cato’s death as a riot. They saw it as a “rebellion” emanating from within their midst against racism and prejudice in their neighborhood; it “resonated with a history of injuries black communities in the Americas have suffered at the hands of callous and indifferent whites.” For them, the young boy’s death did not just happen; it was not an “accident.” The Lubavitchers garnered sympathetic expressions from most corners of the New York Jewish community. Gadfly liberal rabbi Arthur Hertzberg was a rare voice asserting that historical trauma lay behind black rage. He wrote in the New York Times that the motorcade evoked “ghosts of slave masters riding into their quarters and not caring whom their horses might trample.” By contrast, some modern Orthodox activists from Riverdale who agreed with the Lubavitchers that the riot was a pogrom rushed to the scene to support their brethren. And a rump organization, the Jewish Action Alliance, kept up pressure on Dinkins to bring Rosenbaum’s killers to justice. As the investigations and recriminations proceeded, another fault line appeared, separating these Brooklyn Jews, and their allies, from Jewish Manhattanites, or at least from a segment of influential spokespeople who operated out of Midtown headquarters. This establishment group included not only the longstanding American Jewish Committee, the American Jewish Congress, and the Anti-Defamation League of the B’nai B’rith (ADL) but also the Jewish Community Relations Council (JCRC), an agency established after World War II to advocate for Jewish rights on local fronts. Brooklyn Jews charged that each of these organizations had been either silent or hesitant to address the plight of fellow Jews in Crown Heights. They allegedly constrained themselves because of their overwhelming desire to maintain good relations with African Americans at the expense of their own kind. One angered Jew from the Bronx

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damned the ADL as “just a bunch of indifferent yuppies” and asserted, “We need some real leadership.” In response, the executive vice president of the American Jewish Committee contended that organizations such as his had “worked feverishly behind the scenes” in order to end the violence. Two advocates for the JCRC took on their critics, pointing out that among other initiatives their agency had posted a $10,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and ultimate conviction of Rosenbaum’s murderers. However, the head of the ADL broke from the solid defensive pack and admitted that his and his colleagues’ organizations did indeed harbor “a strange sort of color-consciousness [that] may begin to function when the problem is [black] anti-Semitism.” Reflecting on what he saw as these groups’ endemic reticence, one sociologist suggested that there was another crucial factor in play here that went beyond a “hesitan[cy] to disrupt the already fragile black-Jewish coalition in the city.” For Jerome Chanes, those powerful “Manhattan” Jews — my term, not his — “were generally distant from the Hasidim and ambivalent toward them.” Editorialists for the Forward — that classic critic of establishments, even if it had, by the 1990s, moved from its socialist moorings — went further in pillorying the powerful. For them, such “sluggishness [was] at best an unwillingness to revise sentimental notions about black-Jewish relations [and] at worst an aversion to the plight of so conspicuous and fervent a population as the Chasidim,” these most Jewish of New York’s Jews. Meanwhile, journalist Sidney Zion placed this “Brooklyn” versus “Manhattan” split within a provocative historical context. While he did not mention either Stephen S. Wise or Peter Bergson by name, inaction by the resourceful yet apprehensive reminded Zion of the Holocaust years, “when Jewish organizations joined in the conspiracy of silence dictated by the Allied powers with Franklin Roosevelt at the helm.” Certainly, those Jews who took to the streets in Crown Heights, criticized the establishment, and attacked the mayor considered their actions inspired by the failure of Jews to act during the Nazi era. In this spirit, too, supporters of the late Rabbi Meir Kahane, who had been assassinated in a Manhattan hotel ballroom just a year earlier, reiterated his “Never Again” slogan and brought his ethnocentric approach back to the streets. But Crown Heights only made more visible deep divisions among New York Jews. For close to two decades, groups and individuals who rallied under

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the banner of militant activism, despite all of their own differences, had contended with Midtown leaders over tactics in advocating for Jewish causes all over the world. Even amid their city’s wild ride of decline and revival in the 1970s – 1990s, New York held on to its keel as a center of Jewish communal activity and dynamism.63

Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry, Freedom Day Rally at the Soviet UN mission, May 1, 1988. (Photo taken by Abraham Kantor; courtesy Judith Cantor, Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry Records, Yeshiva University Archives)

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When Congresswoman Bella Abzug ran for mayor in 1977, she understood the frustrations her generation of New York Jews felt toward their native city’s faltering promises. To a great extent, she shared their values and experiences. A child of the working class, she had earned her labor bona fides Saturdays at her father’s butcher shop, the Live and Let Live Meat Market on Ninth Avenue, in the Meatpacking District. A product of the South Bronx during its Jewish interwar heyday, she lived at home while attending Hunter College. Like so many who shared her roots, the “abandonment” and “debris around those places” she once called home saddened and angered her. She articulated plans such as “reviving the port, increasing public transportation, collecting some $590 million in uncollected real estate taxes, and lobbying the federal government” to restore New York. She cared about the city’s future. But there was far more to Bella Abzug that set her apart from those who focused narrowly on specific crises. She aspired to be not just someone who would improve city conditions. Pundits pointed out that her palliatives differed little from those of the six other candidates originally in the race for the nomination. Rather, she desired, through a stint in Gracie Mansion, to cap her career as a transformative figure, a catalyst for a more egalitarian society within and without the metropolis. Once again, out of New York Jewry arose a driven activist bearing promises of transcendent change. Her supporters in this campaign recognized that quintessential quality. It was “not so much what she .  .  . promise[d] to do for New York as her image as a fighter” that propelled her as a compelling figure. One local politico understood Abzug as the

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uncommon leader who “stirs up the people who want to kick the backsides of the powerful.”1 By the time Abzug aspired at age fifty-seven to the municipality’s highest office, she had distinguished herself as an aggressive advocate. She had earned high marks as a lawyer in labor and civil rights cases in the 1940s, as a defender of Senator Joseph McCarthy’s targets in the 1950s, and as a founder of Women’s Strike for Peace in the 1960s. She demonstrated for a nuclear test ban treaty and protested against the expanding war in Indochina. An unabashed liberal, she proved to be an attractive representative to residents of Chelsea, the West Side, Greenwich Village, and the Lower East Side, who elected her to Congress in 1970. Women’s Strike for Peace recognized her election as a turning point. After “a decade of struggle,” it “moved from seeking to influence the men in Congress to do the right thing to electing one of its key women.” Once in the House, she championed legislation that women needed most: securing reproductive rights, banning gender discrimination, and helping women gain child care. Abzug served three terms and barely lost the New York State Democratic primary for Senate in 1976 before entering that crowded mayoral contest a year later.2 Abzug failed in that citywide contest. Detractors suggested that her unyielding, uncompromising style, dubbed by her opponents as “inflexible,” limited her appeal.3 Still, for her devoted followers, she remained an iconic figure who personified a world-altering cause that extended beyond the city’s immediate concerns. Her life story bridged generations in the struggle for the liberation of women. This movement possessed deep New York roots and a profound Jewish texture. Abzug followed in the footsteps of exceptional Jewish women from New York who in prior generations had risen within and then beyond their neighborhood surroundings to fight their own battles for women’s rights. Back in the 1910s – 1920s, Clara Lemlich Shavelson — best known for her fiery speech at a labor protest meeting at Cooper Union in 1909, which inspired tens of thousands of young women garment workers to support a general strike — helped to found the Wage Earners’ League for Women Suffrage. Rose Schneiderman — famous too for her role in putting young women out in the streets in the monumental “Uprising of the 20,000,” a strike that was instrumental in the growth of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union — linked arms

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with Shavelson and others in organizing the Wage Earners’ League. They reasoned that the vote would facilitate their “taking control of their own lives.” Their concerns as working women differed from both those of working-class men and middle-class suffragists. Tensions existed over priorities between the uptown “mink brigade activists,” who were animated by unequal gender relationships within their powerful social circles, and these Jewish leaders of working women, who focused on the needs of poor factory girls sweating over sewing machines. Suffrage was essential, said Schneiderman, in order to secure fundamental human entitlements that included “the right to be born well, the right to a carefree and happy childhood, the right to education, the right to mental, physical and spiritual growth and development.”4 Unlike Abzug, Betty Friedan grew up outside New York. Friedan claimed that until she began work on The Feminine Mystique, she was not even “conscious of the women problem.” She lived in a New York suburb, a housewife like millions of her fellow American sisters struggling with the “problem that has no name.” The title of her book gave that festered social pathology a name. Notwithstanding her academic degree from Smith College and her aspirations as a professional writer, Friedan asserted that she had become victimized within her rocky marriage, forced into a “comfortable concentration camp” of a bored, unfulfilling life of affluent routine. Historians have interpreted Friedan’s life differently, arguing that she was “no ordinary suburban housewife and mother” but possessed an activist, radical political past with decades of “prior engagement with women’s issues.” But once she gave voice to dilemmas with which so many identified and her 1963 book rose to become a perennial best-seller, she and her family returned to Manhattan’s Upper West Side, the neighborhood she and her husband, Carl, a theatrical producer, had abandoned for the suburbs. In 1966, Friedan founded the National Organization of Women (NOW), serving as its first president. Three years later, she and Carl divorced. In the early 1970s, she became a major spokeswoman in the National Women’s Political Caucus (NWPC). There she worked with Bella Abzug and black congresswoman Shirley Chisholm, who represented Bedford-Stuyvesant and was the first African American woman to serve in Congress.5 Competition as well as cooperation characterized the women’s movement. Gloria Steinem joined her sister Jewish activists in promoting women’s liberation, when she was not wrestling with them for the primary leadership

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position. Steinem was a cofounder and editor of Ms. magazine, which began publishing in 1971. Also a Smith College graduate like Friedan, Steinem aspired to be a writer and journalist, but unlike Friedan, she did not marry and suburbanize. Steinem moved to the city to pursue her career, only to find doors closed to serious employment opportunities. Furious at the marginalization of women, Steinem worked as a Playboy Club bunny in 1963 and then wrote a damning piece exposing the sexist exploitation of these underpaid waitresses. With the emergence of Ms. magazine, Steinem found a feminist pulpit to galvanize women across the nation. This triumvirate of activists differed over directions the movement should take and who should be its spokeswomen. Friedan often attacked Abzug for “invading her turf ” and took on Steinem for allegedly “ripping off the movement for personal profit.” Abzug, in turn, publicly questioned Friedan’s claim to the “motherhood” of feminism. Still, for all of their jealousies and misunderstandings, they were united by another form of marginality, anti-Semitism. They were lumped together as “leaders of the Jewish conspiracy to destroy the Christian family” and accused of using “Jewish International Communist ideas to destroy America.” For Steinem particularly, born to a Jewish father and Christian mother and baptized as a Congregationalist at age ten, responsiveness to this animus was a major component in her Jewishness. She averred, “Never in my life have I identified myself as a Christian, but wherever there is anti-Semitism, I identify as a Jew.”6 Not only did Steinem, Abzug, and Friedan have to contend with antipathies from antifeminists, but they also confronted prejudices from those within their own movement. In 1975, even with Abzug as chair of the American delegation to the First United Nations International Women’s Decade Conference, they witnessed Israel pilloried as a racist state and their, and their country’s, support for the Jewish state roundly denounced. They endured similar calumnies five years later in Copenhagen, where delegates angrily contended that “Gloria Steinem, Betty Friedan and Bella Abzug all being Jewish gives the women’s movement a bad name.” Friedan recalled with outrage and sadness how a PLO hijacker was lauded as the conference’s “heroine,” while Leah Rabin, the wife of Israel’s prime minister, was attacked for her nation’s alleged “imperialist aggression.” Retreating to a church away from the official gathering to express her views, Friedan reflected ruefully on how far their enemies

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had strayed from a promised sisterhood of unity designed to ameliorate the real problems of women worldwide.7 Back home, however, their trials and steadfastness only enhanced their standing among other New York Jewish feminists, who had long been impressed with their dynamism but whose personal and communal goals differed. In most cases a younger cohort, they sought the transformation of gender power relationships within American society. But they also wanted to change attitudes toward women within Judaism. For many feminists of that era, “Christian as well as Jews, . . . patriarchal religions were simply a source of oppression and hence irrelevant to their lives.” These young Jewish women “could not define themselves solely through their feminist ideology and affiliations.” Jewishness was fundamental to their identities. Rather than reject Judaism, they determined to free themselves from constraints that the tradition had imposed on women’s participation in religious rituals and leadership. “Well-versed in and committed to the women’s movement just as they were to the Jewish tradition, . . . their loyalties” were on “a collision course.” The solutions that they articulated percolated far beyond New York and transformed the way Jewish women and men ordered their religious and communal lives in America and around the world.8 Most of these activist women found each other and coalesced into an influential community on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, the same neighborhood that housed young Jewish professionals who were increasingly disengaged from their faith. Some were pursuing graduate study at nearby Columbia University and at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America (JTS) in Morningside Heights. In the early 1970s, JTS, the flagship school of the Conservative movement, admitted women to its graduate and teacher-training programs but not to its rabbinical school. Jewish feminist activists considered this situation discriminatory and worked to change it. Many belonged to the New York Havurah, an experimental Jewish religious community. Ironically, there, within a supposed open Jewish environment, Havurah membership raised their feminist consciousness by forcing them to confront patriarchal prejudices. Products of the Jewish counterculture ethos of the late 1960s, havurahs attracted committed college-age students who chafed at what they perceived as the shallowness of synagogue life. In their quest to change the Jewish world, they sought kindred spirits eager to experiment with ritual, in song and

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liturgy, to imbibe an authentic communal experience at Sabbath and holiday meals, and most important, to engage Jewish texts by applying modern methods and sensibilities to received teachings. True to the havurah mission, the feminists, “dissatisfied with the strong bias in Jewish religious learning,” established a study group “to subject the Jewish tradition to serious scrutiny as women react[ed] to God-concepts, liturgy and sex roles.” Hopefully, as they learned more about themselves and about women’s historical role within the faith, they expected to convince the men around them to appreciate these issues. This would be a crucial first step toward consciousness raising throughout the wider Jewish community. But to their dismay, these women of the New York Havurah found that while their male counterparts, leaders of their movement, were determined to find new ways of living and acting Jewishly, they did not perceive the amelioration of female concerns as prime, or even worthy, objectives. Out of these painful gender conflicts, the women realized that they had to work for change on their own.9 Well educated and raised in the Conservative movement, these women trained their fire directly on the Jewish Theological Seminary of America. As girls, many of them had been groomed to be the future intellectual and communal leaders of their branch of American Judaism. They had been the star pupils in Conservative religious schools, regular attendees at services, participants in the movement’s United Synagogue Youth groups, and campers and counselors at Camp Ramah, its renowned summer educational program. In all regards, they were educated like their brothers, even so far as to enroll in JTS’s coeducational undergraduate program. But gender equality ended when it came to full participation as adults in religious observances. As important, they were barred from rabbinical and cantorial careers. Paula Hyman explicitly articulated the conflict the women faced: “between the way we are educated [Jewishly] and the kind of role we are allowed in the Jewish community.” A student of modern Jewish history who came to Columbia after taking her undergraduate degree at Radcliffe, Hyman had turned with her sisters in arms to the sources in classic havurah style for religious validation of their discomfiture with the status quo. She observed that “when tradition was incompatible with your sense of self, and some of your basic ethics, then you have to go back and examine the tradition.” In March 1972, Hyman joined others in drafting a manifesto, the Jewish Women’s Call for Change.

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It demanded inter alia that “women be counted in a minyan,” that they have full equality under Jewish law, that they have decision-making power in synagogues and general communal activities, and that they “be permitted and encouraged to attend rabbinical and cantorial schools, and to perform rabbinical and cantorial functions in synagogues.” Hyman subsequently wrote on behalf of the New Jewish Sisterhood to the Committee on Law and Standards of the Rabbinical Assembly, the Conservative movement’s religious authority. When the letter urging acceptance of the Call’s provisions was summarily rebuffed, the Sisterhood concretized into an ongoing advocacy group, Ezrat Nashim. The name literally means “aid to women,” but it also denotes the subordinate women’s section of the traditional synagogue, away from the liturgical action and powerful domains occupied by men. Self-empowered, the women decided to confront the rabbis directly and drove up to the rabbis’ convention in the Catskills. There they distributed their Call and held “countersessions” — a tactic of their times — within earshot of the delegates. This bold move was applauded by at least the 130 delegates and their wives who sat in at their educational forums.10 As Ezrat Nashim’s spokeswomen asserted themselves, they readily acknowledged that just as Abzug followed Shavelson, and Friedan implicitly picked up after Schneiderman, they too walked in the footsteps of exceptional Jewish women who strove to reorient traditions, efforts that possessed national ramifications. Henrietta Szold was their most iconic historical figure. When in the summer of 1973 Response, largely the journal of the New York Havurah, devoted an entire issue to essays on “The Jewish Woman,” it featured a profile of Szold. The volume subsequently became a widely disseminated group study guide. As Szold’s story was told through feminist eyes, she “by the standards of her time . . . was blessed with an intellectual and professional freedom, which only a handful of women enjoyed in her era.” But “by the standards of the current Women’s Liberation movement, she was exploited and harassed throughout the best working years of her long life.” She “harbored two ambitions — one for a brilliant career, the other for a brilliant marriage.” These dreams, her biographer quickly noted, “many ‘liberated’ women today will tell you are incapable of peaceful coexistence in a ‘male-dominated’ world.” Pursuit of a calling in Jewish communal leadership and scholarship prompted her to write articles from her Baltimore birthplace for the Jewish Messenger (New York) under the

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pseudonym “Shulamith.” In these pieces, she attacked Reform Judaism as a threat to Jewish survival. But she also expressed her reservations about the gender limits of traditional Judaism. Most poignantly, she asserted her right and obligation to say Kaddish, the memorial prayer, for her own mother rather than to have a man recite it in her stead. Scrutinizing rabbinic law, she observed, “Elimination of women from such duties was never intended by our law and custom.” Szold inspired a new generation of feminists.11 Szold’s sad saga of frustrations and exploitation at JTS also resonated with the members of Ezrat Nashim. Like her spiritual descendants, she moved to New York for advanced Jewish training. This first woman in the rabbinical school “was accepted for admission to some classes only after she assured its administration that she would not use the knowledge she gained to seek ordination.” So she assisted male classmates with their writing assignments. Later in her career, she similarly served as the “literary secretary” of the Jewish Publication Society, where, for close to thirty years, she aided “men who picked her brain and sapped her strengths, . . . took her for long walks, . . . thanked her with all their hearts and [then] married other women.” Longing for a family and a husband, the resolute Szold adopted the health needs of Palestinian Jewry as her own. Returning to New York in 1912 from her first visit to the new Jewish settlement she founded Hadassah, which not only rose to become Palestine’s and later Israel’s foremost social welfare agency but also provided an autonomous leadership venue for American Jewish women.12 The women of Ezrat Nashim recognized as well that they benefited personally from an accommodation of Judaism to feminism that had occurred fifty years earlier only a few blocks away from where they now lived on the Upper West Side. The tradition of the bat mitzvah that some of these 1970s feminists had celebrated as girls began in 1922 when Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan’s oldest daughter, Judith, read a section of the weekly Torah portion at the Society for the Advancement of Judaism. Rabbi Kaplan considered this innovation as but part of his challenge to Judaism’s status quo on many theological and ritual fronts, leading eventually to the rise of Reconstructionist Judaism. But it also reflected, as Judith Kaplan Eisenstein recalled decades later, “a conscious feminism” in the Kaplan household, a sensibility spurred by the women’s suffrage amendment in 1920. The Kaplans were far ahead of their time, and the bat mitzvah did not become commonplace for several decades. Still, their voices

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publicly called out for changing “women’s place in a synagogue,” a cause that Ezrat Nashim emulated.13 As these activists demanded change primarily within the Conservative movement, Reform Judaism’s contemporary pathbreaking step in empowering women heartened them. Unbound theologically by the strictures of religious legal precedent, Reform Judaism had always been capable, according to its own Jewish system, of ordaining women as rabbis. Frequently during earlier decades of the twentieth century, ambitious women and their male supporters had petitioned for female admission into the Reform Hebrew Union College for rabbinical training and ultimately into its clergy. But the weight of unyielding social mores within Reform leadership and its congregational ranks had stymied all initiatives. In 1972, however, the Cincinnati branch of the Hebrew Union College – Jewish Institute of Religion ordained Sally Priesand as its first woman rabbi. Her first pulpit position brought her to the Stephen S. Wise Free Synagogue as an assistant rabbi and to the Upper West Side, maintaining the neighborhood’s tradition as a locus of Jewish change. Ezrat Nashim happily monitored Priesand’s career path even as it worked to transform all segments of American Judaism.14 In February 1973, Ezrat Nashim participated in the call to New York of five hundred delegates to the first National Jewish Women’s Conference. There the issues that had initially energized the women of the New York Havurah became the articulated goals for a national movement. The unequal power relationships between men and women in Judaism had to end. Delegates emphasized the need to create meaningful life-cycle events for females. Efforts were redoubled to identify and honor women’s role in Judaism’s historical development. Many of the conference’s objectives subsequently became commonplaces across the United States, from mothers and fathers welcoming, with public ceremonial joy, the birth of daughters to the creation of life-cycle rituals celebrating all stages in women’s lives. Even in those Orthodox communities that disdained feminism, formalized bat mitzvah events such as girls learning and then offering public comments on specific parts of the Torah became part of Orthodox practice, although few explicitly acknowledged the implicit influence of the women’s movement. Ezrat Nashim’s extensive political advocacy led to the admission of the first female candidates to the Jewish Theological Seminary of America’s rabbinical school in 1984. The night when the school’s

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faculty made its landmark decision, “the women of Ezrat Nashim gathered to celebrate the fulfillment of the call they had issued over ten years earlier.” In May 1985, some of Ezrat Nashim’s strongest advocates danced outside the Morningside Heights campus on the day that Amy Eilberg was ordained as the first Conservative rabbi.15 The efforts of these young feminists strengthened the Jewishness of leading political activists such as Bella Abzug. A mutual process of influence connected them to Ezrat Nashim. Certainly, the congresswoman’s presence and address at the 1973 National Jewish Women’s Conference spoke loudly of the integration of the women’s rights movement and the struggle for equality within Judaism. In Abzug’s case, her new level of Jewish involvement constituted a return to greater religious and ethnic identity and a chance to salve some old wounds. She had grown up in a kosher home where Sabbath traditions were respected, even as her father worked on Saturday. Bella received a quality Hebrew education. As a young woman, after studying in a local Hebrew high school and at JTS’s coeducational teachers’ program, she supplemented her income by working in a Bronx Jewish center. Her membership as a teenager in her neighborhood’s secular Zionist Hashomer Hatzair helped provide her with the “moral fervor, social idealism and pioneering militancy” that guided her public life. But even as a youngster, she chafed at religious gender inequalities. She did not like being segregated in the women’s balcony and took offense, as had Szold, when she was told that she was forbidden to say Kaddish for her father.16 As Jewish feminists developed new rituals such as their own Passover seder, with the Prophetess Miriam as a central historical figure, both Friedan and Steinem, who were also reminded of their Jewishness by anti-Semitism, gravitated toward a sense of religious sisterhood. For the author of the Feminine Mystique — in that book she had nothing to say about Jewish malaises — these affirmations were a far cry from the “agnostic, atheistic, scientific, humanist” sensibilities that had led her and Carl Friedan, while they were still suburbanites, to provide their sons with “aesthetic bar mitzvahs.” For Steinem, congregating with Jewishly committed women gave her a more positive identity. Comparable dynamics contributed to a revival in Jewish feeling for Letty Cottin Pogrebin, Steinem’s cofounder and editor at Ms. magazine. Even more than Abzug, Pogrebin came from a traditional Jewish background. She attended

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the Yeshiva of Central Queens from the third to fifth grades. But again like so many other women, the negative Kaddish experience, that denial of such a basic filiopietistic right to public prayer upon the death of a parent, fueled a rebellion at age fifteen against Judaism. Anti-Semitism in Copenhagen brought her back partially. But new Jewish feminist rituals and associations gave her a greater stake in helping both to redefine Judaism and to live a positive Jewish life.17 Standing with Abzug as a featured speaker at that first women’s conference in 1973, Blu Greenberg, mother of five and wife of a leading modern Orthodox rabbi, was hardly alienated from Judaism. Yet she readily admitted that Friedan’s calls for gender equality engulfed her. Ezrat Nashim initiatives also impressed her, even as she found at this gathering other Orthodox women who aspired to find a place for themselves as observant female Jews within what she described as the “orthodoxy” of feminism. Leaders of the conference welcomed her since they aspired to create a movement that spoke to the needs of all Jewish women. Greenberg learned from that experience the necessity of a cohort of the like-minded to engender the requisite “support, the testing of ideas, the cross-fertilization.” Until then, she admitted, “except for conversations with [her] husband, the process had been . . . a very private one.”18 Concomitant with Greenberg’s personal journey toward feminism, a cohort like the one that she prayed for began to emerge, albeit independent of her, among younger Orthodox women on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Once again, that neighborhood that was home to Ezrat Nashim provided fertile ground for new Jewish ideas and activities. On the holiday of Simchat Torah in October 1972, Rabbi Steven Riskin of Lincoln Square Synagogue authorized the first Orthodox women’s tefillah (prayer) service. Women were permitted to dance with the Torah scrolls and then read, as the men did in the main sanctuary, the concluding portions of the five books of Moses and the opening chapter of Genesis. Seventeen months later, in May 1973, the congregation experienced another “watershed moment” — as Riskin recalled it decades later — when he officiated at the synagogue’s first bat mitzvah. A precocious female pupil in his Hebrew school petitioned for the right to commemorate her coming of age in the faith, just like the boys, by reading the Prophetic portion during the Sabbath morning services. “Playing it by ear,” trying “to figure out what to do for a bat mitzvah” in an Orthodox realm,

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Riskin “could not give her everything she wanted.” But he and his cantor devised a ceremony that permitted the young woman to read portions of the book of Ruth at a Friday-night service. Some thirty-eight years later, Riskin proudly remembered that event as constituting “part of [his] education” when that woman, Elena Kagan, was nominated by President Barack Obama to the U.S. Supreme Court.19 In the years following that first women’s tefillah and Elena Kagan’s initiative, the Lincoln Square Synagogue hosted periodic, usually monthly, Sabbath services for women only, and bat mitzvahs took place regularly. That this same congregation was simultaneously deeply involved in reaching the disengaged through its “kosher wine instead of cocktails” Friday-night programs only underscores how variegated both tenuous and tenacious forms of Jewish identity coexisted on the 1970s Upper West Side. In 1978, Riskin’s colleague Rabbi Avraham (Avi) Weiss welcomed a women’s tefillah service into his Riverdale congregation. Neighborhood resident Blu Greenberg was a steady participant but not a founder of this feminist group, which consisted primarily of young, secularly and Jewishly well-educated women who advanced ritual models that inspired national emulation. These New York initiatives sparked a trend among some modern Orthodox Jews despite opposition. By 2005, forty-seven women’s tefillah groups flourished in fifteen states (seventeen in New York City) and four foreign countries, including seven in Israel. Meanwhile, leaders of New York’s women’s tefillahs made common cause with Greenberg, ultimately establishing, in 1997, the Jewish Orthodox Feminist Alliance (JOFA). Started “around a member’s kitchen table,” evoking a domestic image, this advocacy group took Orthodox women’s concerns out of its constituents’ homes and local neighborhoods in the hope of transforming the wider Jewish world. Their efforts contributed to the decision, in March 2009, by Rabbi Weiss to designate Sara Hurwitz as the “Maharat” (halachic, spiritual, and Torah leader) of his Hebrew Institute of Riverdale. In February 2010, he titled her “Rabba,” another neologism that sounded much like rabbi. Although Greenberg and her JOFA colleagues were not completely satisfied that he stopped just short of designating her a rabbi — while many of Weiss’s colleagues castigated his move — erstwhile Ezrat Nashim members appreciated the impact of their activism. A vision of women’s equality hatched at Morningside Heights study sessions and later around Riverdale kitchen tables had transformed significant segments of the Jewish world.20

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While New York in the 1970s and 1980s provided the connections to nurture triumphs in the battles for women’s rights within Judaism, the metropolis likewise made possible sustained advocacy for Jews trapped in the Soviet Union. The city offered a perfect backdrop, a staging area, for vibrant protest against anti-Semitism. New York, now more than ever, assumed visibility as an international media capital, even as it continued as the hub of national Jewish communal life and harbored the United Nations, only blocks away from Midtown organizational headquarters — not to mention the millions of local Jews and their non-Jewish friends and neighbors, potential foot soldiers for large-scale public demonstrations. The fight for Soviet Jewry ultimately ended in victory, with close to a quarter million, almost the majority of those freed, settling in New York. Their choice to seek America’s unparalleled promises rankled Israeli officials who had been the first to fight, albeit often behind the scenes, for the release of their Jewish brethren. They desired these refugees’ presence to build up the Jewish people power of Israel. But many of those who chose America over Israel were not Zionists. They preferred to take their professional and technological skills to the United States, where they began to adapt to new surroundings and encountered the usual difficulties of newcomers. Arguably, a confluence of geopolitical factors, especially the collapse of the Soviet Union, did more to produce success in the movement to free Soviet Jews than anything done by New York and American Jews or Israelis on the streets or in the diplomatic backrooms. But, all along the way, those who sought to lead the movement battled one another over tactics. These disagreements were often virulent and personal. Although the struggle to rescue Soviet Jews was taking place in the city, conflicts over tactics often reflected ongoing “Manhattan” versus “Brooklyn” differences in addressing Jewish crises, even if some of the strongest voices emanated from the Bronx. Recriminations over what the Jewish establishment as opposed to grass-roots leaders did, or did not do, a quarter century earlier during the Holocaust period fueled these arguments. Such designations as “establishment” and “grass-roots” were redolent with meaning and passion. Divergent views of the world from headquarters versus the neighborhood loomed large, even as all 1970s – 1980s spokespeople shouted, albeit never in unison, “Never Again.”21 By the mid-1970s, the plight of Soviet Jewry stood second only to the survival of Israel as a source of American Jewish concern. A new wave of

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anti-Jewish agitation that started in the early 1960s had stirred “a mildly interested but passive American Jewry.” Seemingly, after Josef Stalin’s death in 1953, American Jews had taken a deep sigh of relief that physical atrocities would not befall Russian Jews long victimized by Soviet “cultural decapitation” policies. However, in 1963, in response not only to reports of synagogue closings and severe limitations placed on the baking of Passover matzos but also to the arrest of 163 citizens, most of them Jews, for “economic crimes,” punishable by death, three of America’s most distinguished Jews, Supreme Court Justice Arthur Goldberg and Senators Jacob Javits of New York and Abraham Ribicoff of Connecticut, with the assistance of President Kennedy, met with Russian ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin. When the Soviets stonewalled, the troika turned to the Conference of Major Jewish Organizations, the umbrella organization for American Jewish defense groups, and suggested calling a national conference to discuss ways and means of saving Soviet Jewry. Their initiative led to a Washington, D.C., meeting in April 1964, attended by over five hundred delegates from most established Jewish organizations. Out of these deliberations arose the American Jewish Conference on Soviet Jewry (AJCSJ).22 But this incipient rallying point suffered from leadership and financial problems. During AJCSJ’s seven years of existence, it possessed neither independent funding nor a full-fledged professional staff. It was hamstrung by the reluctance of existing organizations to create yet another Jewish entity. Though it met with American government officials, resolved to fight to eliminate “discrimination against Soviet Jews and restoration of their full cultural and religious rights,” and hatched plans for a national day of prayer for its oppressed brethren, by decade’s end, AJCSJ had failed to project the cause as a “major national Jewish concern.”23 This lethargy did not surprise Jacob Birnbaum, who had no faith in American Jewry’s leadership. A British Jew who settled in New York in the early 1960s, he came armed with a different vision of how to attack the Soviets. This cause became his life’s work. He imagined a mass grass-roots movement, a “tidal wave of public opinion,” that would take the message of freedom to the streets, making the enemy decidedly uncomfortable through unfavorable publicity. He planned to recruit his shock troops among Jewish students, primarily recruited from the city’s colleges and universities. Living a few blocks away from Yeshiva College in Washington Heights, he found young Orthodox

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men and women ready to fulfill the religious obligation of “freeing captives.” Birnbaum also received a positive hearing from Columbia’s Jewish students. In fact, in April 1964, he founded the Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry on the Morningside Heights campus. Four days later, on May Day, the group organized its first protest rally, as they picketed the Soviet UN mission on East Sixty-Seventh Street. In subsequent months, they grabbed attention through an interfaith week-long fast outside Russian headquarters, established a string of information booths citywide, and conducted a rally on the Lower East Side. They appeared repeatedly during these early years at the United Nations. The protest themes melded Jewish historical and religious imagery with contemporary political objectives. A “Jericho March,” where picketers blew the shofar and carried Torah scrolls, called for the “walls of hate” to come tumbling down. A Passover “Night of Watching” linked Soviet Jews with the Israelite Exodus. Tisha B’Av, the national day of mourning over the destruction of the Temple and other calamities in Jewish history, provided an appropriate time to sit down and cry at the Isaiah Wall across First Avenue from the United Nations. While organizers may not have consciously considered the beyondthe-political ramifications of these evocative metaphors, almost from the start, demonstrations were acts of Jewish identification.24 Birnbaum’s “take to the streets” tactics also resonated with Jewish college students who were veterans of contemporary American protest movements. A study of the Student Struggle constituency conducted a decade into its existence revealed that a full half of its members had been involved in anti – Vietnam War movements, while more than a quarter had fought for civil rights. Perhaps some who previously had advocated for freedom for African Americans recognized the analogous injustice in the Soviet Union. Others became involved because they no longer felt wanted or appreciated within campaigns that increasingly resounded with militant, no-whites-wanted calls for “Black Power.” Those embracing the Soviet Jewish cause had a senior, eminent role model, with an honored civil rights pedigree, whose teachings they might follow. Philosopher Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel heard the words of the ancient prophets that abjured humankind to change the world for the better as a call to action. Although the era of religious prophecy had ended two thousand years earlier, according to the tradition, Heschel believed that “the prophets endure and can only be ignored at the risk of our own despair.” Thus,

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the scholar had to leave the study and to engage in great crusades, when called by concerns of the time. Acting on this belief, Heschel championed the fight to end racial discrimination. In 1965, he marched arm in arm with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama. The visage of the whitehaired and bearded rabbi with the steadfast African American minister became an iconic image of that era of American protest. Also acting in the spirit of the prophets, Heschel took his own people to task, in this case in 1963, when he told a JTS audience, “There is a dreadful moral trauma that haunts many of us; the failure . . . to do our utmost . . . to save the Jews under Hitler. [The] nightmare that terrifies me today [is] the unawareness of our being involved in a new failure, in a tragic dereliction of duty [toward] Russian Jewry.” Elie Wiesel, a survivor of the Holocaust, echoed this lament. His widely read book The Jews of Silence lambasted American Jewry for its passivity. Appearing in 1966, it contended that while the Soviets had silenced Jews behind the Iron Curtain, Jews of the free world had chosen to silence themselves, “for a second time in a generation,” to the cries of the oppressed.25 All of these currents of Jewish and American thought and action, coupled with an affinity for Dr. King’s nonviolent confrontational tactics, coursed through Glen Richter, an early Birnbaum recruit, who became national coordinator of the Student Struggle. But most importantly, Richter’s sense “of obligation to those who died in the Holocaust” motivated him to free Soviet Jewry. He also deeply disliked the establishment that had “money, memo machines and telephones . . . but don’t really have grass roots support.” Richter credited his group and some similar organizations based in other cities with “creating independent power bases of people which . . . expose the Establishment organizations as shells with not much inside.”26 Meir Kahane and his Jewish Defense League (JDL) agreed that the establishment position was patently reprehensible. If Birnbaum’s and Richter’s motives were unassailable, Kahane deemed their nonviolent confrontational dispositions weak-kneed and “dangerous” since they represented “a false sense of activism.” The Soviet Jewish crisis opened a second front in JDL’s war to protect Jews against all enemies local and international. While in JDL members’ ongoing battles with New York’s black militants they only threatened to use any means available to them, when it came to harassing Russians living in the city, they fought both within and without the law. The lesson that they

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derived from the Holocaust had taught them that Jews stood alone and that those who were content just to “hold rallies and mimeograph sheets of paper” would “doom” Soviet Jewry. Seeing themselves as latter-day Bergsonites, struggling both against the world and shamefully wrongheaded Jewish leaders, JDL members rejected respectability and pledged “to do what must be done . . . to shake the world and spotlight the Soviet Jewish problem” so that the United States would have no alternative but to demand justice for Jews.27 Worldwide fears over the fate of the “Leningrad 11” amplified responses from all sides of the Jewish street. In December 1970, a group of Soviet dissidents, nine of them Jews, were put on trial for their failed attempt to hijack a Russian airliner to take them to freedom in Finland. Their arrest provoked a roundup of over two hundred Russian Jews alleged as coconspirators. When these show trials ended with several defendants sentenced to death and others to decades-long prison terms at hard labor, Jews and their humanitarian supporters everywhere were outraged. Back-tracking amid a whirlwind of spontaneous protests, from UN diplomats to international church officials to a resolution from the U.S. Congress, the Russians in less than a month’s time commuted the death sentences and shortened the prison terms. Although plans for an international gathering of Jewish leaders to promote the cause of Soviet Jewish emigration existed prior to the Leningrad incident, the trials and their aftermath added gravitas and momentum to deliberations in Brussels in February 1971. But while the meeting of eight hundred delegates from across the globe garnered immense publicity for the plight of Soviet Jews, it underscored tensions between grass-roots and establishment activists. Student Struggle types contended that they were marginalized at an event that one student sympathizer stated “was the most telling evidence of the moral bankruptcy of world Jewish leadership since the Holocaust.” The Jewish Defense League was summarily barred from the gathering. Golda Meir, who chaired the gathering in Brussels, used the Belgian police to thwart Kahane’s effort to “crash” the meeting. The Israelis possessed a dual agenda. They were the earliest, if circumspect, champions of Soviet Jews. But at the same time, the government harbored hopes of somehow improving relations with the Russians. Kahane might have derailed everything.28 Still, the turmoil in Brussels taught those who had founded the American Jewish Conference important lessons from the Student Struggle. Kahane’s

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outbursts even sensitized some of them. With the crisis increasingly in the headlines, due to the grass-roots groups, the “think-tank” AJCSJ had to be replaced by a full-time organization with funded staff. In the spring of 1971, a new National Conference on Soviet Jewry (NCSJ) received funding, as did its cooperating organization, the Greater New York Conference on Soviet Jewry (GNYCSJ). These organizations quickly “assumed the posture of the Student Struggle emphasizing mass demonstrations and quick response to emerging issues.” An observer sympathetic to the efforts of Birnbaum and Richter suggested that this approach represented “essentially a capitulation by the establishment to the demands of the activist groups and marked the establishment’s recognition that a successful struggle required whole-hearted participation.” The JDL also influenced the militancy of these new conferences, which believed that the field of protest could not be left to the lawless Kahanites. But this turn did not augur a new unified front among nonviolent advocates. Although the Student Struggle did “reluctantly” join the NCSJ in 1972, it was always at loggerheads with that large combine. The NCSJ, said an admirer of Birnbaum, “made a point of effectively freezing him out of any policy-making role in these groups.” He contended that “the professional staffers at NCSJ and GNYCSJ put an inordinate amount of time and energy into trying to minimize” Student Struggle’s role in the movement.29 Indeed, Student Struggle’s marginalization at Solidarity Sunday infuriated Birnbaum and Richter. This annual event, begun in 1971, attracted up to one hundred thousand marchers down Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue to Dag Hammarskjold Plaza. It exemplified a community engaged in nonviolent protest. Beyond proving the people power of New York Jews with numbers that activists had dreamed of for generations, Solidarity Sunday also intensified the Jewish identities of many who participated. Those who stood in the streets, wearing bracelets bearing the names of oppressed Jews and carrying signs that called for release and emigration, experienced the day as a secularized holy moment. But protestors rarely heard from leaders of the Student Struggle. “Although occasionally given seats on the podium,” a journalist supporter observed, they “were almost never allowed to address the crowd, . . . leaving the distinct impression among the thousands of participants .  .  . that the establishment groups represented the totality of the Soviet Jewry movement in the United States.”30

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JDL, operating within its own spheres, even if it appeared on the outskirts of Solidarity Sunday’s gatherings, redoubled its unbridled militancy. As early as 1969, it had attacked Soviet newspaper and tourist outlets in New York and had disrupted the performances of Russian cultural troupes. In the wake of the Leningrad incident, the group took to firing shots into the Soviet UN mission. Most egregiously, in January 1972, a bombing at Sol Hurok Productions in Manhattan — Hurok was an impresario who was the major conduit to Soviet artists appearing in the United States — killed an employee and injured fourteen others. Seemingly, Kahane answered to no one except the police and the FBI, which monitored his activities. But actually, he was called harshly to task not only by his Manhattan-based Jewish establishment enemies but also by Lubavitch Hasidic leaders. They feared that protests would undermine their own clandestine efforts to smuggle Jewish religious articles into Russia and to spirit Jews out of the Soviet Union. Although never acknowledged, these quiet Orthodox diplomats had much in common tactically with the establishment because they, too, disliked the attention-grabbing, nonviolent confrontations of the Student Struggle.31 According to Birnbaum, Richter, and their allies, during the 1970s – 1980s, the more difficult contretemps focused on GNYCSJ. Ostensibly committed to public pressure tactics, it was not aggressive enough in pushing the Soviets and too willing to relent in response to signs of Soviet goodwill. Student Struggle activists also sensed that GNYCSJ officials worried too much about American politics. The Student Struggle likewise had its issues with the Israeli government, which was seen as insufficiently focused on the peril their Soviet brethren faced. All of these issues appeared in the long decade-and-a-half debate over the Jackson-Vanik amendment. Whether due to a sense of humanitarianism, staunch anti-Communism, or political ambitions, fantasizing about Jewish support for a potential run at the White House, Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson in the mid-1970s was the greatest American friend of the Soviet Jewry movement. From the introduction of the Jackson-Vanik bill in 1972 to its passage in 1975, the senator from Washington unalterably tied the release of Soviet Jews to Moscow’s desire to be accorded “most favored nation” status in its economic dealings with the United States. Jackson stipulated that the Soviets would be denied specific American trade and credit benefits and concessions unless they agreed to release

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annually large numbers of Jews — the target number became sixty thousand — and to end harassment of both politically outspoken dissenters and Jews who just wanted to leave the Soviet Union.32 The Student Struggle single-mindedly supported the legislation. When it became law, the organization refused to contemplate relaxation of the measure until the doors were flung open. Unmitigated pressure, come what may, was the only way to deal with the enemy. The establishment groups and highly placed individual Jews acting on their own often questioned the efficacies of hard-line approaches deemed as both aggressive and naive about world realities. They were more attuned to how this provocative bill fit in with the Cold War policies of several administrations. They deemed American governmental support as essential. President Richard Nixon and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger saw the bill as contrary to their policy of detente. Kissinger once suggested that circumspect, informal agreements, rather than confrontations, would lead to a certain number of Soviet Jews exiting every month. Israel also had its say here and was listened to by NCSJ and GNYCSJ. Yitzhak Rabin, Israel’s ambassador to the United States, made it known that his government’s support for Jackson-Vanik would be counterproductive. Jerusalem harbored hopes to reestablish diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union, broken after the Six-Day War. Israel also worried about alienating Nixon and Kissinger after the Yom Kippur War, when it badly needed to rearm its depleted military arsenal.33 These dispositional and tactical differences became personal during the dramatic and emotional case of Natan Sharansky and his long-suffering wife, Avital, who fought for his release from a Russian prison. More than most Soviet Jewry issues, this Jewish fight over a dissident’s freedom, in the midst of the Jackson-Vanik disagreement, erupted on New York’s streets. And in at least one instance, the battle took a very nasty turn. Sharansky was an outspoken member of the Moscow Helsinki Watch Group, an organization of Russian dissenters headed by Andrei Sakharov. Frequently in contact with Western journalists and diplomats, Sharansky became a KGB target due to his incessant publicizing of Soviet human rights abuses. In March 1977, he was arrested for “crimes against the state,” which included allegations of his spying for the CIA. These offenses carried a death sentence. In July 1978, he was convicted and sentenced to thirteen years in prison.34

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The Student Struggle unconditionally condemned this persecution of a heroic Soviet Jew. Israeli officials and NCSJ, however, worried about Sharansky’s closeness to Sakharov as a critic of the Soviet system. They preferred that the Jewish emigration issue be separated from the larger question of human rights. Harvard Law School professor Alan Dershowitz, who advocated for Sharansky in his Moscow trial, has suggested that the Israelis had an understanding with Moscow that limited the purview of their activities. Sharansky had the pedigree of “a refusenik and ardent Zionist.” But “his broader human rights activities had disqualified him from Israel’s protection.” NCSJ agreed with Jerusalem. But, due largely to the indefatigable efforts of Avital Sharansky, the case became an international cause célèbre. Her efforts came to be championed by all Jewish groups and much of the humanitarian community.35 The press portrayed the Sharanskys’ plight as a great love story, a couple defying an evil empire. Avital struck a compelling pose as she criss-crossed the globe projecting an “image of faith and its link to human resiliency.” Her advocacies resonated beyond her husband’s specific case. George Shultz, who as secretary of state in the Reagan administration played a major role in gaining Soviet Jewry its ultimate freedom, has recalled that his commitment to the cause began when he met the prisoner’s wife and was “wrung out” over his inability to secure Sharansky’s release. Nevertheless, organizations bickered over who would be projected as the Sharanskys’ foremost local supporters.36 Student Struggle chair Rabbi Avi Weiss made the Sharanskys his personal cause. He traveled with Avital nationally to raise consciousness and money. Back home, ever aware of publicity opportunities to highlight his objectives, he poked a thumb in the eyes of the Soviets by having the block across the street from the Russian diplomatic residence, a mile from his Hebrew Institute of Riverdale, renamed Sharansky Square. He chose that locale as the site of rallies, especially on Simchat Torah. There the rabbi reminded those who congregated that in dancing with the Torah scrolls they were connecting spiritually with coreligionists in Moscow and Leningrad, who, in doing likewise, were risking so much to assert their Jewishness. At these gatherings, both women and men would carry the Torah, the holiest Jewish object, as the activist melded two of his concerns: the rights of women within Orthodox Judaism and the right of Soviet Jewry to be free. But Avi Weiss and Avital Sharansky carried additional political baggage that disturbed their critics. Both were connected, implicitly

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in the rabbi’s case and explicitly as far as she was concerned, to Gush Emunim. This right-wing, religious political party in Israel gave voice to West Bank settlers’ call for the expansion of “Greater Israel,” a stance opposed by most American Jewish organizations. Beyond this ideological disagreement, many establishment Jews objected on a visceral level to Weiss’s persistent, confrontational tactics, which they considered grandstanding.37 Competition over who should speak for the Sharanskys and for Soviet Jews in general and mutual animosities between Weiss and his Jewish opponents escalated on November 1, 1982, when two separate demonstrations occurred within sight of the Soviet mission to the United Nations on Sixty-Seventh Street off Lexington Avenue. At that moment, Weiss was in the midst of a fiveday hunger strike in solidarity with Natan Sharansky who, on the eve of Yom Kippur, had begun an indefinite hunger strike in the Chistopol Prison. Weiss claimed that GNYCSJ held its own demonstration a block away but “declined to walk over” and make common cause with him. Weiss was especially angered by the insensitivity of Arthur Schneier, the rabbi of the Park East Synagogue, which was situated literally across the street from the Russians and a few steps from where he sat. Schneier, who saw himself, too, as an advocate for Soviet Jewry, occupied an opposite pole from Weiss in dealing with the Kremlin. He believed in honoring world leaders who might help Soviet Jews and in cajoling the Soviets. His organization, the Appeal of Conscience, even opposed Solidarity Sunday as a counterproductive affront to those whom he might influence. In 1984, while hosting the rabbi of the Moscow Choral Synagogue, who declared from the Yorkville pulpit that “he had not experienced any Government interference in the synagogue’s affairs,” Schneier opined that the mass rally that had taken place a day earlier would “not have any influence in any way.” He “dismissed the parade as an anti-Soviet rather than a proJewish demonstration.” Schneier made clear how he felt about Weiss by denying him overnight sanctuary within his synagogue and turning down other requests for amenities during Weiss’s vigil.38 In February 1986, all who were concerned with Sharansky’s fate rejoiced when the dissident, in line with the Kremlin’s emerging policies of glasnost (openness to discussing their problems) and perestroika (democratization of the regime), was released in return for two Soviet spies. But, as plans for his victory tour to thank his supporters developed, longstanding organizational competitions and personal antagonisms dogged his appearances. In New York,

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two Orthodox synagogues, Kehilath Jeshurun in Manhattan and Weiss’s Riverdale congregation, vied for the honor and recognition of hosting the hero during his first Sabbath in America. Rabbi Haskel Lookstein of Kehilath Jeshurun could make the case that he was an early friend and confidant of the freed prisoner. Beginning in 1972, he had become a frequent visitor to the USSR, where in 1975 he had first met the Sharanskys. His congregation had publicly recorded each week of Natan’s captivity on their bulletin board. And Ramaz School, where he was principal, held prayer vigils at the Soviet UN mission. Lookstein’s concerns kept up a style of family activism that dated back to his father’s pulpit outcries in World War II. GNYCSJ would have been pleased if Haskel Lookstein, then its president, had prevailed. But the Hebrew Institute of Riverdale had been Avital’s home during her long struggle for her husband’s release, and in the end, that emotional tie carried the day.39 Although all of these fractious groups focused world attention on their Jewish concern, most of the two million Jews who eventually left the USSR did so due to forces beyond their advocates’ control or even imaginations. American Jews should be credited with helping “punch a hole in the iron curtain through calling attention to the human failings of the Soviet system” as their issue rose to the top of the world diplomatic agenda. But most Soviet Jews were released either during or after the demise of Soviet Communism. From less than a thousand legal émigrés in 1986, the number increased to 18,000 two years later, before the doors opened wide in 1989, with 71,000 leaving Russia that year. In 1990, some 213,000 Jews departed. They benefited from the end of the Cold War. When Ronald Reagan in June 1987 demanded that the occupiers of East Germany “tear down that [Berlin] Wall,” the right of movement of Soviet Jews was part of his call for freedom for oppressed people. Both Jewish establishment organizations and grass-roots groups had sensitized him and Secretary of State George Shultz to this moral issue. But when the Berlin Wall actually fell in November 1989, Jews joined an international of exodus of peoples from Kremlin control. Free Soviet Jewish emigration “was wrought by the same historic forces that liberated other captive communities in the Soviet sphere.”40 This dramatic turn toward freedom did not, however, stifle tensions among America’s Soviet Jewry groups. They now battled over how to prosecute the cause’s end game. The crux of controversy boiled down to whether the intentions of the Soviets could be trusted and if a concomitant lessening of pressure

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and protest was appropriate. In many ways, this dispute reiterated those profound differences separating New York’s establishment organizations and its grass-roots groups for several generations: the question of to what extent Jews’ activism should be unconditional against their enemies and uncompromising toward allies within American government. Finally, there was the question of when the time might be ripe to move beyond the era of public protests. Although the massive rally of 150,000 in December 1987 in Washington, D.C., was an unequaled moment in time, judged as “a high point in the Soviet Jewry movement and in American history” for close to two decades, New York’s Solidarity Sunday had been the centerpiece of sustained popular agitation on behalf of Soviet Jewry. In March 1989, Student Struggle was chagrined when GNYCJS, now called the Coalition to Free Soviet Jewry, chose to forgo that quintessential tactic. Birnbaum, Richter, and Weiss rejected this compromise and patched together their own “Day of Solidarity,” with the help of a small Long Island – based group. At that rally, Birnbaum made clear that, for them, the battle was not “dayenu” (“enough” or “over”) “without fundamental concessions on the side of the Soviet Union,” critical steps that the enemy had yet to take. Years later, a historian reflecting on that period contended that “victory had come suddenly and . . . too soon” for these people who had “been young, idealistic and Jewishly committed” and consistently on guard from the time they first joined the battle two decades earlier. They could not stand down. Student Struggle retorted that the multifront battle for Soviet Jewry in fact did not end even with the fall of Communism, the dissolution of the Soviet Union, and the opening of the Kremlin’s gates. The Jewish world, it argued, had still to be concerned about the fate of the millions of Jews in the former Soviet Union who now faced a resurgence of popular and nationalist anti-Semitism. It was wrong that the establishment honored Gorbachev at a moment when “Soviet Jews were becoming increasingly apprehensive that a revival of murderous Czarist-era pogroms was becoming a distinct possibility.” Always untrusting of sustained world interest in the fate of Jews, veterans of Student Struggle continued to use the streets of New York to raise public consciousness and to “speak truth to power.”41 Feminism and activism on behalf of Soviet Jewry represent two vital political movements with roots in New York City. Both achieved impressive victories within the lifetimes of their organizers. Both provoked bitter opponents among other Jews, exacerbating divisions separating New York Jews. Yet

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both movements drew on the city’s unique geography, its neighborhoods that grouped Jews according to class, religion, and politics. Despite the inroads of suburbanization and the diminution of New York City’s Jewish population, its over a million Jews still sustained sufficient diversity to fuel activist dreams, to create communities of solidarity, and to transform promises into realities.

Rogarshevsky parlor reconstructed in the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, circa 2010. (Photo by Keiko Niwa; courtesy Lower East Side Tenement Museum)

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Epilogue: In a New Millennium

At the turn of the millennium, New York Jews exuded confidence about their place in the city. Despite decades of economic distress and racial conflict, Gotham appeared poised to fulfill its promises once again. Young Jewish professionals participated actively in neighborhood gentrification, both in Manhattan and the outer boroughs, that revived during the Wall Street boom of the 1990s. Sounding like Jews of earlier eras, those who helped restore “the Brooklyn brownstone belt” of Fort Greene or Dumbo (down under the Manhattan Bridge overpass) areas bragged that it took only fifteen minutes to reach their managerial or executive jobs in Manhattan investment banks, law firms, or software companies. Those who were making even more money settled in luxury lofts within an expanding Soho district that had begun its redevelopment a generation earlier. Some put down stakes in the old Meatpacking District, where the Abzug market once stood. These new residents renewed the city tradition of walking to work, if they did not hop into a cab, destination Wall Street. By 2000, upper-class Jews lived on both the east and west sides of Manhattan south of Sixtieth Street and north of the Lower East Side. In Harlem, gentrification fulfilled a 1984 prediction that “affluent whites” would “inevitably” migrate there due to its stock of transformable low-cost housing and its “location just a few miles from midtown.” A distinctive Jewish presence existed at the start of the new millennium, around the time that Yoel and Shoshana Borgenicht joined the march uptown. By the end of the first decade of the twentieth century, census returns showed the Harlem neighborhood to be majority white for the first time since the 1920s.1

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Jews especially transformed the Lower East Side in the 1990s. Many of the young entrepreneurs and artists returned to the site of their grandparents’ beginnings. Some even lived at the same street address, albeit in a modernized former tenement. But theirs was a different Jewish quarter, as “hipification,” it was said, “reache[d] the street where peddlers once pushed carts.” A chic sensibility replaced the legendary ethnic quality of the neighborhood, as entrepreneurs in pursuit of “their version of the American dream,” and with a ready customer base, established “boutiques featuring their own designer labels or a bar with great vodka martinis, or a vintage furniture store.” Now, observers spoke of the “intersection of new and old, of people of disparate cultures and points of view” on Orchard Street. One sign of the times, as music clubs and other nightlife attractions created a thoroughfare of “a new bohemia,” was the opening in 1997 of the “swanky Lansky Lounge,” which initially shared space with “Ratner’s, the century-old kosher dairy restaurant.” Seven years later, that Jewish food landmark closed its doors forever. Jews living elsewhere in the city did not feel the tug, as prior generations had, to repair to Delancey Street for its sights and sounds and to savor such delicacies as split pea and potato soup, cheese blintzes, and onion rolls. Most young downtowners cared far less for eastern European Jewish culinary traditions than prior generations had. But a good old American hot dog still tempted many to line up at Katz’s Delicatessen. The counterman stood behind a sign reminding customers that this store once sent salamis to boys in the army. Out-of-towners who still desired a taste of the Jewish New York that they remembered, or had heard about, could order Ratner’s frozen foods online.2 Yet even as the Lower East Side streets lost much of their mundane Jewish character, Jews redoubled efforts to concretize the history of this once extraordinary Jewish place. Starting in the 1980s, organizations such as the Museum at Eldridge Street, the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, and the Lower East Side Conservancy worked to entice visitors downtown through exhibits, tours, and cultural programs exploring how Jews and other nineteenth- and twentieth-century immigrants made their way into America through the renowned hub. By the new millennium, these organizations had earned city, state, and national funding to raise historical awareness of the Lower East Side’s significance.3 But even as historians and docents recounted past difficulties, the contemporary Lower East Side still housed thousands of impoverished immigrants

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whose tortured existences “eerily recall[ed] the pathologies of the turn-ofthe-century tenements.” In 1996, the New York Times profiled a Latina woman who lived with her three children “on a corner of Clinton near Delancey, up a narrow stairway between a pawnshop and a Dominican restaurant . . . in a single, illegal room that suffocates their dreams of the future.” She lived streets away from exploited Chinese newcomers who sewed garments in sweatshops or struggled for a living as street peddlers, much as Jews had done a century earlier.4 New York Jews had their own poor, their aged, and Russian immigrants whose needs required communal support. Poverty pockets endured within the Hasidic Williamsburg enclaves and Boro Park. But the sense was, at least among the elderly, that they were not holding out within a deteriorated city, even if inevitably they were dying out. Rabbi Solomon Berl of the Young Israel of Co-op City understood this fact of life when in 2003 he told a Columbia University journalism student that while “moveouts, mortality and Miami” — he had first articulated that sad mantra back in the 1980s — had reduced his congregation to “approximately 75,” he planned “for the future” to remain at the helm of his shul “until the last Jew is left.” Six years later, the then eightyfive-year-old spiritual leader who prayed that 125 worshipers would appear for High Holiday service was still writing to a local community paper about “love, brotherhood, friendship, ethics” to “mostly non-Jews” to “remind people that there is a Jewish presence there.” For Berl, this enclave “was beautiful . . . [and] it’s still beautiful.”5 Neither Co-op City’s elderly equanimity nor the Lower East Side’s exuberant youth epitomized Jewish neighborhood life in the early 2000s. Rather, stability most aptly characterized New York’s Jewish enclaves. Those who had decided, through the trying times of the 1970s to the early 1990s, to remain in the city stayed, ensuring that textures of community life continued. If anything, these enduring neighborhoods attracted newcomers to their midst. Riverdale prospered as an affluent preserve. The Upper West Side retained its idiosyncratic character as “two populations distinct in their levels of Jewish affiliation and practice” living side by side. One group joined synagogues, visited Israel, and enrolled children in Jewish day school, while the other group rejected affiliation and often intermarried.6 But even as the Upper West Side’s Jewish population remained stable, it continued its long tradition, dating back to Mordecai Kaplan’s day, as a creative, innovative Jewish religious center where

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ideas and practices attracted energetic newcomers whose modes of religious observance influenced the nation. The community that gave birth to Jewish feminism became the home to a variety of egalitarian, independent, or partnership minyans where men and women, within strict, and sometimes flexible, Jewish religious standards, joined to pray, to study, and to enjoy companionship. Seemingly, the best of the havurah ideal of the 1960s – 1970s was reborn. When the Yeshivat Hadar was founded in 2008, meeting initially in rooms at the West End Synagogue on Sixty-Ninth Street and Amsterdam Avenue, men and women studied sacred writings together. Its founders, some of them children of Conservative rabbis, fervently believed that their start-up programs “aimed at Jews in their 20s and early 30s . . . are going to have a multiplier effect on the Jewish community” nationwide. Meanwhile, women’s study of the Talmud under Orthodox auspices continued to find its place on the West Side within Drisha, which, in 1979, first opened its doors in rented space at the Jewish Center. And in 2000, near Columbia University, Rabbi Avi Weiss inaugurated Yeshiva Chovevei Torah, a rabbinical training school dedicated to spreading across the United States his message of “Open Orthodoxy,” an ideology that prizes religious traditionalism and gender sensitivity. In 2010, the institution relocated to a permanent space in Riverdale at Weiss’s Hebrew Institute of Riverdale.7 Even within an era of the efflorescence of Jewish studies programs nationally and the presence and creation of modern rabbinical schools across the country, Columbia University continued to attract bright Jewish minds, as it had for generations, to its graduate programs in Jewish studies. In the 1990s, New York’s prestige as a Jewish intellectual hub was enhanced further when NYU mounted vigorous challenges to Columbia’s local leadership, seeking the best students and future professionals as it proffered not only doctoral programs but tracks in Jewish education, museum studies, and Jewish communal organizations. Thus, the city — with its longstanding Orthodox, Conservative, and Reform seminaries and City University programs still very much in place, notwithstanding attractive alternatives everywhere — maintained its position as a prime place where the ambitious flocked to learn how to head Jewish schools and institutions and to educate college students on American university campuses.8 All of these students and senior scholars also benefited from the opening in 2000 of the Center for Jewish History, which united American Jewish,

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Sephardic, eastern European, and central European repositories and centers of study, creating in the vision of its founder, Bruce Slovin, “the Library of Congress of the Jewish People in America.” Though in its early years, it was beset with financial difficulties and internecine rivalries, a decade into its existence, the center was on sound economic footing, and a cooperative spirit prevailed. Here Jewish lawyers, financiers, real estate magnates, bankers, and others who had made out so well in the years of New York’s revival had put their money to great use on behalf of Jewish scholarship.9 Stability and continuity also surely characterized Brooklyn’s old neighborhoods of Williamsburg, Boro Park, and Crown Heights as they expanded their strict Orthodox environments, while families and leaders still coped with poverty. East Queens communities such as Little Neck and Bayside on the edge of the city line aged but stayed “economically secure.” As in the past, significant Jewish movement occurred within the city. Fifteen thousand Jews headed to the quasi-suburban locale of Staten Island. Richmond County attracted a culturally diverse crowd that included better-off Orthodox Jews from Brooklyn, Russian immigrants who prospered, and native-born Jews with little interest in Jewish causes and affiliation. Suburbia also continued to absorb its share of Jews, as it had for more than half a century. But rates of out-migration slowed during the 1990s. While in 2002 the total number of Jews in the five boroughs dropped, for the first time in more than a century, to under one million (972,000), “unlike other East Coast and Midwestern Jewish communities whose suburbanization has resulted in a restructuring of the center of Jewish life,” the city remained the unofficial Jewish capital of the eight-county area, if not the country. Those who left did not move too far, as “approximately 70% of the metropolitan-area Jewish community resided in New York City.” Suburban Jews retained urban connections for both business and cultural activities.10 Many Jews credited Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani for strengthening their faith in the city’s promises. Especially by his second term, there was confidence in most Jewish quarters that he had their concerns and interests at heart — not that the mayor acquired widespread Jewish support easily or immediately. When he first ran against David Dinkins in 1989, Giuliani received strong backing among the tense and security-worried voters in heavily Hasidic neighborhoods of Brooklyn and in Jewish sections of Forest Hills and Kew Gardens. However, Dinkins rode to victory, albeit by the slimmest of margins, because liberal Jews in Manhattan and Bronx neighborhoods joined

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African Americans in sharing the Democrat’s vision of a racially harmonious, reconciled city.11 During Giuliani’s 1993 return engagement against Dinkins, he made certain to fortify his core Jewish base, attacking the city’s willingness to allow Nation of Islam leader Louis H. Farrakhan to rent Yankee Stadium for a rally. While Dinkins averred that access to that public venue was “not discretionary,” as “the Constitution says that freedom of speech is allowed” even to the most disagreeable, Giuliani cagily compared the black Muslim to neo-Nazis or skinheads and implied that the stadium would have been made off-limits to those haters. Speaking strongly to the local racial issue that roiled Jews and still resonated citywide, the challenger, more than any other critic of the incumbent, “harnessed the outrage” among those who viewed the mayor as having mishandled Crown Heights. But to win City Hall, Giuliani had to broaden his constituency not only to “reassemble the Koch coalition of conservative white ethnics, moderate Jews and Hispanic voters” — the so-called Rudycrats — but also to attract Jewish liberals. Emphasizing that the city was dirty and dangerous with a dispirited police force, he also harped on an early 1990s recession. While the rest of the nation recovered, New York, he alleged, did not rebound due to Dinkins’s poor economic leadership and management skills. In other words, the problem with the Dinkins administration transcended his failure to produce his promised glorious mosaic. Some of the worst economic features of the 1970s had been allowed to return.12 Still, as Election Day approached, critically important Jewish voting blocs on both the Upper West and Upper East Side struggled to “balance their doubts against their traditions.” Novelist Hugh Nissenson explained his “dilemma” that as a “lifelong . . . liberal Democrat,” he was inclined to be with Dinkins, even if he felt that Dinkins’s “competence is limited.” But “as a Jew,” Nissenson was “unhappy with the way Crown Heights was handled.” Nonetheless, he could not bring himself to vote for Giuliani because he “instinctively stood against everything this man has stood for.” He did not like the candidate’s “Weltanschauung, . . . his ideas, his politics.” Others around him were similarly conflicted, unhappy with the incumbent’s performance on both the racial and economic fronts. But they perceived the challenger as “too political and not trustworthy.” Some even resented Giuliani’s grandstanding against Farrakhan, which “showed a disregard for the First Amendment.” In the end, Dinkins held sway within liberal Jewish quarters as he garnered almost identi-

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cal numbers as he had in 1989 among constituents who, like Nissenson, chose him “under protest.” But Giuliani won the mayoralty in 1993, largely because of intense support from those Rudycrats, the “white ethnic and Jewish outerborough base.” The campaign revealed that Manhattan and Brooklyn Jews still harbored very different views of where the city was heading and their place within the metropolis.13 As mayor, Giuliani did not disappoint his Jewish core constituency. He visited Israel during the Intifada to show his solidarity with the victims of bombings — some of the killed or maimed were his own erstwhile New Yorkers — and to encourage New Yorkers to follow his example and support Israel through tourism. More impressive for his constant fans was his public snub of Yasir Arafat. In October 1995, Giuliani announced that the Palestinian leader was unwanted at a Lincoln Center concert that the city hosted for United Nations delegates. Even as a debate roiled within and without Israel over whether, and how, to negotiate with Arafat, New York’s mayor declared, “Israel may have to make peace with the man. But I don’t have to extend any courtesies to him.” Dozens of mostly Orthodox leaders and elected officials representing many of the more politically conservative Jewish voters in the city rushed to City Hall’s steps to hear a Brooklyn Jewish assemblyman praise their champion. Giuliani was also uplifted, said his office, by the “more than 1,000 phone calls of support” that he received.14 Giuliani’s act, however, did not play well among many Jews elsewhere in the city. They resented his meddling in international diplomacy and potentially undermining a complicated peace process. Jews fragmented once again on a critical policy issue: it was seemingly, once again, Manhattan versus Brooklyn. Tensions boiled over publicly when the National Jewish Community Relations Advisory Council invited Arafat to address 150 of its leaders from around the country at the B’nai Zion building in Manhattan the same week as the mayor’s snub. While one delegate calmly explained that “every time Arafat repeats his support of the peace process and appears conciliatory, it creates a new reality, one that he has to deal with back home,” two protestors “shouted ‘Arafat is a murderer’ before being arrested at the outset of the meeting,” leaving “the audience embarrassed at this breach of etiquette.”15 Giuliani’s undiplomatic outspokenness energized his supporters and troubled his opponents, but by the end of his first term (1997) both groups of Jews acknowledged that his administration had improved the quality of their lives.

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Despite criticism of heavy-handed practices, the inescapable reality was that under Giuliani’s watch, New York had emerged as a clean, increasingly prosperous, comfortable, and above all, safe city. To some extent, he rode the crest of the boom on Wall Street in his early years in City Hall, which painlessly increased municipal revenues, helping him funnel monies into essential services. But his signature accomplishment, the continuing drop in crime, reassured law-abiding citizens. A 1995 New York magazine cover story, “The End of Crime as We Know It,” said it all. Five years earlier, Time magazine had decried “The Rotting of the Big Apple.” Gotham now recaptured its attractive cachet. Thanks to well-policed subways, a “virtuous cycle was set in motion” that brought residents and tourists securely into public spaces both where they lived and where they might go for entertainment. Times Square, shorn of its porn shops, became an attractive site.16 Widespread appreciation among Jews for a job well done registered clearly when Giuliani ran for reelection in 1997. The race pitted a Jewish, liberal civil libertarian from the West Side of Manhattan against a pugnacious Italian American conservative. Manhattan borough president Ruth Messinger had no standing with the Brooklyn Jewish crowd. That was made clear to her during the Democratic primary season when she, and other aspirants for Gracie Mansion, were not given a chance to speak at a breakfast sponsored by the Council of Jewish Organizations of Flatbush, where Giuliani was presented with a silver candelabra as a token of communal appreciation by his mostly Orthodox supporters. More significantly, as the general election approached, Messinger encountered troubles with her own core constituency. She characterized Giuliani as “strident, mean spirited,” the type of person a Hugh Nissenson had not liked four years earlier. She offered herself as committed to a “more healing leadership style” that “would do the most to bridge ethnic and racial divisions” that had been “exacerbate[ed] over the last four years.” On the Arafat flap, Messinger asserted that it was “inappropriate” for “the city’s chief diplomat” to “remove someone from a concert that the city was a player in.” She also positioned herself as far more concerned than Giuliani with the state of the city’s public schools and unemployment. She was seen as “caring more about the needs and problems of poor people.” However, Messinger failed to “crack through the general satisfaction with Mr. Giuliani and the city.” In the days before the election, a Jewish “business consultant who said he was a liberal planning to vote” Republican opined, “This is no contest.”17

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When the votes were counted, the consultant was proven right. The mayor carried whites by a four-to-one margin and outpolled Messinger among women by nineteen points. He lost only in poor areas of the Bronx and among African Americans. Most strikingly, he won the Jewish vote with an overwhelming 75 percent, including 40 percent of “self-identified liberals.” Standing among Messinger’s saddened supporters when she conceded to Giuliani, Franz Leichter, a Jewish state senator who represented the Upper West Side, mused with regret that “this is a time, certainly, when people have become more concerned about their private lives and welfare” than with the largest societal issues.18 Though Messinger was defeated in her bid for City Hall, she was not deflated. She immediately resounded personally to Leichter’s challenge, becoming president in 1998 of the American Jewish World Service. With rabbis of all movements, Jewish communal leaders, activists, businesspeople, and scholars involved, it became “the first American Jewish organization dedicated to alleviating poverty, hunger and disease among people across the globe.” Again, a New York – based Jewish activist showed the way.19 The mayor and the city continued to receive high marks for most of his second administration. Backed by a robust economy and buoyed by effective crime prevention, the city that never slept was wide awake and at the service of its residents and visitors on a twenty-four-hour-a-day basis. A palpable calm spread across the city’s neighborhoods. This cooperative atmosphere appeared most dramatically in the absence of violence and looting in the summer of 1999. For eighteen hours, three hundred thousand working-class residents of a largely Latino Washington Heights neighborhood suffered in a blackout as temperatures hovered around one hundred degrees. Giuliani praised that neighborhood’s people for supporting one another and for assisting the police, “an example of how communities around the city and the country can come together in the face of adversity.” Elsewhere, some signs of intergroup rapprochement emerged, although the mayor could not take credit for positive developments in Crown Heights. There, local African American, Caribbean immigrant, and Jewish leaders, on their own, were working together to head off “potentially volatile” racial confrontations between their youths. While acknowledging that they lived “parallel lives” with “no social interaction” in a neighborhood now 60 percent black and 38 percent white, “communication between the two groups had improved.” Both wanted Crown Heights

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no longer to be stereotyped as “a war zone torn by racial strife.” When in April 1998 Lemrick Nelson Jr. was sentenced to twenty years in prison for the murder of Yankel Rosenbaum, both Jewish and black streets were quiet.20 Still, Giuliani manifested, in his critics’ view, a profound inability to listen to or hear pained voices. This troubling proclivity came to the fore when he unqualifiedly defended the police in the shooting of an unarmed African immigrant, Amadou Diallo, in the Bronx. Widespread outrage erupted beyond the black and immigrant African community, when officers of the vaunted Street Crime Unit, looking for an alleged murderer of a taxi driver and rape suspect, shot forty-one bullets into Diallo when he walked out a darkened doorway and appeared to the police to have a gun in his hands. While the mayor expressed the city’s condolences to the family, he quickly pointed out that during his administration the police used far less “deadly force” than during Dinkins’s time and that his cops were “the most restrained big city police force in the nation.” His attitude led his most vociferous enemies to denounce him as “Bull Giuliani,” linking him to the racist police chief in Selma, Alabama, of a generation earlier whose dogs attacked civil rights protestors. Among Jews, backing for Giuliani flagged within liberal quarters and among those who were disappointed that City Hall failed to implement the recommendations of a blueribbon panel that was directed to study police-community relations.21 The city’s, and indeed the world’s, evaluation of Giuliani’s performance changed immeasurably after the terrorist 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center. Historians may debate the degree of his actual courage on that fateful day, but in the months that followed, he was honored as “America’s mayor.” He cultivated an image of a steadfast and caring figure who kept New York together under the most extreme circumstances. For New York Jews, his efforts redoubled affection for him in most quarters and largely stilled voices that had questioned his prior heavy-handed or cold-hearted persona.22 In the aftermath of that unparalleled tragedy, subscribing to a palpable citywide resolve to survive and advance, Jews remained committed to being part of the city’s future. Demographers who surveyed the size, shape, and textures of community life just a year after the Trade Center attacks did not discover any panic flight afoot from the metropolis. If anything, more than most white middle-class groups, Jews in the city and its surrounding suburbs remained where they had lived in the prior calm decade, seeking safe and secure lives.23 Yet a new identity was discernible in the Jewish streets, a sense more than

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ever before that as New Yorkers over the long future haul, they possessed a shared destiny with their neighbors. Perhaps that explains in part Jewish support for Michael R. Bloomberg, Giuliani’s successor. The latest Jew to occupy City Hall, Bloomberg personified the view that Jewish and metropolitan concerns were one. His opponent, City Advocate Mark Green, had the active support of “numerous communal leaders . . . and leading rabbis” and spent much of his career cultivating that ethnic vote. But Bloomberg, who had few Jewish ties other than his philanthropic record and who reportedly was wont to make “caustic remarks about Israel and religion” garnered 52 percent of the Jewish vote. This “mass defection . . . help[ed] put [the] billionaire] over the top.” Although Bloomberg benefited greatly from Giuliani’s endorsement, his renowned financial acumen appealed to Jews with its promise of assistance to help the city recover economically. Disarray within Democratic political ranks made Bloomberg’s nonconfrontational style, which spoke of the challenges that all city dwellers shared, attractive. Jews were prepared to “vote more as New Yorkers than they did as Jews.”24 The media tycoon, born in Medford, Massachusetts — the latest renowned newcomer to New York who fulfilled his personal promises — enjoyed exceptional financial success on Wall Street. As mayor, Bloomberg moved into the echelons of power and privilege and said and did all the right things about Jewish issues. No less would be expected of a successful city politician. But he was a very different Jewish mayor, quite unlike the two sons of Jewish New York who preceded him. He conscientiously downplayed his religious background and had no neighborhood roots or affinity for the city’s Jewish street culture that linked him to the group’s past in the metropolis. He did not build his electoral appeal on a defined Jewish base. While still a candidate, he told an inquiring, provocative Jewish journalist, “Am I glad to be born a Jew? I never even thought about it in that context. You are what you are.”25 Years later, in 2008, toward the end of Bloomberg’s second term, as he contemplated a run at the White House, he “refused to make a display of religious faith.” Disdaining this public desideratum, the candidate-in-waiting declared, “I think everyone’s religious beliefs are their own and they should keep them private.” So disposed, he consistently came across while in City Hall as a “colorless, post-partisan,” and highly independent manager. It was just the type of persona, wrote a sympathetic biographer, that the city, including its Jews, needed in the decade post-9/11 and after the bombastic Giuliani years.

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Bloomberg spoke softly about his goals of improving public education and the hospital system, banning illegal guns, and balancing his affinities for the rights of minority communities with sympathy for the police, whose law enforcement strategies often offended blacks and Latinos. Bloomberg achieved some initiatives and lost others amid the maelstroms of metropolitan and national politics. Most critically, New York remained safe from violent attack under his watch. If he possessed his own autocratic streak and sometimes could not resist instructing the citizenry on how to live their private lives, the generally circumspect mayor was always less obvious in his posturing than his predecessor was. In his off-hours, however, Bloomberg was quite visible, as he cut a dashing figure as one of the city’s most eligible bachelors.26 Michael Bloomberg did not strike up a deep love affair with those New York Jews who cherished religious and cultural distinctiveness. He was a friendly, helpful sojourner among them, emblematic of those who lived apart from the boundaries of neighborhood and enclave, a man of the world, though presently contributing to the progress of the metropolis. But with his perspective of a respected outsider, he possessed a compelling message that even the most Jewish New Yorkers could comprehend. In a new millennium, a united city standing together against threats from without and willing to address enduring stubborn challenges from within offered the best chance for Jews to live safe, secure, and meaningful lives with all others within a city of promises.

VI SUAL

ES SAY

An Introduction to the Visual and Material Culture of New York City Jews, 1920 – 2010 DIAN A

L.

LINDEN

In 2005, German-born Jewish photographer Julian Voloj went searching for architectural elements, historical objects, and urban ruins that hinted at traces of New York City’s rich Jewish heritage that had become obscured over time. He sought to create a visual catalog of what had been and what still exists today. Voloj assigns to us a task, if so inspired, to join his search for material remnants and to rediscover the vestiges of New York’s Jewish past that remain potent in our time.1 Literally, Voloj’s search sent him high and low, and he found himself up on the rooftop of Ahavas Israel Synagogue in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. His photograph emphasizes a Magen David (Jewish star) located atop the synagogue’s roof.2 The metal bars are forged into the now familiar six-pointed star, creating a frame within a frame that directs the viewer’s gaze to the blended Brooklyn and Manhattan skyline. The Star of David’s role as a framing device in Voloj’s work calls our attention to the constructedness of his vision and asks us to consider the role of Jewish history within the larger framework of the city. What is a New York Jew, and how are Jews pictured in the city’s visual economy? Voloj’s willingness to seek and to locate the once forgotten shows that Jewishness has not vacated New York, but rather, its nineteenth-century origins no longer command our view. Like an archeologist, Voloj unearths a hidden culture, people, and time and then brings it back to view in these contemporary times. His use of black

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Julian Voloj, untitled photograph, part of Forgotten Heritage Series: Uncovering New York’s Hidden Jewish Past, 2005. (Courtesy of the artist)

and white for his images offers the sense of a document, a survey, and a sense of believability we used to see in newspapers. Voloj embeds the history of New York Jews within the broader fabric of the city at an unconscious level. Just as a photographer has a point of view, so does this visual essay. Rather than rely on the printed word as preserved in historical documents or memoirs, objects, photographs, ephemera, and heirlooms here testify to some of the many meanings evoked by the phrase “New York Jew” from the 1920s into the twenty-first century. This visual essay asks what unique qualities New York City brings to the equation — what attributes make New York Jews different from other big-city Jews. As writer Lenore Skenazy pointedly asked, “Are New York Jews More Jewish?”3 When Jewish culture hit the city’s pavements and matured over the course of the century, particularly from the 1920s onward, what type of alchemic transformation occurred? How has the idea of a New York Jew been made visual? And how have representations of New York Jews been distributed, by whom, and to whom? New York City has been the

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location for pivotal events and institutions. It hosted the 1939 and 1964 World’s Fairs and became the permanent home of the United Nations, drawing tourists to New York on the eve of World War II and during the heyday of civil rights activism. Protestors have gathered regularly in the city to comment on all manner of national and international politics and events. Jewish participation and leadership in such activities shapes perceptions of New York Jews. Both in the city and beyond, New York remains a focal point of Jewishness. This essay offers a visual gateway, enabling us to explore how both Jews and others have understood the term “New York Jew” and to consider through engagement with objects and ephemera various conceptualizations of what this term has meant, how New York Jews have been portrayed, and how they have portrayed themselves. New York City in the 1920s had much to offer to the young Jewish painter Theresa Bernstein (1890 – 2002). There were numerous art schools for her and galleries for the exhibition of her work, as well as like-minded artist friends.4

Theresa Bernstein, Zionist Meeting: Madison Square Garden (study), oil on canvas, 1923. (Courtesy of the Jewish National Fund, New York)

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A dedicated Zionist, Bernstein attended an important Zionist meeting held at Madison Square Garden in 1923. Bernstein interpreted the event, which as marked by the attendance of Albert Einstein (lower right), supporter of binationalism, and Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann, later the first president of Israel. Bernstein rejected the high style of history painting with its sharp details, pronounced importance given to key figures, and the evocation of an awe-inspiring historical narrative. Instead, by placing the two men at eye level, backed by the Garden’s curved walls, which are conspicuously draped with Zionist banners and the American flag, Bernstein presents the historical in the mode of the everyday. Through the immediacy of rough, sketchy brushwork and the nonhierarchical arrangement of figures, Bernstein presents these noble men as ordinary people. While these New York Jews worked toward a Jewish homeland in Palestine, simultaneously there were groups of Jews building their new lives and homes in the Bronx. These leftist Jews’ assertive presence in the public realm helped bring Jews, New York City, and the Left together as one identity.

Wurts Bros., Cooperative Kindergarten in the Amalgamated Houses in the Bronx, photograph, 1929. (Wurts Bros. Collection, Museum of the City of New York, New York)

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In the photograph on the facing page, it is not the teacher who holds the children’s attention this school day but instead the photographer who is capturing their image. In the foreground at right, the toddlers and preschoolers form a semicircle as they play together. Behind them, to the left, desks are arranged in a linear fashion, rather than in hierarchical rows. Through cooperative play and songs in both Yiddish and English, these kindergarteners dutifully learn their Socialist Yiddishist lessons. The predominatly Jewish Amalgamated Clothing Workers union built a massive cooperative housing project in the Bronx in 1927. Immigrant and second-generation Jewish garment workers worked together to lift themselves up from the social and econmoic poverty of tenement life; this cooperative was visionary.5 In addition to the free kindergarten, residents shared a library of more than twenty thousand books in Yiddish, Russian, and English and published a newsletter. This cooperative housing project speaks to the passionate politics of New York City Jews and their desire for a better life in America. While many Jews supported radical politics, their beliefs and commitments varied from Communist to Socialist to Anarchist to Zionist. Even within the Left, New York sustained great diversity, a distinctive characteristic of New York’s Jewish communities. In early twentieth-century Harlem, Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) and the movement’s interest in the history of the African Diaspora inspired black Judaism.6 In 1921, Mordecai Herman, a Garveyite, founded the Moorish Zionist Temple of the Moorish Jews, located at 127 West 137th Street in Harlem; James VanDerZee (1886 – 1983), the official UNIA photographer, ran his studio in Harlem for over fifty years. The neighborhood’s residents were his patrons, including the members of the Moorish Zionist Temple, contributing to his thriving career during the Harlem Renaissance.7 In the photograph on the following page, the visual focus of the group gathered in front of the brownstone that served as their synagogue is their rabbi, Arnold Ford, whose upper torso is wrapped in his white tallit. All of the congregants, with the exception of a young boy, wear hats and kippah, their heads covered in religious fidelity. They appear to be dressed in their finest outfits for this posed group portrait. While the content of contemporary Jewish and African American newspapers attests that other Jews questioned the authenticity of these Moorish Jews, simultaneously the city

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James VanDerZee, The Congregation of the Moorish Zionist Temple of the Moorish Jews, Harlem, photograph, 1929. (Photograph by James VanDerZee; Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC)

provided a home for non-European New York Jews and the inherent differences among Jews.8 In the 1920s – 1930s, New York’s Jews were active in the nascent movement for African American civil rights, and they continued in that struggle well into the 1960s. Native New Yorker and Jewish artist Seymour Lipton’s (1903 – 1986) pedestal-sized sculpture depicts an unnamed man curled up in on himself, his knees placed high on his chest in the fetal position. But while the fetal pose relates to birth, here it represents death at the hands of a lynch mob. The deep mahogany wood is meant to represent black skin. A tight rope noose remains around the man’s elongated, broken neck as if he were just cut free from a tree limb, while behind the man’s back a second rope tightens his hands.9 Lipton’s carved marks and grooves in the wood contrast with the figure’s stillness,

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intensifying its emotional impact. Lipton drew immediate inspiration for his piece from the Scottsboro case in Alabama. Flamboyant New York lawyer Samuel Leibowitz was hired by the International Labor Defense (ILD), a workers’ defense organization of the Communist Party, to represent the “Scottsboro boys,” nine black young men (one only twelve years old) unjustly accused of the rape of two white girls. Although Leibowitz was a fervent anti-Communist, to southern whites who ached for the boys’ execution, he exemplified a meddling “New York Jew.” Politically active Jews drew comparisons between their own persecution and that of the African American teenagers. While both groups set their hopes on Democratic president Franklin D. Roosevelt to enact antilynching legislation, the president refused to do so. Lipton’s sculpture, like the song “Strange Fruit” (1939), written by Abel Meeropol, who later became the adoptive father of Michael and Robert Rosenberg, the sons of executed alleged Soviet spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, represents how New York Jews imagined themselves in the suffering of African Americans.10

Seymour Lipton, Lynched, mahogany, 1933. (© The Estate of Seymour Lipton; courtesy of Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC, New York, NY, and the Palmer State Museum of Art, the Pennsylvania State University, State College, PA)

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“Yoo-hoo, Mrs. Bloom!” Molly Goldberg, played by actress Gertrude Berg, cheerily shouted this signature greeting of The Goldbergs from her kitchen window perch, warmly welcoming audiences into her family’s home in the Bronx. The Goldbergs, a popular radio and then television show sponsored by Pepsodent, was written and produced by Berg and starred her as the matriarch of a Jewish family striving to do well.11 The radio version of fifteen minutes each Tuesday night debuted in November 1929, just one month before the stock market crash. Berg, through her character, created the most modern, positive, and assertive popular image of a Jewish woman to that date. As Molly, she fearlessly took on such issues as anti-Semitism and Hitler’s war against the Jews. For most Americans, Berg’s Mrs. Goldberg was their first, if only fictional, image of a Jewish New Yorker. Berg and Goldberg were closely aligned in the public’s mind as one and same. During the 1930s, Gertrude/Molly stood second only to Eleanor Roosevelt in the quantity of letters received from the public. This Jewish woman of the Bronx presented such a powerful image of motherly strength, tinged with Yiddish-inflected speech and her family’s striving and struggling for a better life, that despite ethnic and geographic differences, many non-Jewish women nationally felt a kinship with Molly Goldberg. Although little known today, before Lucille Ball’s I Love Lucy, it was Berg who created the first popular series about a New York family. New York City in the 1930s was home to both the folk wisdom of Molly Goldberg and several institutions of higher education where students received formal educations. Lower Manhattan’s New School for Social Research was founded in 1919 by a group of leftist and pacifist intellectuals, including a number of Columbia University professors who opposed their university’s support of the United States’ participation in the Great War.12 During the 1920s and 1930s, fascist regimes in Europe exiled thousands of intellectuals, academics, writers, and artists. In 1933, the New School established the University in Exile in response to the rise of Hitler. This graduate division provided crucial support for scholars and artists fleeing Nazism. This influx of European, often facing page: Top: Pepsodent, The Goldbergs Jigsaw Puzzle, color lithograph, 1932. (Published by Pepsodent Co., Chicago, Illinois, 1932, Collection of Yeshiva University Museum, New York) Bottom: Anonymous, A Meeting of the “University in Exile,” photograph, 1933. (The German and Jewish Intellectual Émigré Collection, M. E. Grenander Department of Special Collections and Archives, University at Albany Libraries, Albany, NY)

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Jewish, émigrés exerted a profound impact on the intellectual and artistic development of postwar America, especially New York City. These émigrés contributed to the formation of the New York Jewish intellectuals and also the shift to New York as the art capital of the world. They helped to make “New York Jew” synonymous with intellectualism and cosmopolitanism. By the early twentieth century, New York City was simultaneously the center of artistic training in the United States and also a bedrock of leftist politics involving the Jewish sons and daughters of immigrants. Moses Soyer (b. Russia, 1899; d. New York City, 1974) was all three: a Jewish artist on the left. Soyer composed his celebrated Artists on the WPA as if it were a stage set with the curtain having just lifted to reveal the proceedings, inviting us into this artists’ studio. New York Jews welcomed opportunities to draw a paycheck from the WPA (Works Progress Administration), which nourished many artists who

Moses Soyer, Artists on the WPA, oil on canvas, 1935. (Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Moses Soyer, Washington, DC)

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flourished after the end of World War II. Under the New Deal, artists received not just a paycheck but also a social purpose and comradely support. The floor of Soyer’s studio slants upward, permitting a greater view of the room and its artists at work. Arranged in a semicircle, four painters, both women and men, work on oversized canvases that most likely are parts of murals. Each artist paints in the style of the government-preferred American Scene, with its requisite realistic figures and pleasurable depictions of productivity and harmony, blocking out the contemporary realities of labor unrest and destitution. Soyer creates subtle subterfuge by showing artists as laborers, banded together, and diverse in population. Rather than the more common portrayal of artists as romantic heroes or, less frequently, heroines alone and at odds with society, Soyer’s artists are seen to have a positive social role. The sense of group activity echoes the collective actions of artists through pickets, protests against social injustices, and demands for permanent recognition by the government. Soyer was a member of the Artists’ Union, which later affiliated with the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). During the Great Depression, artists became workers for the people and federal government. Unlike the more famous Treasury Department’s Section of Painting and Sculpture, which held anonymous competitions for mural commissions, the WPA was a make-work project, but it managed to hire such talented artists as Soyer. With the rise of Hitler, New York City, with its concentration of Jewish population, headquarters for most news media, and numerous Jewish social and political organizations, witnessed numerous efforts to agitate on behalf of Europe’s Jews. The American Jewish Congress and the Jewish Labor Committee jointly sponsored a rally in support of a Jewish boycott of German goods that had been launched in March 1933 as part of the New York Jewish community’s response to the anti-Semitic policies of the Nazi regime. The rally was held at Madison Square Garden, like the 1923 Zionist rally depicted in Theresa Bernstein’s painting shown earlier, and garnered attention from local papers. New York Jews gained a reputation for boldness; they used their city to launch national and international efforts to try to rescue German Jews. The photograph on the following page captures the large sign that hung from the balcony of Madison Square Garden, calling for the immediate boycott of all Germanmade goods, which was intended to exert pressure on the Nazi regime.

Top: Anonymous, Anti-Nazis Hold Demonstration, photograph, March 15, 1937. (New York World-Telegram & Sun Newspaper Collection, Library of Congress, Washington, DC) Bottom: Miller Art Co., Inc., New York, the Jewish Palestine Exhibit at the New York World’s Fair, photograph, 1939. (Collection of Yeshiva University Museum, New York)

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In 1939, the borough of Queens, New York City, invited the world to visit its World’s Fair. The Jewish Palestine Exhibit was an enticing advertisement for what did not yet exist: a Jewish national home, and as Palestine was under British mandate at the time, the organizers of the Jewish Palestine building, exhibitions, and accompanying public programs, such as indigenous folk dance, were denied permission to place their building among those of other nations. Allowed to construct a cultural exhibition in a separate location on the fairgrounds, the Zionist sponsors nonetheless aimed to cast the impression that Jewish Palestine was a nation-state. The pavilion featured on its façade a monumental hammered-copper relief sculpture titled The Scholar, the Laborer, and the Toiler of the Soil by the acclaimed art-deco sculptor Maurice Ascalon, who was born in Hungary, studied art in Belgium, and then settled in Palestine. Many New York Jews visited the Palestine Pavilion, absorbing the ways in which it presented a new type of Jewishness rooted in the soil, so different from their urban identity.13 More typical of New York Jews, Weegee’s photograph (on the following page) of a bagel deliveryman in the early morning hours when it is still dark captures the gritty pace of urban life.14 A quick, bright flash illuminates Max as he emerges from the morning darkness of Lower Manhattan, bringing him into view. Photographer Weegee (b. Austria-Hungary, 1899; d. New York City, 1968) nicknamed his camera flash “Aladdin’s Lamp.” “Rembrandt Light” is how Weegee described the sense of illumination within a dark field and the subtle gray tones of the transition from nighttime to dawn. Weegee identities Max by first name in the photo’s title, whereas most artists and photographers captured workers’ images but never noted their names, thus making them into social types rather than portraying them as individuals. Although we cannot tell from the photograph, Weegee describes the man as rushing to a restaurant on Second Avenue, thus locating him as part of the history of New York’s Lower East Side. The encounter occurred at six a.m. on East Fourteenth Street, near the Con Edison building. Weegee’s flash brilliantly illuminates Max, clothed in a baker’s apron under his jacket. He carries three strings of bagels, and a slight smile flits across his face, acknowledging Weegee’s camera even as he does not break his stride. Bagel baking arrived in New York City with eastern European Jewish immigrants. Bagels assumed a favored place in New Yorkers’ diet, gradually traveling with Jews as they migrated to Brooklyn and the Bronx.

Weegee (born Arthur Fellig), Max Is Rushing in the Bagels to a Restaurant on Second Avenue for the Morning Trade, photograph, c. 1940. (Courtesy of International Center of Photography / Getty Images and The Jewish Museum, New York / Art Resource, New York) facing page: Aaron J. Goodelman, Kultur, carved, stained, and waxed pear wood and metal chain, c. 1940. (Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC, Gift of Mrs. Sarah Goodman)

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Weegee usually reserved such illuminating photographs for crime scenes, especially murders, and fires. In both cases, he as often pictured the observers as the victims. He often prowled the streets after dark and in the early morning hours. When the newspaper PM started in 1940, Weegee received a byline for his photographs, and his reputation soared. He pictured New York, naked and noir, as alluring and dangerous, a tough place to call home, as did two million Jews. Weegee’s photographs helped to cement a visual linkage of Jews with a version of New York City.15 Working on the Lower East Side during the 1980s, photographing friends, community, and lovers defined by sexual obsession, drug use, and outsider identity, artist Nan Goldin’s work (page 248) can be seen as in communion with Weegee’s. In Aaron J. Goodelman’s Kultur, a lean, elongated wood figure stands with his hands chained high above his head and pulled taut away from his body. The painfully stretched body creates a visceral sensation of its being ripped apart. While other artists addressed the theme of torture or lynching, the figures were shown already dead, such as Lipton’s Lynched (page 229). But Goodelman carved wood sculptures that keep the victim’s dignity and sense of fight intact. Here, rather than a beaten or an abased figure, the statue stands. His up-reached arms communicate a sliver of hope beyond the immediacy of evil. Goodelman was one of many Jewish artists who drew parallels between their own communities of struggle and the suffering of African Americans.16 His work strengthens the identity of New York Jews as radicals in politics and art. Kultur connects the lynch mobs of the 1930s and the pogroms of the Russian tsar. Goodelman immigrated to New York in 1905 because of pogroms in Russia. After attending Cooper Union and the

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National Academy of Design and supporting himself as a machinist in the 1920s, Goodelman became a Communist. He expressed concerns about social and economic conditions in his art. He was active in many Yiddish organizations and the art section of the Yiddisher Kultur Farband, a Yiddish arts and cultural group; he taught at the radical John Reed arts clubs and participated in the Artists’ Union and the American Artists’ Congress, all based in New York City. Goodelman’s creative commitment to socially conscious art and to preserving the human figure links him with other New York Jewish artists, such as Ben Shahn and Moses Soyer. Ben Shahn’s mural First Amendment celebrates the Constitution’s guarantee of freedom, expressing values held dear by many New York Jews. While Jews benefited from the separation of church and state, the First Amendment also guaranteed their right to speak out, to protest, and to unite as groups. Sharp diagonals lead us through the canvas’s eight separate vignettes, each of which depicts citizens activating their constitutional rights. Painted in matte tones, men marching with fists upraised in protest and solidarity form unified groups to speak, to work to keep the flow of news information going, and to take their political grievances all the way to the Supreme Court. Shahn placed the Statue of Liberty’s oxidized green hand and uplifted torch at center to proclaim the centrality of freedom within his conception of America and also its significance to American Jews, especially in the prewar period. It was only in the late 1930s that the Statue of Liberty rose to symbolic prominence in response to the threat of war and limits on immigration. In black and white, Shahn re-created a conventional New York State voters’ ballot. Shahn asserted, “The ballot [is] to my mind the guarantee of all our freedoms.” Acutely aware of the rise of Hitler and the decision of President Roosevelt’s administration not to increase immigration quotas to accommodate refugees, Shahn reinforced his pictorial vigor by writing to government officials when he was asked to alter his work, “The thing that I have tried to put into this mural, I feel very strongly. I feel that it has profound significance for every American, more significance every day because of increasing threats to our rights and liberties.” The mural was installed in a Queens post office in 1941, as war raged across the globe.17 By fixing the camera’s lens on the front window of a Judaica shop on New York’s Lower East Side, photographer Marjory Collins supports the shop owner’s desire to advertise his dual identities: a Jewish religious identity and an identity as an American patriot. “God Bless America” reads one banner,

Top: Ben Shahn, First Amendment, egg tempera on canvas, 1941. (Photograph by Peter Morgan; Queens Post Office, New York, art © Estate of Ben Shahn / Licensed by VAGA, New York) Bottom: Marjory Collins, Window of a Jewish Religious Shop on Broome Street, New York, photograph, 1942. (Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress, Washington, DC)

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hanging next to a prayer shawl (tallit). On one level, the shopkeeper announces, “It’s great to be an American,” demonstrating through his wares — religious books, a Torah scroll, menorahs, and candlesticks — just how free he feels as a Jew in New York City at a time when Nazi Germany was murdering Jews. Yet simultaneously, the need he feels to assert his patriotism is an answer to those who questioned Jews’ commitment to the United States while the nation was at war. The plate-glass window reflects iconic elements of the New York City urban landscape, such as the curved street lamp (seen also in Weegee’s work) and fire escapes. Collins joined Roy Stryker’s Office of War Information, the renowned group of documentary photographers who worked under Stryker’s very detailed directions, providing his cadre of photographers with detailed shooting scripts. In the first incarnation, the photographers worked for the Farm Security Administration to create and distribute images of the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression throughout the South and the West. The Office of War Information’s graphic artists and photographers were among the first Americans to view the atrocity photos that made their way out of Nazi control. Assigned to document “hyphenated Americans,” Collins’s photos such as this one were duplicated and dropped behind enemy lines in Europe and in Asia, in order to let ordinary citizens who lived under fascist governments know that America supported them. Collins employed an urban aesthetic, deftly portraying the multiethnic and multicultural character of the United States. This window display on the Lower East Side also demonstrates the ongoing importance of the neighborhood for religious New York Jews. The last photographs taken of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, the infamous Brooklyn husband and wife accused, and ultimately executed, for allegedly passing nuclear secrets to the Soviets, illustrate the couple’s desire to acknowledge posthumously their identities as Jews. Here, in a Brooklyn Jewish funeral home, with thousands of people waiting to pay their respects, the Rosenbergs lie in matching wood caskets with the Magen David on the lids, which are lifted up for public viewing. Revealed are the husband and wife, always presented as a couple in the courts as in their deaths, dressed in white burial shrouds, following Jewish burial traditions. Characteristic elements such as Julius’s round, wire-rimmed glasses and mustache no longer appear. A neatly arranged tallit lies on Julius’s shoulders and chest. Their case of conspiracy to commit espionage attracted international interest and support. But their prosecution and execution were especially poignant for New York Jews. Many

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Anonymous, Rosenbergs Lie in State, Brooklyn, NY, UPI news photograph, 1953. (© Bettmann / CORBIS)

gathered in Union Square hoping for a last-minute reprieve because they held similar radical political views, had also attended the free university City College of New York (CCNY), and also were Jews of eastern European heritage. However, factions existed among New York Jews, and there were those who opposed clemency for the Rosenbergs; for example, the judge, attorney, and prosecutors were also Jews. Comedian Lenny Bruce (1925 – 1966) graphically explained what made New York City and its residents Jewish, even when they were not. As Lenny saw it, “If you live in New York or any other big city, you are Jewish. It doesn’t matter even if you’re Catholic; if you live in New York, you’re Jewish. If you live in Butte, Montana, you’re going to be goyish even if you’re Jewish. . . . Jewish means pumpernickel bread, black cherry soda and macaroons. Goyish means Kool-Aid, Drake’s cakes, and lime jello.”18 By contrasting “Jewish” with “goyish,” Bruce transformed all New Yorkers into Jews, strengthening the Jewish identification of the city in the eyes of other Americans. New York and Jewish merged in Bruce’s routine, making his listeners laugh with recognition at his boldness for saying what so many knew. His was humor with a razor-sharp edge to it.

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Anonymous, Lenny Bruce Being Frisked and Arrested, photograph. (Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC)

As stereotypes of Jewish men multiplied, Bruce mutated and reshaped each one. A Jewish intellectual? Well, while that is not an exact description of Bruce, he was sharp, verbal, and smart, although some people reduced him to just a smart aleck. “Muscular Jew” does not apply either, not to a man whose appetite for heroin and cigarettes abused his body; yet he possessed the strength and courage to stand up and speak out during the McCarthy era, when words were suppressed and thought was deemed dangerous. Bruce, like other New York Jews, such as painter Ben Shahn, revered the First Amendment and the Bill of Rights. Bruce was arrested numerous times on charges of obscenity; once the police arrested him for using the Yiddish word schmuck (penis). Civil rights and free speech advocates, artists, writers, and comics spoke on his behalf at his trial in 1964, but to no avail. Bruce received a posthumous gubernatorial pardon from New York State, the first ever decreed in the state’s history. Bruce died from a morphine overdose at age forty. A woman glides on a tightrope over the New York night skyline, naked above the waist except for her bra. The story behind the advertisement on the facing page reveals the many supportive roles that New York’s Jewish women

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have played in America. The Maidenform Company’s “I Dreamed” campaign ran for twenty years between 1949 and 1969, making it one of longest-running advertising campaigns in history. The company developed in reaction to the flat-chested flapper silhouette when a Jewish dressmaker living in New York, Ida Cohen Rosenthal, refashioned the bra to enhance the natural female form and her dress designs. Based on positive reactions from her customers, she launched the Maidenform Brassiere Company in 1923 with her husband and another dressmaker. Jewish women were not only a significant part of New York’s female labor force, but they also played a major role in its fashion design, beauty culture, and advertising industry in the twentieth century. Like many others who did not conform precisely to Euro-American beauty ideals, Jewish women felt the need to align their bodies more closely with that standard. Their desires found expression in various innovations, some of which suggested a boldness, brashness, and sense of humor associated with New York Jews.

“I Dreamed I Walked a Tightrope in My Maidenform Bra,” advertisement, 1961. (Courtesy of the Maidenform Collection, Archives Center, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC; reprinted by permission of the Maidenform Company)

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Right: Howard Zieff, “You Don’t Have to Be Jewish to Love Levy’s Real Jewish Rye,” Doyle Dane Bernbach Ad Agency, New York, 1967. (Courtesy of the Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC) Below: “You Don’t Have to Be Jewish to Oppose the War in Vietnam,” button, late 1960s.

Howard Zieff ’s widely successfully campaign for Levy’s Rye Bread first appeared in the city’s subways, appealing to the inclusiveness of enjoying ethnic food. The visual concept of the series of posters, each presenting a different ethnic or racial type, is that the people pictured would not be identified as Jewish, despite Lenny Bruce’s definition. To be both Native American, or African American, and Jewish was a living oxymoron in these ads. Zieff recalled that he first encountered the Native American man near Grand Central, where he worked as an engineer. In order to amplify the man’s non-Jewishness, Zieff outfitted him in a pastiche of Native costumes, more fictional Hollywood than accurate.19 This “trickster” visual play brings to mind similarities between Native and Jewish humor, each with a dark tone of survival despite all odds. New York City and the nation’s capital were the two main settings for political protests for and against the divisive Vietnam War. New York was the media center as well as home to numerous colleges and universities, where many young Jewish men enrolled, some to claim educational deferments. A play on the slogan of the hugely successful New York City Levy’s bread ad, the protest button plays on the significant Jewish presence in the antiwar movement, as

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well as acknowledging that opposition was not just for Jews. Many Jewish college students, both male and female, were active in the New Left movement Students for a Democratic Society, which protested the war. In 1964, Jews were twice as likely as Protestants and Catholics to want the United States to withdraw its forces from Vietnam. By 1970, half of American Jews, the majority of whom were New Yorkers, supported an immediate withdrawal, while the majority of Catholics and Protestants preferred to send more troops over. A disproportionate number of soldiers were African American, working class, and unable to receive an educational deferment because they did not attend college in substantial numbers, as did Jews. The large and vocal presence of Jews in antiwar protests, sit-ins, marches, and other public forums starkly contrasts with the numbers of Jews who served. Only 269 Jewish soldiers were killed during the war, out of a total of 58,193 Americans killed.20 Just as New York Jewish women had advocated for women’s rights, including in the suffrage and labor-reform movements in the early twentieth century, they played key roles in what is now known as the second-wave feminist movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Women such as Bella Abzug (1920 – 1988), a lawyer who represented a Manhattan district in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1971 to 1976, not only helped to secure civil rights, full protection under the law, and greater economic parity for women, but she also fundamentally rescripted women’s social roles. Abzug grew up in the Bronx and attended Hunter College and Columbia Law School. One of her early legal cases, an appeal on behalf of Willie McGee, who was convicted of raping a white woman,

“This Woman’s Place Is in the House — the House of Representatives! Bella Abzug for Congress,” campaign poster, 1971 – 1976. (Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC)

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took her down to Mississippi. A socialist Zionist, Abzug protested the “Zionism Is Racism” resolution at the United Nations in 1975. Other second-wave Jewish feminists and cofounders with Abzug of the National Women’s Political Caucus in 1971 included Betty Friedan, author of The Feminine Mystique (1963) and first president of the National Organization for Women (NOW, 1966); and Letty Cottin Pogrebin, a founder of Ms. magazine (1972) and an essayist on Jewish feminism. Together with younger New York women, they contributed to the identification of New York Jews with outspoken, politically active feminists, supporters of civil rights and peace movements. From Lou Reed’s place on the “Wild Side,” the Jewish singer-songwriter invited fellow social outcasts — transvestites, gay male hustlers, and speed freaks — to likewise find sanctuary on the dangerous streets of New York’s Lower East Side in the 1970s. While second- and third-generation New York Jews aspired to the better life of the suburbs, their sons and daughters, such as Reed, sought asylum from conformity in the old neighborhood, where heroin, instead of herring, now was the commodity in demand. Reed studied with the poet Delmore Schwartz at Syracuse University in the early 1960s and then moved to Lower Manhattan and formed the rock band the Velvet Underground. Resplendent in biker leathers and dark shades, he was the very definition of cool, an adjective that usually would not stick to “good Jewish boys.” He came to stand for a new type of New York Jew, one in rebellion against bourgeois Jewish life. Recently dubbed the “Zeyde of American Punk Rock,” Reed continues actively to record and perform. He counts himself a regular at annual seder of the music house the Knitting Factory.21 Red and black, colors rich with symbolic meaning, are powerfully applied in the poster on the facing page, demanding the release of Jews forced to remain in the Soviet Union. While red denotes strength, as well as bloodshed and fire, black stands for death, as well as evoking charred coal-black burnt remains. Each brings to mind violence and death during pogroms, the Shoah, and Stalin’s murderous reign. The slogan “Let My People Go,” here written facing page: Top: Donald Greenhaus, Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground, photograph (detail), mid1960s. (© Donald Greenhaus/Shabobba® International, LLC) Bottom: “Let Our People Go,” poster, Coalition to Save Soviet Jewry, NYC Center for Jewish History, mid-1970s. (Courtesy of the American Jewish Historical Society, Waltham, MA, and New York, NY)

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with the more inclusive “our” instead of “my,” motivated the movement. Originating from the nineteenth-century African American spiritual “Go Down, Moses,” the song references the Torah’s account of the Exodus from Egypt. For many Americans, the definitive interpretation belongs to Paul Robeson, whose deep, rich voice reminded some of Moses. New York City was home to the Coalition to Free Soviet Jews, as well as the site for numerous protests and marches. Its Jews led the Soviet Jewry movement.22 Nan Goldin is an insider among outsiders. After suffering a savage beating from her lover, Brian, she made herself pretty for the photograph she took of her mirror image, reapplying her red lipstick, which makes the red of her bruised, bloody eyes all the more evident. Fanciful earrings hang from her ears, and a pearl necklace runs around her neck. Within one face, the beauty of seduction and the rage of romantic, sexual obsession come together. Goldin’s acclaimed The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, originally a constantly changing slide show before it became frozen through publication as a book, offers her visual and public diary, in the making of which she viewed her camera as part of her body, rather than as merely a tool. Goldin drags us into her world on the Lower East Side of New York in the 1980s, when heroin was king, apartments were dirt cheap, and the neighborhood was dangerous. This world of which she was a part refuted her upbringing as a “nice Jewish girl” in the suburbs outside Washington, D.C. In reverse migration, she left home for the tenements. Her world and the people in it, who openly shoot drugs, have casual sex, sleep on filthy mattress on filthy floors, and head out to punk nightclubs, no longer exist. The Lower East Side has been gentrified, excluding young artists, urban transplants, and others from the rougher edges of life. Many of the people within Goldin’s community also no longer exist, having died from AIDS, alcoholism, and drugs. New York City, long a location of social and political organizing involving New York Jews, added to its reputation with the rise of anti-AIDS activism. Angered by the government’s mismanagement of the AIDS crisis, Gran Fury, a group of individuals committed to using the power of art to command social change, designed the “Silence = Death” poster campaign. In 1986, appropriating the pink triangle used by the Nazis to label gay men in the concentration camps, the group drew parallels between the Shoah and the pandemic. The following year, Jewish playwright and gay activist Larry Kramer called for a heated campaign of direct action; his combined energy and anger initiated the

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Above: Nan Goldin, “Nan One Month after Being Battered,” The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, photograph, Cibachrome, 1984. (© Nan Goldin; courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery, New York) Left: Aids Coalition to Unleash Power, “Silence Equals Death,” lapel button, c. 1987. (Photo courtesy of Anthony Viti; Collection of Anthony Viti, New York)

AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT-UP), based in New York. Famous actions of civil disobedience included the group’s infiltration of the New York Stock Exchange to protest the high costs of medications; seizing New York’s General Post Office on the eve of April 15, 1987, as bewildered bystanders filed tax returns; and “Stop the Church,” an event in which close to five thousand protestors took over St. Patrick’s Cathedral in response to the Catholic Church’s opposition to AIDS education. Kramer’s articulate activism, channeled into his play The Normal Heart, added the vision of gay Jews to New York City’s reputation.

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Elaine Reichek, A Postcolonial Kinderhood, needlepoint sampler, 1994. (Courtesy of The Jewish Museum, New York / Art Resource, New York, and Elaine Reichek)

A “middle-class Jewish girl from Brooklyn,”23 artist Elaine Reichek had never thought about doing Jewish-themed work until she was asked to do so by curator Norman Kleeblatt of New York’s Jewish Museum. She later came up with an installation piece that investigated her Brooklyn childhood and the family’s silence about their Jewishness. She re-created a childhood bedroom, colonial house, and Ethan Allen 1776 collection reproduction furniture, all slightly smaller than life-size. This 1994 needlepoint sampler exemplifies women’s domestic art, to which New York Jewish feminist art historian Linda Nochlin brought new attention in the early 1970s. Reichek attended Brooklyn College before going to Yale University; she started out studying painting with Ad Reinhardt before

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rejecting it for conceptual art. Thus, she participated in the rise of an alternative New York art school, one influenced by feminism as well as by New York’s Jewish milieu. The sampler reflects investigations of identity that have been a major preoccupation of contemporary artists. The feminist movement transformed the visual arts and influenced Judaism. Among New York’s world-class museums is the Jewish Museum, established by the Jewish Theological Seminary. The museum’s collections range from antiquities to contemporary religious and secular art. The museum has commissioned Jewish art as well as purchasing it, giving feminist Judaica great visibility and prestige. Formed from silver with small silver cymbals attached, artist Amy Klein Reichert’s Miriam Cup calls to several of our senses. The shiny surface and the hanging cymbals glimmer when struck by light, to entice our eyes; the gentle rattle of the small tambourines delight our ears; and the water within the cup quenches thirst. Women have traditionally contributed a lesser public ritual

Amy Klein Reichert, Miriam Cup, silver, 1997; Steven Smithers, silversmith, and Art Evans, photographer. (Courtesy of The Jewish Museum, New York / Art Resource, New York, and Amy Klein Reichert)

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role in the Passover seder than have men, who read the Haggadah, and young boys, who answer the Four Questions. In the 1970s, feminist Jews in New York City began to bring their voices to the feast of Passover in reclamation of their matriarchal ancestors.24 For centuries, Passover celebrants have placed a cup of wine on the seder table for the Prophet Elijah, who, it is said, will return to herald the coming of the messiah. In recent years, some families have added a second cup — this one filled with water for Moses’s sister, Miriam. The Torah relates that after the crossing of the Red Sea, with tumbrels — a percussion instrument similar to a tambourine — in hand, Miriam led the women of Israel in songs and dances of praise to God. “What are the sounds of freedom?” Reichert has asked. “The wind rustling through grasses, the murmuring of exiles.” What are the “desert sounds”? “A joyous song with a tambourine.” New York – born painter and art historian Jonathan Weinberg began his day on September 11, 2001, as did many people, by focusing on his tasks at hand. When he became aware of the destruction of the World Trade Center, Weinberg responded as an artist might do: he painted the buildings as he saw them from his Jersey City window, chronicling their collapse. With each subsequent painting, black clouds dominate, the once-blue sky vanishes as night falls, and thick smoke fills the air as New York’s celebrated skyline lowers closer to the ground. Inspired by British painter J. M. W. Turner’s The Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons (1835), Weinberg kept painting all day. Working in thickly applied acrylics, he chronicled his response to the horrendous events of the day in his art, presenting images that have stayed with us over a decade later. His work brings us back to that of Julian Voloj’s photograph (shown earlier), conveying the New York skyline’s commanding presence and meaning to Jewish artists. These two men capture the composite character of New York Jewry. Voloj sought to recover with his work a Jewish past, putting the history of New York Jews into dialogue with that of the city. Weinberg captured a heartrending present and an unseeable future, painting his perspective as a Jewish artist to render his city’s history-in-the-making. “Many American Jews,” writes author Douglas Rushkoff, “consider Israel the heart of Judaism. They write checks to Israel.” Yet he notes that it is different for New York Jews and those of the greater New York Jewish Diaspora throughout the United States.25 For these Jews, New York is the motherland. This new “ancestral” home replaces images of an often difficult and dangerous life in Europe or the Middle East with pictures of a challenging, but ultimately

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Jonathan Weinberg, New York City Skyline — 9-11-01 — 5 p.m., 2001, acrylic on panel, 24 × 36 in., 2001. (Courtesy of the artist)

more welcoming, origin of Jewish American roots. Unlike most American cities, New York’s public schools close on the High Holy Days, and food store clerks do not offer quizzical looks when asked for matzo meal in the springtime. Jewish life, rituals, and experiences over the course of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have become incorporated into the fabric of New York and have been communicated and shaped in the nation’s imagination through popular culture, news media, and advertising. Many Americans first met a New York Jewish family through Molly Goldberg, whom they welcomed into their homes each Tuesday night. Molly’s portrait of New York Jewish life received elaboration and revision as the twentieth century ended and a new century began. Her intimate Jewish world, tied to immigrant life through its accented English, yielded in popular culture to enticing notions that anyone could become a New York Jew. All one needed was the right food and a measure of chutzpah. Politics, style, humor, music, painting, advertising, and photography all produced versions of a New York

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Jew, until by the second decade of the twenty-first century most Americans recognize Jews as an important part of American c0ulture. As New York continues to change and grow, so too do New York’s Jews. Many meanings and images of New York Jews have proliferated over the twentieth century, representing their tremendous variation and vitality. As we have seen, these images permeate Jewish and American consciousness, traveling far and wide beyond the city itself.

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1. Milton Lehman, “Veterans Pour into New York to Find That Its Hospitality Far Exceeds Their Dreams,” New York Times, 8 July 1945, 51. 2. Ira Rosenwaike, Population History of New York City (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1972), 98, 101. 3. Robert A. M. Stern, Thomas Mellins, and David Fishman, New York 1960: Architecture and Urbanism between the Second World War and the Bicentennial (New York: Monacelli, 1995), 10, 13 – 19, 27 – 28. 4. Moses Rischin, The Promised City: New York’s Jews, 1870 – 1914 (1962; repr., Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977), 294. 5. “Levi Strauss,” Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levi_Strauss (accessed July 13, 2011). 6. Rischin, “Preface to the Paperback Edition,” in The Promised City, vii. 7. Ibid. “City of Ambition” refers to the 1910 photograph by Alfred Stieglitz taken approaching Lower Manhattan from New York Harbor. 8. In this and the following pages, the text draws on the three volumes of City of Promises: A History of the Jews of New York (New York: NYU Press, 2012).

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1. Information on the historical uses of the building was provided by American Land Services. The title number of the building is SS-919183, filed with the Department of Buildings, New York City. Email communication with Yoel Borgenicht (July 24, 2008). 2. For promotional statements on Harlem Partners, see http://www.harlempartners .com. 3. Robert Kolker, “Whose Harlem Is It?,” New York (July 14, 2008): 30 – 35, 81. 4. Reflections and comments by the Borgenichts are derived from an interview with Shoshana and Yoel Borgenicht (June 27, 2008; tape recording in possession of the author). 5. Federal Writers Project, Yiddish Writers Group, Die Yiddishe Landsmanshaften fun New York (New York: I. L. Peretz Writers Union, 1938), 114 – 15. 6. For a discussion of how varying classes of Jews were pulled and pushed to Harlem in the early twentieth century and then out-migrated in the 1920s – 1930s, see Jeffrey S. Gurock, When Harlem Was Jewish, 1870 – 1930 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979), chaps. 2 and 6.

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1. New York State Reconstruction Commission, Housing Conditions: Report of the Housing Committee of the Reconstruction Commission of the State of New York (Albany: J. B. Lyon, 1920), 9.

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2. Jeffrey S. Gurock, When Harlem Was Jewish, 1870 – 1930 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979), 140 – 41. On post – World War I racial tensions in American cities, see Arthur I. Waskow, From Race Riot to Sit-In: 1919 and the 1960s (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1966), 2, 21 – 22, 304 – 8. 3. On the tax-exemption law, see Real Estate Record and Builders Guide [hereinafter RERBG] (March 5, 1921), cited in Gurock, When Harlem Was Jewish, 42. 4. RERBG (September 3, 1921; March 18, 1922). On the citywide patterns over the decade of the 1920s, see New York City Tenement House Department, Tenth Report, 1918 – 1929 (New York: Martin Brown, 1929), 36 – 49. 5. Population, Land Values and Government: Studies of the Growth and Distribution of Population and Land Values and of Problems of Government, Regional Survey of New York and Its Environs (New York: Regional Plan of New York and Its Environs, 1929), 62; RERBG (September 21, 1921; February 26, 1927). 6. RERBG (September 21, 1921). 7. Edwin Harold Spengler, Land Values in New York in Relation to Transit Facilities (New York: Columbia University Press, 1930), 19 – 24; Clifford Hood, 722 Miles: The Building of the Subways and How They Transformed New York (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993), 158 – 61, 174. See also Michael V. Gershowitz, “Neighborhood Power Structure: Decision Making in Forest Hills” (Ph.D. diss., New York University, 1974), 28; Daniel A. Wishnoff, “The Tolerance Point: Race, Public Housing and the Forest Hills Controversy, 1945 – 1975” (Ph.D. diss., City University of New York, 2005), 153 – 54. 8. Abraham Cahan, The Rise of David Levinsky: A Novel (New York: Harper and Bros., 1917), 464, 480; Jeffrey S. Gurock, “Synagogue Imperialism in New York City: The Case of Congregation Kehal Adath Jeshurun, 1909 – 1911,” Michael 15 (2000): 95 – 108. 9. Edward Steiner, “The Russian and Polish Jewish in New York,” Outlook, November 1902, 532; Burton I. Hendrick, “The Jewish Invasion,” Hebrew Standard, February 15, 1907, 14. 10. Deborah Dash Moore, At Home in America: Second Generation New York Jews (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981), 39. 11. Leon Wexelstein, Building Up Greater Brooklyn with Sketches of Men Instrumental in Brooklyn’s Amazing Development (New York: Brooklyn Biographical Society, 1925), xvii – xx, quoted in Moore, At Home in America, 42. 12. Moore, At Home in America, 44 – 53. 13. Leo Grebler, Housing Market Behavior in a Declining Area: Long-Term Changes in Industry and Utilization of Housing on New York’s Lower East Side (New York: Columbia University Press, 1952), 126 – 27. 14. For statistics on Jewish out-migration from older neighborhoods and resettlement elsewhere in the city, see The Jewish Communal Register of New York City, 1917 – 1918 (New York: Kehillah [Jewish Community] of New York, 1918) [hereinafter JCR], 82, 85; and C. Morris Horowitz and Lawrence J. Kaplan, The Jewish Population of the New York Area, 1900 – 1975 (New York: Federation of Jewish Philanthropies of New York, 1959), 22, 133, 157, 209, 239. See also, on relocation destinations, Grebler, Housing Market Behavior, 124 – 25. On the differing fates of Jews and African Americans in Harlem, circa 1920 – 1930,

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see Gilbert Osofsky, Harlem: The Making of a Ghetto; Negro New York, 1890 – 1930 (New York: Harper and Row, 1964), 130, 248. 15. Richard Plunz, A History of Housing in New York City: Dwelling Type and Social Change in the American Metropolis (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 151 – 57; Andrew S. Dolkart, “Homes for People Cooperatives in New York City, 1916 – 1929,” Sites 30 (1989): 33 – 35. 16. Plunz, History of Housing in New York City, 151 – 57; Dolkart, “Homes for People Cooperatives,” 33 – 35. 17. Gurock, When Harlem Was Jewish, 144 – 45, 156. See also, on the beginnings of “El Barrio,” Lawrence Royce Chenault, The Puerto Rican Migrant in New York (New York: Columbia University Press, 1938). 18. Marc D. Angel, La America: The Sephardic Experience in the United States (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1982), 20, 35 – 36, 146, 169; Aviva Ben-Ur, Sephardic Jews in America: A Diasporic History (New York: NYU Press, 2009), 35 – 37. 19. On the Tremont Temple’s history, see “Tremont Temple Quits the Bronx,” New York Times (December 18, 1976): 27; and interview with Rabbi Larry Rubinstein (September 18, 2008). On attitudes toward the Tremont Temple, see “Tremont Temple,” Remembrance of Synagogues Past website, http://www.bronxsynagogues.org. 20. Hood, 722 Miles, 173 – 177; Plunz, A History of Housing in New York City, 131. 21. Jackson Heights Investing Company v. James Conforti Construction Company, 222 A.D. 687 (1927): 73, 76, 100 – 101. See also Heywood Broun and George Britt, Christians Only: A Study in Prejudice (New York: Vanguard, 1931), 256. 22. See Plunz, A History of Housing in New York City, 117 – 20, for the evolution of the Russell Sage Foundation’s approach toward Forest Hills Gardens. See also, on the foundation, Kenneth T. Jackson, ed., Encyclopedia of New York City (New Haven: Yale University Press and New-York Historical Society, 1995), s.v. “Russell Sage Foundation.” See also, on the rapid-transit issue, Gershowitz, “Neighborhood Power Structure,” 26. 23. On the Jewish population of Forest Hills as of 1930, see Horowitz and Kaplan, The Jewish Population of the New York Area, 275. On the early settlers in the neighborhood, including the Forest Hills Gardens portion, see Jeff Gottlieb, “The Early Years: A Clearer View of Early Jewish Life in Forest Hills,” unpublished paper, formerly appearing at http://www.qjhs.org. 24. Wishnoff, “The Tolerance Point,” 152; Jeff Gottlieb, “Benjamin Braunstein: Quiet, Genius at Work,” unpublished paper, formerly appearing at http://www.qjhs.org. On the Lefrak’s early efforts in Queens, see James Trager, The New York Chronology: The Ultimate Compendium of Events, People, and Anecdotes from the Dutch to the Present (New York: Harper Resource, 2004), 455 – 56. 25. On the affluence of leaders of landmark synagogues on the Lower East Side, see Annie Polland, Landmark of the Spirit: The Eldridge Street Synagogue (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009). 26. Christopher Mele, Selling the Lower East Side: Culture, Real Estate, and Resistance in New York City (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 83 – 84, 94 – 95; Gabrielle Esperdy, “Defying the Grid: A Retroactive Manifesto for the Culture

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of Decongestion,” Perspecta 30 (1999): 17; “Ageloff Towers,” American Architect (May 5, 1929): 621. 27. Grebler, Housing Market Behavior, 144 – 45; Mele, Selling the Lower East Side, 86 – 87. See also Hasia R. Diner, Lower East Side Memories: A Jewish Place in America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 96 – 117. 28. On the status of the Yiddish theater, see Nahma Sandrow, Vagabond Stars: A World History of the Yiddish Theatre (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), 288 – 92; Judd L. Teller, Strangers and Natives: The Evolution of the American Jew from 1921 to the Present (New York: Delacorte, 1968), 20 – 24; Ted Merwin, In Their Own Image: New York Jews in Jazz Age Popular Culture (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2006), 63 – 65; and Kate Simon, New York Places and Pleasures: An Uncommon Guide (New York: Meridian Books, 1959), 162 – 63. 29. Suzanne Wasserman, “Déjà Vu: Replanning the Lower East Side in the 1930s,” in From Urban Village to East Village: The Battle for New York’s Lower East Side, by Janet L. Abu-Lughod and others (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1994), 105 – 6. 30. Roy B. Helfgott, “Women’s and Children’s Apparel,” in Made in New York: Case Studies in Metropolitan Manufacturing, ed. Max Hall (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1959), 22, 55. See also Jackson, Encyclopedia of New York City, s.v. “Garment District.” 31. Selma C. Berrol, “The Jewish West Side of New York, 1920 – 1970,” Journal of Ethnic Studies (Winter 1986): 29. 32. Interview with Leah Novogrodsky Moskovits (August 17, 2008); email communication, Esther Novogrodsky Greenberg to Leah Novogrodsky Moskovits (August 24, 2008). 33. For an oft-referenced source on the reticence of long-term Lower East Siders — particularly, the older ones — to leave the neighborhood because of its “village”-like character, see Michael Gold, Jews without Money (New York: Horace Liveright, 1930). 34. American Jewish Year Book 33 (1931 – 32): 292; American Jewish Year Book 43 (1941 – 42): 684. 35. For the designation of these sections of New York as “immigrant neighborhoods” as of 1930 and statistics on their poverty levels, see Moore, At Home in America, 66, table 4. On the demographic breakdowns of these four areas, see Horowitz and Kaplan, The Jewish Population of the New York Area, 133, 168, 209, 239. Unfortunately census numbers do not permit teasing out precisely how many of the foreign-born were newcomers and how many were longtime residents in the United States. Similarly, these calculations do not indicate exactly what percentage of all foreign-born in these otherwise predominantly Jewish neighborhoods were Jewish. On the early history of Jews in Brownsville, see Alter Landesman, Brownsville: The Birth, Development and Passing of a Jewish Community in New York (New York: Bloch, 1969), 40 – 47, 67 – 77. 36. American Jewish Year Book 41 (1939 – 40): 596 – 97. 37. On the early demographics of Washington Heights, see Horowitz and Kaplan, The Jewish Population of the New York Area, 162; and JCR, 84. On the yeshiva’s relocation and emergence as a second-generation institution, see Moore, At Home in America, 177 – 99.

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38. Ernest Stock, “Washington Heights’ ‘Fourth Reich’: The German Emigres’ New Home,” Commentary (June 1951): 583, quoted in Steven M. Lowenstein, Frankfurt on the Hudson: The German-Jewish Community of Washington Heights, 1933 – 1983, Its Structure and Culture (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1989), 45. 39. Lowenstein, Frankfurt on the Hudson, 45, 46, 50. See also ibid., 45, on chain migration as applied to this community’s growth. 40. Gloria DeVidas Kirchheimer and Manfred Kirchheimer, We Were So Beloved: Autobiography of a German Jewish Community (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1997), 82, 94. 41. On the construction in Forest Hills and the controversy over its impact, see “Queens Homeowners Wage War to Curb Apartment Buildings,” Long Island Star (October 28, 1938), contained in the vertical file “Forest Hills 1938” at the Queens Borough Public Library, cited in Wishnoff, “The Tolerance Point,” 154 – 55. 42. Beth S. Wenger, New York Jews and the Great Depression: Uncertain Promise (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), 46 – 47, 83 – 84, 89, 91, 95. 43. Ibid., 99 – 101, 108 – 9. 44. Calvin Trillin, “U.S. Journal: The Bronx: The Coops,” New Yorker (August 1, 1977): 49 – 54, quoted in Plunz, A History of Housing in New York City, 161 – 62. See also Dolkart, “Homes for People Cooperatives,” 40. 45. Mark Naison, “From Eviction Resistance to Rent Control: Tenant Activism in the Great Depression,” in The Tenant Movement in New York City, 1904 – 1984, ed. Ronald Lawson (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1986), 102 – 12. See also, on non“partisan” Jewish support, Wenger, New York Jews and the Great Depression, 12. 46. The concept of New York Jews living during this period in greater concentration than in prior generations is derived from Deborah Dash Moore. See Moore, At Home in America, 30 – 31, for her use of an “index of dissimilarity” to compute degrees of Jewish residential concentration throughout the city. 47. On residential anti-Semitism beyond Queens, see Broun and Britt, Christians Only, 255, 259, 261 – 62; Leonard Dinnerstein, Antisemitism in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 93 48. Ronald H. Bayor, Neighbors in Conflict: The Irish, Germans, Jews, and Italians of New York City, 1929 – 1941 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), 3 – 5. 49. Arthur Mann, La Guardia: A Fighter against His Times, 1882 – 1933 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959), 45 – 46, 156 – 57. 50. Bayor, Neighbors in Conflict, 26. 51. See ibid., 25 – 26, on Irish women’s prior domination in the city’s public schools. 52. Ibid., 150 – 56. 53. On Coughlin’s biography and message, see Charles J. Tull, Father Coughlin and the New Deal (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1965), 192 – 206, 230 – 31. 54. Bayor, Neighbors in Conflict, 160 – 61. On the connection between street violence and the ethnic anomaly in the public school, see ibid., 26. 55. Ibid., 162.

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56. Sander A. Diamond, The Nazi Movement in America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1974), 146 – 47, 234 – 36, 257. 57. On La Guardia’s dilemmas about the 1937 Bund parade, see Bayor, Neighbors in Conflict, 135 – 36. On the opposition of German Americans to the Bund, see ibid., 60 – 66. 58. For a brief biographical sketch of Wagner, see Jackson, Encyclopedia of New York City, s.v. “Robert Ferdinand Wagner.” On the Wagner-Rogers Act, see Henry L. Feingold, The Politics of Rescue: The Roosevelt Administration and the Holocaust, 1938 – 1945 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1970), 149 – 51. For Lookstein’s recollections, see Bayor, Neighbors in Conflict, 163, 219nn. 53, 57. 59. On the geographical locations of Jewish and black areas of Harlem, see Gurock, When Harlem Was Jewish, 147 – 48. On attempts to exclude blacks, see Seth M. Scheiner, Negro Mecca: A History of the Negro in New York City, 1865 – 1920 (New York: NYU Press, 1965), 30. 60. Gil Ribak, “ ‘What the American Can Do in His Anger’: The Images of Gentiles among Jewish Immigrants in New York City” (Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin, 2007), 380. 61. Cheryl Lynn Greenberg, Or Does It Explode? Black Harlem in the Great Depression (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 116, 120 – 22, 125. See also Winston C. McDowell, “Keeping Them ‘In the Same Boat Together’?,” in African Americans and Jews in the Twentieth Century, ed. V. P. Franklin, Nancy L. Grant, Harold M. Kletnick, and Genna Rae McNeil, 208 – 36 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1998), 226. 62. Greenberg, Or Does It Explode?, 126 – 27; McDowell, “Keeping Them ‘In the Same Boat Together’?,” 228. 63. Cheryl Lynn Greenberg, Troubling the Waters: Black-Jewish Relations in the American Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 109, 112.

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1. All Schayes quotations from interview (December 5, 2008). The estimates on Jewish percentages of the population are based on Horowitz and Kaplan’s examination of numbers for the so-called Fordham section of the Bronx that constitutes a larger slice of the borough than just the Davidson and Jerome Avenue and West Fordham Road area that was Schayes’s turf. See on these statistics for both 1930 and 1940, C. Morris Horowitz and Lawrence J. Kaplan, The Jewish Population of the New York Area, 1900 – 1975 (New York: Federation of Jewish Philanthropies, 1959), 181. 2. These statistics on “nationality of pupils” were derived from periodical studies of such populations that were conducted by the Board of Education of New York City in the 1930s and 1940s. As with all such surveys, the religion of students was not indicated. Yet, as with many American “censuses,” in using these numbers, I am assuming that Russians, Poles, and Romanians were Jews. I have not added into the mix those with parents from Germany and Austria, who in the 1930s might also have been Jews. In addition, all of these percentages that point to Jewish predominance do not include the large cohorts — a third or more — in each school of children from families in which the father’s country of birth was “United States (White).” (The nationality of mothers was not asked.) My

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assumption here is that a goodly proportion were second-generation Jews of eastern European extraction that were born in the first decade and a half of the twentieth century of immigrant parents who by the 1930s had their own, third-generation children. See Board of Education Records, “Bureau of Reference, Research, and Statistics, Reorganization Reports, September 1935 – September, 1945,” boxes 1 – 6, New York City Municipal Archives. 3. William Poster, “From the American Scene: ‘Twas a Dark Night in Brownsville’: Pitkin Avenue’s Self-Made Generation,” Commentary (May 1950): 459, 461 – 62, 464. 4. Ibid., 462 – 63. 5. Gerald Sorin, The Nurturing Neighborhood: The Brownsville Boys Club and Jewish Community in Urban America, 1940 – 1990 (New York: NYU Press, 1990), 14; Beth Wenger, New York Jews and the Great Depression: Uncertain Promise (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), 96. 6. Alfred Kazin, A Walker in the City (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1951), 11 – 12, 37, 38. 7. Ira Rosen, “The Glory That Was Charlotte Street,” New York Times Sunday Magazine (October 7, 1979): 51. 8. Jeff Gottlieb, “Jamaica, Stronghold of the Jews,” unpublished paper, formerly appearing at http://www.qjhs.org. See also, on the message of The Jazz Singer, Ted Merwin, In Their Own Image: New York Jews in Jazz Age Culture (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2006), 118 – 20. 9. Fred Ferretti, “After 70 Years, South Bronx Street Is a Dead End,” New York Times (October 21, 1977): 51; Wenger, New York Jews and the Great Depression, 97; Lillian Elkin, “Memoir,” American Jewish Committee Oral History Collection, New York Public Library. 10. On the creation of Orchard Beach, see Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (New York: Knopf, 1974), 365 – 67. On Jews’ using the beaches, see Wenger, New York Jews and the Great Depression, 58. 11. Andrea Most, Making Americans: Jews and the Broadway Musical (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004), 28; David A. Jasen, Tin Pan Alley: The Composers, the Songs, the Performers and Their Times (New York: Donald I. Fine, 1988), xxii. 12. Jasen, Tin Pan Alley, 78 – 79; Kenneth Aaron Kanter, The Jews on Tin Pan Alley: The Jewish Contribution to American Popular Music, 1830 – 1940 (New York: KTAV and the American Jewish Archives, 1982), 54 – 55, 58, 60, 113, 117, 142 – 43. 13. Stephen Steinberg, The Academic Melting Pot: Catholics and Jews in American Higher Education (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1974), 20 – 21; Marcia Graham Synnott, The Half-Opened Door: Discrimination and Admissions at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, 1900 – 1970 (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1979), 158, 195. 14. Marianne Sanua, “ ‘We Hate New York’: Negative Images of the Promised City as a Source for Jewish Fraternity and Sorority Members, 1920 – 1940,” in An Inventory of Promises: Essays on American Jewish History in Honor of Moses Rischin, ed. Jeffrey S. Gurock and Marc Lee Raphael, 235 – 64 (Brooklyn, NY: Carlson, 1995), 237; Lee J. Levinger, The Jewish Student in America: A Study Made by the Research Bureau of the B’nai B’rith Hillel Foundation (Cincinnati: B’nai B’rith, 1937), 94. 15. Heywood Broun and George Britt, Christians Only: A Study in Prejudice (New

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York: Vanguard, 1931), 107; Felix Morrow, “Higher Learning on Washington Square,” Menorah Journal (Autumn 1930): 353; David Hollinger, “Two NYUs and the ‘Obligation of Universities to the Social Order’ in the Great Depression,” in The University and the City, ed. Thomas Bender, 249 – 66 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 255. On NYU’s Depression-era reversal of policies, see Thomas Bender, New York Intellect: A History of Intellectual Life in New York from 1750 to the Beginnings of Our Own Time (New York: Knopf, 1987), 291. 16. Hollinger, “Two NYUs,” 256. There is a difference of opinion within the sources on the Jewish proportions at NYU, both uptown and downtown. Morrow has offered the figure of 93 percent in 1930, which, if accurate would make it more “Jewish” than the City College of New York. See Morrow, “Higher Learning on Washington Square,” 348. Broun and Britt, on the other hand, reported based on information from the school’s registrar for 1931 that 45.3 percent of the uptown campus was Jewish, as opposed to 63 percent for downtown. See Broun and Britt, Christians Only, 106 – 7. Hollinger has argued that in the 1920s, Jewish percentages in University Heights were down to less than 30 percent (“Two NYUs,” 255). Bender has complicated matters by suggesting that by the end of the 1920s and into the Depression, economics moved NYU uptown to be more hospitable to Jews, and thus the numbers there rebounded to 54 percent from 30 percent in 1922. See Bender, New York Intellect, 291. See also Synnott, The Half-Opened Door, 19, which indicates that the Jewish presence in the Bronx branch in the early 1920s dropped from 40 to 25 percent. On the easy commute from the Lower East Side, see Harold S. Wechsler, The Qualified Student: A History of Selective College Admission in America (New York: Wiley, 1977), 133. 17. Morrow, “Higher Learning on Washington Square,” 348 – 49. 18. Sanua, “We Hate New York,” 237; A. M. Rosenthal, “Of Course, It Is All Quite Obvious as to Why I Am So Moved,” in City at the Center: A Collection of Writings by CCNY Alumni and Faculty, ed. Betty Rizzo and Barry Wallenstein, 67 – 68 (New York: City College of New York, 1983), 67. 19. On the cost of lunch at CCNY, see Gerald Sorin, Irving Howe: A Life of Passionate Dissent (New York: NYU Press, 2002), 15 – 17. In the 1923 – 24 academic year, at NYU the registration fee and tuition amounted to $245. Ten years later, it cost $360 to attend the downtown school. The information on NYU tuition and fees was derived from the school’s catalogues for 1923 – 24 and 1933 – 34, provided by the NYU Archive on December 15, 2008. My thanks to Laura Joanne Zeccardi for her assistance. Columbia University priced tuition and board in the 1930s at $600. On the cost of tuition at Columbia, see Nathan Glazer’s memoir comments in Joseph Dorman, Arguing the World: The New York Intellectuals in Their Own Words (New York: Free Press, 2000), 43 – 44. 20. Robert Cohen, When the Old Left Was Young: Student Radicals and America’s First Mass Student Movement, 1929 – 1941 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 68 – 70. See also “City College Men Fight Rise in Fees,” New York Times (May 24, 1932): 1; and “Protest Fee Plan for City Colleges,” New York Times (May 26, 1932): 11. On the temporary closing of Crane Junior College in Chicago, see City Colleges of Chicago, “Mission & History,” http://www.ccc.edu/MissionHistory.asp (accessed October 21, 2011).

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21. On the academic achievements of CCNY’s most outstanding alumni of that era, see CCNY Alumni Association, “Nobel Laureates,” http://www.ccnyalumni.org/index.php ?option=com_content&view=article&id=100&Itemid=285 (accessed October 21, 2011). 22. David M. Oshinsky, Polio: An American Story (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 96 – 97; Debbie Bookchin and Jim Schumacher, The Virus and the Vaccine: The True Story of a Cancer-Causing Monkey Virus, Contaminated Polio Vaccine, and the Millions of Americans Exposed (New York: St. Martin’s, 2004), 46. 23. L. Shands, “The Cheder on the Hill,” Menorah Journal (March 1929): 269. 24. Steinberg, The Academic Melting Pot, 9; Thomas Evans Coulton, A City College in Action: Struggle and Achievements at Brooklyn College, 1930 – 1955 (New York: Harper and Bros., 1955), 8, 14. 25. “Subway a ‘Campus’ for Many at Hunter,” New York Times (October 2, 1938): 54; Ruth Jacknow Markowitz, My Daughter, the Teacher: Jewish Teachers in the New York City Schools (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1993), 27. On Jewish male-to-female proportions in colleges and universities, see Nettie Pauline McGill, “Some Characteristics of Jewish Youth in New York City,” Jewish Social Service Quarterly 14 (1938): 256. See also Wenger, New York Jews and the Great Depression, 44, on young women sacrificing for their brothers’ education. 26. Meyer Liben, “CCNY: A Memoir,” in Rizzo and Wallenstein, City at the Center, 50. See also, on the importance of basketball to CCNY students, Irving Howe, “From World of Our Fathers,” in ibid., 60. 27. Louis Weiser, “Memoir,” American Jewish Committee Oral History Collection, New York Public Library. 28. On the employment problems Jews faced even with advanced degrees, see Wenger, New York Jews and the Great Depression, 22 – 23. 29. Oshinsky, Polio, 98 – 104, 107. 30. On the intellectual tradition that Cohen embodied, see Moses Rischin, The Promised City: New York’s Jews, 1870 – 1914 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962), 216. See also Irving Howe, World of Our Fathers: The Journey of the East European Jews to America and the Life They Found and Made (New York: Random House, 1976), 283 – 86. On the problems of Jewish academics during the 1920s – 1940s and the changes after World War II, see Lewis S. Feuer, “The Stages in the Social History of Jewish Professors in American Colleges and Universities,” American Jewish History (June 1982): 459 – 60, 462, 464. 31. On High Holiday piety, see “Abraham Cahan” and “Morgen Zhurnal, 4/3/50,” in Irving Howe and Kenneth Libo, How We Lived: A Documentary History of Immigrant Jews in America, 1880 – 1930 (New York: Richard Marek, 1979), 104, 117. On the problem of those “temporary halls of worship,” see “Temporary Halls of Worship,” American Hebrew (January 15, 1901): 431. 32. Alexander M. Dushkin, Jewish Education in New York City (New York: Bureau of Jewish Education, 1918), 154 – 56. 33. For an appreciation of the common dilemmas immigrant religious leaders and radicals faced in the immigrant period, see Jeffrey S. Gurock, “Change to Survive: The

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Common Experience of Transplanted Jewish Identities in America, 1880 – 1920,” in What Is American about the American Jewish Experience?, ed. Marc Lee Raphael (Williamsburg, VA: College of William and Mary, 1993), 54 – 72. 34. On radical dominance of downtown street corners and the significance of the activities for the growth of unions, see Tony Michels, A Fire in Their Hearts: Yiddish Socialists in New York (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005), 70 – 73, 167. 35. Arthur Gorenstein, “A Portrait of Ethnic Politics: The Socialists and the 1908 and 1910 Congressional Elections on the Lower East Side,” Publications of the American Jewish Historical Society (March 1961): 202 – 40. 36. Howe, The World of Our Fathers, 289. 37. Sorin, The Nurturing Neighborhood, 16. 38. McGill, “Some Characteristics of Jewish Youth,” 266 – 67. 39. Jeffrey S. Gurock, Judaism’s Encounter with American Sports (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005), 66 – 67; Israel Herbert Levinthal, “The Value of the Center to the Synagogue,” United Synagogue Review (June 1926): 19. 40. On the rise of synagogue centers in New York during the 1920s, see Deborah Dash Moore, At Home in America: Second Generation New York Jews (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981), 140 – 43. On Kaplan’s break with Orthodoxy, see Jeffrey S. Gurock and Jacob J. Schacter, A Modern Heretic and a Traditional Community: Mordecai M. Kaplan, Orthodoxy, and American Judaism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 106 – 34. 41. Gurock, Judaism’s Encounter with American Sports, 70 – 71; Merwin, In Their Own Image, 59; Wenger, New York Jews and the Great Depression, 186. 42. Quoted in Wenger, New York Jews and the Great Depression, 187. 43. Susan Dworkin, Miss America, 1945: Bess Myerson’s Own Story (New York: Newmarket, 1947), 13 – 17. 44. Eric L. Goldstein, “ ‘A Childless Language’: Yiddish and the Problem of ‘Youth’ in the 1920s and 1930s,” in 1929: Mapping the Jewish World, ed. Gennady Estraik and Hasia Diner (New York: NYU Press, forthcoming). 45. Dworkin, Miss America, 14 – 15. 46. Irving Howe, “A Memoir of the Thirties,” in Steady Work: Essays in the Politics of Democratic Radicalism, 1953 – 1966 (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1966), 349 – 53. See also Sorin, Irving Howe, 11. 47. Dorman, Arguing the World, 33 – 34, 36, 39. 48. Liben, “CCNY,” 48; Sorin, Irving Howe, 17. 49. Dorman, Arguing the World, 45. 50. As Wenger has pointed out (New York Jews and the Great Depression, 214n. 6), the attitudes and changing perspectives of the “New York Intellectuals” have been favored with much scholarly discussion. See, for example, Terry A. Cooney, The Rise of the New York Intellectuals, Partisan Review and Its Circle (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986); Alan M. Wald, The New York Intellectuals: The Rise and Decline of the AntiStalinist Left from the 1930s to the 1980s (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987); and Alexander Bloom, Prodigal Sons: The New York Intellectuals and Their World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986).

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51. Irving Howe, A Margin of Hope: An Intellectual Autobiography (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982), 137; Cooney, The Rise of the New York Intellectuals, 43, 50, discussed in Nathan Abrams, “ ‘A Profoundly Hegemonic Moment’: De-mythologizing the Cold War New York Jewish Intellectuals,” Shofar (Spring 2003): 64 – 82. 52. Dorman, Arguing the World, 46; Liben, “CCNY,” 48. 53. Dorman, Arguing the World, 44 – 45, 51 – 52. 54. R. Cohen, When the Old Left Was Young, 44. 55. Christopher Phelps, “An Interview with Harry Magdoff — Co-editor of the ‘Monthly Review,’ ” Monthly Review (May 1999), http://monthlyreview.org/1999/05/01/ an-interview-with-harry-magdoff. 56. R. Cohen, When the Old Left Was Young, 24, 27 – 28, 274 – 75, 350n. 16. See also Morris Freedman, “CCNY Days,” in Rizzo and Wallenstein, City at the Center, 65. 57. Lucy S. Dawidowicz, From That Place and Time: A Memoir, 1938 – 1947 (New York: Norton, 1989), 16 – 17; Markowitz, My Daughter, the Teacher, 52 – 54, 60 – 61. 58. Hal Draper, “The Student Movement in the Thirties,” in As We Saw the Thirties: Essays on Social and Political Movements of a Decade, ed. Rita J. Simon (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1967), 182 – 88. See also, on the tuition crisis and Scottsboro, R. Cohen, When the Old Left Was Young, 68 – 71, 211. 59. James Traub, City on a Hill: Testing the American Dream at City College (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1993), 39. 60. Although the application forms for admission into the program did not inquire about the student’s religion, the majority of applicants possessed Jewish-sounding names and hailed from neighborhoods, when indicated, that were Jewish ones in the city. See, for these examples, a “certificate” dated September 17, 1931, which lists twenty-eight senior ROTC cadets. Nineteen possessed Jewish-sounding names. These documents are on file at the Archives of the City College of New York. 61. Solomon Willis Rudy, College of the City of New York: A Centennial History, 1847 – 1947 (New York: City College Press, 1949), 404 – 19. See also “Expanded Historical Note on Department of Military Science (ROTC),” undated document in CCNY Archives. For an example of the group’s publication, see the Lavender Cadet (November 1934), in CCNY Archives. 62. “Conclusions to Be Drawn,” Campus (February 25, 1931): 2; “S.C. Charter Day Boycott Cuts Attendance to 1,000,” Campus (May 10, 1935): 1. See also untitled press release, dated October 4, 1939, describing the growth of ROTC at CCNY in the 1930s, in CCNY Archives. On the athletes’ support of ROTC and the administration, see S.  W. Rudy, College of the City of New York, 419. See also, on CCNY’s ROTC as the largest campus military group in the United States, Irving Rosenthal, “Rumblings of Unrest and Empty Stomachs,” in Rizzo and Wallenstein, City at the Center, 56. On athletes’ support for a stance comparable to that of ROTC, see “5 More Suspended in City College Row,” New York Times (June 3, 1933): 15; and “186 Awards Made at City College,” New York Times (June 3, 1933): 9. 63. “Boycott Charter Day,” Campus (May 7, 1935): 2; “Looking Backward,” Campus (May 31, 1935): 2; “Nation’s Students ‘Strike for Peace’: Disorders Are Few,” New York

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Times (April 13, 1935): 1 – 2. See also “Protest ROTC,” in “The Struggle for Free Speech at CCNY, 1931 – 42,” virtual exhibition, Virtual New York City website, http://www.vny.cuny .edu/gutter/panels/panel6.html. 64. On the Socialists’ antiwar stance into World War II and its decline in mass popularity, see David A. Shannon, The Socialist Party of America: A History (New York: Macmillan, 1955), 254 – 56. On American Communists’ positions, see Maurice Isserman, Which Side Were You On? The American Communist Party during the Second World War (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1982), 32 – 33, 85. On the mixture of left and right politics in the isolationist movement, see Manfred Jonas, Isolationism in America, 1935 – 1941 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1966), 39, 229. See also, on isolationist activities, David Gold, “America First: The Anti-war Movement, Charles Lindbergh and the Second World War, 1940 – 1941,” New York Military Affairs Symposium (September 26, 2003), http://bobrowen.com/nymas/americafirst.html. 65. “Four Students Seized at Military Drill,” New York Times (May 18, 1940): 8. 66. For an overview of early Zionist history in America, see Melvin I. Urofsky, American Zionism from Herzl to the Holocaust (Garden City, NY: Anchor, 1975), 43 – 152. 67. Noah Nardi, “A Survey of Jewish Day Schools in America,” Jewish Education (September 1944): 22 – 23; Nardi, “The Growth of Jewish Day Schools in America,” Jewish Education (November 1948): 25. 68. Jeffrey S. Gurock, “Jewish Commitment and Continuity in Interwar Brooklyn,” in Jews of Brooklyn, ed. Ilana Abramovitch and Seán Galvin, 231 – 41 (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England / Brandeis University Press, 2002), 238 – 39. 69. Chaim Potok, The Chosen: A Novel (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1967). 70. Judah Lapson, “A Decade of Hebrew in the High Schools of New York,” Jewish Education (April 1941): 34 – 45. 71. Nettie Pauline McGill and Ellen Nathalie Matthews, The Youth of New York City (New York: Macmillan, 1940), 241, 334. 72. On strict observance within Williamsburg, see George Kranzler, Williamsburg: A Jewish Community in Transition (New York: Feldheim, 1961), 17, 18, 214 – 15. 73. Meir Kimmel, “The History of Yeshivat Rabbi Chaim Berlin,” Sheviley ha-Hinuch (Fall 1948): 51 – 54; Alter F. Landesman, Brownsville: The Birth, Development and Passing of a Jewish Community in New York (New York: Bloch, 1969), 234 – 35. 74. On the presence of Hasidic elements in Brooklyn in the interwar period, see Jerome R. Mintz, Hasidic People: A Place in the New World (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), 21 – 26, 53 – 56. 75. Kranzler, Williamsburg, 213 – 15.

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1. The geographical location of these New York – based national Jewish organizations and other institutions noted in this chapter was derived from the annual directory “Jewish National Organizations in the United States,” published in the American Jewish Year Book. See, for example, the listing for 1941 – 42 that appeared in volume 43, 521 – 602, and those for 1945 – 46 in volume 47, 560 – 610.

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2. On the mission and ideology of the Histadrut — especially its American context — see Mark A. Raider, The Emergence of American Zionism (New York: NYU Press, 1998), xvi, 1, 25. On the mission and approaches of the Revisionist Zionists in America, see Rafael Medoff, Militant Zionism in America: The Rise and Impact of the Jabotinsky Movement in the United States, 1926 – 1948 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2002). On the battles between Wise’s Congress and the Revisionists, see David S. Wyman, The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust, 1941 – 1945 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), 87, 90 – 92. 3. On the location of Lugee’s, see its ad in Jewish Life (October 1946): 97. 4. On the proximity of these two groups and the mission of the Mizrachi, see American Jewish Year Book 43 (1941 – 42): 558, 569. 5. For basic information on the name and number of media outlets in the city, see Kenneth T. Jackson, ed., The Encyclopedia of New York City (New Haven: Yale University Press and New-York Historical Society, 1995), s.vv. “Magazines,” “Newspapers,” “Radio.” See also Aviva Ben-Ur, “In Search of the Ladino Press: A Bibliographic Survey,” Studies in Bibliography and Booklore (Winter 2001): 10 – 52. 6. For reports on the size of these rallies, see American Jewish Year Book 40 (1939): 216; American Jewish Year Book 41 (1941): 271; “20,000 Jam Garden in Reich Protest,” New York Times (November 22, 1938): 6. See also, on public protest, Haskel Lookstein, Were We Our Brothers’ Keepers? The Public Response of American Jews to the Holocaust, 1938 – 1944 (New York: Hartmore House, 1985), 55, 83, 98. 7. Monte Noam Penkower, “In Dramatic Dissent: The Bergson Boys,” American Jewish History (March 1981): 286 – 88. 8. “22,000 Nazis Hold Rally in Garden; Police Check Foes,” New York Times (February 21, 1939): 1. 9. Naomi W. Cohen, American Jews and the Zionist Idea (New York: KTAV, 1975), 60 – 62, 87; Melvin I. Urofsky, American Zionism from Herzl to the Holocaust (Garden City, NY: Anchor, 1975), 399 – 400; Samuel Halperin, The Political World of American Zionism (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1961), 222 – 33, 236 – 37. 10. Efraim Zuroff, The Response of Orthodox Jewry in the United States to the Holocaust: The Activities of the Vaad Ha-Hatzala Rescue Committee, 1939 – 1945 (New York: Michael Scharf Publication Trust of Yeshiva University Press, 2000), 134. 11. Rafael Medoff, “ ‘Retribution Is Not Enough’: The 1943 Campaign by Jewish Students to Raise American Public Awareness of the Nazi Genocide,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies (Fall 1997): 172, 174, 178 – 81. 12. On Rabbi Weitzmann’s decision, see Rafael Medoff ’s phone interview with Rebbitzen Teitz, Rabbi Weizmann’s daughter (March 7, 2006). I am grateful to Dr. Medoff for sharing this source with me. 13. Jonathan Krasner, The Benderly Boys and the Making of American Jewish Education (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England / Brandeis University Press, 2011), 347 – 50. I am grateful to Dr. Krasner for sharing this information with me. 14. Huslal Lookstein, “May 1943: The Prayer Service That Almost Wasn’t,” sermon delivered at Congregation Kehilath Jeshurun, April 18, 2009.

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15. “Adolf Hitler Was Once Teacher Here,” Commentator (February 26, 1942): 1; “Concrete Action to Be Done by Every Type of Reader” and “Yeshiva Students Are Not Blameless,” Commentator (March 4, 1943): 6. 16. Marsha L. Rozenblit, “The Seminary during the Holocaust Years,” in Tradition Renewed: A History of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, ed. Jack Wertheimer, vol. 2 (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary, 1997), 289, 304. 17. Laurel Leff, “When the Facts Didn’t Speak for Themselves: The Holocaust in the New York Times, 1939 – 1945,” Harvard International Journal of Press/Politics (2000): 52 – 57; Leff, “A Tragic ‘Fight in the Family’: The New York Times, Reform Judaism and the Holocaust,” American Jewish History (March 2000): 3 – 4. 18. Alex Grobman, “What Did They Know? The American Jewish Press and the Holocaust, 1 September 1939 – 17 December 1942,” American Jewish History (March 1979): 327 – 52. 19. Krasner, The Benderly Boys. 20. Lookstein, “May 1943.” 21. Deborah Dash Moore, GI Jews: How World War II Changed a Generation (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2004), 30 – 31, 39 – 40. 22. Ibid., 42 – 43; Edward Alexander, “Irving Howe and the Holocaust: Dilemmas of a Radical Jewish Intellectual,” American Jewish History 88 (March 2000): 101 – 2. 23. On the debate over the origins of the ditty, see Bee Wilson, “Bee Wilson Suggests Sending Salami Missiles to Iraq,” New Statesman (January 20, 2003), http://www .newstatesman.com/200301200047; and Barry Popik, “Send a Salami to Your Boy in the Army,” Big Apple Corner (blog) (October 14, 2004), http://www.barrypopik.com/index .php/new_york_city/entry/send_a_salami_to_your_boy_in_the_army/. On soldiers coping with ham, see Moore, GI Jews, 49 – 85. 24. Alter F. Landesman, Brownsville: The Birth, Development and Passing of a Jewish Community in New York (New York: Bloch, 1969), 321. 25. Home News (Bronx) (April 13, 1943): 3; (April 18, 1943): 11; Marianne Sanua, “From the Pages of the Victory Bulletin,” YIVO Annual 19 (1992): 295 – 97, 327; Commentator (February 4, 1943): 1; (November 18, 1943): 1; (December 16, 1943): 1; (March 8, 1945): 1. 26. Home News (Bronx) (April 4, 1943): 8; (April 26, 1943): 1. 27. Home News (Bronx) (April 19, 1943): 3; (April 26, 1943): 1. 28. Stella Sardell, introduction to Community Memories: The Syrian Jews of Brooklyn during World War II (Brooklyn, NY: Sephardic Community Center, 1984), 2, cited in Sanua, “From the Pages of the Victory Bulletin,” 287. 29. For an example of the “Roll of Honor,” see Victory Bulletin (July 1942): 3; see also (November 1942): 5; and (November 1942): 3. All references to the newsletter are derived from Sephardic Archives, The Victory Bulletin, July 1942 – September 1945: Wartime Newspapers of the Syrian Jewish Community in Brooklyn (New York: Sephardic Archives, c. 1984). 30. Victory Bulletin (September 1942): 2; (March 1943): 2; (April 1944): 2; (December 1944): 2; (September 1945): 2, 10.

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31. Stephen S. Wise, “The Victorious Leader: A Tribute to Franklin Delano Roosevelt,” Congress Weekly (April 20, 1945): 7 – 8. 32. Lawrence H. Fuchs, The Political Behavior of American Jews (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1956), 129 – 30, 152 – 53; Henry L. Feingold, A Time for Searching: Entering the Mainstream, 1920 – 1945 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 212 – 17. 33. On the founding of this synagogue, its mission, and its early priorities, see the following sources in the Young Israel of Parkchester Papers (hereinafter YIP) at the Yeshiva University Archives: Mrs. B. Silver to Friend (September 5, 1940), Jerome H. Rosenblum to Friend (December 4, 1940), the Arrangements Committee to Friend (April 30, 1941); “Young Israel to Dedicate Home,” Parkchester News (November 13, 1941); Jack Solve to Members (June 24, 1942); The Young Israelight (December 2, 1942): 2. 34. “Minutes of Meeting on Tuesday, December 9, 1941 at Quarters”; “President Roosevelt Has Proclaimed Thursday, January 1, 1942,” flyer (n.d.); “Minutes of Meeting on Tuesday, January 13, 1942 at Quarters”; “Minutes of Meeting on June 23, 1942 at Quarters”; United Victory Committee of Parkchester to Young Israel of Parkchester (April 16, 1942; March 18, 1943); Jack Slove to Soldier (February 4, 1944); Chairman of War Work Committee to Member (May 12, 1944); “A Review of Our War Effort,” Young Israelight (December 1945): 5; all in YIP. 35. Jack Slove to Member (June 24, 1942); “Did You Know That . . . ,” Young Israelight (December 1945): 6. 36. Y.I.S. Reporter (February 1942): 1 – 3. 37. For examples of “Recent News” coverage, see Young Israel Viewpoint (October 1941): 17; (September 1942): 3, 12; (November, 1942): 12. On explicit discussions of the dimensions of the Holocaust, see Young Israel Viewpoint (December 1942): 15; (September 1943): 1; (September 1944): 9. 38. “Annual Report for the Year 1942 – 1943 Presented at the Convention of the National Council of Young Israel, June 25 – 28, 1943 Pine View Hotel Fallsburg, N.Y., Submitted by J. David Delman, National President,” in YIP. 39. The only other reference to rallies was the item in “Recent News” that spoke of a Carnegie Hall gathering in 1942 to promote a Jewish army. See Young Israel Viewpoint (February 1942): 17. 40. “President’s Column,” Young Israel Viewpoint (October 1942): 5. 41. Kehilath Jeshurun Bulletin (March 16, 1945): 1; (April 16, 1945): 1, in Kehilath Jeshurun Archives (hereinafter KJ). 42. Kehilath Jeshurun Bulletin (January 7, 1944): 1; (January 14, 1944): 3; (February 25, 1944): 1; (January 12, 1945): 1; (February 16, 1945): 1; Max J. Etra, “Seven and Seventy,” Congregation Kehilath Jeshurun Dance Journal (1941): n.p., all in KJ. 43. “Rabbinate Proclaims Fast Days for Jews,” Hamigdal (February 1945): 9. I am grateful to Dr. Rafael Medoff for sharing this source. 44. All Goldberg quotations and information from interview with Sylvia and Jack Goldberg (February 13, 2009; audiotape in possession of the author). 45. On Greenberg and Koufax and the different way their absences were treated in

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America, see Jeffrey S. Gurock, Judaism’s Encounter with American Sports (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005), 5. 46. N. Cohen, American Jews and the Zionist Idea, 64 – 66; Halperin, The Political World of American Zionism, 270 – 74, 284 – 91; Medoff, Militant Zionism in America, 171 – 72. 47. Medoff, Militant Zionism in America, 201 – 2. 48. Leonard Slater, The Pledge (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1970), 94 – 96. 49. Ibid., 63. 50. Judd L. Teller, Strangers and Natives: The Evolution of the American Jew from 1921 to the Present (New York Delacorte, 1968), 183 – 84. See also Robert A. Rockaway, But He Was Good to His Mother: The Lives and Crimes of Jewish Gangsters, rev. ed. (Jerusalem: Gefen, 2000), 230 – 31; Arthur Hertzberg, My Life and a People’s Struggle for Identity (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2002), 186. 51. N. Cohen, American Jews and the Zionist Idea, 68 – 71; Rozenblit, “The Seminary during the Holocaust Years,” 291. See also “Rally Held Here,” New York Times (May 17, 1948): 1, 3.

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1. Deborah Dash Moore, To the Golden Cities: Pursuing the American Dream in Miami and L.A. (New York: Free Press, 1994), 22 – 25, 49, 50, 68. See also interview with Dolph Schayes (December 5, 2008). 2. Ted Merwin, Homeland for the Jewish Soul: A History of the Jewish Deli (forthcoming). I am grateful to Dr. Merwin for sharing his information and insights with me. 3. Kenneth T. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 231 – 41; C. Morris Horowitz and Lawrence J. Kaplan, The Jewish Population of the New York Area, 1900 – 1975 (New York: Federation of Jewish Philanthropies, 1959), 17. 4. For estimates of Bergen County’s Jewish population, see American Jewish Year Book 60 (1959): 14 – 15. See also Simon Glustrom, “Some Aspects of a Suburban Jewish Community,” Conservative Judaism (Winter 1957): 27 – 28. 5. Harry Gersh, Minority Report (New York: Crowell-Collier, 1962), 128 – 33. 6. Ibid., 120 – 25; see also Sam Welles, “The Jewish Élan,” Fortune (February 1960): 138. 7. Marshall Sklare, “Jews, Ethnics, and the American City,” Commentary (April 1972): 73; Horowitz and Kaplan, The Jewish Population of the New York Area, 22, 45, 283, 285, 289, 305. 8. “New Apartments Offer Terraces,” New York Times (April 26, 1942): RE1; see also Sklare, “Jews, Ethnics, and the American City,” 72. 9. All these sources are derived from a clipping file, a compilation of newspaper articles entitled “Forest Hills Housing, 1921 – 1971,” at the Queens Public Library, Long Island Division. 10. Sklare, “Jews, Ethnics, and the American City,” 72. 11. Alison Gregor, “Away from the Limelight a Builder Makes His Mark,” New York Times (December 21, 2006), http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/31/realestate/commercial/ 31sqft.html. See also the company history of their endeavors: Muss Development LLC:

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Building New York since 1906 (document provided to the author by Joshua Muss); interview with Joshua Muss (November 24, 2008). 12. On the history of the LeFraks, see “LeFrak, Samuel J.,” American National Biography Online, http://www.anb.org. On the Lefraks’ early efforts in Queens, see “Forest Hills Gets New Apartments of Unusual Design,” New York Times (April 1, 1951). On their approach to housing for less affluent residents, see Charles V. Bagli, “Blue-Collar Builders Expand Empire to Glitzier Shores,” New York Times (October 9, 2007). 13. Hal Shapiro, “Co-op Owners Proud Dwellers,” Long Island Star Journal (February 24, 1962). 14. Morris Freedman, “New Jewish Community in Formation: A Conservative Center Catering to Present-Day Needs,” Commentary (January 1955): 36 – 37, 39, 43, 45, 46. 15. On the founding and early mission of the Forest Hills Jewish Center, see Daniel A. Wishnoff, “The Tolerance Point: Race, Public Housing and the Forest Hills Controversy, 1945 – 1975” (Ph.D. diss., City University of New York, 2005), 159 – 64. 16. Jeffrey S. Gurock, “Devotees and Deviants: A Primer on the Religious Values of Orthodox Day School Families,” in Rav Chesed: Essays in Honor of Rabbi Dr. Haskel Lookstein, ed. Rafael Medoff, 271 – 94 (Hoboken, NJ: KTAV, 2009). 17. On the founding of the Yeshiva of Central Queens, see its brief institution history, composed as part of its Yeshiva of Central Queens Golden Jubilee Dinner Journal (March 3, 1991), provided to the author courtesy of the Yeshiva of Central Queens. See also Jeff Gottlieb, “Jamaica: Stronghold of the Jews,” unpublished paper, formerly appearing at http://www.qjhs.org, 7. For the interview with the principal, see Harold U. Ribalow, “My Child Goes to Jewish Parochial School,” Commentary (January – June 1954): 64 – 67. On the assertion that Charny once allowed that most students came from Conservative backgrounds, see Ben Zion Bokser, “Schechter Day Schools,” United Synagogue Review (March 1957): 11. On the early history of the Yeshiva Dov Revel, see Morris Charner and Frances S. Morris, “Curricular Development at Yeshiva Dov Revel,” Yeshiva Education (Fall 1959): 34. For recollections on the question of religious diversity at Central Queens as opposed to Revel, see interview with Rabbi Fabian Schoenfeld (April 29, 2009). 18. See undated report, circa 1957, on Solomon Schechter Schools in the Ben Zion Bokser Papers, box 20, Ratner Center, Jewish Theological Seminary. See also Ribalow, “My Child Goes to Jewish Parochial School,” 65. 19. Bokser, “Schechter Day Schools,” 11. 20. Ruth Glazer, “West Bronx: Food, Shelter, Clothing,” Commentary (June 1949): 578, 580, 584, 585. 21. Vivian Gornick, “There Is No More Community,” Interchange (April 1977): 4; Vivian Gornick, “Commencement Address,” in City at the Center: A Collection of Writings by CCNY Alumni and Faculty, ed. Betty Rizzo and Barry Wallenstein, 84 – 87 (New York: City College of New York, 1983), 84 – 85. 22. Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg, Ralph Lauren: The Man behind the Mystique (New York: Little, Brown, 1988), 25 – 35. 23. Alfred Jospe, Jewish Students and Student Services at American Universities (Washington, DC: B’nai B’rith Hillel Foundation, 1963), 6, 7, 14.

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24. Welles, “The Jewish Élan,” 134. 25. Calvin Trillin, “U.S. Journal: The Bronx: The Coops,” New Yorker (August 1, 1977): 49 – 54; Deborah Dash Moore, “Reconsidering the Rosenbergs: Symbol and Substance in Second Generation American Jewish Consciousness,” Journal of American Ethnic History 8 (Fall 1988): 26 – 29. 26. Stephen G. Thompson, “Co-op Housing: N.Y.C. vs. U.S.A.,” Architectural Forum (July 1959): 132 – 33, 178. 27. Daniel Bell, “The Three Faces of New York,” Dissent 8 (Summer 1961): 225. 28. Steven Gaines and Sharon Churcher, Obsession: The Lives and Times of Calvin Klein (New York: Birch Lane, 1994), 13, 21, 35, 49, 65, 73 – 74, 178. 29. Bernard Postal, “New York’s Jewish Fare,” Congress Bi-Weekly (October 12, 1964): 9. 30. Myron Kandel, “Tale of a Modern Dybbuk,” New York Times (November 1, 1959): X3; Dan Sullivan, “Theater: ‘The Tenth Man’ Is Revived,” New York Times (November 9, 1967): 54; John S. Radosta, “After 39 Years — a Hit,” New York Times (September 18, 1960): X5; “London Critics Split on ‘The Tenth Man,’ ” New York Times (April 14, 1961): 23. 31. David Zurawik, The Jews of Prime Time (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England  / Brandeis University Press, 2003), 17 – 28; Myrna Hant, “Molly Goldberg: A 1950s Icon,” Women in Judaism 5 (Spring 2008), http://wjudaism.library.utoronto.ca/ index.php/wjudaism/article/view/3532/1587. See also Jonathan Pearl and Judith Pearl, The Chosen Image: Television’s Portrayal of Jewish Themes and Characters (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1999). 32. Bell, “The Three Faces of New York,” 226. 33. Burton Bernstein and Barbara B. Haws, Leonard Bernstein: American Original (New York: HarperCollins, 2008), 1 – 11. 34. Ibid., 88 – 97; Paul Myers, Leonard Bernstein (London: Phaidon, 1998), 39 – 40 109, 114. 35. Myers, Leonard Bernstein, 44. See also Lewis Nichols, “The Play,” New York Times (December 29, 1944): 11. 36. Arthur Laurents, Original Story By: A Memoir of Broadway and Hollywood (New York: Knopf, 2001), 329 – 40; Irene G. Dash, Shakespeare and the American Musical (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), 80 – 82, 85 – 87; see also Bernstein and Haws, Leonard Bernstein, 6 – 7. 37. Joshua M. Zeitz, White Ethnic New York: Jews, Catholics, and the Shaping of Postwar Politics (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 16. 38. Bureau of Community Statistical Services Research Department, Community Council of Greater New York, Bronx Communities: Population Characteristics and Neighborhood Social Resources, typescript (New York: Community Council of Greater New York, 1962), 45 – 46, 69, 70. See also Horowitz and Kaplan, The Jewish Population of the New York Area, 175, 217, 229, 233, 235; Mark Naison, “Crown Heights in the 1950s,” in Jews of Brooklyn, ed. Ilana Abramovitch and Seán Galvin, 143 – 52 (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England /Brandeis University Press, 2002). 39. Edgar M. Hoover, Anatomy of a Metropolis: The Changing Distribution of People and Jobs within the New York Metropolitan Region (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,

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1959), 16; Robert Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (New York: Knopf, 1974), 851 – 52; Joshua B. Freeman, Working-Class New York: Life and Labor since World War II (New York: New Press, 2000), 35, 37; Naison, “Crown Heights in the 1950s,” 144; Ken Emerson, Always Magic in the Air: The Bomp and Brilliance of the Brill Building Era (New York: Viking, 2005), 84 – 85. 40. Welles, “The Jewish Élan,” 139; Zeitz, White Ethnic New York, 23, 32 – 35, 236 – 37. 41. Ira Rosenwaike, Population History of New York City (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1972), 159; William B. Helmreich, Against All Odds: Holocaust Survivors and the Successful Lives They Made in America (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992), 46 – 48. 42. United States Displaced Persons Commission, Memo to America: The DP Story: The Final Report of the United States Displaced Persons Commission (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1952), 27, 38 – 39. I am grateful to Professor William B. Helmreich for directing me to this source. See also Rosenwaike, Population History of New York City, 159. 43. Victor D. Sanua, “A Study of the Adjustment of Sephardi Jews in the New York Metropolitan Area,” Jewish Journal of Sociology 9, no. 1 (June 1967): 26 – 27. See also Joseph A. D. Sutton, Magic Carpet: Aleppo-in-Flatbush: The Story of a Unique Ethnic Jewish Community (New York: Thayer-Jacobi, 1979), 4. 44. On the adjustment patterns of Jews from Germany after World War II, see Joseph Berger, Displaced Persons: Growing Up American after the Holocaust (New York: Washington Square Press, 2002). 45. George Kranzler, Williamsburg: A Jewish Community in Transition (New York: Feldheim, 1961), 40 – 43; Jerome R. Mintz, Hasidic People: A Place in the New World (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), 30. 46. Egon Mayer, From Suburb to Shtetl: The Jews of Boro Park (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1979), 31; Kranzler, Williamsburg, 40 – 43. 47. On the Lubavitcher farbrengen, see Mintz, Hasidic People, 48 – 50, 97.

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1. Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (New York: Knopf, 1974), 854. 2. Ibid., 859 – 77. For an alternative, revisionist view of Moses’s activity, in response largely to Caro’s work, see Hilary Ballon and Kenneth T. Jackson, eds., Robert Moses and the Modern City: The Transformation of New York (New York: Norton, 2007). 3. Caro, Power Broker, 867, 888. C. Morris Horowitz and Lawrence J. Kaplan, The Jewish Population of the New York Area, 1900 – 1975 (New York: Federation of Jewish Philanthropies of New York, 1959), 197. On Fieldston anti-Semitism, see Deborah Dash Moore, At Home in America: Second Generation New York Jews (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981), 38. See also George Dugan, “Jews to Worship in a Parish House,” New York Times (October 11, 1952): 21. 4. Caro, Power Broker, 850 – 93. 5. Gerald Sorin, The Nurturing Neighborhood: The Brownsville Boys Club and Jewish Community in Urban America, 1940 – 1990 (New York: NYU Press, 1990), 165; Carole Bell

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Ford, The Girls: Jewish Women of Brownsville, Brooklyn, 1940 – 1995 (Albany: SUNY Press, 2000), 4, 90 – 91, 94 – 96, 104; see also Ford, “Nice Jewish Girls: Growing Up in Brownsville, 1930s – 1950s,” in Jews of Brooklyn, ed. Ilana Abramovitch and Seán Galvin, 129 – 36 (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England /Brandeis University Press, 2002), 133. 6. Horowitz and Kaplan, The Jewish Population of the New York Area, 239. 7. Joshua M. Zeitz, White Ethnic New York: Jews, Catholics, and the Shaping of Postwar Politics (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 149, 152; Sorin, The Nurturing Neighborhood, 162; Mark Naison, “Crown Heights in the 1950s,” in Abramovitch and Galvin, Jews of Brooklyn, 145. 8. Wendell E. Pritchett, “From One Ghetto to Another: Blacks, Jews and Public Housing in Brownsville, Brooklyn, 1945 – 1970” (Ph.D. diss. University of Pennsylvania, 1997), 164. 9. Ibid., 23, 132 – 33. 10. Joshua B. Freeman, Working-Class New York: Life and Labor since World War II (New York: New Press, 2000), 107, 117 – 18; Zeitz, White Ethnic New York, 150 – 51. 11. Pritchett, “From One Ghetto to Another,” 175 – 77. 12. Freeman, Working-Class New York, 183 – 84. 13. Pritchett, “From One Ghetto to Another,” 194; Jerome R. Mintz, Hasidic People: A Place in the New World (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), 141, 143; Daniel A. Wishnoff, “The Tolerance Point: Race, Public Housing and the Forest Hills Controversy, 1945 – 1975” (Ph.D. diss., City University of New York, 2005), 177; Eli Lederhendler, New York Jews and the Decline of Urban Ethnicity, 1950 – 1970 (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2001), 165. 14. Sam Welles, “The Jewish Élan,” Fortune (February 1960): 160. 15. Lederhendler, New York Jews and the Decline of Urban Ethnicity, 127 – 29. 16. Joseph P. Fried, “City Charges Bias at Three Projects,” New York Times (May 28, 1968): 27; “Changes in Parkchester Bring a Fear Oasis May Go,” New York Times (December 29, 1968): 56. 17. Paul L. Montgomery and Francis X. Clines, “Thousands Riot in Harlem Area; Scores Hurt,” New York Times (July 19, 1964): 1; Junius Griffin, “Harlem Businessmen Put Riot Losses at $50,000,” New York Times (July 21, 1964): 22; “Store Ransacked in Riot Sues City,” New York Times (July 25, 1964): 8. 18. “The Root of the Trouble,” New York Times (July 23, 1964): 26; Layhmond Robinson, “Negroes View of Plight Examined in Survey Here,” New York Times (July 27, 1964): 1; Fred Powerledge, “Negro Riots Reflect Deep-Seated Grievances,” New York Times (August 2, 1964): 133; Lenora E. Berson, The Negroes and the Jews (New York: Random House, 1971), 338 – 40. Interestingly, historical works that document the evolution of tensions between blacks and Jews also have not found explicit anti-Semitism in the 1964 riots. See, as an example, Murray Friedman, What Went Wrong? The Creation and Collapse of the Black-Jewish Alliance (New York: Free Press, 1995), 214, which notes that “the degree of anti-Semitism involved was not at all clear.” Many other works do not mention the 1964 outbreak at all.

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19. Jewish Telegraphic Agency Daily News Bulletin (July 23, 1964): 1; Jewish Press (July 3, 1964): 1; (July 10, 1964): 1; (July 31, 1964): 1. 20. Jerald E. Podair, The Strike That Changed New York: Blacks, Whites and the Ocean Hill – Brownsville Crisis (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), 38, 72, 77 – 78. 21. Cheryl Lynn Greenberg, Troubling the Waters: Black-Jewish Relations in the American Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 230. 22. Jonathan Kaufman, Broken Alliance: The Turbulent Times between Blacks and Jews in America (New York: Scribner, 1988), 142 – 43, 148 – 49. See also Greenberg, Troubling the Waters, 230; Friedman, What Went Wrong?, 260; Podair, The Strike That Changed New York, 2; Zeitz, White Ethnic New York, 161 – 63. 23. On the chronology of the three-stage strike and the text of the unsigned letter, see Podair, The Strike That Changed New York, 115 – 24. On the text of the WBAI poem and the museum essay, see Robert G. Weisbord and Arthur Stein, Bittersweet Encounter: The Afro-American and the American Jew (Westport, CT: Negro Universities Press, 1970), 175 – 78. 24. On the connection between local black problems with Jews and the international scene, see Zeitz, White Ethnic New York, 64 – 66. On the relationship between the 1967 Israeli victory and New York Jewish assertiveness, see Freeman, Working-Class New York, 223 – 34. On public opinion polls of black attitudes, see ibid., 165 – 66. 25. On the history of the Teachers Union and its relationship with the United Federation of Teachers, see Celia Lewis Zitron, The New York City Teachers Union 1916 – 1964: A Story of Educational and Social Commitment (New York: Humanities Press, 1968), 45 – 52; and Podair, The Strike That Changed New York, 142. See also Ralph Blumenthal, “When Suspicion of Teachers Ran Unchecked in New York,” New York Times (June 16, 2009): 15 – 16. 26. On the recruitment of these replacement teachers, many of whom were young Jews, see Freeman, Working-Class New York, 221. For the opinions of a replacement teacher and his comparisons of his colleagues with the older teachers, see a personal account of life in a Brooklyn school: Charles S. Isaacs, “A J.H.S. 271 Teacher Tells It Like He Sees It,” New York Times Magazine (November 24, 1968), http://query.nytimes.com/ mem/archive/pdf?res=F10C13F93C5A14728FDDAD0A94D9415B888AF1D3. On the return of Jewish teachers to their old neighborhood to teach minority youngsters, see Zeitz, White Ethnic New York, 167. For a sense among some older women teachers of not being appreciated for their efforts, see Ruth Jacknow Markowitz, My Daughter, the Teacher: Jewish Teachers in the New York City Schools (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1993), 171. 27. Greenberg, Troubling the Waters, 231; Friedman, What Went Wrong?, 261; Weisbord and Stein, Bittersweet Encounter, 165, 177 – 78. 28. On the founding of the Jewish Defense League, its connection to the teachers’ strike, and its early activities during the time of these difficulties, see Kaufman, Broken Alliance, 157 – 58; Weisbord and Stein, Bittersweet Encounter, 201 – 4; Lederhendler, New York Jews and the Decline of Urban Ethnicity, 192 – 94.

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29. Tom Wolfe, “Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny’s,” New York Magazine (June 8, 1970): 53. 30. Greenberg, Troubling the Waters, 231; Jonathan Rieder, Canarsie: The Jews and Italians of Brooklyn against Liberalism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985), 73, discussed in Podair, The Strike That Changed New York, 144. 31. Louis Harris and Bert E. Swanson, Black-Jewish Relations in New York City (New York: Praeger, 1970), 18 – 22, 30, 77, 105 – 6, 129. 32. Ibid., 19 – 20, 36 – 37, 60 – 61, 105 – 6. 33. Ibid., 18, 61, 93, 105, 129. 34. Ibid., 93. 35. Zeitz, White Ethnic New York, 174 – 76; Chris McNickle, To Be Mayor of New York: Ethnic Politics in the City (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 205 – 8; Charles Brecher and Raymond D. Horton, with Robert A. Cropf and Dean Michael Mead, Power Failure: New York City Politics and Policy since 1960 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 83 – 86. 36. Peter Kihss, “How Voter Swings Elected Lindsay,” New York Times (November 4, 1965): 1, 50. 37. Zeitz, White Ethnic New York, 176 – 87; Brecher et al., Power Failure, 86 – 91; Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Beyond the Melting Pot: The Negroes, Puerto Ricans, Jews, Italians, and Irish of New York City, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1970), xxvii. 38. Peter Kihss, “Poor and Rich, Not Middle-Class the Key to Lindsay Re-election,” New York Times (November 6, 1969): 37. 39. Zeitz, White Ethnic New York, 190 – 92; Wishnoff, “The Tolerance Point,” 137 – 43, 181, 184, 188, 225. 40. Text of Bokser’s remarks, from his papers at the Jewish Theological Seminary, are quoted in Wishnoff, “The Tolerance Point,” 190. 41. New York Times, November 25, 1971, and Walter Goodman, “Rabbi Kahane Says: ‘I’d Love to See the JDL Fold Up, but . . . ,’ ” New York Times, November 21, 1971, both quoted in Wishnoff, “The Tolerance Point,” 231 – 32. 42. Quoted in Zeitz, White Ethnic New York, 193. 43. Ibid., 191 – 92.

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1. For an extensive examination of Cosell’s statement in the context of the city in decline, using many sports metaphors, see Jonathan Mahler, Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx Is Burning: 1977, Baseball, Politics, and the Battle for the Soul of a City (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005). This saga has also been the foreground to a movie of the same name on 1977 New York City’s struggles. See also Constance Rosenblum, Boulevard of Dreams: Heady Times, Heartbreak, and Hope along the Grand Concourse in the Bronx (New York: NYU Press, 2009), which recounts Cosell’s remark and the television visual as a “terrifying image of devastation” (183). 2. Lee Dembart, “Carter Takes a ‘Sobering’ Trip to South Bronx,” New York Times

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(October 6, 1977): A1, B16; James M. Naughton, “Ford Holds Rockefeller Blameless for Troubles,” New York Times (October 31, 1975): 12. 3. Charles Brecher and Raymond D. Horton, with Robert A. Cropf and Dean Michael Mead, Power Failure: New York City Politics and Policy since 1960 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 91 – 94. 4. Robert E. Meyer, “How Government Helped Ruin the South Bronx,” Fortune (November 1975): 143 – 45; Matthew P. Drennan, “The Decline and Rise of the New York Economy,” in Dual City: Restructuring New York, ed. John Hull Mollenkopf and Manuel Castells, 29 – 43 (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1991), 29 – 33. See also Thomas Bailey and Roger Waldinger, “The Changing Ethnic/Racial Division of Labor,” in ibid., 43; Joshua B. Freeman, Working-Class New York: Life and Labor since World War II (New York: New Press, 2000), 273. 5. Freeman, Working-Class New York, 257 – 70. See also Peter Blake, “How to Solve the Housing Crisis (and Everything Else),” New York (January 1, 1970): 56. 6. Freeman, Working-Class New York, 271, 273; Bailey and Waldinger, “The Changing Ethnic/Racial Division of Labor,” 47, 55; Samuel Kaplan, “The Bronx Arrangement,” New York (December 14, 1970): 10. 7. Meyer, “How Government Helped Ruin the South Bronx,” 143; Philip Siekman, “The Rent Control Trap,” Fortune (February 1960): 123. 8. On the 1971 law and its implications, see Rosenblum, Boulevard of Dreams, 181; on “redlining,” see Freeman, Working-Class New York, 275. 9. Freeman, Working-Class New York, 274 – 75. 10. Kaplan, “The Bronx Arrangement,” 10; Meyer, “How Government Helped Ruin the South Bronx,” 145; Rosenblum, Boulevard of Dreams, 181 – 83, 189, 203 – 5, Freeman, Working-Class New York, 281. 11. Fred Massarik, “Basic Characteristics of the Greater New York Jewish Population,” American Jewish Year Book (1976): 239, 242; Steven M. Cohen and Paul Ritterband, “The Social Characteristics of the New York Jewish Community, 1981,” American Jewish Year Book 84 (1984): 129, 140; Frederick M. Binder and David M. Reimers, All the Nations under Heaven: An Ethnic and Racial History of New York City (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 240 – 42. See also Eleanor Blau, “Population Shift Beset Jewish Community Here,” New York Times (August 21, 1975): 73; and James Feron, “Tremont Temple Quits the Bronx,” New York Times (December 18, 1976): 27. 12. Center for New York City Affairs, New School for Social Research, New York’s Jewish Poor and Jewish Working Class: Economic Status and Social Needs, typescript (New York: Federation of Jewish Philanthropies, 1972), 10; interview with Berl Steinberg (November 11, 2008; notes in possession of the author); Edward C. Burks, “Middle Class Still Leaving City,” New York Times (May 29, 1973): 22. District 10 is a mélange of Bronx communities that included Tremont, the Grand Concourse, and the virtually all-white Riverdale. 13. Fran Markowitz, A Community in Spite of Itself: Soviet Jewish Émigrés in New York (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1993), 1; Aviva Ben-Ur, Sephardic Jews

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in America: A Diasporic History (New York: NYU Press, 2009), 196, 220n. 80; Moshe Shokeid, Children of Circumstances: Israeli Emigrants in New York (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), 20 – 21, 20. In the case of the Israelis in New York, apparently 60 percent of them settled in Brooklyn, and almost all of the rest chose Queens. See also Binder and Reimers, All the Nations under Heaven, 240 – 42. 14. Jonathan Rieder, Canarsie: The Jews and Italians of Brooklyn against Liberalism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985), 16, 19 – 20, 26, 45, 65, 69 – 71, 80, 110 – 11, 128, 129, 184. 15. Ibid., 110 – 111, 114, 172 – 73. 16. Ibid., 193 – 98. 17. Ibid., 207 – 14. 18. Allan M. Siegal, “Rent Is Primary Issue for Co-op City,” New York Times (September 6, 1974): 73; James F. Clarity, “Co-op City, Home to 40,000 Is Given Tempered Praise,” New York Times (May 27, 1971): 41; Rita Reif, “Some Subsidized Co-ops Far from Pioneers’ Ideal,” New York Times (January 25, 1976): 2, 6; interview with Allegra and Gary Gordon (August 27, 2009; tape recording in possession of the author); Murray Schumach, “Co-op City: A Symptom of Mitchell-Lama Ills,” New York Times (June 18, 1975): 86; Samuel G. Freedman, “Co-op City: A Refuge in Transition,” New York Times (June 25, 1986): B1; Don Terry, “Co-op City: A Haven Marred as Drugs Slip In,” New York Times (August 10, 1989): B1. 19. Sydney Schwartz, “Maintaining the Minyan: The Struggle of a Storefront Synagogue” (M.A. essay, Columbia University School of Journalism, 2005), 8, 9, 23. 20. Robert E. Thompson, “As Change Intrudes, the Concourse Sells,” New York Times (August 13, 1972): R1; Kaplan, “The Bronx Arrangement,” 10; Jack Luria, “A Pox on You, Riverdale,” New York Times (June 21, 1972): 43. See also, for Riverdale population statistics for 1981, United Jewish Appeal – Federation of Jewish Philanthropies, Greater New York Jewish Population Study (New York: UJA-Federation, 1981), typescript report maintained online at the Mandell L. Berman Institute North American Jewish Data Bank, University of Connecticut. 21. For Riverdale population statistics as of 1991, see United Jewish Appeal – Federation of Jewish Philanthropies, The New York Jewish Population Study: Profiles of Counties, Boroughs and Neighborhoods (New York: UJA-Federation, 1995), typescript report maintained online at the Mandell L. Berman Institute North American Jewish Data Bank, University of Connecticut, 3,12, 15; Schumach, “Co-op City: A Symptom of Mitchell-Lama Ills,” 86; Reif, “Some Subsidized Co-ops Far from Pioneers’ Ideal,” 2; Joseph P. Fried, “Compromise Ends Co-op Strike,” New York Times (June 30, 1976): B1; Francis X. Clines, “Grass Roots in Concrete,” New York Times (October 2, 1976): S23; Leslie Maitland, “Co-op City: Paradise or Paradise Lost?,” New York Times (January 8, 1979): B4. See also Freeman, Working-Class New York, 122. 22. Freedman, “Co-op City: A Refuge in Transition,” B1; David Bird, “Tentative Agreement Is Negotiated by State on Co-op Repairs,” New York Times (May 13, 1979): 17; Susan Chira, “Co-op City: Life Begins to Improve,” New York Times (May 8, 1982): 27; Ari I. Goldman, “At Co-op City, Worship in Transition,” New York Times (May 31, 1989):

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B2; Terry, “Co-op City: A Haven Marred as Drugs Slip In,” B1. See also Allegra and Gary Gordon interview. 23. Peter L. Berger, “In Praise of New York: A Semi-Secular Homily,” Commentary (February 1977): 61 – 62; Andrew Hacker, “The City’s Comings, Goings,” New York Times (December 2, 1973): 26; editorial, “Victims of Urban Revival,” New York Times (November 18, 1978): 20; Blake Fleetwood, “The New Elite and an Urban Renaissance,” New York Times (January 14, 1979): SM26, 34. 24. On the assumed early periodization for Jews leaving the labor force by the 1920s, see Will Herberg, “The Jewish Labor Movement in the United States,” American Jewish Yearbook (1952): 28. 25. Center for New York City Affairs, New York’s Jewish Poor, 26 – 27, 45, 50, 53, 54, 59, 60. See also Peter Kihss, “Job Shift Urged on Young Jews,” New York Times (January 25, 1972): 27. 26. Cohen and Ritterband, “The Social Characteristics of the New York Area Jewish Community,” 132, 156. 27. These figures on Jewish enrollment patterns are but rough estimates derived from self-reporting from Hillel — Jewish student life associations — on campuses. See such periodic reports in B’nai B’rith Hillel Foundations, Jewish Life on Campus (Washington, DC: B’nai B’rith Hillel Foundations, 1968 – 69, 1978 – 79, 1982 – 83). 28. On the background of campus radicals in the 1960s, see Kenneth Keniston, Young Radicals: Notes on Committed Youth (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1968), 14, 311; Nathan Glazer, “The Jewish Role in Student Activism,” Fortune (January 1969): 112; Vincent Cannato, The Ungovernable City: John Lindsay and His Struggle to Save New York (New York: Basic Books, 2001), 246. See also Bernard Weinraub, “Student Radicals Losing Ground at City College,” New York Times (December 5, 1968): 76. 29. See B’nai B’rith Hillel Foundations, Jewish Life on Campus (1968 – 89, 1978 – 79, 1982 – 83), for statistics on these various schools. On the ethnic and racial changes at the City University, see Freeman, Working-Class New York, 331 – 33. For internal criticism at CCNY about the plan, see Theodore L. Gross, “How to Kill a College: The Private Papers of a College Dean,” Saturday Review (February 4, 1978): 13 – 18, cited in Sherry Gorelick, City College and the Jewish Poor: Education in New York, 1880 – 1924 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1981), 194, 231. 30. Paul Ritterband and Steven M. Cohen, “The Social Characteristics of the New York Area Jewish Community,” typescript report dated October 1982, on file in the Brandeis University library, II-6, V-1, V-2. 31. Mark Effron, “It Wasn’t Supposed to Happen This Way” (unpublished manuscript, Columbia University School of Journalism, 1973), cited in Thomas J. Cottle, Hidden Survivors: Portraits of Poor Jews in America (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1980), 5; Naomi B. Levine and Martin Hochbaum, introduction to Poor Jews: An American Awakening, ed. Naomi B. Levine and Martin Hochbaum (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 1974), 2 – 3; Anne G. Wolfe, “The Invisible Jewish Poor,” Journal of Jewish Communal Service 48 (Spring 1972): 259 – 65. See also Michael Harrington, The Other America (New York: Macmillan, 1962), 3.

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32. Ann G. Wolf, “The Invisible Jewish Poor,” in Levine and Hochbaum, Poor Jews, 34; Center for New York City Affairs, New York’s Jewish Poor, 16, 29. See also Robert McG. Thomas Jr., “Elderly Cling to Old Neighborhoods Despite Growing Fear of Criminals,” New York Times (June 17, 1974): 20; Rosenblum, Boulevard of Dreams, 185. 33. Jack Kugelmass, The Miracle of Intervale Avenue: The Story of a Jewish Congregation in the South Bronx (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 7, 11, 17 – 18, 212 – 13. 34. Jerome R. Mintz, Hasidic People: A Place in the New World (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), 36 – 38, 52, 189 – 90, 391; Dorothy Rabinowitz, “Blacks, Jews, and New York Politics,” Commentary (November 1978): 45; Egon Mayer, From Suburb to Shtetl: The Jews of Boro Park (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1979), 34 – 36. See also Mintz, “Ethnic Activism: The Hasidic Example,” in Dimensions of Orthodox Judaism, ed. Reuven P. Bulka, 225 – 41 (New York: KTAV, 1983), 232. 35. Center for New York City Affairs, New York’s Jewish Poor, 18; Wolfe, “The Invisible Jewish Poor,” 34; Mintz, Hasidic People, 365. 36. Phyllis Franck, “The Hasidic Poor in New York City,” in Levine and Hochbaum, Poor Jews, 60 – 61; Mintz, Hasidic People, 33. 37. Joseph A. D. Sutton, Magic Carpet: Aleppo-in-Flatbush: The Story of a Unique Ethnic Jewish Community (New York: Thayer-Jacobi, 1979), 62, 66 – 67, 96 – 102; Walter P. Zenner, A Global Community: The Jews from Aleppo, Syria (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2000), 138 – 41, 156, 162 – 66. See also Barry Meir, “Crazy Eddie’s Insane Odyssey,” New York Times (July 19, 1992): F1. 38. Chris McNickle, To Be Mayor of the City of New York: Ethnic Politics in the City (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 272 – 75. 39. Maureen Dowd, “Poll Finds New Yorkers’ Pessimism Subsides,” New York Times (January 19, 1985): 1. 40. Drennan, “The Decline and Rise of the New York Economy,” 34 – 37; see also John Hull Mollenkopf, A Phoenix in the Ashes: The Rise and Fall of the Koch Coalition in New York City Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 46 – 47. 41. Interview with David Fox (September 30, 2009). On the history of Skadden as a work-ethic firm and its success under Flom in the hostile-takeover realm, see Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers: The Study of Success (New York: Little, Brown, 2008), 118 – 28. 42. Leslie Bennetts, “If You’re Thinking of Living in Chelsea,” New York Times (May 2, 1982): R9; Jan Morris, “The Future Looks Familiar,” New York Times (April 26, 1987): SMA16; Freedman, “Real-Estate Boom Cited as Peril to the City,” New York Times (April 15, 1986): C13. 43. William J. Palmer, The Films of the Eighties: A Social History (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1993), 284 – 85; Leslie Bennetts, “Woody Allen’s Selective Vision of New York,” New York Times (May 7, 1986): C1; Vincent Canby, “Hannah and Her Sisters,” New York Times (February 7, 1986); Graham McCann, Woody Allen: New Yorker (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 1990), 14, 27, 35 – 36. 44. On Boesky’s Jewish philanthropic endeavors before and after his fall, see Joseph Berger, “For Charities, a Benefactor,” New York Times (November 22, 1986): 41; Ari L.

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Goldman, “Boesky Studying Hebrew and Talmud at Seminary,” New York Times (July 23, 1987): B3. 45. UJA-Federation, Greater New York Population Study, 1981, 9, 10, 40. This study does not enumerate and analyze data on a neighborhood basis. Rather, it offers boroughwide statistics. However, assuming that proportions in each category were reduced by the presence of older, married, and less affluent individuals who lived in places such as the Lower East Side, it makes the youth and upscale nature of the rest of the borough even greater. The same assumptions underlie the data on synagogue attendance that will be discussed presently. 46. Ibid., 29. 47. Jeffrey S. Gurock, “The Late Friday Night Orthodox Services: An Exercise in Religious Accommodation,” Jewish Social Studies 12 (Spring – Summer 2006): 149. 48. UJA-Federation, The New York Jewish Population Study, 69, 77, 87. See also United Jewish Appeal – Federation of Jewish Philanthropies, The 1991 New York Jewish Population Study (New York: UJA-Federation, 1993), xviii. 49. Moshe Shokeid, A Gay Synagogue in New York (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 16, 48, 63 – 64, 79, 81. 50. On the numbers and status of the Jewish poor elderly from 1981 to 1991, see UJAFederation, Greater New York Population Study, 1981, 10, 36, 37, 40; and UJA-Federation, The New York Jewish Population Study, 1, 9, 10. On the numbers of elderly assisted and the greater concern with the problems of those who were poor, see UJA-Federation, The 1991 New York Jewish Population Study, xvi, 116 – 17. 51. Kugelmass, The Miracle of Intervale Avenue, 221 – 24, 234 – 35, 262. 52. UJA-Federation, The 1991 New York Jewish Population Study, xvi; UJA-Federation, The New York Jewish Population Study, 37. 53. Brecher et al., Power Failure, 99 – 101. 54. McNickle, To Be Mayor of the City of New York, 281 – 87, Brecher et al., Power Failure, 101 – 3. 55. McNickle, To Be Mayor of the City of New York, 287 – 92. See also, for an analysis of the 1989 mayoral campaigns, Mollenkopf, A Phoenix in the Ashes, 165 – 85. 56. Brecher et al., Power Failure, 105. 57. McNickle, To Be Mayor of the City of New York, 292 – 95. 58. Celestine Bohlen, “Dinkins and Koch Vie for Jews’ Votes,” New York Times (September 10, 1989): 44. 59. Frank Lynn, “2 Nominees Clash in Race for Mayor with Harsh Words,” New York Times (September 14, 1989): A1. 60. John Kifner, “The Mayor-Elect Inspires Pride, but It’s Hardly Universal,” New York Times (November 9, 1989): B1; Sam Roberts, “Almost Lost at the Wire,” New York Times (November 9, 1989): A1. 61. Richard Levine, “Koch Confers with Dinkins on Transition,” New York Times (November 9, 1989): A1. See also Mollenkopf, A Phoenix in the Ashes, 184; and McNickle, To Be Mayor of the City of New York, 313.

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62. Saskia Sassen, The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 289n. 8. 63. The description and discussion of events in Crown Heights and the quotations cited in the remainder of the chapter are based on both historian Edward S. Shapiro’s and anthropologist Henry Goldschmidt’s studies of the event and its ramifications. Edward S. Shapiro, Crown Heights: Blacks, Jews, and the 1991 Brooklyn Riot (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England / Brandeis University Press, 2006), especially xi – xvi, 5 – 6, 27, 43, 47 – 48, 57 – 62, 75 – 77, 83 – 87, 108, 112, 137n. 98; Henry Goldschmidt, Race and Religion among the Chosen People of Crown Heights (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2006), especially 38 – 39, 40, 47, 48 – 50, 59, 61 – 71.

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1. Carey Winfrey, “In Search of Bella Abzug,” New York Times (August 21, 1977): 55, 60 – 61. 2. Amy Swerdlow, Women Strike for Peace: Traditional Motherhood and Radical Politics in the 1960s (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 4, 54, 146; Joyce Antler, The Journey Home: Jewish Women and the American Century (New York: Free Press, 1997), 271 – 74. 3. Winfrey, “In Search of Bella Abzug,” 60 – 61. 4. Annelise Orleck, Common Sense and a Little Fire: Women and Working Class Politics, 1900 – 1965 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 87 – 91. 5. On the differing visions of Friedan’s road to feminism and her life after the publication of her book, see Daniel Horowitz, Betty Friedan and the Making of the Feminine Mystique: The American Left, the Cold War, and Modern Feminism (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998), 2 – 5, 224 – 27. See also Friedan’s memoir, Life So Far (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000), 131 – 41, 143 – 47. 6. There is a difference of opinion among biographers of Steinem over the extent of Jewishness of the feminist beyond her identification with the ancestral group because of anti-Semitism. Letty Cottin Pogrebin has accorded Steinem the designation of Jew less because of her father’s background and more because of her sense of self “as an outsider [who] sees Jews as the quintessential out-group and because she feels drawn to spiritual and social justice agenda of Jewish feminism.” However, Caroline Heilbrun has quoted Steinem as saying, “I don’t believe in either religion,” Judaism or Christianity. “When I’m around Jews who feel there’s something good about being exclusively Jewish, I emphasize the non-Jewish side of the family. When I’m around Protestants who think there is something good about being Protestant, then I emphasize the Jewish side.” See Letty Cottin Pogrebin, “Gloria Steinem,” in Jewish Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia, vol. 2, ed. Paula E. Hyman and Deborah Dash Moore (New York: Routledge, 1997), 1319 – 23, which contains Pogrebin’s characterization and a discussion of Steinem’s larger career; and Carolyn G. Heilbrun, The Education of a Woman: The Life of Gloria Steinem (New York: Dial, 1995), 49. See also Horowitz, Betty Friedan, 229; and Marcia Cohen, The Sisterhood (New York: Fawcett Columbine, 1988), 41 – 42. On disagreements among these leaders, see Antler, The Journey Home, 276.

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7. Letty Cottin Pogrebin, Deborah, Golda, and Me (New York: Crown, 1991), 154 – 64. See also Friedan, Life So Far, 291 – 94. 8. Paula E. Hyman, “Jewish Feminism Faces the American Women’s Movement: Convergence and Divergence,” in American Jewish Women’s History: A Reader, ed. Pamela S. Nadell, 297 – 312 (New York: NYU Press, 2003), 300; Alan Silverstein, “The Evolution of Ezrat Nashim,” Conservative Judaism 3, no. 1 (Fall 1975): 43. 9. Silverstein, “The Evolution of Ezrat Nashim,” 43 – 44. See also Stephen C. Lerner, “The Havurot,” Conservative Judaism 24, no. 3 (Spring 1970): 2 – 15. 10. Reena Sigman Friedman, “The Jewish Feminist Movement,” in Jewish American Voluntary Organizations, ed. Michael N. Dobkowski (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1986), 575 – 81. 11. Susan Dworkin, “Henrietta Szold,” Response 18 (Summer 1973): 39 – 41. 12. Ibid., 43 – 45. 13. Pamela S. Nadell, “A Bright New Constellation: Feminism and American Judaism,” in The Columbia History of Jews and Judaism in America, ed. Marc Lee Raphael, 385 – 405 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 387 – 88. 14. For a comprehensive history of the long road toward women’s ordination among Reform Jews, see Pamela S. Nadell, Women Who Would Be Rabbis: A History of Women’s Ordination, 1889 – 1985 (Boston: Beacon, 1998), especially 61 – 117. 15. Nadell, “A Bright New Constellation,” 393 – 94. On Ezrat Nashim’s advocacy at JTS and reaction to the affirmative vote, see Beth S. Wenger, “The Politics of Women’s Ordination: Jewish Law, Institutional Power, and the Debate over Women in the Rabbinate,” in Tradition Renewed: A History of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, vol. 2, ed. Jack Wertheimer, 483 – 524 (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1997), 514 – 15. 16. Nadell, “A Bright New Constellation,” 391; Antler, The Journey Home, 268 – 69. 17. Sylvia Barack Fishman, A Breath of Life: Feminism in the American Jewish Community (New York: Free Press, 1993), 2; Antler, The Journey Home, 266 – 67; Hyman, “Jewish Feminism,” 308. See also Pogrebin, Deborah, Golda, and Me, especially 42, 48 – 52, 235. 18. Blu Greenberg, On Women in Judaism: A View from Tradition (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1994), 21 – 25, 27, 30 – 33, 47, 92 – 97, 135. 19. On Elena Kagan’s bat mitzvah, see Stewart Ain, “A Pioneer at Age 12,” Jewish Week (May 14, 2010): 11; Meira Beinstock, “Kagan Showed Great Wisdom in Her Youth,” Jerusalem Post (June 29, 2010): 6. 20. For a full consideration of women’s activities of these sorts within Orthodoxy, see Jeffrey S. Gurock, Orthodox Jews in America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009), 274 – 80. A number of dates have been offered for the beginnings of the Simchat Torah women’s activity at Lincoln Square. My use of the date in 1972 relies on a study that interviewed women who assert that they were there at that moment. An alternate date is 1974, also basically concomitant with Greenberg’s emergence. See Ailene CohenNusbacher, “Efforts at Change in a Traditional Denomination: The Case of Orthodox Women’s Prayer Groups,” Nashim 2 (Spring 1999): 112n. 7. See also Edah, “Women’s Tefilla Groups,” http: //www.edah.org/tefilla, for a listing of contemporary women’s tefillahs, c. 2005.

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21. Henry L. Feingold, “Silent No More”: Saving the Jews of Russia, the American Jewish Effort, 1967 – 1989 (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2007), 51 – 54, 57, 291. For a discussion of the estimates of Russian Jewish population figures in New York as of the turn of the twentieth century, see Sam Kliger, “Russian Jews in America: Status, Identity and Integration,” paper presented at the Russian-Speaking Jewry in Global Perspective conference, June 14 – 16, 2004, Bar Ilan University Israel, http://www.kintera.org/atf/ cf/%7B93CDF11D-9AEB-4518-8A00-25C7C531756B%7D/russian_jews_in_america.pdf. On the problem for Israel of those who chose New York, particularly during the 1970s, see Feingold, “Silent No More,” chap. 5. 22. Paul S. Appelbaum, “The Soviet Jewry Movement in the United States,” in Jewish American Voluntary Organizations, ed. Michael Dobkowski, 613 – 38 (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1986), 614 – 17. The term “cultural decapitation” is Feingold’s (“Silent No More,” 40). 23. William M. Orbach, The American Movement to Aid Soviet Jews (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1979), 26 – 27; Appelbaum, “The Soviet Jewry Movement,” 617; Feingold, “Silent No More,” 57. 24. Appelbaum, “The Soviet Jewry Movement,” 617, 619; Orbach, The American Movement to Aid Soviet Jews, 27 – 28. 25. Eli Lederhendler, New York Jews and the Decline of Urban Ethnicity, 1950 – 1970 (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2001), 116 – 20, 188. 26. Appelbaum, “The Soviet Jewry Movement,” 618; Orbach, The American Movement to Aid Soviet Jews, 30 – 31. See also, on the Student Struggle’s feeling that their counterparts lacked “moral spiritual fiber,” Feingold, “Silent No More,” 62. 27. Orbach, The American Movement to Aid Soviet Jews, 8 – 9. See, on the Jewish Defense League’s critique of the Student Struggle, Walter Ruby, “The Role of Nonestablishment Groups,” in A Second Exodus: The American Movement to Free Soviet Jews, ed. Murray Friedman and Albert D. Chernin, 200 – 223 (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England / Brandeis University Press, 1999), 207. 28. Feingold, “Silent No More,” 80 – 86; Appelbaum, “The Soviet Jewry Movement,” 624. 29. Appelbaum, “The Soviet Jewry Movement,” 625; Feingold, “Silent No More,” 93; Orbach, The American Movement to Aid Soviet Jews, 65 – 67; on the contention that Birnbaum was marginalized, see Avi Weiss, “Memoirs of a Soviet Jewry Activist” (unpublished typescript, 2009), 18, 40; and Richter’s memoirs in the Wiener Oral History Library of the American Jewish Committee, cited in Fred A. Lazin, The Struggle for Soviet Jewry in American Politics: Israel versus the American Jewish Establishment (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2005), 37, 41, 67n. 106. 30. Ruby, “The Role of Nonestablishment Groups,” 209. 31. Appelbaum, “The Soviet Jewry Movement,” 620. 32. Feingold, “Silent No More,” 117, 188, 143. 33. Ibid., 117, 122, 133, 148. 34. “Prisoners of Zion, 1977,” Soviet Jews Exodus website, http://www.angelfire.com/ sc3/soviet_jews_exodus/English/POZ_s/POZ-77.shtml.

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35. Lazin, The Struggle for Soviet Jewry, 234n. 23; Orbach, The American Movement to Aid Soviet Jews, 74, 77 – 78; David Shipler, “The U.S and Soviet Repression: Both Sides in a Quandary,” New York Times (December 7, 1977): 3. See also Alan M. Dershowitz, Chutzpah (Boston: Little, Brown, 1991), 251. 36. Feingold, “Silent No More,” 101, 310. See also ibid., 355n. 5, which references Shultz’s remark, from George P. Shultz, Turmoil and Triumph: My Years as Secretary of State (New York: Scribner, 1993), 121. 37. On Weiss’s travels with Avital Sharansky, see Weiss’s unpublished memoir, “Memoirs of a Soviet Jewry Activist,” 51 – 60. See also Ruby, “The Role of Nonestablishment Groups,” 217; and Lazin, The Struggle for Soviet Jewry, 234. 38. Weiss, “Memoirs of a Soviet Jewry Activist,” 1 – 5; see also “Rabbi Joins Sharansky in Hunger Strike in New York,” Jewish Week (November 5, 1982): 4; “Freedom Marchers,” Jewish Week (November 12, 1982): 1; David Bird, “Moscow Rabbi Reports Rise in Attendance at Synagogue,” New York Times (May 8, 1984): B2. 39. On Haskel Lookstein’s involvement with the Sharansky case, see Rafael Medoff, Rav Chesed: The Life and Times of Rabbi Haskel Lookstein (Jersey City, NJ: KTAV, 2008), 70 – 86; Ruby, “The Role of Nonestablishment Groups,” 217. 40. Feingold, “Silent No More,” 242 – 43, 261 – 62, 302. On the numbers allowed to leave, see Ruby, “The Role of Nonestablishment Groups,” 222. 41. Weiss, “Memoirs of a Soviet Jewry Activist,” 133, 145 – 46; Feingold, “Silent No More,” 290. Actually, as Feingold notes, this public disagreement was during the second year of cancelation of the rally that started in 1972 and continued to 1988. See ibid., 364n. 57.

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1. Fred Siegel, The Prince of the City: Giuliani, New York, and the Genius of American Life (San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2005), 268 – 69; United Jewish Appeal – Federation of Jewish Philanthropies of New York, The Jewish Community Study of New York: 2002: Geographic Profile (New York: UJA-Federation, 2004), 110 – 11, typescript report maintained online at the Mandell L. Berman Institute North American Jewish Data Bank, University of Connecticut. On the transformation of Harlem, see “Migration of Affluent Whites to Harlem Forecast,” New York Times (May 28, 1984): 23; Sam Roberts, “In Harlem, Blacks Are No Longer a Majority,” New York Times (January 6, 2010): A16. 2. Ingrid Abramovitch, “Hipification Reaches the Street Where Peddlers Once Pushed Carts,” New York Times (November 16, 1997): ST1, 6. See also the Cuisine Innovations website, http://www.kingkold.com, for advertisements about shipping Ratner’s foods out of New York City. 3. On the history of these institutions, see the websites of the Museum at Eldridge Street, http://www.eldridgestreet.org; the Tenement Museum, http://www.tenement.org; and the Lower East Side Jewish Conservancy, http://www.nycjewishtours.org. 4. Deborah Sontag, “For Poor, Life ‘Trapped’ in a Cage,” New York Times (October 6, 1996): 1. 5. UJA-Federation, The Jewish Community Study of New York: 2002: Geographic Profile, 27, 43, 69, 77, 101, 177. See also, on Rabbi Berl, Deborah Pardo, “Synagogues Fade in

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the Northeast Bronx,” Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism (September 1, 2003), http://web.jrn.columbia.edu/studentwork/religion/2004/archives/000465.asp; and Jonathan Mark, “A Season’s Simple Gifts,” Jewish Week (September 18, 2009): 23. 6. UJA-Federation, The Jewish Community Study of New York: 2002: Geographic Profile, 35, 36, 143, 169, 187. 7. Anthony Weiss, “New Egalitarian Yeshiva Prepares to Go Full Time,” Forward (August 22, 2008), http://www.forward.com/articles/13972/. On the history of Drisha, see Drisha Institute for Jewish Education, “About Drisha,” http://www.drisha.org/ aboutdrisha.php. On Talmud programs at Yeshiva University for women and the founding of Weiss’s “Open Orthodox” yeshiva, see Jeffrey S. Gurock, Orthodox Jews in America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009), 278, 309 – 11. 8. For the nature of the Columbia program, see Columbia University’s Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies, http://iijs.columbia.edu/. On the scope of the NYU Jewish studies program, see NYU’s Skirball Department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies, http:// hebrewjudaic.as.nyu.edu. 9. “Unprecedented $30 Million Capital Campaign Secures Future for Center for Jewish History: Single Largest Fund-Raising Effort Since Building Was Completed in 2000,” PR Newswire (January 24, 2011), http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/ unprecedented-30-million-capital-campaign-secures-future-for-center-for-jewish -history-114477714.html. 10. United Jewish Appeal – Federation of Jewish Philanthropies of New York, Jewish Community Study of New York: 2002 (New York: United Jewish Appeal – Federation of Jewish Philanthropies of New York, 2004), 25, 30, typescript report maintained online at the Mandell L. Berman Institute North American Jewish Data Bank, University of Connecticut. 11. For a discussion of the Jewish vote during the Dinkins-Giuliani campaign in 1989, see chapter 6, pages 177 – 79. 12. Catherine Manegold, “Do Not Let Farrakhan Use Stadium, Giuliani Says,” New York Times (October 11, 1993): B3; “Mr. Farrakhan’s Stadium Rally,” New York Times (October 12, 1993): A22; Todd S. Purdum, “Crown Heights Drives Contest for Mayor,” New York Times (December 7, 1992): B1; Purdum, “White Hispanic Ticket Grabs at a Black Mayor’s Coalition,” New York Times (June 15, 1993): 128. See also George J. Lankevich, American Metropolis: A History of New York City (New York: NYU Press, 1998), 242 – 43; and Siegel, The Prince of the City, 38 – 39, 43 – 44, 47, 65, 68. 13. Ian Fisher, “Upper West Side Voters Balance Doubts against Their Traditions,” New York Times (October 23, 1993): 1; Celia W. Dugger, “Mayoral Race Still Perplexes Many Voters,” New York Times (October 31, 1993): L1. The Republican also benefited from the “20,000 more votes he got . . . on Staten Island,” which “accounted for nearly half of his margin of his citywide victory.” His enthusiasm for a very different issue, “the secession referendum,” brought more supporters to the polls. See “Many Tiny Ripples Create a Sea Change,” New York Times (November 4, 1993): A1. 14. “Mayoral Meddling?,” Jewish Week (March 15, 1996): 4; David Firestone, “In Mayor’s Snub, a Hint of Strategy,” New York Times (October 26, 1995): B1.

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15. Gary Rosenblatt, “Between the Lines: How to React to Arafat,” Jewish Week (October 27, 1995): 5. 16. Lankevich, American Metropolis, 252 – 53; Siegel, The Prince of the City, 149. 17. Adam Dickter, “Getting in Their Two Cents? Mayoral Candidates Scramble for Equal Time at Brooklyn COJO Breakfast Honoring Giuliani,” Jewish Week (April 11, 1997): 8; “Rudy, Ruth: In Their Own Words; Messinger ‘Tough Not Mean,’ ” Jewish Week (October 24, 1997): 1; Adam Nagourney, “Poll Finds Most Voters Have No Opinion about Messinger,” New York Times (October 21, 1997): A1, B2. 18. Lawrence Kohler-Esses, “Still Fighting the ‘War’: As Combative Messinger Calls on Mayor to Heed Her Warnings, Supporters Rue Death of ‘New Deal,’ ” Jewish Week (November 7, 1997): 12; Siegel, The Prince of the City, 210. 19. On the history of this organization and Messinger’s involvement, see the organization’s website, http://www.ajws.org. 20. Siegel, The Prince of the City, 215 – 16; Rudolph W. Giuliani, “A Blackout That Tested, and Proved, New York City’s Character,” Mayor’s WINS Address (July 11, 1999), http://home2.nyc.gov/html/records/rwg/html/99a/me990711.html; Jim Yardley, “Jews and Blacks Try to Avoid Reprise of ’91 in Crown Heights,” New York Times (April 4, 1998): A1, B6. 21. Adam Dickter, “A Friend ’Til the End: For Jewish Community, Giuliani Was America’s Top Mayor,” Jewish Week (December 28, 2001): 10. 22. Ibid. 23. UJA-Federation, Jewish Community Study of New York: 2002, 28 – 29. 24. Adam Dickter, “Jewish Vote Vital for Bloomberg,” Jewish Week (November 9, 2001): 1. 25. Joyce Purnick, Mike Bloomberg: Money, Power, Politics (New York: PublicAffairs, 2009), 4, 74, 87 – 88. 26. Ibid., 168, 204, 223.

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N O T E S T O V I S U A L E S S AY

I thank Deborah Dash Moore for graciously inviting me to be part of this project, for her support of my work, and for her deep appreciation of objects and images. Jennifer Hammer of New York University Press has worked magic with my writing. It has been a delight to work with all four coauthors: Jeffrey S. Gurock, Annie Polland, Howard Rock, and Daniel Soyer. Danny earns a special thank-you for driving me around New York City to see murals and architecture. I also thank the anonymous readers for their helpful suggestions and advice. Numerous archivists, curators, librarians, collectors, and subscribers to the American Art listserv and the American Jewish History listserv offered valuable information. I appreciate all the living artists who granted me permission to reproduce their work. Laura Holzman, Nina Liss-Schultz, and Shoshana Olidort were terrific research assistants, and Alexandra Maron was of great help with the illustrations and permissions. Sonja Assouline, Kate Breiger, and Amanda Koire were loving, responsible, and very fun babysitters to Alex and Emily, allowing me to work.

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Friends, family, and colleagues have all generously given support, citations, personal stories and photographs, criticism, and beds on which to crash while in New York City. I thank Susanne Hunt for morning walks and for two years of hearing me go on about this book. She makes Claremont, California, home. David Brody finesses the perfect balance between his “amazings” to his “oy gevalts,” and I love him for that. Tom Burke, Sarah Cash, Kate Fermoile, George Gorse and Susan Thalmann (both of Pomona College), Martha Grier, Carol Hamoy, Camara Dia Holloway, Russet Lederman, Dr. Erica Rosenfeld, Kerri Steinberg, Craig S. Wilder, and Karen Zukowski — I thank you all. And Carolyn Halpin-Healy is just golden in all regards. My mom and dad, Joan and David Linden, put a subway map and a subway token in my hands at an early age with the mandate to go learn and love New York City. They are also the world’s greatest grandparents. My husband, Peter Ross, offers an unlimited supply of love, humor, understanding, and appreciation; he also holds everything together when I am off to New York on research trips. As my twins, Alex and Emily Linden-Ross, are New York Jews by heritage rather than birth, I am proud that they recognize the Flatiron Building at a distance, love Junior’s cheesecake, and hold on tight when the subway sways. I hope that they too will discover the magic of the City of Promises. 1. Voloj’s work is included in Alana Newhouse, ed., A Living Lens: Photographs of Jewish Life from the Pages of the Forward (New York: Norton, 2007). Voloj explains his photographic mission as being to rediscover forgotten Jewish history in New York City, as well as the “ways the culture is reborn and reinvented in a city in a permanent transition.” Julian Voloj to author (February 5, 2011). 2. The website of Congregation Ahavas Israel, http://www.greenpointshul.org, describes the synagogue this way: “We are a welcoming Modern Orthodox Synagogue that loves hipsters and hasids, lefty students and WW II veterans. . . . Come as you are: in a skirt or jeans, black suit or track suit.” Congregation Ahavas Israel is located at 108 Noble Street, Brooklyn, NY 11222. The congregation dates to the late nineteenth century; the building dates to 1903. 3. See Lenore Skenazy, “Are New York Jews More Jewish?,” Forward (February 17, 2010), http://www.forward.com/articles/125883 (accessed January 3, 2011) 4. Despite New York’s sophistication, the art world remained a male stronghold. Critics applauded Bernstein’s possession of “a man’s vision” and the “masculine vigor to her brushwork.” A graduate of the Educational Alliance, she also trained at the Arts Students League (ASL) and privately with William Merritt Chase, one of the era’s premier painters. Patricia M. Burnham, “Theresa Bernstein,” Woman’s Art Journal 9, no. 2 (Autumn 1988 – Winter 1989): 22 – 27. 5. In addition to the Amalgamated Co-ops, there were the Sholom Aleichem Houses built by Yiddishists, the Farband Houses built by Labor Zionists, and the United Workers Cooperative Community built by Jewish Communists. See Deborah Dash Moore, At Home in America: Second Generation New York Jews (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981), 80 – 82. Andrew S. Dolkart kindly gave me copies of the following: Dolkart, “Homes for People: Non-profit Cooperatives in New York City, 1916 – 1929,” Sites 30

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(1989): 30 – 35; Landmarks Preservation Commission, Landmarks Designation Report: United Workers’ Cooperative Colony (“The Coops”), Borough of the Bronx (June 24, 1992). 6. For history of black Judaism, see Roberta S. Gold, “The Black Jews of Harlem: Representation, Identity, and Race, 1920 – 1939,” American Quarterly 55, no. 2 (June 2003): 179 – 225. 7. Richard J. Powell, Black Art and Culture in the 20th Century (London: Thames & Hudson, 1997), 53. For background information on VanDerZee’s photograph, see Richard J. Powell and David A. Bailey, Rhapsodies in Black: Art of the Harlem Renaissance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). For information on the African American Jews of New York City, see Rabbi Ben Shlomo Levy, “Rabbi Arnold Joshua Ford: A Moses to His People,” in African American National Biography, ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), reprint courtesy of Rabbi Levy; BlackJews.org, “Who Are We? Where Did We Come From? How Many of Us Are There?,” http://www.blackjews.org/articles.htm (accessed February 28, 2011); and Powell, Black Art and Culture in the 20th Century. I thank art historian Michael D. Harris for introducing me to Rabbi Levy, and in turn, I thank the rabbi for his assistance. 8. The rediscovery of the history of Jews of African descent connected with panAfricanist reappraisal of Egypt’s relationship to the African continent. Solomon’s lineage down to Emperor Menelik II of Ethiopia, coupled with the flight of Moorish Jews to Timbuktu in West Africa during the fourteenth century, reinforced plausible links between Judaism and African Americans, fueling a belief that they were true descendants of ancient Israelites. A small minority was inspired to adopt the faith. 9. In the early 1930s, the United States experienced a resurgence of lynchings, which were openly held, especially in the South, and photographed as trophies. The overwhelming majority of lynch victims were black men, whose bodies were sometimes burnt and castrated. In the mid-1930s, both the NAACP and the Artists’ Union organized similar, yet competing, exhibitions to demand legislation outlawing lynching, which President Franklin Roosevelt, in fear of losing the votes of southern Democrats, refused to support. See Marlene Park, “Lynching and Anti-lynching: Art and Politics in the 1930s,” in The Social and the Real: Political Art of the 1930s in the Western Hemisphere, ed. Alejandro Anreus, Diana L. Linden, and Jonathan Weinberg, 155 – 77 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006). 10. David Margolick, Strange Fruit: Billie Holiday, Café Society, and an Early Cry for Civil Rights (Philadelphia: Running Press, 2000). 11. Henry Bial, Acting Jewish: Negotiating Ethnicity on the American Stage and Screen (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005), 1 – 29, 40 – 48; Donald Weber, “The Jewish American World of Gertrude Berg: The Goldbergs on Radio and Television, 1930 – 1950,” in Talking Back: Images of Jewish Women in Popular Culture, ed. Joyce Antler, 85 – 99 (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England / Brandies University Press, 1998). 12. Peter M. Rutkoff and William B. Scott, New School: A History of the New School for Social Research (New York: Free Press, 1986); Claus-Dieter Krohn, Intellectuals in Exile:

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INTERVIEWS

David Fox, September 30, 2009 Jack and Sylvia Goldberg, February 13, 2009 Allegra and Gary Gordon, August 27, 2009 Leah Novogrodsky Moskovits, August 17, 2008 Joshua Muss, November 24, 2008 Larry Rubinstein, September 18, 2008 Dolph Schayes, December 5, 2008 Berl Steinberg, November 11, 2008

I NDEX

Page numbers in italics refer to a figure or a caption on the page. 9/11 attack, 220, 252 47th Street Photo (retailer), 167 1965 N.Y.C. mayoral election, 144 – 145 1969 N.Y.C. mayoral election, 144 – 147 1977 N.Y.C. mayoral election, 185 – 186 1981 N.Y.C. mayoral election, 175 1985 N.Y.C. mayoral election, 176 1987 stock market crash, 176 1989 N.Y.C. mayoral election, 177 – 179, 215 – 216 1993 N.Y.C. mayoral election, 216 – 217 1997 N.Y.C. mayoral election, 218 – 219 1999 N.Y.C. blackout, 219 Abrams, Robert, 154 Abzug, Bella: 1970 congressional election, 186; campaign poster, 245, 245 – 246; Chisholm, Shirley, 187; Columbia University Law School, 245; feminism, 186, 188; Friedan, Betty, 187; Hashomer Hatzair, 194; Hunter College, 185, 245; Jewish Theological Seminary of America (JTS), 194; Jewishness, 194; McCarthyism, 186; McGee, Willie, 245 – 246; National Women’s Political Caucus (NWPC), 187, 246; political activism, 185 – 186; Socialism/Socialists, 246; South Bronx, 185; Women’s Strike for Peace, 186; Zionism/Zionists, 194, 246 ACT-UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power), 249 Adler, Stella, 22 advertising, 243 – 245 African-American Teachers’ Association, 138 African Americans, 34 – 37, 130 – 148, 175 – 183; 1969 N.Y.C. mayoral election, 147; antiSemitism, 139, 142 – 143; black Judaism, 227, 289n8; Bloomberg, Michael R., 222; Bronx “slave market,” 36; Brooklyn, 120 – 121; Brownsville (Brooklyn), 130, 131, 132; civil rights movement, 228; Co-op City, 161; domestic laborers, 36, 121, 130; East Tremont Avenue (Bronx), 129; FHA (Federal Housing Authority) programs, 131 – 132;

garment industry, 162; gentrification, 3; Giuliani, Rudolph, 219; Grand Concourse (Bronx), 120 – 121, 144, 155; Harlem (Manhattan), 15, 34 – 35; homelessness, 176; Israel, 139; Italian Americans, 147 – 148; Jewish Americans, 137; Jewish New Yorkers, 34 – 37, 125, 133 – 134, 135, 156, 179 – 183, 229; Koch, Edward I., 175 – 178; manufacturing jobs, 153 – 154; migrants from the South, 130 – 131; Parkchester (Bronx), 134 – 135, 159; residential discrimination by Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, 134; residential discrimination in Washington Heights, 15; Third World, identification with, 139 – 140; unions, 162 Ageloff, Samuel, 21 Ageloff Towers (Manhattan), 21, 24 Agudath ha-Rabbanim, 82, 93 Agudath Israel, 75, 78, 82 Ahavas Israel Synagogue (Brooklyn), 223 Allen, Woody, 170 – 171 Allen Street (Lower East Side), 17 Amalgamated Bank, 16 Amalgamated Clothing Workers Cooperative (Lower East Side), 22 – 23, 24, 29, 227 Amalgamated Clothing Workers Union, 16, 110, 162 America First Committee, 65 American Artists’ Congress, 238 American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), 141 American Jewish Committee: Crown Heights riot/rebellion (1991), 181 – 182; elite leadership, 73; Forest Hills low-income housing dispute, 148 American Jewish Conference (1943), 78, 91 American Jewish Conference on Soviet Jewry (AJCSJ), 198, 202 American Jewish Congress: Ben-Gurion, David, 74; Crown Heights riot/rebellion (1991), 181; Madison Square Garden rallies, 76 – 77; rallies, 233; Revisionist Zionists, 74;

307

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Index

American Jewish Congress (continued ) war-bond drives, 84; Wise, Stephen S., 74; Zionism/Zionists, 73 American Jewish World Service, 219 American Labor Party (ALP), 88 American League for Free Palestine, 97 American League for Peace and Democracy, 76 American Zionist Emergency Council, 74, 95 – 96 Amerks (nonviolent gang), 40, 41, 102 Amsterdam News (newspaper), 36, 133 Annie Hall (film), 171 Ansche Chesed (Manhattan), 148 Antar, Ezra “Crazy Eddie,” 167 anti-AIDS activism, 248 – 249 Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, 113, 142, 148, 181 – 182 Anti-Nazis Hold Demonstration (photograph), 234 anti-Semitism: African Americans, 139, 142 – 143; America First Committee, 65; in Bronxville (New York), 102 – 103; Christian Front, 32 – 33; Christian Mobilizers, 32 – 33; Coughlin, Charles, 32 – 33; East Side Story (musical), 119; feminism, 188; Fieldston (Bronx), 128; Ocean Hill – Brownsville public school district (Brooklyn), 137; residential discrimination (see residential discrimination); Salk, Jonas, 51 – 52; Soviet Union, 208 anti-Zionism, Satmar Jews, 166 Appeal of Conscience, 206 Arafat, Yasir, 217, 218 Arbeter Ring (Workmen’s Circle), xviii, 54 Arrow, Kenneth, 49 Artists of the WPA (Soyer), 232 Artists’ Union, 233, 238, 289n9 Ascalon, Maurice, 235 Astoria (Queens), 10, 15 “Authentic New York Transit Map,” 12 Axelrod, Julius, 49 Badillo, Herman, 152 bagels, origins, 235 Baker, Belle, 56 Balfour Declaration (1917), 66 – 67 Ballad of Sexual Dependency (Goldin), 248, 249 Barnard College, 163 Baruch, Bernard, 88 Baruch College, 163 – 164

bat mitzvahs, 192 – 193, 195 – 196 Bayside (Queens), 105, 106, 215 Beame, Abraham D. (Abe): 1965 N.Y.C. mayoral election, 144, 147; Cosell, Howard, 151; fiscal crisis, xix – xx; photograph showing Daily News front page, 150; urban decline, 152 – 153 Bedford-Stuyvesant (Brooklyn), 120, 130, 135 – 136 Begin, Menachem, 96 Bell, Daniel, 59, 60, 114 Bellamy, Carol, 176 Bellerose (Queens), 105 Ben-Ami, Jacob, 116 Ben-Gurion, David, 78, 96 Bensonhurst (Brooklyn): Jewish migration from Lower East Side, 15; Orthodox Jews, 69; Rosenbergs’ execution, block party celebrating, 113; Sephardic Jews, 123; Syrian Jews, 17, 84 – 85, 167 – 168 Berg, Gertrude, 117, 231 Bergen County, New Jersey, 102 Bergson, Peter: criticism of FDR, 87; Delman, J. David, 92; League for a Free Palestine, 97; war efforts, public awareness of his, 94; Zion, Sidney, 182; Zionism/Zionists, 77 Berl, Solomon I., 160, 213 Berlin, Irving, 44, 45 Berlin Wall, 207 Bernstein, Felicia, 142 Bernstein, Leonard, 118 – 120, 142 Bernstein, Theresa, 225 – 226 Bevin, Ernest, 97 Biaggi, Mario, 152 Bill of Rights, 242 Birnbaum, Jacob: Day of Solidarity, 208; Greater New York Conference on Soviet Jewry (GNYCSJ), 203; Richter, Glen, 200; Solidarity Sunday, 202; Soviet Jewry, fight for, 198 – 199; Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry, 199 black Judaism, 227, 289n8 Black Panther Party, 142 “blockbusting,” 132 Bloom, Fred, 65 – 66 Bloomberg, Michael R., 221 – 222 Blue Network, 75 Blumstein, Jacob, 35 – 36 Blumstein’s Department Store, 35 – 36 B’nai B’rith, 76 – 77 Board of Education, 122, 260n2 Board of Education’s Board of Examiners, 63

Index Board of Estimate, 10 Boesky, Ivan F., 171 – 172 Bokser, Ben Zion, 108, 109 – 110, 147 – 148 Borgenicht, Delia, 2 Borgenicht, Rex, 2 Borgenicht, Shoshana, 1 – 5, 211 Borgenicht, Theo, 2 Borgenicht, Yoel, 1 – 5, 211 Boro Park (Brooklyn): African Americans, 120; anti-eviction protests, 30; Hasidic Jews, 124; Jewish elementary schools, 67; Jewish migration from Lower East Side, 15; Jewish migration from Williamsburg, 124; Jewish population, 120; Lubavitchers, 165 – 166; Orthodox Jews, 215; poverty, 213; stability and continuity, 215 Boys High School (Brooklyn), 45, 68 Brandeis, Louis D., 66 Braunstein, Benjamin, 20 Brawley, Tawana, 176 – 177 Brill, Morris, 44 Brill Building (Manhattan), 44, 121 Bronx, 14 – 17, 151 – 161; 1960s, 144; 1970s, 151 – 161, 174; central European Jews, 17; cooperative housing projects, 15 – 16; eastern European Jews, 40; elderly Jews, 165, 174; foreign-born population, 40, 260n2; housing development (1990s), 174; housing development (post – World War I), 10; Irish Americans, 39; Jewish migration from Harlem, 4, 15, 16 – 17; Jewish migration from Lower East Side, 14 – 15; Jewish population, xx, 15, 112, 155; Jews’ social attitudes, 144; Mizrachi Jews, 17; parks in, 42; population decline, 174; post – World War I era, 10; post – World War II era, 110 – 111; rent strike (1932), 58; “slave market,” 36; synagogue attendance, 56; urban decline, 129, 151 – 152 Bronx Botanical Gardens, 142 Bronx High School of Science, 122 Bronx Home News (newspaper), 75 Bronx Park East, 16, 29 – 30, 113 Bronxville, New York, 102 – 103 Brooklyn, 120 – 124; 1965 N.Y.C. mayoral election, 145; African Americans, 120 – 121; “brownstone belt,” 211; central European Jews, 17; eastern European Jews, 123 – 124; housing development (post – World War I), 10; Israeli immigrants, 156; Jewish elementary schools, 67; Jewish migration from Lower East Side, 14 – 15; Jewish population, 15, 120 – 121; Jews’ social attitudes, 143;

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309

Mizrachi Jews, 17; Orthodox Jews, 68 – 69; Orthodox Judaism, 123 – 124; post – World War I era, 10; subway connections to Manhattan, 11; Zionism/Zionists, 68 Brooklyn College: Brownsville (Brooklyn) students, 129; Jewish faculty members, 52; Jewish female students, 50; Jewish students, 164; National Student League, 63; Orthodox Jewish night students, 69; Reichek, Elaine, 250; Syrian Jews, 168; tuition threat (1932), 63 Brooklyn Eagle (newspaper), 75 Brooklyn Heights (Brooklyn), 30, 161 Brooklyn Jewish Center, 55 – 56 Brooklyn Jews. See Brooklyn-Manhattan Jewish split Brooklyn-Manhattan Jewish split: 1993 N.Y.C. mayoral election, 217; Crown Heights (Brooklyn), 181 – 183; Soviet Jewry, fight for, 197 Brooklyn Technical High School, 122 Brooks, Fred, 65 – 66 brownstones: Borgenicht family’s, xxx; “brownstone belt,” 211 Brownsville (Brooklyn), 129 – 132; African Americans, 130, 131, 132; Brooklyn College, 129; Elkin, Lillian, 43; evictions, 28 – 30; “finishers” in, 154; foreign-born population, 26; Great Depression, 42; Hebrew Educational Society, 56; Jewish migration from Lower East Side, 15; Jewish migration to Canarsie, 156; Jewish migration to Queens, 129; Kazin, Alfred, 42; Latinos, 130, 132; Moses, Robert, 131; Murder, Inc., 41; Orthodox Jews, 69; Poster, William, 41 – 42; “redlining,” 132; Siegel, Ben “Bugsy,” 41 – 42; synagogue attendance, 54 – 55; urban decline, 129 – 132, 154; Weitzmann, Baruch David, 79; “working poor,” 131 Brownsville Houses (Brooklyn), 131 Bruce, Lenny, 241 – 242 Buckley, William F., 145 Bundy, McGeorge, 137 – 138 Cahan, Abraham, 13, 58, 88 Calvin Klein Ltd., 115 Camp Ramah, 190 Campbell, Les, 139 Campus (CCNY student newspaper), 64 – 65 Canarsie (Brooklyn), 129, 156 – 157, 161 Carey, Hugh, 168 Carter, Jimmy, 151 – 152

310

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Index

Castle Hill Pool (Bronx), 94, 95 Cato, Gavin, 179 – 180, 181 CCNY (City College of New York), 48 – 52, 59 – 62, 63 – 66; 1962 – 1963 academic year, 112; 1970s, 163; academic performance, 61 – 62; Alcove #1, 59, 60, 65; Alcove #2, 59, 60, 61 – 62, 65; alcove debates, 59 – 61; “Allegaroo” cheer, 50; as alternative/precursor to the Post Office, 48, 51; antiwar activism, 64 – 66; antiwar rally (1938), 38; Arrow, Kenneth, 49; athletes, 64; Axelrod, Julius, 49; Bell, Daniel, 59, 60; Bloom, Fred, 65 – 66; Brooks, Fred, 65 – 66; Campus (student newspaper), 64 – 65; Charter Day demonstrations (1935), 65; Cohen, Irving, 65 – 66; Cohen, Morris Raphael, 52; College Athletic Association, 64; as “College of the Circumcised Citizens of New York,” 48; Communism/Communists, 62, 65; doctorates won by alumni, 52; elite high schools, 122; Flom, Joseph, 169; Gornick, Vivian, 111; Hauptman, Herbert, 48; Howe, Irving, 59 – 60; Jewish enrollment, 48, 122, 262n16; Jewish faculty members, 52; “Jingo Day” event (1933), 65; Karle, Jerome, 48; Kristol, Irving, 60 – 61; Lauren, Ralph, 111 – 112; Lewisohn Stadium, 121; Magdoff, Harry, 61 – 62, 64; Miller, Milton, 65 – 66; National Student League, 63, 64, 163; “New York Intellectuals,” 60; Nobel Prize winners from, 48 – 49; “Open Admissions” policy, 163 – 164; out-of-city alumni associations, 101 – 102; as “Proletarian Harvard,” 48; Robinson, Frederick B., 61; Rosenberg, Ethel and Julius, 241; Rosenthal, A. M., 48; ROTC (Reserve Officers Training Corps), 63 – 66; Salk, Jonas, 49; Social Problems Club, 65; Socialism/Socialists, 65; sports fans’ alcove, 63; Townsend Harris High School, 49; tuition threat (1932), 48, 63; Varsity Club, 64; Wiener, Milton M., 66 Center for Jewish History, 214 – 215 Central Park West (Manhattan), 178 Chabad (Lubavitch) Hasidim, 2 Chanes, Jerome, 182 Charlotte Street (Bronx), 152, 154 Charny, Bernard (Baruch), 109 Chayevsky, Paddy, 116 “chazzer fressers” (those who ate pork), 18 Chelsea (Manhattan), 74, 170, 178, 186 Cheney, James, 135 Chisholm, Shirley, 187

Chosen, The (Potok), 67, 69 – 70 Christian Front, 32 – 33, 34 Christian Mobilizers, 32 – 33 Christie Street (Lower East Side), 17 Christopher Columbus High School (Bronx), 68, 135 Citizen’s League for Fair Play, 35 – 36 City Center, 79, 82 City University of New York (CUNY), 153, 214 civil rights movement, 228 civil service jobs: exams for, 58; Jewish New Yorkers, 31 – 32; Jewish radicals, 58 civilian police review board, 145 Clinton Street (Lower East Side), 21 Co-op City (Bronx), 157 – 161, 178 Coalition to Free Soviet Jewry, 208 Cohen, David A., 13 Cohen, Irving, 65 – 66 Cohen, Joseph A., 86 Cohen, Morris Raphael, 52 College Point (Queens), 106 Collins, Marjory, 238 – 240 Colorado (Queens apartment building), 106 – 107 Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS), 75 Columbia University: Abzug, Bella, 245; discrimination against Jews, 45; Jewish students, 112, 163, 199, 214; Jewish studies, 214; National Student League, 163; New School for Social Research, 231; Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry, 199; tuition and fees (1930s), 262n19 Columbus Avenue (Manhattan), 161 Comden, Betty, 119 Commentator (Yeshiva College student newspaper), 80 – 81 Communism/Communists: Bronx Park East, 29; CCNY (City College of New York), 62, 65; Coughlin’s view of, Charles, 32; IWO (International Workers Organization), 57; McCarthyism, 113; Myerson, Louis, 57; opposition to, 113 Concord Cafeteria, 43 Concourse Center of Israel (Bronx), 18, 40 Coney Island (Brooklyn), 43 Conference of Major Jewish Organizations, 198 Conforti, James, 19 Congregation Beth Simchat Torah (Manhattan), 173 – 174 Congregation of the Moorish Zionist Temple (VanDerZee), 228 Conservative Judaism: Jewish Theological

Index Seminary of America (JTS), 74, 188; Orthodox day schools, 109 – 110; Solomon Schechter Day School (Queens), 110; synagogue-center model, 108; women rabbis, 194; women’s participation in religious rituals and leadership, 189 – 191, 193 – 194 Conservative Party, 145 Cooperative Heim Gesellschaft (Bronx), 16 cooperative housing projects: Amalgamated Clothing Workers Cooperative (Lower East Side), 22 – 23, 24, 29, 227; Cooperative Heim Gesellschaft (Bronx), 16; Farband Houses (Bronx), 16; Great Depression, 29; Jewish push for, xviii; Limited Dividend Housing Companies law (1926), 15 – 16; political activism, 57; post – World War II building boom, 114; rents, 16; Sholom Aleichem Houses (Bronx), 16, 29, 57; United Workers Houses (Bronx), 16, 30 Cooperative Kindergarten (Wurts Bros.), 226 Cosell, Howard, 151, 154 Coughlin, Charles, 32 – 33 Council of Jewish Organizations of Flatbush, 218 Council of Orthodox Jewish Schools (Va’ad haHinuckh-ha-Haredi), 82 “Crazy Eddie,” 167 Creston Junior High School (Bronx), 40 Crimes and Misdemeanors (film), 171 Cross Bronx Expressway, 128 Crotona Park (Bronx), 30, 42 Crown Heights (Brooklyn), 179 – 183; African Americans, 120 – 121; African Americans from the South, 130; black-Jewish confrontation, 179 – 183; “blockbusting,” 132; Borgenicht family, 4; Brooklyn-Manhattan Jewish split, 181 – 183; community planning, control over, 180; Dinkins, David, 216; “finishers” in, 154; Hasidic Jews, 125, 133, 165 – 167, 180; intergroup rapprochement, 219 – 220; Jewish migration from Williamsburg, 124, 125; Jewish population, 120 – 121; Jewish street patrols, 132 – 133; Lubavitchers, 125, 133, 165, 179 – 181; Maccabees, 132 – 133; Orthodox Jews, 215; racial-profiled vigilantism, 180; racial transformation of, 125; riot/rebellion (1991), 179 – 183; stability and continuity, 215; urban decline, 154 Crown Heights Community Patrols, 133 Crown Heights Yeshiva (Brooklyn), 67 Cuomo, Mario, 149, 175, 180

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311

Daily News (newspaper), 75, 150, 152 Daily Worker (newspaper), 62 dating: Crotona Park (Bronx), 42; Jamaica (Queens), 42 – 43; whistling Beethoven quartets, 112 Daughters of the American Revolution, 66 Dawidowicz, Lucy (née Schildkret), 62 – 63 de Forest, Robert, 19 Delman, J. David, 91 – 92 Democratic Party, 54, 88, 113 Dershowitz, Alan, 205 DeWitt Clinton High School (Bronx), 24, 39, 48, 111 – 112 DeWitt Homes (Bronx), 105 Diallo, Amadou, 220 diamond industry, 167 Dinkins, David, 215 – 217; 1989 N.Y.C. mayoral election, 177 – 179, 215 – 217; 1993 N.Y.C. mayoral election, 216; Crown Heights (Brooklyn), 216; Israel, 177; Jackson, Jesse, 177; Orthodox Jews, 178; Soviet Jewry, 177 District Council 37 (AFSCME), 162 Dobrynin, Anatoly, 198 Douglaston (Queens), 105 Draper, Hal, 63 Drisha Institute (Manhattan), 214 Dubinsky, David, 88 Dumbo (Brooklyn), 211 East Bronx, 29 – 30, 58, 134, 160 East New York (Brooklyn), 15, 69, 132, 156 East Side Story (musical), 119 East Tremont Avenue (Bronx), 117, 127, 128 – 129 eastern European Jews: bagel baking, 235; Bronx, 40; Brooklyn, 123 – 124; central European Jews, 17; Concourse Center of Israel (Bronx), 18; culinary traditions, 212; Great Depression, 28; Harlem (Manhattan), 1, 4; Rosenberg, Ethel and Julius, 241; second-generation, 18 Eastern Parkway (Brooklyn): address on as Jewish identifier, 45; African Americans, 121; Lubavitchers, 125; as symbol of success, 14; synagogue attendance, 172 education. See higher education; public schools; school teachers Eilberg, Amy, 194 Einstein, Albert, 226 Eisenstein, Judith Kaplan, 192 Elchanan, Isaac, 27 Eldridge Street (Lower East Side), 17 Eldridge Street (Manhattan), 13

312

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Index

Elkin, Lillian, 43 Emergency Committee to Save the Jewish People, 77, 94 Essex Street (Lower East Side), 17, 21 Etra, Max J., 93 Etz Hayim – Hebrew Institute (Brooklyn), 67 Extraordinary Zionist Conference, 78 Ezrat Nashim, 191, 192 – 195, 196 Fahan, L. (pseudonym), 83 – 84 Fairchild, Henry Platt, 46 Farband Houses (Bronx), 16 Farm Security Administration, 240 Farrakhan, Louis, 177, 216 Farrell, Herman “Denny,” 176 Fashion Institute of Technology, 115 Federal Communications Commission, 142 Federation of American Zionists, 66 Federation of Jewish Philanthropies, 164 Feminine Mystique, The (Friedan), 187 feminism, 186 – 196; 1970s, 252; Abzug, Bella, 186, 188; anti-Semitism, 188; bat mitzvahs, 192 – 193, 195 – 196; Conservative Judaism, 189 – 190; divisions within Jewish feminists, 187 – 188; Ezrat Nashim, 191, 192 – 195, 196; Friedan, Betty, 188 – 189; Greenberg, Blu, 195, 196; Hebrew Institute of Riverdale (Bronx), 196; Hyman, Paula, 190 – 191; Jewish leadership, 188 – 189, 245 – 246; Jewish Orthodox Feminist Alliance (JOFA), 196; Jewish Theological Seminary of America (JTS), 189 – 190, 193 – 194; Jewish Women’s Call for Change, 190 – 191; Kaddish prayer, right to say, 192, 195; Lincoln Square Synagogue, 195 – 196; “mink brigade activists,” 187; National Jewish Women’s Conference (1973), 193; National Organization of Women (NOW), founding, 187; National Women’s Political Caucus (NWPC), 187; New York City roots of, 208 – 209; New York Havurah, 189 – 190, 193; Orthodox Judaism, 193, 195 – 196; Pogrebin, Letty Cottin, 194 – 195; Schneiderman, Rose, 186 – 187; Shavelson, Clara Lemlich, 186 – 187; Steinem, Gloria, 187 – 188; Szold, Henrietta (“Shulamith”), 191 – 192; Upper West Side (Manhattan), 189, 195 – 196; visual arts, 251; Wage Earners’ League for Women Suffrage, 186 – 187; women’s participation in religious rituals and leadership, 189 – 191, 193 – 194, 251 – 252; women’s tefillah prayer service, 195 – 196; working women, 187

FHA (Federal Housing Authority), 102, 114, 131 Fieldston (Bronx), 128 Fier, Irving, 42 Fifth Avenue (Manhattan), xvii “Fighting Zion” sound truck, 96 Financial Control Board, 168 Finkelstein, Louis, 81 First Amendment, 242 First Amendment (Shahn), 238, 239 Fischel, Harry, 13 Flatbush (Brooklyn): 1969 N.Y.C. mayoral election, 146; African Americans, 120; Christian Front agitators, 33; “finishers” in, 154; Jewish migration from Lower East Side, 15; Jewish population, 120; Sephardic Jews, 123; Syrian Jews, 17, 167 – 168; urban decline, 154 Flatbush Park Jewish Center (Brooklyn), 148 Flom, Joseph, 169 food processing industry, collapse of, 152 Ford, Arnold, 227 Ford, Gerald, 152 Ford Foundation, 137 – 138 Fordham Road (Bronx), xvii, 155 Forest Hills (Queens): 1930s, 11, 28; 1965 N.Y.C. mayoral election, 147; 1969 N.Y.C. mayoral election, 146; 1989 N.Y.C. mayoral election, 178; Giuliani, Rudolph, 178; Jewish migration from Lower East Side, 15; Jewish population, 103 – 105; low-income housing dispute, 147 – 149; Orthodox Jews, 70; Parker Towers, 100, 105 – 106; post – World War II era, 108; residential discrimination against Jews, 19 – 20, 28, 30; Rhoda House, 105; Sephardic Jews, 123; stability and continuity, 215 Forest Hills Gardens (Queens), 19 – 20 Forest Hills Jewish Center, 108, 148 Forest Hills Property Owners Committee, 28 Forgotten Heritage Series (Voloj), 224 Forsyth Street (Lower East Side), 17 Fort Apache section (Bronx), 165 Fort Greene (Brooklyn), 211 Fortune (magazine), 112, 114, 133 Fourteenth Street (Manhattan), xvii “Fourth Reich” (Jewish section, Washington Heights), 27 Francis, Thomas, 51 – 52 Frank, Henry, 31 Freedom Day Rally (1988), 184 Friedan, Betty, 187, 188 – 189, 194, 246

Index Friedan, Carl, 187 Frontiers (magazine), 61 Galbraith, John Kenneth, 161 gangs (nonviolent), 39 – 40, 41 Garment Center (Manhattan), 23 Garment Center Realty Company, 23 garment industry: African Americans, 162; Irish Americans, 31; Jewish entrepreneurs, 114 – 116; Jewish New Yorkers, 31; Jewish women, 243; Latinos, 162; move from Lower East Side to Midtown, 23; relocation to the South, 152; Strauss, Levi, xiii Garvey, Marcus, 227 Gecko, Gordon (character in Wall Street), 171 gentrification: 1980s, 170; African Americans, 3; Chelsea (Manhattan), 170; Harlem (Manhattan), 211; Jewish professionals, 211; Lower East Side (Manhattan), 248 German-American Bund, 27, 77, 97 German Americans, x, 2, 33 – 34 German goods, boycott of (1933), 233 – 234 German Jews: expellees, 123; post – World War II immigration, 123; rally supporting (1933), 233; Wagner-Rogers Act (1939), 34; Washington Heights (Manhattan), 26 – 27 Gershwin, George, 45 Gershwin, Ira, 45 GI Bill (Servicemen’s Readjustment Act, 1944), 101, 102 Gilligan, Thomas, 135 Girls’ Junior League, 86 – 87 Giuliani, Rudolph, 178, 215 – 220 Glasser, Ira, 141 Glazer, Nathan, 60, 163 Glazer, Ruth, 110 – 111 Glicker, Jack, 85 “God Bless America” (Berlin), 45 Gold and Cohen Realtors, 13 Goldberg, Arthur, 198 Goldberg, Jack, 94 – 95 Goldberg, Linda May, 94 Goldberg, Molly (character in The Goldbergs), 117, 127, 231, 253 – 254 Goldberg, Sylvia, 94, 95 Goldbergs, The (television series), 116 – 117, 231 Goldbergs Jigsaw Puzzle (Pepsodent), 230, 231 Goldin, Harrison J., 177 Goldin, Nan, 237, 248 Goldstein, Israel, 82, 85 – 86, 167 Goodelman, Aaron J., 237 – 238 Goodman, Andrew, 135

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313

Gorbachev, Mikhail, 208 Gordon, Solomon, 109 Gornick, Vivian, 111 government hiring practices, 31 Gran Fury, 248 Grand Concourse (Bronx): African Americans, 120 – 121, 144, 155; Carter visit, Jimmy, 151 – 152; decline, 144; “finishers” in, 154; Jacob H. Schiff Center, 56; Jewish migration from Harlem, 15; Jewish migration to Co-op City, 157; Jewish population, 120, 155; Latinos, 155; photograph, 8; picking up girls on, 112; post – World War II era, 110 – 111; Puerto Ricans, 144; rents (1927), 16; Sabbath promenading, 43; as symbol of success, 14; synagogue attendance, 172; Temple Adath Israel, 56; Tremont Temple (Bronx), 17 – 18; urban decline, 154 Great Depression, 28 – 31; artists during, 233; Brownsville (Brooklyn), 42; cooperative housing projects, 29; eastern European Jews, 28; evictions, 28 – 30, 58; federal relief recipients, 28; Harlem (Manhattan), 28; higher education degree, 51; Hunter College, 50; Jewish immigrants, 27; Lower East Side (Manhattan), 28; NYU (New York University), 47; rent strike (1932), 58 “Great Rent Strike War of 1932,” 29 – 30 “Great Revolt” (1910), 54 Greater New York Conference on Soviet Jewry (GNYCSJ): Birnbaum, Jacob, 203; Israel, 204; Lookstein, Haskel, 207 – 208; Richter, Glen, 203; Soviet Jewry, fight for, 202, 204, 207 – 208; Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry, 203, 208; Weiss, Avraham (Avi), 206 Green, Adolph, 119 Green, Mark, 221 Greenberg, Blu, 195, 196 Greenberg, Hank, 94 – 95 Greenhaus, Donald, 246 Greenpoint (Brooklyn), 223 Greenwich Village (Manhattan), 178, 186 Grossen’s ice cream parlor, 43 Gush Emunim party, 206 Hadassah, 192 Haganah, 96 – 97 Halpern, Harry, 148 Hamid, Abdul, 36, 136 Hannah and Her Sisters (film), 170 – 171 Harlem (Manhattan), 1 – 4, 34 – 37; 341 West 122nd Street, 1 – 2; 1920s, 35; 1930s, 4;

314

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Index

Harlem (Manhattan) (continued ) 1960s, 2, 37; African Americans, 15, 34 – 35; African Americans from the South, 130; Blumstein’s Department Store, 35 – 36; Borgenicht family, xxx, 1 – 4, 211; Central Harlem, 4, 15; Chabad (Lubavitch) Hasidim, 2; East Harlem (later “El Barrio”), 4, 17; eastern European Jews, 1, 4; ethnic/ neighborhood conflict, 35 – 36; gentrification, 2 – 3, 211; German Americans, 2; Great Depression, 28; Institutional Synagogue (Manhattan), 56; Jewish economic control over, 35 – 36; Jewish heyday, 1 – 2, 3 – 4; Jewish housing developers, 13; Jewish migration during 1920s, 35; Jewish migration from the East Side, 13; Jewish migration to the Bronx, 4, 15, 16 – 17; Jewish migration to the Upper West Side, 15; Jewish migration to the Washington Heights, 15; liquor stores, campaign against, 133; Mizrachi Jews, 17; Moorish Zionist Temple of the Moorish Jews, 227 – 228; Orthodox Jews, 2; pre – World War I, 1 – 2; Puerto Ricans, 17; race riots (1964), 135 – 136; Sephardic Jews, 17; VanDerZee, James, 227 – 228 Harlem Housewives League, 35 Harlem Labor Union, 36 Harlem Merchants’ Association, 36 “Harlem on My Mind” exhibit, 139, 142 Harlem Partners, 3 Harrington, Michael, 164 Hart, Lorenz, 45 Hart, Moss, 77 Harvard University, 46 Hashomer Hatzair, 194 Hasidic Jews, 165 – 167; 1970s, 166; 1989 N.Y.C. mayoral election, 178; Americanization, resistance to, 166; Boro Park (Brooklyn), 124; Crown Heights (Brooklyn), 125, 133, 165 – 167, 180; diamond industry, 167; disputes and rivalries among, 124; educational and cultural institutions, 175; family size, 166; Giuliani, Rudolph, 178, 215; insularity, 175; Jewish street patrols, 133; local economy, 166 – 167; Lubavitchers (see Lubavitchers); marketable skills, 166; Orange and Rockland counties, 166; post – World War II immigration, 70; poverty, 166, 175, 213; Satmars (see Satmar Jews); secular amusements, 124; Williamsburg (Brooklyn), 124 – 125 Hatzolah, 179

Hauptman, Herbert, 48 “Heartbreak Highway,” 128 Hebrew Educational Society, 56 Hebrew Institute of Riverdale (Bronx), 196, 205, 207, 214 Hebrew Union College, 193 Hecht, Ben, 77 Heilbrun, Caroline, 282n6 Henry Street (Lower East Side), 25 Hentoff, Nat, 141 Herman, Mordecai, 227 – 228 Hertzberg, Arthur, 97, 181 Heschel, Abraham Joshua, 135, 199 – 200 “high-holiday Jews,” 70 High School of Industrial Arts (Manhattan), 115 High School of Music and Art (Manhattan), 122 higher education, 45 – 48; discrimination against Jews, 45 – 46; first-generation college students, 45; graduate degrees, 162; graduate education in humanities and social sciences, 52; Great Depression, 51; Jewish faculty members, 52; Jewish female students, 50; Jewish fraternities, 47 – 48; land-grant universities, 46; professional degrees, 51; state universities, 112; student activism, 163. See also colleges and universities under their name Hillcrest (Queens), 105, 107 – 108 Hillcrest Jewish Center, 107 Histadrut, 74 Hitler, Adolf, 80 – 81 Hitler-Stalin pact (1939), 65, 76 Holocaust, 75 – 82, 91 – 94; eyewitness testimony, 82; Jewish New Yorkers’ response to, 75 – 77, 91 – 94; news of, 76 – 77, 78 – 79, 80; press coverage, 81 – 82; sefira days, 79 – 80, 82 Holton, Herbert M., 64 homosexual and lesbian Jews, 173 – 174, 249 Horenstein, Irving, 84 House Un-American Activities Committee, 113 housing: ads in ethnic newspapers, 157; “blockbusting,” 132; cooperative housing projects (see cooperative housing projects); evictions, 28 – 30, 58, 128 – 129; “finishers,” 154; Forest Hills low-income housing dispute, 147 – 149; “Great Rent Strike War of 1932,” 29 – 30; Jewish developers and builders, 11 – 14; Mitchell-Lama law (Limited Profit Housing Company Act, New York State, 1955), 114; post – World War I era, 9 – 13;

Index post – World War II era building boom, 114; “redlining,” 132, 154; rent control laws, 153; rent strike (1932), 58; “subway suburbs,” 11, 20; tax exemption ordinance (1921), 10; United Housing Federation, 114; upscale Lower East Side, 22 – 23; vacancy decontrol law (1971), 154 Howard Beach (Queens), 176 Howe, Irving: CCNY (City College of New York), 59 – 60; pseudonyms, 83 – 84; Socialism/Socialists, 54, 58 – 59; on “thoughtful moderates,” 57; on World War II, 83 – 84 Humphrey, Burt Jay, 19 Hunter College: Abzug, Bella, 185, 245; Great Depression, 50; Jewish faculty members, 52; Jewish women students, 50; National Student League, 63; Novogrodsky, Sarah (née Lifschitz), 24; Schildkret, Lucy (later Lucy Dawidowicz), 62 – 63; tuition threat (1932), 63; women radicals, 62 – 63 Hunter College High School (Manhattan), 122 Hunts Point (Bronx), 17, 135 Hurwitz, Sara, 196 Hyman, Paula, 190 – 191 “Hymietown,” 176 “I-95 corridor,” 128 “I Dreamed I Walked a Tightrope” (advertisement), 243 IND (Independent Subway line), 11, 20 Independence Homes (Queens), 106 Institutional Synagogue (Manhattan), 56 Inter-Seminary Conference of Christian and Jewish Students (1943), 79 International Labor Defense (ILD), 76, 229 International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union, 31, 59, 186 Intervale Jewish Center (Bronx), 165, 174 Iranian Jews, 155 Iraqi Jews, 155 Irgun, 96, 97 Irish Americans: Bronx, 39; garment industry, 31; Jewish New Yorkers, 30 – 31, 32; Parkchester (Bronx), 134, 159; public schools, 40; school teachers among, 31 – 32; Washington Heights (Manhattan), 32; women school teachers, 31 – 32; Yorkville (Manhattan), 34 Israel: African Americans, 139; Dinkins, David, 177; Giuliani, Rudolph, 217; “Greater Israel,” 206; Greater New York Conference on Soviet Jewry (GNYCSJ), 204; Gush

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315

Emunim party, 206; Hadassah, 192; Jewish New Yorkers, 73; National Conference on Soviet Jewry (NCSJ), 204; Soviet Jewry, fight for, 201, 204 Israeli immigrants, 156 Italian Americans: African Americans, 147 – 148; defense of turf, 157; East Side Story (musical), 119; Fordham Road (Bronx), 155; Jewish New Yorkers, 156 – 157; Parkchester (Bronx), 159; public schools, 40 Ivy League, 45 IWO (International Workers Organization), 57 Jackson, Henry “Scoop,” 203 – 204 Jackson, Jesse, 176, 177 – 178 Jackson Heights (Queens): German Jews, 123; housing development (post – World War I), 10; residential discrimination against Jews, 18 – 19, 30 Jackson-Vanik bill (1972), 203 – 204 Jacob H. Schiff Center (Bronx), 56 Jahn’s ice cream parlor, 43, 45 Jamaica (Queens), 15, 42 – 43, 132 Jamaica Arena, 43 James Monroe High School (Bronx), 135 Javits, Jacob, 198 “Jericho March” (1965), 199 “Jew Deal,” 88 Jewish Action Alliance, 181 Jewish Agency for Palestine, 73, 96, 97 Jewish Americans: affection for America, 45; African Americans, 137; culture of, xii; as a minority group, 44; political capital, 7; student activism, 163 Jewish Center (Manhattan), 55, 56, 214 Jewish clubs, youth membership in, 68 Jewish Community House of Bensonhurst (Brooklyn), 72 Jewish Community Relations Council (JCRC), 181 – 182 Jewish Daily Forward (newspaper), 16, 29, 58, 182 Jewish Defense League (JDL): Bernstein, Leonard, 142; Forest Hills low-income housing dispute, 148; Kahane, Meir, 141; Maccabees, 141; Soviet Jewry, fight for, 200 – 201, 202 – 203; WBAI-FM protest, 142 Jewish education: Columbia University, 214; community-run Talmud Torahs, 53; Cooperative Kindergarten (Wurts Bros.), 226; day schools, 108 – 110, 122; elementary school age children receiving, 53;

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Index

Jewish education (continued ) elementary schools, 67; Jewish radicals, 53 – 54; NYU (New York University), 214; one-room tenement schoolhouse, 53; Orthodox Jews, 69; Ramaz School, 108 – 109; segregation of the sexes, 109; Solomon Schechter Day School (Queens), 110; Yeshiva of Central Queens, 109 – 110 Jewish fraternities, 47 – 48 Jewish immigrants: 1920s, 26; 1930s, 231 – 232; 1940s – 1960s, 122; displaced-persons legislation, 123; German, 26 – 27; German expellees, 123; Great Depression, 27; Israelis, 156; Jewish religious life, 122; from Muslim countries, 155; Polish, 26; post – World War II era, 70, 122 – 125; quota laws, 123; Romanian, 26; Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 238; Soviet Union (see Soviet Jewry, fight for); “victims of persecution” legislation, 123; voting rights, 54; Wagner-Rogers Act (1939), 34 Jewish Institute of Religion, 74 Jewish Labor Committee, 76 – 77, 233 Jewish liberals: 1993 N.Y.C. mayoral election, 216; 1997 N.Y.C. mayoral election, 218; Giuliani, Rudolph, 220; “limousine liberals,” 146 Jewish media, 75 – 76 Jewish Messenger (newspaper), 191 – 192 Jewish Museum, 250, 251 Jewish music composers and publishers: Reed, Lou, 246 – 247; Tin Pan Alley, 44 – 45 Jewish New Yorkers, xii – xxii; 1920s, 13 – 14; 1920s – 1930s, 30; 1938 to 1948, xxii; 1960s, xii, xix; 1970s, xix – xx; African Americans, 34 – 37, 125, 133 – 134, 135, 156, 179 – 183, 229; architects and builders, 14; civil service jobs, 31 – 32; civil society, xxi; clothing, stylish, xiv; connection to their city, xv; cultural life of New York, 116 – 120; defense of turf, 157; Democratic Party, 113; department stores, xvii; divisions within Jewish community, 140 – 147, 181 – 183, 187; early 20th century, xviii – xix; early 21st century, xx, 1; the elderly, 164 – 165, 174; employment opportunities, xiv, xvi – xvii, xx; entrepreneurship, xvii – xviii; the “establishment,” 7; ethnic/neighborhood conflict, xix, xxii, 30 – 31, 33, 35 – 36, 125, 136 (see also Ocean Hill – Brownsville public school district); first generation, 45; food and diet, changes in, xiv; foreign-born population, 122 – 123;

gangs (nonviolent), 39 – 40, 41; garment industry, xiii, xvii, 31; graduate degrees, 162; Holocaust, response to, 75 – 77, 91 – 94; homosexuals and lesbians, 173 – 174, 249; as housing developers and builders, 11 – 14; immigrants from central and eastern Europe, xxi; insularity, pre – World War II, 41; Irish Americans, 30 – 31, 32; Israel, 73; Italian Americans, 156 – 157; Jackson, Jesse, 177 – 178; laborers, 13 – 14; language diversity, xiv – xv; legal rights, xv, xvi; as a majority group, 39 – 44; Manhattan – Brooklyn attitudinal split, 143 – 147; middle-class, 112 – 113, 117, 161 – 162; migration, chain, 14 – 15, 101; migration, intracity, 4, 14 – 17, 23 – 24, 30, 124, 128 – 129, 156, 157, 215; migration to Los Angeles, 101 – 102; migration to suburbia, 102 – 103, 124, 128, 155, 156, 159, 161, 215; neighborhood enclaves, 30, 213; neighborhood feelings, 127; neighborhoods in the history of, 5 – 7; other Jews’ attitude toward, 46; political activism, 5 – 7, 57, 185 – 186, 219, 225 (see also anti-AIDS activism; feminism; Soviet Jewry, fight for); political participation, xvi, xvii – xviii, xxii; population, xii – xiii, xix – xx; population distribution, 104; public schools, embrace of, xiv; realtors, 13 – 14, 105; as renters, xix; residential discrimination against, 18 – 20, 28, 30; retailing, xiii; reverse migration from suburbs, 107, 161; Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 88; school teachers among, 31 – 32; second generation (see second-generation Jews); secularization, xv; Six-Day War (1967) on, effect of, 139 – 140; Socialism, xviii; unions, xviii; upper-class, 211; upper-middle-class professionals, 172 – 173 Jewish Orthodox Feminist Alliance (JOFA), 196 Jewish Palestine Exhibit (Miller Art Co.), 234, 235 Jewish People’s Committee, 76 Jewish Press (newspaper), 137, 141, 180 Jewish Publication Society, 192 Jewish radicals: aspiring teachers, 63; civil service jobs, 58; ideological commitment of, 54; Jewish education, 53 – 54; New Left, 63; second-generation Jews, 54; support for, 54; unionists, 54; women radicals, 62 – 63. See also Communism/Communists; Leftist politics; Socialism/Socialists; Zionism/ Zionists

Index Jewish religious life: Bloomberg, Michael R., 221 – 222; The Goldbergs (television series), 116 – 117; Greenberg, Hank, 95; halfhearted allegiance to Judaism, 53; “high-holiday Jews,” 70; High Holidays, synagogue attendance on, 55, 56, 172; holy days, observance of, xx; Jewish immigrants, 53, 122; Jewish youth, 68; Koufax, Sandy, 95; leisure-time activities, 55; “mushroom” or “provisional” synagogues, 53; New York Havurah, 189 – 190; partnership minyans, 214; pray-through-play posture, 55 – 56; rabbinical and cantorial careers for women, 190 – 191, 193, 194; recruitment efforts, 172 – 173; religious antipathies, 82; republicanism, xv – xvi; Sabbath promenading, 43; second-generation Jews, 53, 54; synagogue affiliation, 108, 173; synagogue attendance, 54 – 55, 56, 122, 172 – 173; Synagogue Center idea, 55 – 56, 108; “Turn Friday Night into Shabbos” program, 173; upper-middle-class professionals, 172 – 173; Upper West Side (Manhattan), 213 – 214; women students of the Torah, 214; women’s participation in religious rituals and leadership, 189 – 191, 193 – 194, 251 – 252 Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA), 76, 82, 136 – 137 Jewish Theological Seminary of America (JTS): Abzug, Bella, 194; Boesky, Ivan F., 171 – 172; Conservative Judaism, 74, 188; Finkelstein, Louis, 81; Heschel, Abraham Joshua, 200; Inter-Seminary Conference of Christian and Jewish Students (1943), 78 – 79; Jewish elementary school students, 67; Jewish Museum, 251; Orthodox Jews, 69; Szold, Henrietta (“Shulamith”), 192; women’s participation in religious rituals and leadership, 189 – 191, 193 – 194 Jewish War Veterans, 33 Jewish Women’s Call for Change, 190 – 191 Jews of African descent, 289n8 Jews of Silence, The (Wiesel), 200 John Birch Society, 145 Johnson, Lyndon B., 123 Joint Distribution Committee, 73 – 74 Junior High School 45 (Bronx), 155 Kaddish, women’s right to say, 192, 195 Kagan, Elena, 196 Kahane, Meir: assassination of, 182; Forest Hills low-income housing dispute, 148;

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317

Lubavitchers, 203; Ocean Hill – Brownsville public school district (Brooklyn), 141 – 142; Soviet Jewry, fight for, 200 – 202 Kalikow, Harold V., 105 Kallen, Horace, 66 Kaplan, Mordecai M., 55 – 57, 79, 192 – 193 Karle, Jerome, 48 Katz’s Delicatessen (Manhattan), 84, 212 Kazin, Abraham E., 114 Kazin, Alfred, 42 Kehal Adath Jeshurun (Manhattan), 13 Kehilath Jeshurun (Manhattan), 34, 82, 93, 207 Kennedy, John F., 198 Kern, Jerome, 45 Kew Gardens (Queens), 146, 178, 215 King, Carole, 121 – 122 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 135, 200 Kings County Hospital (Brooklyn), 121, 180 Kingsbridge (Bronx), 159 Kissinger, Henry, 204 Kleeblatt, Norman, 250 Klein, Calvin, 115 Knit Goods Union, 162 Knitting Factory, 246 Koch, Edward I., 175 – 178; 1981 N.Y.C. mayoral election, 175; 1985 N.Y.C. mayoral election, 176; African Americans, 175 – 178; first mayoral administration (1978 – 1981), 168 – 169; housing development in the Bronx, 174; Jackson, Jesse, 176; second mayoral administration (1982 – 1985), 175 – 176; third mayoral administration (1986 – 1989), 176 – 177 Koenigsberg, Arthur, 64 kosher delicatessens, 21 Koufax, Sandy, 95 Kramer, Larry, 248 – 249 Kristallnacht, 26, 76 Kristol, Irving, 60 – 61 Kronish, Herbert, 105 Kugelmass, Jack, 165, 174 Kuhn, Fritz, 77 Kultur (Goodelman), 236 – 237 La Guardia, Fiorello, 31, 33 – 34, 51, 85 Labor Action (journal), 83 – 84 Labor Zionists, 57, 74 Landesman, Alter, 56 Lansky, Meyer, 97 – 98 Lansky Lounge (Manhattan), 212 Latinos: Bloomberg, Michael R., 222; Brownsville (Brooklyn), 130, 132; Co-op City, 161;

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Latinos (continued) “El Barrio” (East Harlem), 4, 17; garment industry, 162; Grand Concourse (Bronx), 155; Lower East Side (Manhattan), 213; Parkchester (Bronx), 159; Puerto Ricans (see Puerto Ricans); unions, 162 Laughan, John, 68 Laurelton (Queens), 15 Lauren, Ralph (née Lifshitz), 111 – 112, 115 Laurents, Arthur, 119 Lavender Cadet, The (monthly publication), 64 Lazarcheck, Helen, 127 League for a Free Palestine, 97 Lederhendler, Eli, 133 – 134 Leff, Laurel, 81 LeFrak, Aaron, 106 LeFrak, Harry, 20, 106 LeFrak, Samuel, 106 LeFrak City (Queens), 20, 107 LeFrak family, 106 – 107 Leftist politics, 226 – 227, 232, 245 Leibowitz, Samuel, 229 Leichter, Franz, 219 “Leningrad 11,” 200 – 201 Lenny Bruce Being Frisked (photograph), 242 Lenowitz, Gerry “Sheiky,” 42 Lenox Avenue subway, 11 “Let our people go” (poster), 246, 247 Levine, Max, 105 Levinthal, Israel, 55 Levy, Esther, 86 Levy’s Rye Bread, 244 – 245 Lewisohn Stadium, 121 liberals. See Jewish liberals Life (magazine), 75 Lifsh, Yosef, 179 Limited Dividend Housing Companies law (1926), 15 – 16 Limited Profit Housing Company Act (Mitchell-Lama law, New York State, 1955), 114 “limousine liberals,” 146 Lincoln Center, 120 Lincoln Square Synagogue (Manhattan), 173m 195 – 196 Lindsay, John V., 137 – 138, 144 – 147, 178 – 179 Lipton, Seymour, 228 – 229 Little Neck (Queens), 105, 215 Live and Let Live Meat Market, 185 London, Meyer, xviii Long Island City (Queens), 10 Long Island Press (newspaper), 75

Look (magazine), 75 Lookstein, Haskel, 207 Lookstein, Joseph H., 34, 80, 93 Los Angeles, 101 – 102 Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground (Greenhaus), 246, 247 Lower East Side (Manhattan), 20 – 26; 1930s, 25; 1970s, 246; 1980s, 248; 1990s, 212 – 213; Abzug, Bella, 186; Borgenicht family, 4; Chinese immigrants, 213; construction of subways and bridges, xviii; eastern European Jewish culinary traditions, 212; “finishers” in, 154; garment industry move to Midtown, 23; gentrification, 248; Goldin, Nan, 237; Great Depression, 28; “hipification,” 212; homefront war efforts, 90 – 91; housing, upscale, 22 – 23; housing development, 1920s, 13; Jewish businesses, 21; Jewish immigrants (1920s), 26, 30; Jewish migration to Bronx, 14 – 15, 23 – 24; Jewish migration to Brooklyn, 14 – 15; Jewish migration to Queens, 15; Jewish migration to Upper West Side, 23 – 24; Jewish population, 25; Latinos, 213; Max is Rushing in the Bagels (Weegee), 235 – 236; Mizrachi Jews, 17; museums, 212; nightlife attractions, 212; poverty, 212 – 213; Reed, Lou, 246; retention of business people and professionals, 20 – 25; Sephardic Jews, 17; Tenement Museum, 210, 212; theaters, 21 – 22; urban decline, 154; walk-to-work scenario, 20 – 21, 25; Window of a Jewish Religious Shop (Collins), 239 Lower East Side Conservancy, 212 Lubavitchers: Boro Park (Brooklyn), 165 – 166; Crown Heights (Brooklyn), 125, 133, 165, 179 – 181; headquarters location, 125; Kahane, Meir, 203; proselytism, 175; Satmar Jews, 180; Soviet Jewry, fight for, 203 Lugee’s Kosher Restaurant, 75 Lynched (Lipton), 229 lynchings, FDR’s response to, 229, 289n9 Maccabees (Jewish street patrols), 132 – 133, 141, 180 Madison Square Garden, rallies at, 76 – 77, 80, 92, 98 Madison Square Park (Manhattan), 74 Magdoff, Harry, 61 – 62, 64 – 65 Magen David congregation (Brooklyn), 84, 86 Mahoney, Jeremiah T., 34 Maidenform Brassiere Company, 243 Manhattan: 1965 N.Y.C. mayoral election, 145;

Index 1980s, 172; housing development (post – World War I), 10 – 11; Jewish singles, 172; Jews’ social attitudes, 143 – 144; Jews with graduate degrees, 162; population growth (1915 – 1920), 10; upper-middle-class professionals, 172 – 173 Manhattan (film), 171 Manhattan Jews. See Brooklyn-Manhattan Jewish split manufacturing jobs, 152, 153 – 154, 169 Marble Hill (Bronx), 27 Marchi, John, 145, 152 Max is Rushing in the Bagels (Weegee), 235 – 236 McCarthyism, 113, 140, 186, 242 McCoy, Rhody G., 138 – 139, 140 McDougall, Edward, 18 – 19 McGee, Willie, 245 – 246 McGrath, Diane, 176 McKay, Claude, 36 Me and Molly (Broadway show), 117 Meatpacking District (Manhattan), 185, 211 Meeropol, Abel, 229 Meeting of the “University in Exile” (photograph), 230, 231 Meir, Golda, 201 Melrose (Bronx), 30 Mesard, Harry, 20 Mesard, Lillian, 20 Mesivta Torah Vodaath (Brooklyn), 69 Messinger, Ruth, 218 – 219 Methodist Hospital (Brooklyn), 179 Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, 16, 134 Metropolitan Museum of Art, 139, 142 Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA), 177 Mezes, Sidney, 64 Midtown (Manhattan), 7, 73, 77 – 78 Midwood (Brooklyn), 167 – 168 Mill Basin (Brooklyn), 129 Miller, Milton, 65 – 66 Miller Art Co., Inc., 234 “mink brigade activists,” 187 Minow, Newton N., 118 Miriam Cup (Reichert), 251 – 252 Mitchell-Lama law (Limited Profit Housing Company Act, New York State, 1955), 114 Mitchell-Lama subsidies, 158 Mizrachi Jews, 17, 75 Moorish Zionist Temple of the Moorish Jews (Manhattan), 227 – 228 Morenstein, Abe, 115 Morgen Freiheit (newspaper), 16

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319

Morgenthau, Henry W., 84, 88 Morningside Heights (Manhattan), 74 Morningside Park (Manhattan), 3 Morrisania (Bronx), 17, 30 Moses, Robert, 28, 127 – 128, 131 Mosholu Parkway (Bronx), 115 Moshowitz, Israel, 108 Ms. (magazine), 194, 246 Muni, Paul (née Muni Weissenfreund), 22 Municipal Assistance Corporation, 168 Munn, James Buell, 47 Murder, Inc., 41, 97 – 98 Museum at Eldridge Street, 212 “mushroom” or “provisional” synagogues, 53 Muss, Alex, 106 Muss, Charles, 106 Muss, David, 106 Muss, Isaac, 106 Myerson, Bella, 57 Myerson, Bess, 57, 58 Myerson, Helen, 57 Myerson, Louis, 57 Myerson, Sylvia, 57 NAACP, 289n9 Naison, Mark, 121 Nassau County (New York State), 172 Nasser, Gamal Abdul, 123 National Basketball Association, 39 National Broadcasting Company (NBC), 7f5 National Committee to Secure Justice in the Rosenberg Case, 113 National Conference on Soviet Jewry (NCSJ), 202, 204, 205 National Council of Young Israel, 91 National Jewish Community Relations Advisory Council, 217 National Jewish Women’s Conference (1973), 193, 194 National Organization of Women (NOW), 187, 246 “National Scottsboro Week” teach-in (1934), 63 National Student League, 61, 63, 64, 163 National Women’s Political Caucus (NWPC), 187, 246 Negro Labor Committee, 36 Nelson, Lemrick, Jr., 220 neoconservatism, 60 Ner Tormid Society, 121 New Deal, 32, 40, 88 New Jewish Sisterhood, 191 New Left, 63, 245

320

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Index

New Lots (Brooklyn), 17 New School for Social Research, 231 New York (magazine), 3, 218 New York Age (newspaper), 36 New York Board of Rabbis, 82 New York City, xi – xxii, 116 – 121, 152 – 155; 1830s and 1840s, xvi; 1920s, 11; 1950s, 121; 1970s, xii; as capital of American Jews, xxii; as a city of promises, xiii – xv, 37, 155, 181, 185, 215, 222, 252 – 253; colonial era, xiii, xv, xxi; consolidation of, xviii; cultural life, 116 – 120; diamond industry, 167; discrimination in, xi; early 20th century, xviii – xix; fiscal crisis, xix – xx, 152 – 153; garment industry (see garment industry); government hiring practices, 31; Jewish American culture, xii; Jewish population, 215; manufacturing jobs, 153 – 154, 169; multiethnic diversity, xi; nonprofit foundations, 179; Panics of 1857 and 1873, xvi – xvii; per capita income, xi; population, 10; post – World War II era, xi – xii; race riots (1964), 135 – 136; racial conflict in city’s politics, 146; real estate boom (1980s), 170; rent control laws, 153; republicanism, xv – xvi; Revolutionary era, xv; security in, xi; service industries, 169; social welfare benefits, xii; “subway suburbs,” 11, 20; transportation infrastructure, xiv, xviii; urban decline (see urban decline); vacancy decontrol law (1971), 154; white collar crime, 171 – 172 New York City Commission on Human Rights, 133 New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA), 131 New York City Skyline (Weinberg), 253 New York College of Dentistry, 24 New York Havurah, 189 – 190, 191, 193 New York Herald Tribune (newspaper), 41 “New York Intellectuals,” 60 New York Jewish Education Committee, 79 – 80 New York Philharmonic, 117 – 118, 121 New York Times (newspaper): ads for houses, rentals, 157; Crown Heights riot/rebellion (1991), 181; Emergency Committee ads, 77; gentrification in Chelsea, 170; Holocaust stories, 81 – 82; Lower East Side poverty, 213; on need for affordable housing, 22 – 23; Poster, William, 41; race riots (1964), 136; Rosenthal, A. M., 48; suburban apartments, 105

New Zionist Organization, 74 Newsweek (magazine), 75 Nissenson, Hugh, 216 Nixon, Richard, 204 Nochlin, Linda, 250 Normal Heart, The (Kramer), 249 Novogrodsky, Chanah, 25 Novogrodsky, David, 24, 25 Novogrodsky, Esther, 24 Novogrodsky, Sarah (née Lifschitz), 24 – 25 Novogrodsky, Shimon, 25 Novogrodsky, Solomon, 24 – 25, 51 NYU (New York University): College of Arts and Pure Science, 47; College of Commerce and Education, 47; Great Depression, 47; Jewish students, 46 – 47, 112, 262n16; Jewish studies, 214; Magdoff, Harry, 61; Salk, Jonas, 51; Schayes, Adolph (Dolph), 39; tuition and fees (1923 – 1924), 262n19; Washington Square College, 47 Ocean Hill – Brownsville public school district (Brooklyn), 137 – 143; anti-Semitism, 137; black-Jewish tensions, intensification of, 139 – 140; Bundy, McGeorge, 137 – 138; Campbell, Les, 139; confrontation photograph, 126; dismissal of 19 teachers and administrators (1968), 138 – 139; Ford Foundation, 137 – 138; Glasser, Ira, 141; Hentoff, Nat, 141; Jewish community, divisions within, 140 – 143; Jewish teachers, young, 140 – 141; Jewish universalism to parochialism, 143; Kahane, Meir, 141 – 142; Lindsay, John V., 137 – 138; McCoy, Rhody G., 138 – 139, 140; racism, 137; Shanker, Albert, 138, 140; state trusteeship, 139; strikes by teachers, 139; United Federation of Teachers (UFT), 137 – 143; WBAI-FM, 139, 141 Ocean Parkway Jewish Center (Brooklyn), 56 Office of Price Administration (OPA), 85 Office of War Information, 240 Ohio State University, 46 Olmsted, Frederick Law, Jr., 19 Omnibus (television series), 118 On the Town (musical), 119 “Open Admissions” policy, 163 – 164 Orange County (New York State), 166 Orchard Beach (Bronx), 43 Orchard Street (Lower East Side), 17, 212 Orthodox Judaism, 68 – 70; Americanization, 68, 167; bat mitzvahs, 193, 195 – 196; Bensonhurst (Brooklyn), 69; Boro Park

Index (Brooklyn), 215; Brooklyn, 68 – 69, 123 – 124; Brooklyn College night students, 69; Brownsville (Brooklyn), 69; cooperation with non-Orthodox and nonreligious Jews, 82; Crown Heights (Brooklyn), 215; day schools, modern, 108 – 110; Dinkins, David, 178; feminism, 193, 195 – 196; Forest Hills (Queens), 70; Harlem (Manhattan), 2; Jewish education, 69; Jewish Theological Seminary of America (JTS), 69; Potok’s The Chosen, 69 – 70; rabbis’ march on Washington (1943), 92; Upper West Side (Manhattan), 195 – 196; Washington Heights (Manhattan), 74; West Bronx, 111; Williamsburg (Brooklyn), 68 – 69, 215; women’s tefillah prayer service, 195 – 196; Yeshiva College, 69, 74 Oxford Oath, 65, 83 painters: Bernstein, Theresa, 225 – 226; Shahn, Ben, 238, 239; Soyer, Moses, 232 – 233; Weinberg, Jonathan, 252, 253 Palestine, 96 – 99; British White Paper (1939), 78; support for Jewish commonwealth in, 78, 96 – 99; Zionist fighters, arming and fund-raising for, 96 – 97 “Palestinianism,” 66 – 67 Park Crest Terrace (Queens), 105 Park East Synagogue (Manhattan), 206 Park Slope (Brooklyn), 30 Parkchester (Bronx): African Americans, 134 – 135, 159; homefront war efforts, 84, 89 – 90; Irish Americans, 134, 159; Italian Americans, 159; Jewish migration to Co-op City, 158 – 159 Parker, Jack, 106 Parker Towers (Queens), 100, 105 – 106 Parkmore Realty Corporation, 105 Passover (1943), 85 – 86, 93 Passover (1948), 96 Pelham Parkway (Bronx), 135 Pennsylvania State University, 46 Pepsodent tooth paste, 231 Perkins, Frances, 88 Peter Cooper Village (Manhattan), 134 photographers: Collins, Marjory, 238 – 240; Goldin, Nan, 237, 248, 249; Stryker, Roy, 240; VanDerZee, James, 227 – 228; Voloj, Julian, 223 – 224, 252; Weegee (Arthur Fellig), 235 – 237; Wurts Bros., 226 Picon, Molly, 22 Pilsudski, Josef, 26

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Pitkin Avenue (Brooklyn), xvii, 41 PM (newspaper), 237 Pogrebin, Letty Cottin, 194 – 195, 246, 282n6 Polish Jews, 26, 27, 40 post – World War I era, 9 – 13 post – World War II era: Bronx, 110 – 111; Forest Hills (Queens), 108; Grand Concourse (Bronx), 110 – 111; Hasidic Jews, 70; housing development, 114; Jewish immigrants, 70, 122 – 125; New York City, xi – xii Postcolonial Kinderhood (Reichek), 250 Poster, William, 41 – 42, 55 Potok, Chaim, 67, 69 – 70 poverty: Boro Park (Brooklyn), 213; Hasidic Jews, 166, 175, 213; Lower East Side (Manhattan), 212 – 213; Williamsburg (Brooklyn), 213 Powell, James, 135 Preisand, Sally, 193 printing industry, collapse of, 152 Procaccino, Mario, 145, 146 Promised City, The (Rischin), xiii – xiv “provisional” synagogues, 53 public beaches, 43 Public School 9 (Bronx), 33 Public School 79 (Bronx), 40 Public School 91 (Bronx), 40 public schools: busing, 157; Canarsie (Brooklyn), 157; District 10 (Bronx), 157; Hebrew language classes, 68; Irish Americans, 40; Italian Americans, 40; Jewish New Yorkers’ embrace of, xiv; Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur holidays, 122, 253. See also Ocean Hill – Brownsville public school district; school teachers Puerto Ricans: 1969 N.Y.C. mayoral election, 147; “El Barrio” (East Harlem), 17; Grand Concourse (Bronx), 144; West Side Story (musical), 120 Queens, 103 – 110; 1965 N.Y.C. mayoral election, 145; 1969 N.Y.C. mayoral election, 146; housing development (post – World War I), 10; Israeli immigrants, 156; Jewish identification, 107 – 108; Jewish migration from Brownsville, 129; Jewish migration from Lower East Side, 15; Jewish population, xx, xxii, 103 – 105; Jews’ social attitudes, 143 – 144; residential discrimination against Jews, 18 – 20; reverse Jewish migration from suburbs, 107; subway connections to Manhattan, 11

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Index

Queens Boulevard, 105, 149 Queens College, 164 Queensboro Corporation, 18 – 19 Rabbi Jacob Joseph School, 25 Rabbinical Assembly, 191 Rabin, Leah, 188 Rabin, Yitzhak, 204 race riots (1964), 135 – 136 racism in Ocean Hill – Brownsville public school district (Brooklyn), 137. See also residential discrimination radio and television industry, 116 – 117, 118 Ramaz School (Manhattan), 108 – 109, 207 Ratner’s (Manhattan), 212 Reagan, Ronald, 207 real estate boom (1980s), 170 Reconstructionist (publication), 79 Reconstructionist Judaism, 192 Red Cross, 87 Red Scare (1919), 46 “redlining,” 132, 154 Reed, Lou, 246 – 247 Reform Judaism: Hebrew Union College, 193; Szold, Henrietta (“Shulamith”), 192 – 193; Tremont Temple (Bronx), 17 – 18; Wise, Stephen S., 74; women rabbis, 193 Rego Park (Queens), 103 – 105, 106 Reichek, Elaine, 250 – 251 Reichert, Amy Klein, 251 – 252 rent control laws, 153 Republican Party, 54 residential discrimination: against African Americans by Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, 134; against African Americans in Washington Heights, 15; against Jews in Bronxville (New York), 102 – 103; against Jews in Brooklyn Heights, 30; against Jews in Forest Hills, 19 – 20, 28, 30; against Jews in Jackson Heights, 18 – 19, 30; against Jews in Park Avenue buildings, 30; against Jews in Park Slope, 30; against Jews in Riverdale, 30; “redlining,” 132, 154; urban renewal, 131 Response (journal), 191 Revisionist Zionists, 74, 82, 96 Rhoda House (Bronx), 105 Ribicoff, Abraham, 198 Richter, Glen, 200, 202, 203, 208 Ridgewood (Queens), 27, 97 Rischin, Moses, xiii – xiv Rise of David Lavinsky, The (Cahan), 13

Riskin, Steven, 195 Riverdale (Bronx): 1969 N.Y.C. mayoral election, 146; 1989 N.Y.C. mayoral election, 178; as affluent preserve, 213; Dinkins, David, 178; Jewish migration from Co-op City, 159; Jewish migration from East Tremont Avenue, 128; Jewish population, 128, 144; residential discrimination against Jews, 30 Robbins, Jerome, 119 Robinson, Frederick B., 61, 65 Rockaways, the (Queens), 43, 146 Rockefeller University, 51 Rockland County (New York State), 166 Rogers, Richard, 45 Romanian Jews, 26, 40 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano: affection for, 40; Coughlin, Charles, 32; Delman, J. David, 92; on Holocaust perpetrators, 77; immigration quotas, 238; Jewish advisors, 88; Jewish New Yorkers, 88; lynchings, response to, 229, 289n9; Socialism/Socialists, 88; Wise, Stephen S., 74, 87 – 88; Zion, Sidney, 182 Rose, Alex, 88 Rose, Billy, 77 Rosenbaum, Yankel, 179 – 181 Rosenberg, Ethel, 229, 240 – 241 Rosenberg, Julius, 59, 229, 240 – 241 Rosenberg, Michael, 229 Rosenberg, Robert, 229 Rosenbergs Lie in State (photograph), 241 Rosenman, Samuel, 88 Rosenthal, A. M., 48 Rosenthal, Ida Cohen, 243 ROTC (Reserve Officers Training Corps), 63 – 66 “Rudycats,” 216, 217 Rushkoff, Douglas, 252 Russell Sage Foundation, 19 Russian Jews, 27, 40, 155 Sacks, Moishe, 165, 174 Sakharov, Andrei, 204 – 205 Salk, Jonas, 49, 51 – 52 “Salute to Israel” rally (1948), 98 Sam Minskoff and Sons, 105 Sarnoff, David, 75 Satmar Jews, 124, 165 – 166, 180 Scarsdale Synagogue (Westchester County, New York), 155 Schayes, Adolph (Dolph), 39 – 41, 47, 102

Index Schildkret, Lucy (later Lucy Dawidowicz), 62 – 63 Schneersohn, Joseph Isaac, 125 Schneersohn, Menachem Mendel, 125, 133 Schneiderman, Rose, 186 – 187 Schneier, Arthur, 206 Scholar, the Laborer, and the Toiler of the Soil, The (Ascalon), 235 school teachers: aspiring teachers, 63; Irish American, 31 – 32; Jewish New Yorkers, 31 – 32; United Federation of Teachers (UFT), 126. See also Ocean Hill – Brownsville public school district Schrage, Samuel, 132 – 133, 137 Schultz, George, 205 Schwartz, Barry, 115 – 116 Schwartz, Delmore, 246 Schwartz, Israel, 160 Schwartz, Louis “the Waiter,” 84 Schwartz, Maurice, 22 Schwerner, Michael, 135 Scottsboro case in Alabama, 229 sculptors: Goodelman, Aaron J., 237 – 238; Lipton, Seymour, 228 – 229 Second Avenue (Manhattan), 21 – 22 second-generation Jews: concentrations of, 30; eastern European Jews, 18; Jewish radicals, 54; Jewish religious life, 54; Mizrachi Jews, 17; Sephardic Jews, 17 Sedgwick Avenue (Bronx), 16, 58 Sephardic Jews: central European Jews, 17; post – World War II immigrants, 123 Seward Park Houses (Manhattan), 24 Shahn, Ben, 238, 242 Shanker, Albert, 138, 140, 141 Sharansky, Avital, 204, 205 – 206, 207 Sharansky, Natan, 204 – 205, 206 – 207 Sharansky Square (Bronx), 205 Shavelson, Clara Lemlich, 186 – 187 Shearith Israel (Spanish-Portuguese Synagogue) (Manhattan), xv – xvi, 82 Sholom Aleichem Houses (Bronx), 16, 29, 57 Shulamith School for Girls (Brooklyn), 67 Shultz, George, 207 Siegel, Ben “Bugsy,” 41 – 42, 97 “Silence=Death” campaign, 248, 249 Six-Day War (1967), 139, 204 Sixth Avenue Deli (Manhattan), 84 Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher and Flom, 169 Skenazy, Lenore, 224 “slave market” in Bronx, 36 Slovin, Bruce, 215

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Smith, Kate, 45 Social Problems Club (CCNY), 65 Socialism/Socialists: Abzug, Bella, 246; Bell, Daniel, 59; Bronx Park East, 29; CCNY (City College of New York), 65; Draper, Hal, 63; Hashomer Hatzair, 194; Howe, Irving, 54, 58 – 59; Myerson, Louis, 57; Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 88 Socialist Labor Party, 54 Socialist Party, 54 Soho (Manhattan), 161, 211 Sol Hurok Productions, 203 Solidarity Sunday, 202 – 203, 206 Solomon Schechter Day School (Queens), 110 Sondheim, Stephen, 119 Soundview (Bronx), 135 South Bronx: 1980s, 165; Abzug, Bella, 185; Carter visit, Jimmy, 151 – 152; elderly Jews, 165; foreign-born population, 26; JewishIrish conflict, 33; Jewish migration to Parkchester, 159; subway connections to Manhattan, 11; urban decline, 154, 174 Soviet anti-Semitism, 208 Soviet “cultural decapitation” policies, 198 Soviet Jewry, fight for, 197 – 209, 205 – 206; American Jewish Conference on Soviet Jewry (AJCSJ), 198, 202; Birnbaum, Jacob, 198 – 199; Brooklyn-Manhattan Jewish split, 197; Conference of Major Jewish Organizations, 198; Day of Solidarity (1987), 208; Dinkins, David, 177; Dobrynin meeting (1963), 198; funding, 202; Greater New York Conference on Soviet Jewry (GNYCSJ), 202, 204, 207 – 208; Heschel, Abraham Joshua, 199 – 200; human rights, 205; immigrants (1972 – 1984), 155; Israel, 201, 204; Jackson, Henry “Scoop,” 203 – 204; “Jericho March” (1965), 199; Jewish college students, 198 – 199; Jewish Defense League (JDL), 200 – 201, 202 – 203; Jewish emigration, 205, 207; Kahane, Meir, 200 – 202; “Leningrad 11,” 200 – 201; “Let our people go” (poster), 246, 247; Lubavitchers, 203; militancy, 202 – 203; National Conference on Soviet Jewry (NCSJ), 202, 204, 205; Schultz, George, 205; Sharansky, Avital, 204, 205 – 206; Sharansky, Natan, 204 – 205, 206 – 207; Solidarity Sunday, 202 – 203, 208; Soviet arrests of Jews, 198; Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry, 201 – 205, 208; Washington, D.C., rally (1987), 208; Weiss, Avraham (Avi), 205 – 206

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Index

Soviet Union, collapse of, 197 Soyer, Moses, 232 – 233 Spanish-Portuguese Synagogue (Shearith Israel) (Manhattan), xv – xvi, 82 Stalin, Josef, 198 Stanton Street (Lower East Side), 21 Staten Island, 97, 215 Steinem, Gloria, 187 – 188, 194, 282n6 Stephen S. Wise Free Synagogue (Manhattan), 193 Sternberg, Berl, 155 Sternstein, Joseph, 148 – 149 “Stop Hitler Now” rally (1943), 77 Strand Building (Manhattan), 44 Street Crimes Unit, 220 Stryker, Roy, 240 Student for a Democratic Society (SDS), 245 Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry, 201 – 205; Birnbaum, Jacob, 199; founding, 199; Freedom Day Rally (1988), 184; Greater New York Conference on Soviet Jewry (GNYCSJ), 203, 208; Jackson-Vanik bill (1972), 203 – 204; “Jericho March” (1965), 199; National Conference on Soviet Jewry (NCSJ), 202; Richter, Glen, 200; Soviet Jewry, fight for, 201 – 205, 208; Weiss, Avraham (Avi), 205 Student War Council Committee (Yeshiva College), 85 Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), 163 Stuyvesant High School (Manhattan), 122 Stuyvesant Town (Manhattan), 134 suburbia: acceptance of Jewish New Yorkers, 103; children’s Jewish identity, 103 – 104; The Goldbergs (television series), 117; Jewish migration to, 102 – 103, 124, 128, 155, 156, 159, 161, 215; Jewish reverse migration to Queens, 107, 161 “subway suburbs,” 11, 20 subways: access to work, 121; “Authentic New York Transit Map,” 12; connections to Manhattan from outer boroughs, 11; IND (Independent line), 11, 20; Lenox Avenue subway, 11 Sutton Place (Manhattan), 178 Synagogue Center idea, 55 – 56, 108 Synagogue Council of America, 79, 82, 85 Syrian Jews: 1970s, 168; Bensonhurst (Brooklyn), 17, 84 – 85, 167 – 168; entrepreneurialism, 167 – 168; Flatbush (Brooklyn), 17, 167 – 168; homefront war efforts, 84 – 85, 86;

immigrants (1972 – 1984), 155; Midwood (Brooklyn), 167 – 168 Szold, Henrietta (“Shulamith”), 191 – 192 “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” (Von Tilzers), 45 Talmud Torah Mishkan Israel synagogue (Queens), 109 television industry, 116 – 117, 118 Temple Adath Israel (Bronx), 56 Temple Emanu-el (Manhattan), 142 Tenderloin District (Manhattan), 23 Tenth Man, The (Chayevsky), 116 theater: Bernstein, Leonard, 118 – 120, 142; Second Avenue (Manhattan), 21 – 22 Time (magazine), 75, 172, 218 Tin Pan Alley, 44 – 45 Tisha B’Av (national day of mourning, 1967), 199 Top Hat (film), 45 Townsend Harris High School (Manhattan, later Queens), 49 Transport Workers Union, 76 Tremont Temple (Bronx), 17 – 18, 155 Triboro Bridge and Tunnel Authority, 127 – 128 Trotyskyists, 83 Trupin, Lou, 64 Trylons (nonviolent gang), 39 – 40 Tucker, Sophie, 56 unions: African Americans, 162; “Great Revolt” (1910), 54; Jewish New Yorkers, xviii; Jewish radicals, 54; Latinos, 162; municipal unions, 168; “Uprising of the 20,000” (1909), 54 United Federation of Teachers (UFT), 126, 137 – 143 United Housing Federation, 114, 157 – 158, 159 – 160 United Jewish Appeal, 80, 171 – 172 United Nations International Women’s Decade Conference (First, 1975), 188 United Nations Victory rally (1942), 89 United Palestine Appeal, 74 United Synagogue Youth, 190 United Victory Committee of Parkchester, 89 United Workers Houses (Bronx), 16, 30 Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), 227 University Heights (Bronx), 46 University in Exile, 231 – 232

Index University of Alabama, 46 University of California – Berkeley, 163 University of Michigan, 51, 163 University of Wisconsin, 163 Upper Bronx Unemployment Council, 29 Upper East Side (Manhattan), 4, 146 Upper West Side (Manhattan): 1969 N.Y.C. mayoral election, 146; 1989 N.Y.C. mayoral election, 178; clothing manufacturers’ residences, 23 – 24; Dinkins, David, 178; Ezrat Nashim, 195; feminism, 189, 195 – 196; Friedan, Betty, 187; Jewish Center, 55; Jewish migration from Harlem, 15; Jewish migration from Lower East Side, 23 – 24; Jewish population, 213; Jewish religious life, 213 – 214; Orthodox Judaism, 195 – 196; partnership minyans, 214; Preisand, Sally, 193; as symbol of success, 14; “Turn Friday Night into Shabbos” program, 173 “Uprising of the 20,000” (1909), 54 urban decline, 151 – 161; “blockbusting,” 132; Bronx, 129, 151 – 152; Brownsville (Brooklyn), 129 – 132; corporate taxes and fees, 152; “finishers,” 154; fiscal crisis, xix – xx, 152 – 153; food processing industry, collapse of, 152; Ford, Gerald, 152; Grand Concourse (Bronx), 154; Jewish intracity migration, 156 – 161; looting, 154; Maccabees (Jewish street patrols), 132 – 133; manufacturing jobs, decline in, 152, 153 – 154; middle-class exodus, 155; printing industry, collapse of, 152; “redlining,” 132, 154; rent control laws, 153; South Bronx, 174; vacancy decontrol law (1971), 154 “urban homesteaders,” 161 urban renewal and residential discrimination, 131 Va’ad ha-Hatzala, 78, 91, 93 – 94 Va’ad ha-Hinuckh-ha-Haredi (Council of Orthodox Jewish Schools), 82 Vaad L’Pekuach Nefesh, 91 – 92 vacancy decontrol law (1971), 154 Van Cortlandt (Bronx), 15 – 16, 114 VanDerZee, James, 227 – 228 Varsity Club (CCNY), 64 Velvet Underground, 246 Victory Bulletin (newsletter), 84 – 85, 86 – 87 Vietnam War, 146, 244 – 245 Viewpoint (Young Israel of Manhattan), 91 – 92 Voloj, Julian, 223 – 224, 252

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Von Tilzers, Albert, 45 Von Tilzers, Harry, 44 – 45 Wage Earners’ League for Women Suffrage, 186 – 187 Wagner, Robert F., Jr., 49 Wagner, Robert F., Sr., 34 Wagner-Rogers Act (1939), 34 Wall Street (film), 171 Wallace, Henry, 92 War Assets Administration, 97 War Work Committee, 89 – 90 Warsaw Ghetto, 80 Washington Heights (Manhattan): 1999 blackout, 219; as “Fourth Reich,” 27; German Jews, 26 – 27, 123; housing development (post – World War I), 10 – 11; Irish Americans, 32; Jewish migration from Harlem, 15; Jewish population, 27; Orthodox Judaism, 74; residential discrimination against African Americans, 15 WBAI-FM radio, 139, 141, 142 Weegee (Arthur Fellig), 235 – 237 Weinberg, Jonathan, 252, 253 Weiner, Bert, 85 Weiss, Avraham (Avi), 196, 205 – 206, 208, 214 Weiss, Harry, 56 Weissenfreund, Muni (later Paul Muni), 22 Weitzmann, Baruch David, 79 Weizmann, Chaim, 78, 226 West Bronx, 110 – 111, 158 West End Synagogue (Manhattan), 214 West Side (Manhattan), 186 West Side Improvement Association, 35 West Side Institutional Synagogue (Manhattan), 82 West Side Story (musical), 119 – 120 West Side Tennis Club (Queens), 20 West Village (Manhattan), 173 Westchester County (New York State), 172 white collar crime, 171 – 172 Whitestone (Queens), 15, 105, 106 Wiener, Milton M., 66 Wiesel, Elie, 200 Wilkins Street (Bronx), 43 Williamsbridge Road (Bronx), 16 Williamsburg (Brooklyn): 1950s, 125; antieviction protests, 30; foreign-born population, 26; Hasidic Jews, 124 – 125; Jewish enclave, xviii; Jewish migration from Lower East Side, 15; Jewish migration to Boro Park, 124; Jewish migration to

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Williamsburg (Brooklyn) (continued ) Crown Heights, 124, 125; Orthodox Jews, 68 – 69, 215; poverty, 213; Satmar Jews, 124, 165 – 166; stability and continuity, 215 Window of a Jewish Religious Shop (Collins), 239 Wise, Stephen S.: American Jewish Congress, 74; Delman, J. David, 92; Lansky, Meyer, 98; Reform Judaism, 74; Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 74, 87 – 88; war efforts, public awareness of his, 94; Zion, Sidney, 182 WNYC radio, 80 Wolosoff, Leo, 20 women’s domestic art, 250 – 251 Women’s Strike for Peace, 186 Woodhaven (Queens), 15 Woodside (Queens), 27 Workmen’s Circle (Arbeter Ring), xviii, 54 World War I, 9 – 10, 17, 53. See also post – World War I era World War II, 77 – 84, 92 – 99; black market, 87; early postwar era, 98 – 99; Goldberg family, effect on, 94 – 95; Holocaust (see Holocaust); homefront war efforts, 84 – 89; Howe, Irving, 83 – 84; Jewish soldiers, 83, 84; Orthodox rabbis’ march on Washington (1943), 92; Passover (1943), 85 – 86, 93; “second front” policy debate, 87; “send a salami to your boy in the army,” 84; support for Jewish statehood, 77 – 84, 95 – 96; war-bond drives, 84; women’s activism, 86 – 87. See also post – World War II era World Zionist Organization, 76, 78 World’s Fair (1939), 234, 235 WPA (Works Progress Administration), 232 – 233 Wurts Bros., 226 Yale University, 46 Yankee Stadium, 151, 216 Yellowstone Boulevard (Queens), 105 – 106 Yeshiva Chaim Berlin (Brooklyn), 69 Yeshiva Chovevei Torah (Manhattan, Riverdale), 214 Yeshiva College: Commentator (student newspaper), 80 – 81; Elchanan, Isaac, 27; homefront war efforts, 85; Jewish elementary school students, 67; Orthodox Jews, 69; Orthodox Judaism, 74; Student War Council Committee, 85 Yeshiva Dov Revel (Queens), 109

Yeshiva of Central Queens, 109 – 110, 194 – 195 Yeshiva of Flatbush (Brooklyn), 67 Yeshiva Rabbi Isaac Elchanan (Manhattan), 74 Yeshivat Hadar (Manhattan), 214 Yiddish Art Theatre, 22 Yiddisher Kultur Farband, 238 Yiddishists, 16, 57 – 58, 127 Yom Kippur War (1973), 204 Yorkville (Manhattan): 1930s, 34; 1969 N.Y.C. mayoral election, 146; German-American Bund, 27, 97; German Americans, 33 – 34; Irish Americans, 34; Ramaz School, 108 – 109 “You don’t have to be Jewish” (Zieff ), 244 “You don’t have to be Jewish to oppose the war” (button), 244 Young Communist League (YCL), 59, 62 – 63 Young Israel of Co-op City (Bronx), 160 – 161, 213 Young Israel of Manhattan, 90 – 92 Young Israel of Parkchester (Bronx), 89 Young People’s Concerts, 118 – 119 Young People’s League of the United Synagogue, 68 Young Peoples’ Socialist League (YPSL), 59 Youth League Against War and Fascism, 61 yuppies, 170 – 171 “Zeyde of American Punk Rock,” 246 Zieff, Howard, 244 Zion, Sidney, 182 Zionism/Zionists, 66 – 70; Abzug, Bella, 194, 246; American Jewish Congress, 73; Arab riots in Palestine (1929), 57; Bergson, Peter, 77; Bernstein, Theresa, 226; Brooklyn, 68; Farband Houses (Bronx), 16; fundraising group, 74; Hashomer Hatzair, 194; interest in, 98; Jewish Palestine Exhibit (1939 World’s Fair), 235; Jewish youth, 68; La Guardia, Fiorello, 31; Mizrachi Jews, 75; “Palestinianism,” 66 – 67; Potok’s The Chosen, 67; proselytism, effectiveness of, 52 – 53; publicity arm, 74; Sharansky, Natan, 205; support for Jewish statehood, 95 – 96; ultimate goal, 78; UN “Zionism Is Racism” resolution (1975), 246; West Bronx, 111. See also anti-Zionism Zionist Meeting (Bernstein), 225 Zionist Organization of America, 66 Zwern, Eddie, 101 Zwern, Pauline, 101

ABOUT

THE

AUTHOR

Jeffrey S. Gurock is Libby M. Klaperman Professor of Jewish History at Yeshiva University. A prize-winning author, he has written or edited fifteen books in American Jewish history. He lives with his family in the Riverdale section of the Bronx.

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Emerging Metropolis New York Jews in the Age of Immigration, 1840 – 1920

C ITY O F PROMISES was made possible in part through the generosity of

a number of individuals and foundations. Their thoughtful support will help ensure that this work is affordable to schools, libraries, and other not-for-profit institutions. The Lucius N. Littauer Foundation made a leadership gift before a word of CITY O F PROMISES had been written, a gift that set this project on its way. Hugo Barreca, The Marian B. and Jacob K. Javits Foundation, Mr. and Mrs. Peter Malkin, David P. Solomon, and a donor who wishes to remain anonymous helped ensure that it never lost momentum. We are deeply grateful.

C I TY O F PR O M I S ES A

H ISTORY

G E NE R A L

OF

THE

E D I T O R :

JEW S

D E BORAH

O F

NEW

DASH

Y O R K

M OORE

Volume 1

Haven of Liberty New York Jews in the New World, 1654 – 1865 H o wa r d b . R o c k Volume 2

Emerging Metropolis New York Jews in the Age of Immigration, 1840 – 1920 Annie Polland and Daniel Soyer Volume 3

Jews in Gotham New York Jews in a Changing City, 1920 – 2010 Jeffrey S. Gurock Advisory Board: Hasia Diner (New York University) Leo Hershkowitz (Queens College) Ira Katznelson (Columbia University) Thomas Kessner (CUNY Graduate Center) Tony Michels (University of Wisconsin, Madison) Judith C. Siegel (Center for Jewish History) Jenna Weissman-Joselit (Princeton University) Beth Wenger (University of Pennsylvania)

CI T Y O F P R O M I S E S A HISTORY OF THE JEWS OF NEW YORK

EMERGING

METRO POLI S NEW

YORK

JEWS

IMMIGRATION,

IN

THE

AGE

OF

1840–1920

ANNIE POLLAND DANIEL SOYER

AND

WITH A FOREWORD BY

DEBORAH DASH MOORE AND W I T H A V I S U A L E S S AY B Y

DIANA L. LINDEN

a NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS ■

N E W

YO R K

A N D

L O N D O N

NEW YORK UNIVERSIT Y PRESS New York and London www.nyupress.org © 2012 by New York University All rights reserved References to Internet websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor New York University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data City of promises : a history of the Jews of New York / general editor, Deborah Dash Moore. v. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. Contents: v. 1. Haven of liberty: New York Jews in the New World, 1654 – 1865 / Howard B. Rock — v. 2. Emerging metropolis: New York Jews in the age of immigration, 1840 – 1920 / Annie Polland and Daniel Soyer — v. 3. Jews in Gotham: New York Jews in a changing city, 1920 – 2010. ISBN 978-0-8147-7632-2 (cl : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8147-4521-2 (ebook) — ISBN 978-0-8147-7692-6 (ebook) — ISBN 978-0-8147-1731-8 (boxed set : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8147-2932-8 (e-set) 1. Jews — New York (State) — New York. 2. New York (N.Y.) — Ethnic relations. I. Moore, Deborah Dash, 1946 – II. Rock, Howard B., 1944 – F128.9.J5C64 2012 305.892'40747 — dc23

2012003246

New York University Press books are printed on acid-free paper, and their binding materials are chosen for strength and durability. We strive to use environmentally responsible suppliers and materials to the greatest extent possible in publishing our books. Manufactured in the United States of America 10

9

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■ To Mike and Lily (AP)

and To the Soyer, Futterman, Chassner, and Wilson families — Jewish New Yorkers in three centuries (DS)

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CON TENTS

Foreword by Deborah Dash Moore, General Editor General Editor’s Acknowledgments Authors’ Acknowledgments ■

1 2 3 4 5 6 7

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xi xxv xxvii

Introduction: The Emerging Jewish Metropolis Neighborhood Networks “Radical Reform”: Union through Charity Moorish Manhattan Immigrant Citadels: Tenements, Shops, Stores, and Streets Capital of the Jewish World Jews at the Polls: The Rise of the Jewish Style in New York Politics Jews and New York Culture Conclusion: The Jewish Metropolis at the End of the Immigrant Era

1 11 45 73 103 137

245

Visual Essay: An Introduction to the Visual and Material Culture of New York City Jews, 1840–1920

255

173 207

Diana L. Linden

Notes Bibliography Index About the Authors

289 325 341 365

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FOR EWORD

“[O]f all the big cities,” Sergeant Milton Lehman of the Stars and Stripes affirmed in 1945, “New York is still the promised land.”1 As a returning Jewish GI, Lehman compared New York with European cities. Other Jews also knew what New York offered that made it so desirable, even if they had not served overseas. First and foremost, security: Jews could live without fear in New York. Yes, they faced discrimination, but in this city of almost eight million residents, many members of its ethnic and religious groups encountered prejudice. Jews contended with anti-Semitism in the twentieth century more than German Protestants or Irish Catholics dealt with bias, perhaps; but the Irish had endured a lot in the nineteenth century, and Jews suffered less than African Americans, Latinos, and Asian New Yorkers. And New York provided more than security: Jews could live freely as Jews. The presence of a diverse population of close to two million New York Jews contributed to their sense that “everyone was Jewish.”2 New York Jews understood that there were many ways to be Jewish. The city welcomed Jews in all their variety. New York Jews saw the city as a place where they, too, could flourish and express themselves. As a result, they came to identify with the city, absorbing its ethos even as they helped to shape its urban characteristics. When World War II ended in Europe with victory over Nazi Germany, New York’s promises glowed more brightly still. New York’s multiethnic diversity, shaped in vital dimensions by its large Jewish population, shimmered as a showplace of American democratic distinctiveness, especially vis-à-vis Europe. In contrast to a continent that had become a vast slaughterhouse, where millions of European Jews had been ruthlessly murdered with industrial efficiency, New York glistened as a city Jews could and did call their home in America. The famous skyline had defined urban cosmopolitanism in the years after World War I. Now the city’s thriving ethnic neighborhoods — Jewish and Catholic, African American and Puerto Rican, Italian and Irish — came to represent modern urban culture. New York’s economy responded robustly to demands of war production. By the end of hostilities, its per capita income exceeded the national average by 14 percent.

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But as a poster city for immigration, with a majority population composed of immigrants and their children, the city had to contend with negative perceptions. Considered undesirable by many Americans, Jews and other foreigners in the city contributed to impressions that New York seemed less American than other cities with large percentages of native-born residents.3 As the city flourished during and after the war, it maintained its political commitments to generous social welfare benefits to help its poorest residents. Jews advocated for these policies, supporting efforts to establish a liberal urban legacy. In modeling a progressive and prosperous multiethnic twentiethcentury American city, New York demonstrated what its Jews valued. Versions of Jewish urbanism played not just on the political stage but also on the streets of the city’s neighborhoods. Its expressions could be found as well in New York’s centers of cultural production. By the middle of the twentieth century, no city offered Jews more than New York. It nourished both celebration and critique. New York gave Jews visibility as individuals and as a group. It provided employment and education, inspiration and freedom, fellowship and community. Jews reciprocated by falling in love with the city, its buildings’ hard angles and perspectives, its grimy streets and harried pace. But by the 1960s and ’70s, Jews’ love affair with the city soured. For many of the second generation who grew up on New York’s sidewalks, immersed in its babel of languages and cultural syncretism, prosperity dimmed their affection for the working-class urban world of their youth. Many of them aspired to suburban pleasures of home ownership, grass and trees that did not have to be shared with others in public parks. Yet New York City remained the wellspring of Jewish American culture for much of the century, a resource of Jewishness even for those living thousands of miles west of the Hudson River. Jews had not always felt free to imagine the city as their special place. Indeed, not until mass immigration from Europe piled up their numbers, from the tens of thousands to the hundreds of thousands, had Jews laid claim to New York and influenced its politics and culture. Its Jewish population soared from five hundred thousand at the turn of the twentieth century to 1.1 million before the start of World War I. On the eve of World War II, Jews, over a quarter of New York’s residents, ranked as the largest ethnic group.4 Demography both encouraged many outsiders to perceive New York as a Jewish city and underwrote local cultural productions, such as a thriving theater scene, a

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flourishing popular music business, and extensive publishing in several languages. Jews were used to living as a minority in Europe and the Middle East. New York offered life without a majority population — without one single ethnic group dominating urban society. Now Jews could go about their business, much of it taking place within ethnic niches, as if they were the city’s predominant group. When and in what sense did New York become a city of promises for Jews? Certainly not in the colonial era. During that period, seeds for future promises were planted, most importantly political, economic, and religious rights. While New York’s few hundred Jews lived in the shadow of far more prosperous Jewish communities in London and Amsterdam, New York Jewish men enjoyed citizenship rights and responsibilities that their peers in London could only envy. These rights gradually led New York Jews to emerge from a closed synagogue society and to participate with enthusiasm in revolutionary currents sweeping the colonies. Jews in New York absorbed formative ideas regarding human rights; they tasted freedom and put their lives on the line for it during the Revolution. In the decades that followed, they incorporated ideals of the American Enlightenment into their Jewish lives. Sometime during the nineteenth century, these changes attracted increasing attention from European Jews. New York began to acquire a reputation as a destination in itself. Arriving from Europe at Castle Garden, increasing numbers of Jewish immigrants decided to stay. New York’s bustling streets enticed them, so they put off riding west or south to peddle or settle. Sometimes, older brothers made that choice, as did Jonas and Louis Strauss, who sent their younger brother Levi to the West Coast via steamship in 1853 to open a branch of their New York City dry-goods firm. Levi Strauss did better, perhaps, than they expected when he went into manufacturing copper-riveted denim work pants after the Civil War.5 But such a move into garment manufacturing from selling dry goods and, especially, used clothing had already taken root in New York prior to the war. It formed the basis of an industry that became the city’s largest, and more than any other, it made New York the city of promises. In 1962, the historian Moses Rischin published his pioneering book, The Promised City: New York’s Jews, 1870 – 1914. Rischin aimed to “identify those currents of human and institutional vitality central to the American urban experience that converged on the Lower East Side in the era of the great Jewish migration just as New York emerged as the nation’s and the world’s most

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dynamic metropolis.”6 The interlocking themes of Jewish immigration from eastern Europe and the rise of New York as a “city of ambition” led Rischin to cast his account as a “revolutionary transformation” not only in American urban history but also in Jewish history.7 Rischin saw a universal paradigm of modernization unfolding in the very particularistic experiences of New York Jews. His vision of democratic urban community remains relevant to contemporary scholars. What did the city promise? First, a job. Close to half of all immigrants sewed clothing in hundreds of small-scale sweatshops that disguised an everburgeoning industry that soon became one of the nation’s most important. Second, a place to live. True, the overcrowded Lower East Side bulged with residents, even its modern tenements straining to accommodate a density of Jewish population that rivaled Bombay. Yet by the early twentieth century, bridges to Brooklyn and rapid transit to Harlem and the Bronx promised improvements: fresh air, hot and cold running water, even a private toilet and bathroom. Third, food. Jewish immigrants had not starved in Europe, but New York’s abundance changed their diets and attitudes toward food and its simple pleasures. In New York, a center of the nation’s baking industry, Jews could enjoy a fresh roll and coffee each morning for pennies. Fourth, clothing. It did not take long, especially laboring in the garment industry, for Jews to trade their old-world clothes for the latest ready-made styles. Thus properly attired, they looked and felt like modern men and women, able and willing to make their way.8 Such promises might be quotidian, but they opened Jews’ eyes to other more important ones. Young Jewish immigrants embraced the city’s promise of free public education, from elementary school to secondary school, all the way through college. Only a handful of Jewish immigrants in the nineteenth century and years before World War I ever managed to take advantage of such a magnificent offer. Although a family economy that privileged sons over daughters when decisions about post-elementary education had to be made and costs of forgoing income from teenaged children often required Jews to go to work and not attend school, increasingly Jews flocked to the city’s free schools. Some immigrants, especially women, thought the city promised freedom to choose a spouse, though matchmakers also migrated across the ocean. Still others rejoiced in what they imagined was a promise of uncensored language: written and spoken, published and on stage, in Yiddish, Hebrew,

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German, Ladino, and English. Some conceived of the city’s rough democracy as holding a promise of solidarity among working men and women, while a significant number demanded extension of civil and voting rights to women. Then there were more ambiguous promises. Did New York offer Jews a chance to live without a formal, legally constituted Jewish community? Did it suggest that Jews no longer needed to practice Jewish rituals or observe the Sabbath? Some Jewish immigrants thought they could leave behind old-world ways of thinking and acting; they secularized their Jewish lives, often starting the process in Europe even before they emigrated. Others fashioned ways of being Jewish, both secular and religious, in tune with New York’s evolving cultures. Both groups identified their own visions of what it meant to be Jewish in America with New York itself. That New York City bloomed with such promises would have been hard to anticipate in 1654. Then the ragged seaport only reluctantly welcomed its first contingent of miserable Jewish migrants. In fact, not receiving permission to settle, Jews had to petition to stay, to live and work in the outpost. They agreed to practice their religion in private even as they participated in civic culture. When the British turned New Amsterdam into New York, they accepted these arrangements, giving Jews unprecedented legal rights. Here lay hints of future promises. Gradually the British increased opportunities for public religious expression and extended to Jewish men civil rights, including citizenship, the right to vote, and the right to hold office. When Jews founded their first congregation, they called it Shearith Israel (Remnant of Israel), an apt name for the handful living in a colonial town far from European centers of Jewish life. Yet during the eighteenth century, Jews integrated into the fabric of New York life. They faced challenges of identifying as Jews within a free society. As the first to enjoy such political freedoms, they struggled to balance assimilation with Jewish distinctiveness. By the time of the Revolution, many New York Jews felt deeply connected to their city and fellow American patriots, enough to flee the British occupation for Philadelphia. The end of the war marked a new democratic consciousness among New York Jews who returned to rebuild their city and community. A democratic ethos pervaded Jewish urban life in the new republic, opening possibilities for individual and collective ambition as well as cooperation. This republicanism changed how Jews organized themselves religiously and how they imagined their opportunities. Shearith Israel incorporated and

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drafted its own constitution, modeled on the federal example. Republicanism animated women, inspiring them to establish charities to help succor the poor. Once Jewish immigration brought sufficient ethnic and economic diversity to New York in the 1830s and 1840s, Jews started to build a different type of community. They forged bonds based on intimacy, gender, shared backgrounds, common aspirations, and urgent necessities. Jewish religious life became increasingly diverse, competitive, and strident. Democracy without an established religion fostered creativity and experimentation. Congregations multiplied in the city, but most Jews chose not to join one, despite variety ranging from Orthodox to Reform. The city saw a fierce battle between proponents of orthodoxy and advocates of reform. These debates engaged Jews deeply but did not lead the majority to affiliate. Still, increasingly synagogue buildings formed part of the cityscape, an indication of Jewish presence. Democratic freedoms permitted a new type of urban Jewish life to emerge. Lacking formal communal structures, Jews innovated and turned to other forms of organization as alternatives. They established fraternal orders and literary societies, seeking a means to craft connections in a rapidly growing and bewildering city. Yet soon they multiplied these activities as well. Pleas for charity and education, hospitals and libraries, mobilized Jewish New Yorkers. With the extension of the franchise, more Jewish men acquired the right to vote, irrespective of their economic situation, encouraging them to enter political debates with enthusiasm. They paid attention to events overseas affecting fellow Jews, especially examples of anti-Semitism, and tried to convince the president to help. New York Jews mastered the arts of petition and protest. They took sides as individuals in election cycles, first between Federalists and Jeffersonians, later between Democrats and Whigs, and finally between Democrats and Republicans. Domestic issues divided Jews; even the question of slavery found supporters and opponents. Rabbis debated the subject in pulpit and press until the Civil War ended their polemics and both sides rallied to the Union cause. Politics necessarily pushed Jews into public consciousness; non-Jews noticed them. Prejudice began to appear in social life, and stereotypes started to circulate in the press. Yet Jewish New Yorkers were hardly the retiring sort, and many gave as good as they got. Jewish immigrants readily found employment, entering the city’s expanding economic marketplace as they carefully tested its promises of personal fulfillment. Although the Panics of 1857 and 1873 threw thousands out of work,

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during normal times, Jews coped with capitalist volatilities. Many gravitated to small-scale commerce and craft production. Men and women both worked and drew on family resources, especially the labor of their children, to help make ends meet. Jews saved regularly to withstand seasonal swings in employment. Within the city’s diversifying economy, they located ethnic niches that became occupational ladders of advancement for many. Some of the merchants trading in old clothes around Chatham Street initiated manufacturing of cheap goods. A garment industry took shape; it received a big boost with demand for uniforms in the Civil War. As the industry grew, its need for workers increased steadily, employing an ever-greater proportion of Jewish immigrants to the city. Small shops and a competitive contracting system continued to dominate the industry. Despite miserable conditions, the system tempted many workers with a promise of self-employment. Taking a risk, some immigrants borrowed money, often from relatives and fellow immigrants from the same European town, to supplement meager savings. Then they plunged into contracting, trying with a new design idea to secure prosperity. As often as not, they failed, falling back into the laboring class. But success stories trumped failures; they stood as reminders that the city had fulfilled its promise. Merchants and peddlers, who occupied another popular Jewish economic niche, viewed the rise of department stores as an urban achievement. These commercial emporiums proffered a magical array of goods under one roof and represented the pinnacle of success for local hardware-store owners or dry-goods shopkeepers. Retail establishments proliferated around the city as it grew; Jewish entrepreneurship flourished on local shopping streets in the Bronx and Brooklyn. Pitkin Avenue in Brownsville and Fordham Road in the Bronx could not rival Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue or even Fourteenth Street. But they provided a measure of prosperity and independence to Jewish merchants, enough so that they could enjoy some of the perquisites of middle-class living, such as sending one’s sons and even one’s daughters to high school and college. Mobility came in many forms, and often immigrant Jews achieved economic and social mobility first through business and then through education. New York’s explosive growth at the turn of the twentieth century produced radical social movements based on class struggle and politics. For many Jewish immigrants, becoming a small manufacturer paled beside a larger vision of a just society, one without workers living in overcrowded, filthy tenements, exposed to disease, and wracked by despair. Hedging their bets, they dreamed of

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becoming capitalists even as they sought in socialism better living conditions, fair wages, and reasonable working hours. Socialism as a utopian ideal promised equality, an economic system that took from each according to his or her ability and returned to everybody whatever he or she needed. Even some Jewish capitalists subscribed to such an ideal. But on a pragmatic level, socialism appealed to Jewish workers for its alternatives to unrestrained capitalist exploitation. Paths to socialism led through union organizing, the polling booth, fraternalism, and even cooperative housing. Jewish immigrants embraced them all. They forged vibrant garment-workers unions, as well as unions of bakers and plumbers, teachers and pharmacists. They voted for Socialist candidates, sending Meyer London in 1914 to represent the Lower East Side in Congress. They organized the Workmen’s Circle, initially in 1892 as a mutualaid society and then in 1900 as a multibranch fraternal order in which they could socialize with fellow workers and receive health and social welfare benefits not provided by a wealthy but stingy city government. And after World War I ended, New York Jews pushed for legislation that would allow them to build cooperative housing projects, so that they could enjoy living in decent apartments together with other Jewish workers. These examples of democratic community radically reshaped the city and contributed to its progressive commitments even as Jewish struggles for social justice empowered them both individually and as a group. For several centuries, until the beginning of the twentieth, most New York Jews lived in Lower Manhattan, with smaller numbers residing in Williamsburg and Bedford, in the city of Brooklyn. The consolidation of New York with Brooklyn and the creation of a city of five boroughs, including the Bronx, Queens, and Staten Island, stimulated construction of subways and bridges which expanded opportunities for Jewish immigrants to leave the constricted quarters of the Lower East Side. Once they started to move, only the Great Depression, discrimination, and wartime constraints made Jews pause. New neighborhoods held out hopes of fresh beginnings. Adjusting to the strangeness of a neighborhood invited ways to reimagine one’s relationship to New York City. Jews adopted different perspectives on themselves and their city as they exchanged views out kitchen windows. Modern tenements, with steam heat, hot and cold running water in the kitchen sink, and an icebox, proclaimed a sense of accomplishment worth the pain of dislocation produced by immigration. Modern apartment buildings with parquet floors, windows in

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every room, and the latest conveniences announced a form of success. It did not matter that these apartments were rented; home ownership did not rank high on Jewish New Yorkers’ requirements for either the good life or economic security — better to be able to catch the express train and in ten minutes travel two stops on the subway to reach the Midtown garment district than to own a house in the suburbs with a commute of an hour to work each day. And renting let Jews move as their finances fluctuated, freeing funds for other purposes. New York Jews committed themselves to a wide array of neighborhoods, reflecting different desires. Did one wish for a neighborhood filled with modern synagogues and kosher butcher shops, bakeries, and delicatessens? There was a range of choices based on how much rent one was willing to pay. Did one seek a lively center of radicalism where socialism was considered “right wing” in comparison to “left wing” communism, an area filled with union activities, cultural events, and places to debate politics? A slightly narrower number of neighborhoods fit the bill. Did one yearn to speak Yiddish or German or Ladino or Russian, to find traces of the old home in familiar styles of shopping and praying? Neighborhoods, not just a block or two but a cluster of them, catered to those who yearned for what they had left behind in Europe or the Middle East. Did one seek a yeshiva for sons and eventually for daughters, as well as intimate congregations for daily study and prayer? New York made room for these as well. In all of them, Jews had neighbors who were not Jewish, but that mattered less than the neighbors who were Jewish. Jews lived next door to other white ethnics, as well as to African Americans, and, after World War II, Puerto Ricans. While most Jews tolerated their non-Jewish neighbors, economic competition, national and international politics, and religious prejudice ignited conflict. An uneasy coexistence among neighbors characterized many New York neighborhoods. Despite this diversity of residential neighborhoods, Jews stayed in an area usually only for a generation. New neighborhoods beckoned constantly; children moved away from parents; parents lost money or made money. Primarily renters, unlike other groups, Jews did not remain committed for long to a neighborhood. They were ready to move elsewhere in the city, to try something different. Such was New York’s promise of community for Jews. New York Jews began to leave their city in the 1960s, a process that continued for the rest of the century. The largest decline in Jewish population occurred in the 1970s when the city’s fiscal crisis arrived, just in time to welcome

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Abe Beame, New York’s first Jewish mayor. As Jews departed, African Americans and Puerto Ricans moved into the city in ever-greater numbers. By the mid-1950s, a million African Americans lived in New York. After liberalization of immigration laws in 1965, an increasingly diverse array of immigrants from Asia, especially China, and also from the Caribbean, Latin America, and Africa arrived in New York. Jewish immigrants figured among them, most prominently from the Soviet Union; these new immigrants brought some of the same drive and energy that had made New York a city of promises a hundred years earlier. At the start of the twenty-first century, New York still lacked a majority population. In contemporary ethnic calculus, Jews made up a significant percentage of white New Yorkers. But whites constituted a minority in the city, hence Jews’ overall percentage of the population declined. Most Jews were college educated; many had advanced degrees. Having overcome occupational discrimination that endured into the 1960s, Jews held jobs in real estate, finance, publishing, education, law, and medicine in this postindustrial city. They still congregated in neighborhoods, but Queens attracted more Jews than the Bronx did. They still worked in commerce, usually as managers of large stores rather than as owners of small ones. New York Jews still debated how to observe Jewish rituals and holidays. Most declined to join a congregation, yet many retained a consciousness of being Jewish. Often awareness of Jewish differences grew out of family bonds; for some, their sense of Jewishness flowed from work or neighborhood or culture or politics. A visible minority rigorously observed the strictures of Judaism, and their presence gave other Jews a kind of yardstick by which to judge themselves. Despite Jews’ greatly reduced numbers, the city still honored Jewish holy days by adjusting its mundane rhythms. New York Jews knew they lived in American Jews’ capital city; the cluster of national Jewish organizations announced this fact. These organizations, able to mobilize effective protests or to advocate for a cause, focused on problems facing Jews throughout the world. Jewish cultural creativity also endured along with effervescent, experimental, multiethnic commitments to new forms of democratic urban community. City of Promises portrays the history of Jews in New York City from 1654 to the present. Its three volumes articulate perspectives of four historians. In the first volume, Howard Rock argues that the first two centuries of Jewish presence in the city proved critical to the development of New York Jews. He

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sees an influential template in communal structures created by colonial Jews and elaborated in the nineteenth century by Jewish immigrants from central Europe. Rock emphasizes the political freedom and economic strength of colonial and republican Jews in New York. He shows that democratic religious and ethnic community represented an unusual experiment for Jews. Using American political models, Jews in New York innovated. They developed an expansive role for an English-language Jewish press as a vehicle for collective consciousness; they introduced fraternal societies that secularized religious fellowship; they crafted independent philanthropic organizations along gendered lines; they discussed the pros and cons of reforming Judaism; and they passionately debated politics. They were the first American Jews to demonstrate how political and economic freedoms were integral to Jewish communal life. Although many of them arrived as immigrants themselves, they also pointed a path for future migrants who confronted the city’s intoxicating and bewildering modern world. In so doing, these eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Jews laid the foundations for the development of a robust American Jewish community in New York. In the second volume, Annie Polland and Daniel Soyer describe the process by which New York emerged as a Jewish city, produced by a century of mass migration of Jews from central and eastern Europe as well as from the Middle East. Focusing on the urban Jewish built environment — its tenements and banks, its communal buildings and synagogues, its department stores and settlement houses — the authors convey the extraordinary complexity of Jewish immigrant society in New York. The theme of urban community runs like a thread through a century of mass migration beginning in 1840. Polland and Soyer revise classic accounts of immigration, paying attention to Jewish interactions in economic, social, religious, and cultural activities. Jews repeatedly seek to repair fissures in their individual and collective lives caused by dislocation. Their efforts to build connections through family and neighborhood networks across barriers of class and gender generated a staggering array of ethnic organizations, philanthropic initiatives, and political and religious movements. Despite enormous hardship and repeated failures, Jewish immigrants in New York developed sufficient institutional resilience to articulate a political vision of social solidarity and reform. New York Jews also stepped forward into national leadership positions by establishing organizations that effectively rallied American Jews on behalf of those still suffering in Europe.

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New York City became the capital of American Jews in these years and the largest Jewish city in history. In telling the story of twentieth-century New York Jews in the third volume of the series, Jeffrey S. Gurock looks to the neighborhood, the locale of community and the place where most Jews lived their lives. Jews liked their local community and appreciated its familiar warmth. But New York Jews also faced demands for political action on behalf of a transnational Jewish world. During the crucial decade from 1938 to 1948, New York Jews debated what course of action they should take. How should they balance domestic needs with those of European Jews? World War II and the Holocaust demonstrated the contrasts between Jews in New York and Jews in Europe. Gurock shows how Jewish neighborhoods spread across the boroughs. He describes Jewish settlement in Queens after World War II, illuminating processes of urban change. Ethnic-group conflict and racial antagonism left deep scars despite efforts to overcome prejudice and discrimination. New York Jews were found on both sides of the barricades; each decade produced a fresh conflagration. Yet Jewish New Yorkers never ceased to lead movements for social change, supporting women’s rights as well as freedom for Soviet Jewry. New York City retained its preeminence as the capital of American Jews because of deep roots in local worlds. These urban neighborhoods, Gurock argues, nourish creative and unselfconscious forms of Jewishness. Each volume contains a visual essay by art historian Diana L. Linden. These essays interpret Jewish experiences. Linden examines diverse objects, images, and artifacts. She suggests alternative narratives drawn from a record of cultural production. Artists and craftspeople, ordinary citizens and commercial firms provide multiple perspectives on the history of Jews in New York. Her view runs as a counterpoint and complement to the historical accounts. Each visual presentation can be read separately or in conjunction with the history. The combination of historical analysis and visual representation enriches the story of Jews in New York City. In the first essay, Linden emphasizes the foreignness and loneliness of being Jewish in the colonial and republican periods, even as Jews integrated themselves into Christian society. They were the first to create a new identity as “American Jews.” The second visual essay chronicles the challenges of navigating a rapidly expanding city. It explores contrasts of rich and poor. Jews in immigrant New York fashioned new charitable, educational, and cultural institutions as they established the city as the capital of the

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American Jewish world. The third visual essay takes as its theme New York Jews in popular American imagination. It presents many meanings and identities of “New York Jew” over the course of the twentieth century and the beginning years of the twenty-first century. These different viewpoints on Jews in New York City situate their history within intersecting themes of urban growth, international migration, political change, economic mobility, religious innovation, organizational complexity, cultural creativity, and democratic community. Jews participated in building the Empire City by casting their lot with urbanism, even as they struggled to make New York a better place to live, work, and raise a family. Their aspirations changed New York and helped to transform it into a city of promises, some fulfilled, some pending, some beckoning new generations. Deborah Dash Moore

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GENERAL

EDITOR’S

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

All books are collaborative projects, but perhaps none more than this three-volume history of Jews in New York City. The eminent historians directly involved in the project, Jeffrey S. Gurock, Annie Polland, Howard Rock, Daniel Soyer, and art historian Diana L. Linden, have devoted their considerable skills not only to their own volumes but also to evaluating and enhancing each other’s work. Editorial board members helped to guide the project and served as crucial resources. City of Promises began during my term as Chair of the Academic Council of the American Jewish Historical Society, and I owe a debt of gratitude to David P. Solomon for making a match between Jennifer Hammer of New York University Press and the Academic Council. Good ideas have legs, but they require the devotion and support of influential men and women. City of Promises fortunately found both in William Frost z”l of the Lucius N. Littauer Foundation and Jennifer Hammer of NYU Press. Bill Frost generously underwrote the project when it was just an idea, and I think that he would have treasured this history of a city he loved. Jennifer Hammer worked prodigiously to turn vision into reality, never faltering in her critically engaged commitment despite inevitable obstacles. I am indebted to both of them for staying the course, and I greatly appreciate the opportunity to work with Jennifer, an excellent, flexible, and insightful editor. City of Promises received additional important financial support from individuals and foundations. I want to thank the Malkin Fund, The Marian B. and Jacob K. Javits Foundation, Hugo Barreca, David P. Solomon, and an anonymous foundation donor for significant support, as well as several other individuals including Judd and Karen Aronowitz, David and Phyllis Grossman, Irving and Phyllis Levitt, Irwin and Debi Ungar, and Rabbi Marc StraussCohen of Temple Emanuel, Winston-Salem, North Carolina. All recognized the importance of this project through timely contributions. I appreciate their generosity. Several students at the University of Michigan provided assistance that helped to keep the volumes on track. Alexandra Maron and Katherine Rosenblatt did valuable research, and I am grateful for their aid.

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general Editor’s Acknowledgments

These volumes are dedicated to my family of New York Jews. Without their steadfast encouragement, and especially that of my husband, MacDonald Moore, City of Promises would not have appeared. Dedicated to my grandchildren, Elijah Axt, Zoe Bella Moore, and Rose Alexa Moore, authors of future chapters Deborah Dash Moore

AUTHOR S’

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thanks are due, first of all, to our colleagues on the City of Promises team: Deborah Dash Moore, Howard Rock, Jeffrey Gurock, Diana Linden, and, of course, Jennifer Hammer of NYU Press. All helped keep the project on track and gave valuable advice on the manuscript. Without the research assistance of Katie Rosenblatt, Diane De Fazio, Shoshana Olidort, and Elizabeth Stack this book could not have been written so quickly. Roberta Newman’s expert services as a photo researcher helped give the book added depth and attractiveness. In addition to the City of Promises team, Andrew Dolkart, Rebecca Kobrin, David Mikics, and Peter Eisenstadt made helpful comments on the manuscript, as did two anonymous readers for the press. The book could not have been written without the collections of a number of libraries and archives, or the assistance of their staffs. Thanks to the New York Public Library, the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, American Jewish Historical Society (Susan Malbin), the New York City Municipal Archives, Central Synagogue Archives (Anne Minenberg), Museum at Eldridge Street (Amy Milford), and Fordham University. Finally, thanks to our families, Michael and Lily Smrtic, and Moses CohenSoyer (fifth- or sixth-generation New Yorker, depending on how you count) for putting up with us while we wrote this book. annie polland and daniel soyer

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Emerging Metropolis New York Jews in the Age of Immigration, 1840 – 1920

The premier Jewish immigrant aid organization, the Hebrew Sheltering and Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS), established a kosher kitchen on Ellis Island in 1911. It also took charge of the Passover seders that had been occurring since the beginning of the century. (Archives of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, New York)

Introduction: The Emerging Jewish Metropolis

On April 10, 1906, 160 detained eastern European Jewish immigrants gathered in the Great Hall of the immigration center at Ellis Island for a Passover seder, the traditional ceremonial meal that commemorates the flight of the children of Israel from Egyptian slavery. Alexander Harkavy, a member of a delegation of immigrant communal leaders, welcomed the detainees by drawing parallels between the Israelites of the Exodus and the Jews of Ellis Island: whether fleeing the oppression of Pharaoh’s Egypt or Tsarist Russia, both groups sought freedom in a Promised Land. A few days later, Yiddish journalist Yakov Pfeffer described the moving seder, proclaiming that the poor, bedraggled immigrants — no longer fearful of blood-libel accusations or pogroms — had celebrated the Passover holiday as bene horin, children of freedom. In addition to linking these Ellis Island immigrants to the Haggadah’s ancient Israelites, Pfeffer argued that the contemporary immigrants merited their own mention in the chronicle of Jewish history: “When the future historian tells the story of the freedom of the Jewish people, when that person has the good fortune to tell not only of the sorrows but also the joys of the Jewish nation, . . . he will need to tell of the Seder night on Ellis Island.”1 The Jews who celebrated the seder on Ellis Island in 1906 arrived in the United States at the crest of a century-long wave of Jewish immigration from Europe. Beginning in the 1820s, economic change in their European homelands drove many Jews out of their accustomed trades and, along with political and religious persecution, sent them in search of new livelihoods. By contrast, the burgeoning United States needed workers and offered unparalleled

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political freedom. Early on, most Jewish immigrants came from central Europe, particularly the German lands. By the end of the nineteenth century, eastern European Jews predominated. One-third of eastern Europe’s Jews uprooted themselves. The vast majority headed for the United States. Most of these immigrants entered the country through New York Harbor, which by the second decade of the nineteenth century had overtaken Philadelphia as North America’s busiest port. New York’s rise was conditioned by its natural advantages, which included access to a large hinterland via the Hudson River and Long Island Sound; deep channels; and a well-protected harbor. But innovative business practices and government support also played an important role. The introduction of regularly scheduled transatlantic departures in 1818 and the opening of the Erie Canal in 1825 drew shipping to the city. New York’s status as the country’s largest port made it the most important textile and financial center, as well as the main point of entry for European news and fashion. The port of New York became the dominant entry point for people as well as goods. Three-quarters of the thirtythree million immigrants who entered the United States between 1815 and 1915 came through New York. Many supplied the cheap labor that enabled the city to grow into a major manufacturing center. New York’s streets led from the docks to the garment shops that produced most of the country’s readymade clothing.2 In 1855, faced with an ever-increasing influx and almost complete lack of oversight by the federal government, New York State established an immigrant processing center at Castle Garden off the southern tip of Manhattan. Castle Garden had a varied history, each stage of which left a mark on the building’s unusual shape. Built on an artificial rocky island some one hundred yards off shore, its original round masonry walls and twenty-eight guns formed part of the harbor’s defense system. In 1823, it was decommissioned and turned into a “resort, theater, and restaurant.” In 1845, a domed roof was added, along with additional tiers of galleries, transforming Castle Garden into a popular concert hall. By the time the state took it over for an immigration station, landfill had moved the shoreline closer to the Garden, and soon Battery Park completely surrounded the old fort. To placate respectable local residents, who feared that placing the immigration station in Castle Garden would cause disagreeable immigrants to overrun the Battery, a twelve-foot

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Between 1855 and 1890, the state of New York operated an immigration station at Castle Garden, offering immigrants information on jobs and housing in an attempt to help them avoid the “runners,” “scalpers,” and “loafers” who took advantage of vulnerable newcomers. (Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC)

fence was erected around the building. A number of smaller structures completed the complex.3 For the next three and a half decades, this odd structure — like a “huge reservoir or gas-holder” in appearance — was the first American building encountered up close by millions of immigrants. By establishing the station, the state aimed to protect immigrants from the “runners,” “scalpers,” “loafers,” and prostitutes who frequently robbed and cheated them while offering to find them work, transport, or lodging.4 At Castle Garden, immigrants could receive reliable information about jobs and housing, exchange money at official rates, acquire railroad tickets without exorbitant surcharges, receive decent medical care, buy food at reasonable prices, and even take a bath. The centralization of services also allowed the state to collect comprehensive data on immigration for the first time. Some of the newcomers stayed overnight at Castle Garden, preparing coffee on coal stoves from the piped-in Croton water and

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In 1892, the newly built federal facility at Ellis Island assumed control of immigrant processing. The strenuous inspection process there engendered fear among immigrants that they might be returned to their point of origin. But after the turn of the century, dozens of ethnic and religious aid associations established posts on the island, helping newcomers navigate entrance into their new country. (Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC)

exchanging intelligence on the economic situation in the city. Castle Garden closed in 1890, but so ingrained had it become in the immigrant consciousness that Jewish immigrants referred to New York’s subsequent immigration station as “Castle Garden” for years thereafter. A massive new federal installation opened on Ellis Island in 1892, replacing Castle Garden. The Ellis Island station’s original wood-frame structures, “wretched barns” that were “monuments to ugliness,” burned down in 1897, replaced in 1900 by the buildings that have become iconic in the collective memory of American immigration. The fireproof new main building, constructed in French Renaissance style, sported a steel frame trimmed with brick and limestone, and four hundred-foot domed towers. The giant central “registry room,” where new arrivals lined up to be processed, was surrounded by

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offices, hearing rooms, dining rooms, and dormitories. Eventually, a total of thirty-three structures dotted the island, which had been expanded to meet the needs of the station. Ellis Island ironically became practically synonymous with the giant wave of (mainly) European immigration of the end of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth, despite its role in enforcing a growing number of regulations aimed as much at keeping certain kinds of people out as admitting them in.5 Ellis Island became known to Jews as the “Island of Tears,” a place from which arrivals judged deficient would be returned to the countries they had hoped to escape. In truth, most people’s experience of the island was not nearly so bad. True, immigrants endured intrusive (and quick) medical examinations and oral questioning that might concern their intended destinations and livelihoods, mental state, family situation, and politics. But although treatment fluctuated with government policy, officials, many of them multilingual, were generally polite and efficient. They were assisted — and watched — by representatives of ethnic aid organizations such as the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS) and the National Council of Jewish Women. As Aaron Domnitz, an immigrant from Belarus later recalled, the first impression was not necessarily a bad one: My first contact with my new country was the short conversation between me and the immigration officials. We were put into short lines as we entered the large buildings at Ellis Island. Each line had to go by a small table next to which officials sat who questioned each immigrant in his language. The new immigrant felt right at home. My line spoke Yiddish. Hence, a big, strange country recognized my language that I had brought here with me from abroad as an official language. In Russia and Germany, I did not receive any such privilege. One official asked me what I would do in America. I told him that until then I had been a Hebrew teacher. He smiled, “A rebbe?” “No,” I said, “A teacher!” A second official called out, “What’s the difference?” I explained that a “rebbe” is hasidic. They laughed at me. “Go, go,” they said, “you’ll be a great rebbe in America,” and pushed me aside. I looked around. Here I am on the other side of the railing, among those who have been let in. But why did they laugh at me? It’s nothing. People are good-natured here and they were joking. I liked the reception.6

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Arriving from Warsaw, Minnie Goldstein had a different experience. When her relatives failed to pick her up at the station, she was left behind, “along with the people who were being sent back home”: “When I saw them wringing their hands and crying, I was overcome with fear.” This fear of being among the 2 percent who were rejected gave Ellis Island its dubious reputation. But most, like Goldstein and Domnitz, found themselves “on the other side of the railing” within eight hours of arrival.7 Tens of millions of people flowed through Castle Garden, Ellis Island, and New York on their way to other cities, towns, and rural settlements. But most Jews stayed in their port of entry, joining a population that consisted largely of immigrants from Ireland, Germany, England, the Russian and Austro-Hungarian Empires, and Italy, along with their children. If the Passover detainees conformed to the general pattern among Jewish arrivals, approximately 40 of them (25 percent) traveled to other U.S. cities, while 120 of them (75 percent) followed Harkavy and Pfeffer back to New York’s immigrant neighborhoods, where they started the process of adjustment to American life. Jewish immigrants wove a dense network of formal and informal support systems in their new neighborhoods. Often, in fact, they found their way to the neighborhoods with the help of relatives, friends, and communal organizations. HIAS helped Domnitz find his cousin in Brownsville. His cousin helped him find a job. Ben Reisman’s brother-in-law was late in picking him up, so the immigrant from Galicia found his way to his sister’s apartment with the aid of strangers: [An immigration official] told them to show me where the ferry was and they took me and showed me. I took my suitcase and went out. I saw many people going to the ferry. I followed them. On the ferry I recognized a Jew and asked him how to get to Eldridge Street. He told me that he would put me on the right streetcar himself and wrote on a piece of paper for me to show the conductor. The conductor let me off at Grand Street and showed me which way to go.

There followed a whirl of activity, as relatives and people from the same hometown came to hear reports of “the old home” and to give the newcomer advice on life in the new country. Buying the “greenhorn” a new suit of American clothes was a common important symbolic first step in the adjust-

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ment process. Getting him or her a job and housing were important material steps.8 People seldom remained in their first work and living arrangements for long. New York promised mobility — social and residential, the two often coupled. Even by 1881, when Harkavy arrived in the vanguard of the eastern European wave, most of the central European Jews who had lived in Lower Manhattan’s Five Points and Kleindeutschland neighborhoods as glaziers and tailors had resettled in Upper Manhattan as merchants and professionals. A few had even become spectacularly wealthy, as the owners of major department stores such as Macy’s or as financiers. By 1906, when the Ellis Island seder took place, even many of the early eastern European arrivals had moved uptown or to neighborhoods in Brooklyn and the Bronx, since 1898 joined with Manhattan in the consolidated city of Greater New York. New York City rapidly became a patchwork of Jewish neighborhoods ranging from areas of first immigrant settlement, such as the Lower East Side in Manhattan, Brownsville and Williamsburg in Brooklyn, and the East Bronx, to uppermiddle-class and even upper-class sections such as the Upper West Side, the Bronx’s Grand Concourse, and Brooklyn’s Eastern Parkway. New York also promised freedom. But from what? Of what? Pfeffer folded the American immigrant experience into the broader scope of Jewish history and argued that the new immigrants stationed at Ellis Island, “the border between the land of goles [exile] and the land of freedom,” would soon leave the shadow of exile for the safety and security of America. To Pfeffer, precisely this safety and freedom from violence and persecution represented a new chapter in Jewish history. Sheer numbers introduced another new factor in Jewish life. In 1840, there were perhaps seven thousand Jews in New York City. By 1920, there were over a million and a half. Along with the conditions of relative security noted by Pfeffer and the loosening of traditional communal constraints, which he did not mention, their numbers gave New York Jews freedom to hammer out a staggering variety of expressions of Jewish identity — religious and secular. New York became the capital of the Jewish world, providing leadership to American Jewry and relief to Jews abroad in periods of calm and crisis. Over the course of this century, the majority of New York’s Jews were immigrants and working class. Even as many Jews ascended a ladder of economic

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and social mobility, the city continued to attract Jewish newcomers, replenishing the ranks of its working class. Sometimes, there was interclass cooperation, as more established members of the community assumed obligations to aid those less fortunate. But often conflict erupted: eastern Europeans founded parallel institutions that they thought could serve them better than those formed by the earlier arrivals; largely Jewish unions struggled against mainly Jewish employers in predominantly Jewish trades; ideologues with differing views of what it meant to be Jewish and what the Jewish future should hold clashed over the shape that the Jewish community should take. The struggle of a largely immigrant and working-class community to define itself and work out its place in American culture and society produced a tremendous amount of creativity. In this period, Jews began to carve out prominent places in the arts that they later occupied so conspicuously. They produced theater and literature in German, Yiddish, English, and other languages. They wrote hit popular songs and helped introduce modernism into the American visual arts. Some of these artistic expressions focused on Jewish subjects, some did not. Some were in Jewish languages and intended for Jewish audiences, but some were not. Taken together, Jews helped to make New York the American cultural capital, just as the city introduced them to modern urban life. Similarly, Jews promoted a political style that emphasized social solidarity and justice and became associated in particular with New York. This volume explores the central European and eastern European Jews’ encounter with New York City, tracing immigrants’ economic, social, religious, political, and cultural adaptation between 1840 and 1920. By looking at New York’s department stores, sweatshops, settlement houses, newspaper buildings, banks, synagogues, schools, and streets, it shows how Jews wove their ambitions and aspirations — for freedom, security, and material prosperity — into the very fabric of the city. Each chapter explores the mark left by immigrant and native-born Jews on the streets of New York, examining the commercial activity, political protest, consumer unrest, and religious devotion that characterized their engagement with the city. Despite their numbers, Jews never became a majority in New York City. A history of Jewish New York therefore necessarily includes other people, non-Jews, with whom Jews interacted, sometimes harmoniously and sometimes in conflict. New York promised its Jews the ability to integrate into society and at the same time

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to maintain a vigorous independent existence. The New York Jewish story is therefore one of both Jewish distinctiveness and Jewish absorption into the city as a whole. It is the story of how New York became the greatest Jewish metropolis of all time.

In this 1878 drawing, hook-nosed Jewish merchants manipulate unsuspecting Americans into purchasing ill-fitting used clothing. Caricatures of immigrant groups — whether simian Irish or beer-drinking Germans — commonly appeared in the nineteenth-century press and theater. (New York Public Library, New York)

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Neighborhood Networks

In the middle of the nineteenth century, European and American visitors to New York knew to stop by Chatham Street, a commercial district just to the northeast of City Hall, at the base of the Bowery. So characteristic of New York with its commercial hustle and bustle, Chatham Street’s ramshackle storefronts and frenzied merchants almost begged for inclusion in travel accounts. In their colorful depictions, pants and shirts hanging off signs and rustling in the wind seemed designed to ensnare unwary passersby; once so detained, the hapless marks were susceptible to the “gentle” yet persistent enticements of “natty, blackbearded, fiercely mustached” Jewish merchants, who had a beguiling way of selling a fellow clothes that did not fit. The accounts’ descriptions of the flapping layers of fabric, the waist-length beards, and the devious mannerisms not so subtly marked these businessmen as ethically and even racially suspect. One observer declared that a “Yankee shopkeeper” would have no hope of succeeding on Chatham Street; his presence was a “physical impossibility.” Yet another observer suggested that P. T. Barnum create a museum or circus out of the activity there. Jewish writers, too, often preferred to dissociate themselves from the area; Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise’s memoirs summarily dismissed Jewish Chatham as “a disgrace.”1 Indeed, Wise’s distaste for Chatham Street was indicative of his dislike of New York in general when he arrived in 1846 from Radnitz, Bohemia. Wise surveyed Broadway all the way to Canal Street, reporting, “The whole city appeared to me like a large shop where every one buys or sells, cheats or is cheated. I had never before seen a city so bare of all art and of every trace of good taste; likewise I had never witnessed anywhere such rushing,

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hurrying, chasing, running.”2 Chatham Street thus exemplified a business current that pulsed through all of Manhattan. A contemporary observer, Cornelius Mathews, disparaged Chatham commerce but suggested that this very competitive spirit was after all part and parcel of New York’s history and future and that the terrain itself inspired a competitive spirit among its inhabitants: “This street, reader, was in the old times of this Island, a warpath of Manhattan Indians to the west; civilization hath not affected it greatly. The old red men scalped their enemies, the Chatham Clo’men skin theirs. So little difference have two-hundred years in changing the character of mankind!”3 Whether or not one accepts Mathews’s suggestion that Chatham Street’s soil fostered this fierce competitive drive, his account leaves no doubt that Jews’ commercial ambitions had made them a highly visible part of New York life. While Cornelius Mathews returned home and Isaac Mayer Wise journeyed on to Albany and then Cincinnati, those who were most engaged with the Chatham Square street scene remained to live and work there. The clothing business was not a literary curiosity for them but rather the means through which they could stitch together a new life in America. From the mid-1820s to the 1880s, the area around Chatham Street, especially the south side, remained a touchstone for immigrant Jews arriving in New York. There they found housing, work, and community. Although many of these Jews moved on to other neighborhoods to the east and north within a few years, a continuous influx of immigrants maintained a constant Jewish presence. Those who settled learned to navigate the neighborhood. Jewish residents of Chatham Street interacted with its diverse populations yet also created sites of Jewish interest. The twists and turns of Mott, Mulberry, and Orange Streets introduced them to a vast array of New Yorkers — Irish carpenters, African American laborers, and German brewers — as well as to Henry L. Goldberg, who in 1852 is listed in the New York City directory as a “scriber of the Pentateuchs” at 63 Mott Street. Unflustered by flapping merchandise or peddlers’ entreaties, Jewish immigrants soon learned that the handsome three-story New York Dispensary on the corner of Centre and White not only offered medical attention but also housed temporarily several congregations, including Shearith Israel, Anshe Chesed, Shaarey Zedek, and Beth Israel.4 A Bayard Street tenement’s staircase led to Gittel Natelson, who sold wigs to married Jewish women and arranged matches for those yet unmarried.5 Jews discovered that a saloon’s rear room

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might be a meeting place of a B’nai B’rith lodge or that Newman Cowen’s Canal Street glass warehouse doubled as a charitable distribution site at the beginning of each Jewish month.6 More important, this neighborhood provided opportunities to pioneer — to find occupations, to forge partnerships, and to start congregations. In seeking advice and finding companionship, newly arrived immigrants also received the impression that in a few years’ time, they too might be in a position to help the next wave of newcomers. In the vanguard of a century of migration that eventually brought nearly three million central and eastern European Jews to the United States, Chatham Jews by the end of the nineteenth century had created the neighborhood and industrial web of associations that made New York a magnet for immigrant Jews and made Jews garment manufacturers for the nation. Upon arrival, midnineteenth-century immigrant Jews tended to settle around Chatham Street, in the so-called Five Points. By the 1850s, Jews also formed a “conspicuous” segment of the German-speaking immigrants in Kleindeutschland, or Little Germany, located to the east of the Bowery, in an area later known as the Lower East Side.7 In the first few decades of the century of migration, many immigrants continued the journey west, but enough remained to make New York home to approximately forty thousand Jews, 25 percent of the United States’ Jewry by 1860 and approximately 5 percent of New York’s population.8 By 1880, New York Jews numbered close to eighty thousand, and many of them were firmly established in the middle class and living uptown. They ascended by carving out their own place in the city’s “niche economy.” Jews from Bavaria, Prussia, Bohemia, and Poland came with experience in trade and peddling.9 In New York, they applied this experience wholeheartedly to dry goods and the used-clothing trade. They then parlayed their foothold in the used-clothing business into a pioneering role in the ready-made garment industry, both as manufacturers and as marketers, guiding Americans to what was then a novelty — ready-made clothing for middle-class and even upper-class people. By the end of the century, they thus left an unmistakable imprint on the city’s economy and in so doing also set a pattern for future Jewish immigrants’ relationship to the city.10 The needle trades were New York’s largest manufacturing sector, employing large numbers of more recent Jewish immigrants from eastern Europe, who provided the industry with the cheap labor necessary for its rapid growth.11

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■ Neighborhood Beginnings From the colonial period until the beginning of the nineteenth century, most Jews, like most New Yorkers, lived and worked in the area to the south of City Hall. The Jewish community’s sole synagogue, Shearith Israel, had been located on Mill Street since the early eighteenth century. By the late 1810s, the more prominent Jews had already moved farther north, to the west of Broadway, on the “quiet, tree-shaded blocks” of upper Greenwich, Laight, Charlton, Greene, and Wooster Streets. From there, New York’s wealthier families could still walk to their businesses and their places of worship.12 Poorer Jews from England and central Europe had begun to settle to the north of the synagogue as well, though they followed other newcomers to the east of Broadway, on Broome, Houston, Lispenard, Canal, and Franklin Streets. But while the Protestants could choose among an array of churches, many reflecting class, denominational, and ethnic differences, all Jewish New Yorkers, regardless of wealth or neighborhood, headed to Shearith Israel. Much more than simply a place of worship, Shearith Israel was also the Jewish communal center, providing access to kosher meat, Passover matzos (unleavened bread), and education. A hazan, or prayer leader, led services in Hebrew, and men and women sat separately, according to traditional custom. Early leaders of the congregation had instituted the Sephardic rite, emanating from Spain, whose pronunciation of Hebrew and order of prayers differed from those of the Ashkenazi, or central and eastern European, rite. Though the majority of New York Jews were of Ashkenazi descent by 1728, Shearith Israel maintained what had become a New York Sephardi rite. Despite these traditional elements, however, changes in Jewish life reflected New York’s environment of relative freedom and openness. Whereas traditional Jewish communities in Europe could exert force over the population through the threat of herem, or excommunication, America’s more tolerant environment diminished this threat. In the absence of sanctions, many members of Shearith Israel led less than fully observant lifestyles outside the synagogue. More recent immigrants tended to follow the law more scrupulously than did older members. Moreover, to the ears of these more observant Ashkenazi newcomers, the Sephardic pronunciation of Hebrew seemed strange. But Ashkenazi Jews seeking changes encountered entrenched opposition. Tensions came to a head in April 1825, when the English-born Barrow E.

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Cohen refused to make a traditional charitable contribution for the honor of reading the Torah. Shearith Israel’s leaders deliberated over their course of action, ultimately forgoing the imposition of a fine in favor of a milder reprimand. Unsatisfied, Cohen and the newer, traditionalist Ashkenazi immigrants seized an opportunity to demand the right to conduct a separate morning service within the congregation, one requiring more stringent Sabbath observance by its leaders. While the Shearith Israel elite was willing to discard the fees for participation in the service, it rejected these signs of independence. The leadership feared that separate services would breach the unity of the congregation and sensed that the growing numbers of newcomers threatened longstanding rituals and traditions and, more pointedly, its authority. The venerable Shearith Israel could no longer contain the diversity of its congregation, and a contingent separated to form B’nai Jeshurun, thereby setting in motion a pattern of splintering and diversity that characterized New York Jewish congregational life for the next two centuries.13 Contemporary observers blamed the breakup of Shearith Israel on the growing geographic spread of the Jewish population. Edmund Blunt’s 1828 Picture of New York attributed the split from Shearith Israel to the fact that “the increase of the city has left few families in that neighborhood [where Shearith Israel was located], and this, with the great increase, and the continued arrivals from the continent of Europe, rendered it necessary to erect a new temple.”14 The seceders themselves cited “the distance at which many lived from the Spanish and Portuguese house of worship.”15 Neighborhoods reflected variations in class, occupations, and points of origin, which often led to different modes of daily life. While the more established Shearith Israel leaders who lived to the west of Broadway might have used oil lamps, coal stoves, and ice boxes, those on the eastern side inhabited dilapidated and hastily subdivided wooden homes and depended on candles, oil lamps, and found wood. Clearly, those who lived to the west of Broadway and constituted the leadership of Shearith Israel could more easily afford the twenty-five-cent dues for Torah honors than could newly arrived immigrants living to the east. This class division reflected broader trends in New York City religious congregations — in Protestant churches, newcomers protested pew rentals that they could ill afford.16 Eventually, the Ashkenazi Jews who created B’nai Jeshurun rented a former church on the corner of Canal and Elm, in the very heart of Five Points,

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New York’s immigrant working-class neighborhood. And by 1833, Shearith Israel had rebuilt its synagogue on Crosby Street, closer to its more established members. Though B’nai Jeshurun and Shearith Israel cultivated a working relationship, this division marked a turning point in New York Jewish communal life. Until the 1820s, New York’s five hundred Jews united fairly easily as a minority, and the congregational unit could contain and foster community. But increasing numbers of immigrants diversified the Jewish population and its institutions. A more pronounced upper class and a growing working-class population emerged, as the varied hometowns of the new immigrants and their desires for more stringent observance of Jewish law sparked additional differences. American democracy and freedom encouraged individual Jews to aspire to leadership positions within the synagogue. No single institution could contain these variations, as the earlier congregation had done. Neither could one congregation accommodate all the would-be leaders, who over a thirty-year period called into being twenty-seven congregations. When Jews did go to synagogue, they went to pray and to socialize. But, increasingly, New York Jews found alternative places not only to socialize but also to buy kosher meat and to engage in acts of charity. New York Jews spent more time beyond the confines of the synagogues — in tenements, on the streets, and in the market. They interacted with non-Jewish New Yorkers on a daily basis, forming relationships that influenced synagogue life and encouraged new patterns of Jewish association. New York synagogue-goers adapted what they learned from New York politics, business, and society to introduce such new trends within the synagogue as elected officers and Jewish ministers able to represent the congregation in ecumenical gatherings and to deliver English-language sermons. But daily life in New York also inspired the formation of new, more secular forms of Jewish community — including Jewish newspapers, social clubs, libraries, hospitals, lectures, and charities. Thus, the story of New York synagogues and their various divisions, while telling, is not the story of Jewish New York. Rather, we can find the story of Jewish New York in the markets, tailor shops, saloons, and butcher stores where Jews formed an ethnic economy and forged neighborhood networks. These more informal networks in turn influenced synagogue structure and shaped new forms of associational life for New York Jews. Raphael Cowen was one of the new immigrants who built the diversified

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Jewish community in New York. In the mid-1840s, Cowen left his hometown of Graetz in Prussia to seek work as a tailor’s apprentice. He first made his way to Janowicz, Posen, where he met and married Julia Manasseh. The Cowens journeyed to Manchester, England, in search of economic opportunity but soon left for New York. They joined a migration of 150,000 Jews from central Europe to the United States between 1820 and 1880. As central Europe transitioned from a society of estates, in which Jews served as middlemen between peasants and nobles, to an industrial society, many Jews faced dismal economic prospects. Matrikel laws, restricting Jewish marriages in Bavaria and elsewhere, made it all but impossible for young Jews to establish households. While the slightly better-off went to larger cities in search of work, poor young Jews migrated to the United States. Migration accelerated in the 1850s. Letters home and newspaper articles heralded economic opportunities and spoke of helping hands extended by fellow Jews. Jewish immigrants thus joined a great migration streaming out of various regions of Germany. Indeed, Jews tended to emigrate in larger proportions than did their non-Jewish neighbors, who were also leaving in large numbers. For example, while Jews made up 1.5 percent of the Bavarian population, they composed 5 percent of the Bavarian migration to the United States. Whereas most Germans who emigrated tended to be slightly better-off peasants, coming as family units, Jews arrived with little money and often in groups of single men and women. Most important, whereas the majority of German emigrants sought farmland, Jews opted for towns and cities.17 Whether young immigrant Jews left Prussia, Bavaria, or Bohemia, they shared characteristics: lack of formal education, little money, and hardly any knowledge of English. Like all immigrants to New York, they desired communities in neighborhoods that could help them adapt to their new surroundings. When the Cowens arrived in 1849, they “sought that section of the city that was then the destination of German Jewish immigrants. . . . Finding countrymen they knew, [they] located near them on Mott Street, and [Raphael] set out as a boss tailor.” Julia gave birth to Nathan soon after their arrival in March 1849, and their son Philip was born in 1853, when they had moved a few blocks to the corner of Canal and Mulberry.18 The Cowens passed their first years in Five Points, where difficult living conditions were offset by familial and communal ties. Five Points, so called due to the five-cornered intersection of Anthony, Orange, and Cross Streets

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(now Baxter, Park, Worth), was bounded by Centre Street on the west, the Bowery on the east, Canal Street to the north, and Chatham and Pearl Streets to the south. The neighborhood became lodged in collective memory as a place of crime, prostitution, and disorder; but it primarily served as a home and workplace for a struggling but burgeoning working-class population. By mid-nineteenth century, Irish immigrants and their children — the largest immigrant group in New York City — constituted 75 percent of Five Points’ population. German-speaking immigrants composed the second-largest group (approximately 20 percent), and of these, approximately half were Jewish.19 Like the Cowens, approximately 70 percent of the Jews living in Five Points came from Posen, Polish territory then governed by Prussia. Built over an improperly drained pond, Five Points’ two-and-a-half-story wooden structures regularly flooded. Yet the neighborhood’s stables, workshops, and factories provided a convenient combination of work and residence, making it a prime destination for the tens of thousands of immigrants who sought affordable rent in housing close to work. As a result, the dilapidated wooden homes contained far more inhabitants than one might expect. The first floors often housed stores, and backyards had additional sheds and work stations. Soon, the great demand for homes and work in this neighborhood led property owners to tear down the old wooden structures in order to build brick tenements. But the tenements’ crowdedness, dark interior spaces, and cellars made for miserable housing.20 Various immigrant groups clustered in specific industries and occupations. Initially, the movement into specific occupations reflected skills and experience that the immigrants brought with them. Irish immigrants arrived extremely poor, with only agricultural experience, and they thus entered the laboring jobs. By mid-nineteenth century, they composed the majority of laborers in New York City — longshoremen, shipyard workers, warehousemen, quarrymen, and construction workers. Germans possessed more money. They had experience in trades such as carpentry, tailoring, shoemaking, tanning, pottery making, bricklaying, and weaving.21 Just as other ethnic groups specialized in certain occupations within the city’s economy, so did immigrant Jews find their niche in peddling and selling used clothing. German Jews applied their old-country experience in these areas to their new situation, supplying demand in the city and countryside. As many as 50 percent of Jewish new arrivals took up peddling. Others worked

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as tailors or shoemakers, also using skills they had learned in their country of origin. These Jews joined their fellow German immigrants who worked in similar trades.22 As immigrant Jews took root in Five Points, they, like other ethnic groups, settled on specific blocks and even in specific tenement buildings. Baxter Street, below the Five Points intersection, hosted many Jewish stores; similarly, Mott Street, between Bayard and Canal, had a higher-than-average Jewish population. But even blocks that had a high proportion of a certain immigrant group still retained a heterogeneous population. In other words, just because a block attracted more Jews did not mean that all the shops or all the residences were necessarily Jewish. For example, the “Jewish” block on Mott Street had Jewish residents in only three of the seventeen buildings; the remaining buildings held large numbers of Christian Germans and Irish immigrants. And 56 Mott, the most “Jewish” of the buildings, still had two Irish families living among twelve Jewish households. Even when immigrants lived on more “Jewish blocks,” they formed a diverse mix of residence, commerce, and communal associations created by people of all backgrounds.23 A closer look at the buildings through the 1860 U.S. Census demonstrates this point: 91 Mulberry had a typically diverse mix of residents who, nevertheless, shared commonalities. Most important, the Irish, German-Jewish, and Russian-Jewish heads of households — John Purcell, Samuel Lesser, Isaac Jacobs, Moses Davis, and Mary McFay — all worked as peddlers. Though the Jacobs family originated in Russia and the Lesser family started out in Germany, both stopped along the way in London, as indicated by the fact that both families had middle children born there.24 In the spring of 1858, Jacobs applied for free Passover matzo from a Jewish congregational consortium, and he might have seen Myer and Sarah Levy, who lived at 56 Mulberry, in line as well. Myer, a twenty-four-year-old secondhand clothier, and his wife, Mary, came from Russia and found a home on the “Jewish” block of Mulberry.25 However, they appear to have been the only Jewish family in that particular building, living among Irish tailors, milk dealers, and laborers. All the residents of 33 Mulberry Street, by contrast, appear to have been Jewish, and looking at the census allows us to speculate as to how the Cohens, Colanders, Inspecks, Isaacses, Levys, and Schuls moved beyond past identities as residents of various regions in Germany or Poland to forge New York Jewish bonds of support and community. Julius Isaacs, a storekeeper from

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Russia-Poland, was perhaps the most established. The 1860 census recorded his personal estate of $500, most likely his store merchandise, perhaps located on the first floor of 33 Mulberry. Augusta Isaac, who appears to have been his daughter, was twenty-six and also born in Russia-Poland, and Isador Isaac, his oldest son at fourteen, was born in New York, suggesting that the family immigrated between 1834 and 1846. Least established, Poline Tichner, a fortyyear-old widow from Russia-Poland, worked as a peddler and boarded with the Inspecks from Germany. Most households included older children born in their respective home countries and younger siblings born in New York. Of the six heads of households, two identified as peddlers, two as cap makers, one as a tailor, and one as a storekeeper. Additionally, Charles Cohen, one of the cap makers, had a seventeen-year-old son named Marx, who is listed in the 1859 city directory as a glazier at 33 Mulberry. Both Poline Tichner and Marx Cohen also appear on an 1858 charity list for free matzos sponsored by the Jewish community.26 It is hard to know if Poline told Charles about the matzo distribution or whether any of the residents knew each other from Europe or even if Abram Schul, twenty-seven, met Charles Cohen, fifty-seven, through their shared work as cap makers in New York.27 Unmarried women — whether widows or daughters — often worked as peddlers, washerwomen, and tailors, while many married women kept house. In Five Points, 48 percent of employed women worked in the needle trades, 25 percent as domestic servants, 8 percent as laundresses, and 13 percent as boardinghouse keepers. While some seamstresses labored in workshops, many worked in their apartments, taking home sewing. Whether employed outside the home or not, most women kept house. Whether through wage work or house work, shared occupations and responsibilities of the Five Points Jews created informal but vital neighborhood networks. When Mary Wasserzug’s family arrived in the mid-1870s, they lived in a series of Five Points homes in which the water pump was either in the first-floor hallway or the courtyard, necessitating many trips up and down stairs with pails and much social interaction with neighbors: This arrangement provided a first-floor neighbor with an opportunity to court Mary: “Louis would watch for Mary, and would take the pail away from her, pump it full, and carry it up for her.” Most women lacked suitors to handle this work, but one can imagine the countless ways in which housework and shared spaces nurtured neighborhood relationships.28

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Indeed, in immigrant neighborhoods, newcomers often relied on ethnic ties to gain a foothold. Employers, conversely, looked to members of their own ethnic groups as workers on whom they could rely and with whom they could easily communicate.29 Once settled, Raphael and Julia Cowen helped relatives who arrived in New York after them, both those passing through and those, like Newman Cowen, a cousin from Russia-Poland, who settled down. Newman reciprocated years later when he gave Raphael and Julia’s American-born son Philip a job in his glass business at 207 Canal Street. Though Philip was uninterested in his cousin’s glass business and intent on preparing for a career in printing and journalism, he marveled at the communal support Newman provided to less fortunate Jewish immigrants: “His store was the rallying place for nearly every Jew from Russian Poland who came here. He was in very truth their guide, philosopher and friend. To him they went with their troubles, for advice, to be set up in business, or to entrust their funds. . . . He started the newcomer with a box of glass on condition that he took a territory not already covered.”30 Neighborhoods like Five Points offered not only jobs but also Jewish community networks. Networks helped newcomers directly even as more established Jews used them to create an American Jewish identity that involved caring for coreligionists in need. Philip Cowen noted in his memoir that Newman’s work anticipated both the United Hebrew Charities (1873) and the Industrial Removal Office (1901), suggesting how informal neighborhood networks developed fundamental elements of more formalized charitable organizations as the community grew. Newman Cowen’s assistance represented more than simple charity. By offering a bundle of glass to a newcomer and earmarking new territory, Cowen not only gave an immigrant a chance but also furthered his own business, expanding its market. Cowen required new peddlers to cover new territory to protect the more established peddlers’ routes and to avoid duplication. If an immigrant succeeded in selling that first box of glass, doubtless he would return to Cowen for more boxes: “These people returned to the city every Friday to be with their families over the Sabbath, and called Sunday mornings to pay their debts and get additional stock.”31 In Five Points, people relied on those they knew, often those of shared hometown and family, to get started, and this help also often benefited the giver. Such work propelled individuals forward, even as it knit together a tight ethnic economy.

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Thus, while Jews might bicker in the synagogue, they forged ties with one another in the streets. They helped each other find jobs, expand business networks, and form community in shops and on street corners. Over time, this community even survived the dispersal of its members. Within five years, Raphael and Julia Cowen moved uptown to Third Avenue and Thirtieth Street, where Raphael opened a clothing store, joined a new synagogue, Beth El, and had six more children. But the Cowens returned to Five Points to visit the old synagogue, to patronize Jewish book dealers, and to buy Passover groceries and matzo. Thus, though the Cowens had moved to a more pleasant neighborhood, they relied on Five Points for jobs for their children and for social ties for themselves. The Jewish ethnic economy’s stores and services also served a social role as a source for New York Jewish identity, even when they were no longer geographically convenient. Just as these neighborhood networks could transcend the neighborhood, they could also cultivate strong ties that could compete with family bonds. Cowen recalled Rachel Weinstock, “a woman of large stature and kindly feeling,” who “made a comfortable living selling walking sticks on the corner of Broadway and Canal.” Even though her grown sons had established themselves on the West Coast and wanted her to join them, she stood her ground in Five Points: “Her life, she said, was with the people with whom she had been brought up.” Though Cowen remembered Weinstock citing the importance of shared hometown origins, she was clearly specifying those from her hometown with whom she had reconnected in Five Points, as well as new ties she forged selling walking sticks on a daily basis in her neighborhood.32 Upon arriving in New York City in 1846, Isaac Mayer Wise recalled finding “a number of young fellow-countrymen of culture transformed into factory hands, cigar makers, and peddlers.” Wise had loftier ambitions, as he hoped to become a congregational leader and intellectual, and so became disgruntled when the acquaintances he called on consistently advised him to peddle or learn a trade. But conversations he had with several professors led him to an understanding: “a few drops of water and a confession of Christianity would open for me the way to all hearts” — and, one presumes, professions.33 As a Jew, he faced a choice, it seemed, to peddle or convert. While Wise rejected both and became a leading rabbi and writer, the majority of immigrants arriving in the 1830s, 1840s, and 1850s became peddlers. But like Wise, they associated peddling with the humble conditions of basement-dwelling young

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fellow countrymen, and many of the peddlers assiduously worked to ascend the socioeconomic ladder that led from peddler to dry-goods merchant. In the 1840s and 1850s, approximately one-third of New York’s Jewish wage earners earned a living through peddling.34 Peddlers hoped one day to open their own store on Chatham Street, then within a few years to relocate to Grand Street or the Bowery, and then, ultimately, to form a larger concern on William or Fulton Street. A letter in the Asmonean, New York’s first Jewish weekly, detailed this process: When the newly arrived Israelite asks what he shall do to make a living, he is most commonly advised to go and peddle. Accordingly a basket is hastily fixed up, and he is hurried into the country. The country merchants . . . receive them [sic] coolly and oppose them step by step. An acrimonious feeling takes hold of the pedlar’s heart — he is disappointed and discouraged, and yet he goes on from day to day, changes the basket for the bundle, the bundle for the horse and wagon peddling, and finally emerges a sleek, thrifty merchant. Have the history of one of these men and you have the history of them all.35

The myth of ascent appealed to many immigrants, but some entrepreneurs preferred the security of the ethnic neighborhood. In this way, if one went out of business, one was more likely to find employment through local ethnic networks.36 Many peddlers expanded their businesses by developing ties with Jews elsewhere in the country. By 1860, the majority of the sixteen thousand peddlers in the United States were Jewish, and this enabled New York Jewish merchants to take advantage of new regional and even national markets. In establishing business connections with communities throughout the country, Jewish peddlers thus also facilitated the growth of New York suppliers. For example, Joseph and James Seligman operated a dry-goods store on William Street but also sent clothing to a brother, William, in St. Louis and to connections in California. Likewise, Levi Strauss made headway in the West in part through his close business connections with his brothers, Jonas and Louis, who had opened J. Strauss & Co., a wholesale dry-goods business in New York. When Levi arrived from Bavaria in 1847, he first stayed in New York and worked for his brothers, learning from them but also recalling his father’s experience as a dry-goods peddler in Germany. Six years later, Levi went to San Francisco, buoyed by the steady stream of credit and goods from his brothers. Subsidiary

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wholesale and manufacturing centers such as Cincinnati emerged, led by transplants from the shops and warehouses of New York.37 Jewish peddlers often specialized in the sale of secondhand clothing. In the first two-thirds of the nineteenth century, ready-made clothing was marginal — intended for sailors, miners, or slaves. Most Americans made clothes at home, had clothes sewn by a custom tailor, or bought reconditioned used garments. While some custom tailors were Jews, such as Raphael Cowen, most were non-Jewish Irish, Germans, and native-born Anglo-Americans. Most Jews’ clothing businesses concentrated on the secondhand trade. Settling on Chatham Street, Jewish secondhand-clothing merchants took in, cleaned, and renovated old clothing, preparing it for both retail and wholesale markets. Jewish secondhand traders actually “renovated” the traffic, incorporating innovative commercial ideas as well as experimenting with the production of new clothes on the side. Contemporary observers credited Jewish peddlers with introducing the installment plan (selling on “time”), direct selling, and lower prices, made possible by a willingness to maintain a smaller profit margin. One visitor from Chicago noted, “There are quite a number of time peddlers in New York, and they are most useful members of the community. They are all Hebrews, and sell everything on the installment plan.” Jews placed eighteen out of twenty advertisements in the New York Herald for used clothing for sale in New York, as well as in the southern and western markets.38 The secondhand-clothing trade was often “an object of ridicule and contempt,” but it allowed Jews to make significant contributions to the emerging garment industry, despite the fact that they played no role in technological advances such as the invention of the sewing machine. Jewish merchants experimented in both marketing and manufacturing. At first, they dabbled in the production of cheap clothing — “slops” — which they sold to miners and workers. A dry-goods merchant with cloth in stock risked little by hiring workers to produce inexpensive ready-made clothes, a process that transformed him from a merchant into a small manufacturer.39

■ In Congregations and Societies Five Points Jews formed the city’s third, fourth, and fifth congregations; indeed, for a time prior to the Civil War, more Jews prayed in Five Points than anywhere else in New York. When Raphael Cowen arrived in 1849, he immediately joined a newly established congregation, Bikur Cholim.40 Perhaps the

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same countrymen who helped him find a home helped him locate the congregation, otherwise unrecognizable as a synagogue as it was housed in the New York Dispensary. The bonds he forged there must have been strong, because he stayed with the congregation as it moved to 56 Chrystie. Even after the Cowens moved uptown, where Raphael joined the newly formed Beth El, the family continued to attend services fairly regularly at the Chrystie Street synagogue. Jewish religious life reflected the city’s reach into newer neighborhoods, its competitiveness, and its increasing role as a magnet for Europeans in search of new homes. Jewish congregations, lacking resources to purchase their own buildings, rented a variety of spaces typical of the heterogeneous and evolving neighborhood, including basements, saloons, storefronts, workshops, and old Protestant churches. Even when Jews possessed the means to build a new synagogue, as in the case of Shearith Israel, they often needed to rent during construction. The New York Dispensary, a stately structure on the corner of Centre and Walker, rented its second floor to a revolving array of congregations. Humbler secular sites also harbored congregations: Matt Brennan’s saloon, at Centre and Pearl, hosted several congregations in the 1840s and 1850s. Once Beth Hamedrash Hagadol, the nation’s first Russian congregation (1852), secured the funds and members to move out of a Bayard Street garret, they found themselves below a carpentry shop. Their next stop, a year later, situated them above a saloon.41 Their frequent moves demonstrated their members’ mobility and energy. While geographic mobility certainly shaped congregations in the midnineteenth century, so did increasing numbers. In forming B’nai Jeshurun in 1825, Five Points Jews set a pattern that proved more lasting than the founding of the second synagogue. After that initial division from one congregation into two, New York Jews grew into a linguistically, religiously, and socially diverse community. Their differences found expression in the creation of ever more congregations. For example, in 1828 some discontented members of B’nai Jeshurun left to form Anshe Chesed. In 1839, both B’nai Jeshurun and Anshe Chesed lost members to the newly formed Shaarey Zedek, and Anshe Chesed also lost members to Shaarey Shamayim. In each case, the original congregation survived, attracting incoming immigrants to replace those who had shifted allegiance. In some cases, the new congregations formed due to variations in ritual that can be attributed to hometown customs. Thus, when a critical mass of immigrants from a particular region settled, they formed

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their own congregation; while in the 1820s the first Ashkenazi congregation included English, Dutch, and German together, by the 1840s new congregations reflected English, Dutch, Polish, German, and Bohemian divisions. Sometimes arguments over procedure and Jewish law sparked a split. In the case of Ohabey Zedek, a contingent left when the leadership refused to allow a member to officiate at a wedding; in the case of Shaarey Zedek, divisions occurred when a member wished to have a non-Jewish wife converted. Other contentious congregational factions debated over fees. Power struggles underlay many of the disputes. Indeed, in 1845, the leadership of B’nai Jeshurun, which had originally broken from Shearith Israel over their lack of influence as newcomers, now feared that new arrivals jeopardized their own power. Abandoning B’nai Jeshurun, they strove to secure their control by forming Shaarey Tefilah and specifically safeguarded the founders’ power. In this way, the congregations’ competitive drive mirrored the business spirit that shaped immigrants’ daily lives.42 While the competitiveness, and sometimes pettiness, that fostered the multiplication of New York’s synagogues diminished hopes for a united Jewish community, this dynamic also highlighted the loyalty that individual Jews possessed for their own congregations and traditions. Had they not cared how a congregation should be led or services orchestrated, they would not have devoted considerable time and energy to establishing new congregations. Congregations encouraged individuals and communities to blend affection for prayers and melodies from their European hometown with a new style of American governance. In Bohemia, Germany, or Poland, these Jews would most likely have had little say in synagogue governance. In New York, however, they could vote and debate, and they found ultimate recourse in challenging authority by walking away and forming a new congregation. Mutual aid associations at first took shape within synagogues. But by the middle of the nineteenth century, these societies opened possibilities of Jewish affiliation outside the synagogue. A turning point came in 1845, when B’nai Jeshurun’s Hebrah Gmilut Hassed, or Hebrew Mutual Benefit Society, remained intact even as B’nai Jeshurun itself lost a contingent of members to Shaarey Tefilah. To maintain the integrity of the mutual aid association, which now drew on members from both the original B’nai Jeshurun and the new Shaarey Tefilah, the leadership decided to make membership to the mutual aid association available to any New York synagogue member. Now New York had an

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organization extending beyond a single synagogue. In the 1850s, the Hebrew Mutual Benefit Society and other mutual aid societies began to purchase their own cemeteries, thereby weakening the synagogue’s hold on those who joined to secure a proper Jewish burial. While many society members retained synagogue memberships, this status was no longer a given, and a New York Jew could live — and be buried — as a Jew without synagogue membership.43 Just as mutual aid associations came into their own, thereby diminishing the centrality of the synagogue in Jewish life, so too did kosher slaughterers and Passover matzo bakers move beyond the synagogue’s purview. Changes in the distribution and sale of kosher meat in New York point to a transition from the synagogue as the center of Jewish community to the neighborhoods. In the first few decades of the nineteenth century, congregations hired their shohetim (kosher slaughterers) directly, and Jews bought their kosher meat from the synagogue. By the 1840s, however, butchers began to hire shohetim on their own. While several congregations maintained their shohetim, both Jewish and non-Jewish butchers who hired their shohetim directly gained a much larger share of the kosher-meat market. In the 1850s, the sale of matzo at Passover, paralleled this transition from the synagogue community to the open market.44 The fact that Christian butchers and bakers found it profitable to offer kosher meat and unleavened bread indicates significant demand. While we cannot dismiss the criticisms of various rabbis and leaders, such as Rabbi Max Lilienthal, who accused the purportedly kosher butchers of mixing kosher meat with nonkosher meat, we should appreciate the continued demand for kosher meat. Those who purchased kosher meat undoubtedly thought that the meat advertised and priced as kosher was indeed kosher; otherwise, they would have simply purchased less expensive nonkosher meat. The commercial streets of Lower Manhattan’s immigrant neighborhoods, with their Jewish groceries and butcher shops, allowed Jews to maintain a Jewish lifestyle in New York outside the synagogue. Ethnic stores sold food and other items that appealed to members of particular immigrant groups. Store owners established the loyalty of consumers not only by offering certain goods but also by doing business in the old language. Stores became social centers where people exchanged news of the old country and the new neighborhood. Any Jewish-owned dry-goods or grocery store could become a place for Jewish immigrants to gather, to read letters from home, to exchange gossip or business tips, and in the process, to foster familial and business relationships.

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Of course, local commerce also offered opportunities for entrepreneurship catering to a Jewish clientele. Women played a particularly active role in the identity-building function of the neighborhood streets. While welcome to attend synagogue services with their husbands or fathers, women could not be active or leading members of congregations. Yet, as consumers, Jewish women, like other housewives in New York, dominated street commerce. The preference for kosher food gave shopping religious overtones for Jews and made grocery stores and, especially, butcher shops venues for women to express their Jewish identities.45 Mid-nineteenth-century Jewish leaders acknowledged the importance of Jewish commerce as a gauge of the Jewish community and population. When asked to approximate the Jewish population in New York, contemporary leaders and historians increasingly depended on Passover matzo purchases for the answer. In 1855, the leader of Shearith Israel, Jacques Judah Lyons, estimated the Jewish population of New York based on matzo consumption. Samuel Myers Isaacs, the leader of congregation Shaarey Tefilah and the editor of the Jewish Messenger, the leading Jewish New York weekly in the 1850s and 1860s, noted in 1864 that the Passover holiday provided an important potential gauge on population statistics: “It is a pity we have no statistics of the number of Israelites in our city. That they are rapidly increasing is evident from the scarcity of matzos on the eve of the late festival, although the bakers assured us that all of them had supplied themselves with quantities in excess of former years.”46 The fact that by mid-nineteenth century communal leaders increasingly linked population statistics to the consumption of matzo, as opposed to synagogue membership and seating, affirms the importance of neighborhood networks and shopping, suggesting that Jewish ritual practice could exist independently of and in addition to the synagogue. Advertisements for kosher meat and groceries in the Jewish Messenger reveal (1) movement from neighborhood to neighborhood, (2) continued allegiance to a former neighborhood, and (3) the ongoing importance of kosher goods. Kosher butcher stores and groceries advertising in the English-language Jewish press followed the Jewish population from Five Points east to Kleindeutschland and then uptown; these advertisements also suggest that even the Five Points stores that remained in place adjusted to the movement of Jews away from the neighborhood by offering delivery services. In 1860, Lyons and Guion, a store in Five Points at 132 Chatham Street, advertised its wares and

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promised that “orders thankfully received from the Israelitish community” would be “promptly sent to any part of the city.” This advertisement suggests, too, that even those who moved beyond the immigrant neighborhood continued to desire kosher groceries and value Five Points ties. Phillip Friedman kept one store in Five Points, at 131 Elizabeth Street, but added one at number 9 in the Essex Street Market, in the heart of Kleindeutschland. Friedman supplied kosher meat to individuals and organizations. His advertisement in an 1850 issue of the Asmonean read, “Societies, Festivals, Dinner Parties, and Balls Contracted for, at a low rate and executed in the best manner.” In September 1855, perhaps in response to increased movement to Kleindeutschland, Friedman announced that he had moved his Elizabeth Street store to 134 Rivington and maintained his store at the Essex Market. From Kleindeutschland, he was prepared to send kosher meat to the West Indies as well. Another Five Points store, McGowan and Hart, had moved to Grand Street, a major Kleindeutschland artery, by 1860. Its advertisement referred explicitly to kosher “English and Dutch Cheese” among a list including “Family and Fancy Groceries,” not identified as kosher.47 By 1860, Jews in search of kosher beef and poultry could venture further uptown to a new kosher meat market at 669 Eighth Avenue, between FortySixth and Forty-Seventh Streets, with the assurance that this meat market had downtown approval. C. Willmot assured Jewish Messenger readers that his shohet, Rev. Isaac Marks, was recommended by rabbis in England and certified by Rev. Samuel Myers Isaacs of Shaarey Tefilah, Dr. Morris Raphall of B’nai Jeshurun, and the officials at Beth Hamedrash and “therefore solicits the patronage of those families who depend upon a proper place for getting real kosher meat.” Here shopkeepers advertised their allegiance to standards, showing that rabbis and shopkeepers were not the only arbiters of Jewish law but that customers also had a role in determining communal standards through their patronage. Willmot also promised “to deliver to any part of the city free of charge,” indicating that Jews in search of kosher meat were not located in one specific neighborhood.48 Although the Five Points neighborhood remained a center of Jewish immigrant life through the turn of the twentieth century (in 1890, Jews composed 18 percent of the population there), Jews had started to move east of the Bowery as early as the 1840s and ’50s. A ribbon of Jewish settlement headed east from Mott and Baxter Streets along East Broadway and then north to

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Broome and Houston and still further east to Attorney and Ridge Streets. In many ways, Kleindeutschland resembled Five Points — both were decidedly working-class immigrant neighborhoods that housed and employed its resident laborers. However, the population here was more German than Irish, and the German language dominated. In fact, Kleindeutschland was the first massive foreign-language urban enclave in American history. Manhattan and Brooklyn constituted the world’s third-largest German-speaking city after Berlin and Vienna, and Kleindeutschland itself ranked as the fifth-largest German-speaking city. In many ways, this city-within-a-city proved profitable for immigrant entrepreneurs — they catered to their fellow countrymen and established grocery stores, saloons, and dry-good stores, as well as breweries and cigar factories. Tailors, shoemakers, and furniture makers set up shop in Kleindeutschland’s “maze of alleyways . . . [with] internal courtyards crowded with industrial workshops.”49 Kleindeutschland nurtured an ethnic economy that catered to Germanspeaking immigrants, both Jewish and non-Jewish. Grocers, delicatessen owners, and cigar manufacturers depended on the immigrant community for their customers.50 Yet at the same time, the immigrants formed the labor pool on which the broader city depended; though a distinct quarter, these immigrants were fundamentally part of New York City. They could establish German societies, and they could reconstitute Catholic parishes or build Lutheran churches, but their children would learn English. Even their Germanlanguage newspapers, while leaving space to follow events in the homeland, focused primarily on New York politics and events. Similarly, the Jewish immigrants of Kleindeutschland often lived and labored side by side with their German-speaking Christian neighbors but at the same time maintained distinctive congregations and associations. Census records indicate that German Jews lived in buildings that often had at least one other Jewish family, as well as several non-Jewish families. For example, in 1860, Mayer Stern, a shoemaker, lived with his family at 220 Second Street with nine other families. Of the ten households, all parents were born in Germany (Baden, Bavaria, Prussia), and three families out of the ten (including the Sterns) appear to have been Jewish. At 129 Willett Street, Baden-born Jacob Abraham, who worked at an exchange office in 1860 but had worked as a baker in 1859, and his Bavarian-born wife, Fanny, lived with their five children, all born in New York. They shared the building with three other families. Their

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neighbors Herman, a shoemaker, and Barbara Meyer, from Wurtemburg and Bavaria, raised their own New York – born children, Meyer and Mary, and appear to have been Jewish; the other two families both hailed from Darmstadt and do not appear to have been Jewish.51 Jews formed one of Kleindeutschland’s many regionally or religiously defined ethnic subgroups.52 Within the German community as a whole, class distinctions became more important over time, reshuffling former regional affiliations in favor of shared socioeconomic status. German-speaking Jews followed a similar pattern in some respects, though not in others. Within Kleindeutschland, they married other German-speaking Jews (irrespective of region) and lived in specific areas. Their institutional affiliations gradually came to emphasize their Jewishness over their Germanness. By the late 1850s, however, moresuccessful German-Jewish immigrants had moved beyond Kleindeutschland, while the working classes remained. An 1858 list of Jews who applied for free Passover matzo showed distinct clusterings around Ridge and Attorney Streets. One way that Jews continued to mark their separate identity as Jews was by forming congregations. New congregations sprouted in rented spaces in Kleindeutschland: Shaarey Shamayim (1839) and Rodeph Shalom (1842), the sixth and seventh congregations in New York, started on Attorney Street. Bohemian Jews formed Ahawath Chesed (later Central Synagogue) in rented quarters on Ludlow Street in 1844. In 1852, Jews from Poland and Germany formed Beth El on Thirty-Third Street, the first “uptown” congregation. Beth Hamedrash, the Russian congregation that had moved from garret to carpenter shop to saloon, excitedly jumped at the opportunity to purchase an old Welsh church on Allen Street in 1856. Years later, the congregation remembered this site as “a good spiritual and physical situation.”53 In addition to Shaarey Hashamayim and Rodeph Shalom, Temple Emanu-El (1845), Bikur Cholim (1849), Shaarey Rachamim (1849), and Beth Elohim (1853) were founded in Kleindeutschland. Other congregations followed individuals out of Five Points and often into Kleindeutschland. Though in 1850, B’nai Jeshurun, the original Five Points congregation, bypassed Kleindeutschland and built a new synagogue on Greene Street and Houston, Anshe Chesed, the second congregation formed in Five Points, installed its congregation in an impressive Gothic synagogue on Norfolk and Houston. Temple Emanu-El, born in Kleindeutschland, spearheaded the radical changes in Jewish ritual and thought that led to the Reform movement in Judaism.

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Despite the importance of religious congregations, however, the majority of immigrants devoted much of their time and energy to secular associations and clubs. In this respect, Jews resembled their non-Jewish neighbors. The German community, in particular, included many free thinkers who did not attend church of any kind. The Staats-Zeitung, the city’s major German-language newspaper, noted in 1860 that 50 percent of the Kleindeutschland community lacked church affiliation; in another article, the newspaper claimed that only one out of five German immigrants could be considered a “regular churchgoer.” Jews also strayed from strict religious practice. In the 1840s and 1850s congregational participation diminished in two ways. Newspapers noted the increasing numbers of the unaffiliated. Additionally, those who did affiliate with congregations neglected religious obligations. By the 1840s, congregational leaders realized that they could not depend on ten members to attend prayer services to make the requisite ten-man quorum, or minyan, and so hired “minyan men” to attend services.54 In place of church, German immigrants became known as inveterate creators and joiners of voluntary associations, or Vereine.55 While some Vereine represented particular hometowns, others promoted a certain trade or occupation, political interest, or leisure pursuit. Many German immigrants had been members of voluntary associations in Germany, so this form of organizing was familiar. Voluntary, democratic gathering meshed well with American social trends. American fraternalism flourished in the second half of the nineteenth century. Beginning with the Masons and Odd Fellows, millions of American men and hundreds of thousands of women subjected themselves to elaborate initiation rituals to become “brothers” and “sisters” of a myriad of secret societies and fraternal orders. Fraternal orders claimed one out of five American men; many joined several societies.56 Both the “fraternals” and the Vereine offered material benefits. Although the oldest order, the Masons, relied mostly on an informal system of mutual aid, most of the newer orders formalized the benefits they provided. Most paid a “death benefit” to the survivors of a brother who died. Many also supplied medical care to the sick and burial. At a time when there was little government-provided social insurance, or even privately sponsored pensions, these benefits offered a modicum of security to working- and middle-class men and women.

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Germans found that one could join a fraternal organization and further both German identity and integration into American culture at the same time. The Independent Order of Red Men, for example, translated the pseudoIndian lore of an American order into German.57 Likewise, Jews often joined German fraternal orders yet preserved their religious identity. Jews assumed leadership of lodges of such German fraternal orders as the German Order of the Harugari, the Orden der Hermanns Soehne (Order of the Sons of Hermann), the Independent Order of Red Men, and the Improved Order, Knights of Pythias (the last two were breakaways from mainstream English-speaking orders). Sometimes, Jews joined predominantly Jewish lodges of these German orders. On October 13, 1843, a group of German-speaking Jews, some with experience as Masons and Odd Fellows, some with active synagogue memberships, gathered at Sinsheimer’s saloon on Essex Street and created a wholly new Jewish association: B’nai B’rith, Sons of the Covenant. This organization derived its identity both from the daily aspects and structures of Kleindeutschland and from Jewish values and rituals. The founding’s very setting — a saloon — shows the influence of Kleindeutschland social norms. The lager beer saloon served as the quintessential living room of Kleindeutschland, whose Tenth Ward alone hosted 526 of them in 1865.58 As evidenced by notices in the Germanlanguage newspaper the Staats-Zeitung, hundreds of chapters of the Masons, Odd Fellows, and International Order of Red Men gathered in the rear rooms of saloons. Still, the dozen founders of B’nai B’rith, of whom 25 percent were members of prominent German fraternals, chose to gather at a saloon owned by a fellow Jew, and they chose to organize a distinctly Jewish fraternal. Why form a distinctly Jewish secular association when one could join a preexisting secular association such as the Masons? Or, for that matter, a synagogue? To some extent, strains of anti-Semitism or discomfort within the general fraternal orders could have motivated the twelve men. But in their own preamble to their constitution, they stated that they formed a new association precisely because they felt that the synagogues had failed to capture the attention of the Jewish youth: “to speak plainly, a youth would rather not be recognized as a Jew, and never thinks of visiting a synagogue, it becomes necessary for us to try at least to remedy this evil and show the beauties of our Holy Religion.”59 Even as they established a secular institution that mimicked the

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rituals and forms of standard fraternal organization, they infused those forms with Jewish content and used it to fulfill a goal of Jewish unity and fellowship. Like most fraternal associations, B’nai B’rith supported “its members in the event of illness and other untoward events” and also helped support “the widow and the orphan.” The founders also emphasized that B’nai B’rith strove to unite Jews in the interests of humanity, promoting “science and art” and “developing and elevating the mental and moral character of the people of [the Jewish] faith.”60 But beyond simply supporting fellow Jews and pursuing an interest in broader civilization, it aimed to redress a void in Jewish life. Even as it looked forward to the creation of a new, vital Jewish association, B’nai B’rith founders acknowledged a void left in New York by the synagogue’s fading hold. Henry Jones, usually accorded pride of place among the order’s twelve founders, conflated Jewish and fraternal symbols and practices as he explained how Jewish fraternalism would rescue Judaism from the hidebound traditions increasingly rejected by modern youth. Jones, born Heinrich Jonas in Hamburg, was a thirty-two-year-old mechanic when the meeting at Sinsheimer’s took place. Dark haired and bespectacled, with a prominent nose and cleft chin framed by a fringe of beard, Jones was secretary of congregation Anshe Chesed and “a born organizer.” He averred, The Jewish religion has many observances and customs corresponding to the secret societies known to us. The synagogue, for instance, might be compared to a lodge room. It used to be open twice a day; for a Jew desiring to find a friend, he had but to go there and make himself known by certain signs and tokens; he was sure to find assistance. The sign consisted of a grip given with a full hand and the magical words Sholem Alechem. The Mesussah on the door-post was the countersign. The Arbacanphoth represented the regalia. Shema Israel was the password. But now, since the synagogue is open but once a week, since the Mesussah is to be found at very few doorposts, since the regalia, the Arbacanphot, has almost disappeared from the breasts of our coreligionists, since the pass-word is not given twice a day as it used to be, and therefore has lost its magical power.61

Jones appeared to yearn for the power of a traditional Jewish lifestyle — its rites and customs — to shape the texture of daily life and form community, and he attempted to graft Judaism’s symbols onto Vereine culture. While the synagogue had, to Jones’s mind, failed, the thriving Vereine and fraternal culture of

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Kleindeutschland could perhaps strengthen Jewish customs and community, making them a visible part of daily life for American Jews. Rooted in a particular Kleindeutschland saloon, and conditioned by a structure of mutual aid that coursed through the German immigrant quarter and American society, B’nai B’rith spoke to a fundamental desire of immigrant Jews: to adapt their Jewish identity to new American formats. By 1852, the order had more than seven hundred members in New York City, in addition to lodges in Baltimore and Cincinnati. That year, the New York lodges dedicated Covenant Hall, at 56 Orchard Street, containing meeting rooms, a large assembly hall, and a library, as well as a private restaurant run by an order member. New York’s B’nai B’rith enrolled nearly one thousand members by 1856; by 1861, every state in the country had a B’nai B’rith lodge. Beginning in New York, this novel mode of Jewish identification spread throughout the United States. In every city and town in which it took root, B’nai B’rith offered a means for Jews of various hometowns and levels of religious observance to unite around a shared Jewish identity. It created a whole new way of affiliating with the Jewish community that was fully compatible with contemporary American culture. The trend of establishing Jewish organizations outside the synagogue escalated in ensuing decades. By 1860, New York had twenty-seven synagogues but forty-four charitable and benevolent societies. At least sixteen additional national Jewish fraternal orders arose between the 1840s and the 1910s. They had names like Independent Order Free Sons of Israel, Kesher shel Barzel, Order Ahavas Israel, Order Brith Abraham, and Independent Order Brith Sholom. All offered material benefits and combined Judaic symbols with fraternal elements. Membership overlapped and rituals diffused throughout the community as joiners accumulated fraternal experience. Hirsh Heinemann, for example, one of the founders of B’nai B’rith, subsequently served as first Grand Master of the Free Sons of Israel, which once included a whole lodge of former members of the Harugari. Among the founders of Order Ahavas Israel were several Masons, Odd Fellows, and members of Sons of Benjamin and Independent Order Brith Abraham (IOBA).62 As an independent women’s order, unaffiliated with a men’s group, the Unabhaengiger Orden Treuer Schwester (Independent Order of True Sisters) was unique. Although it began in 1846 as a ladies’ auxiliary to congregation Emanu-El, by 1851, it could claim to be the first independent national Jewish

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women’s organization, with six lodges, two in New York City. The True Sisters had all the trappings of a fraternal order, including not just material benefits but also a system of four degrees of membership, named after Jewish heroines: Miriam (sisterly love), Ruth (friendship and loyalty), Esther (fidelity), and Hannah (piety). Although many of its members discovered fraternal forms through their husbands’ B’nai B’rith membership, and the two orders maintained friendly relations, the Independent Order of True Sisters promoted “the development of free, independent and well-considered action of its members. The women are to expand their activities, without neglecting their obligations as housekeepers, in such a manner, that if necessary they can participate in public meetings and discussions, besides [sic] the man, not inferior to him.” Although the True Sisters remained a small organization — with twenty-one lodges and 5,991 members nationwide (ten lodges with 2,412 members in New York City) — it offered a rare place in communal life for autonomous women’s activities. When the National Council of Jewish Women was founded in 1893, many True Sisters played active roles in the new organization.63 B’nai B’rith evolved gradually to meet its members’ needs. Initially they were German immigrants of modest means, but by the end of the century they were both German and English speaking and solidly middle class. Over time, B’nai B’rith simplified its rituals and deemphasized its benefits. Those who were in need still received support, and the New York District opened an oldage home in Yonkers in 1882; but as members moved up socially, they directed more of their attention to philanthropic efforts. For a time, B’nai B’rith took the lead in mobilizing for Jewish rights at home and abroad and in aiding and Americanizing new waves of Jewish immigrants. By 1917, although it retained its headquarters on upper Broadway, its center of gravity shifted outside the city: of 313 lodges and 35,422 members across the country, only 19 and 2,100, respectively, were in New York.

■ The Sabbath and the Jewish Street One manifestation of the large German influence on Jewish organizational practices in the nineteenth century was their secularization practices. This carried over to Sabbath observance as well. In an editorial in the Jewish Messenger, an exasperated Rabbi Samuel Myers Isaacs noted that the average Jewish New Yorker desired to keep the Sabbath but felt that America’s “climate” created “something in the air that opposes his intention.”64 This pattern held

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steady. Fifty years later, Rabbi Bernard Drachman, a staunch crusader for Sabbath observance, claimed that Sabbath laxity became significant in the midnineteenth century. Immigrants seeking freedom and economic opportunities “seemed to think there was something in the American atmosphere which made the religious loyalty of their native lands, and especially the olden observance of the Sabbath, impossible.”65 What, exactly, transpired in New York’s “climate” to make regular Sabbath observance difficult? Doubtless economic pressures weighed more heavily on Jews than on the Irish and Germans, since the Jewish Sabbath was an accepted workday for the city. Nevertheless, Sabbath practices differentiated not only Jew from Christian but also Catholic from Protestant and German from Anglo. New Yorkers debated the meaning of the Sabbath, how it should be observed, and whether it should be observed at all. German Christian immigrants contributed to the debate over appropriate behavior on the American Sunday. Even Germans who attended church regularly included “secular activities” as part of their Sunday routine, and these elicited criticism from nativeborn Protestants and even prompted legislation. While Sabbatarians wished to reserve Sunday for rest and churchgoing, more fluid definitions of Sunday behavior included attendance at a library, a voluntary association, or a lecture hall. As more immigrants entered the city, many supported the notion of a “Continental Sabbath,” which encompassed leisure and amusement. Theaters, dance halls, and saloons beckoned many city dwellers but irked those who favored a strictly observed and government-protected Sunday as a day of church attendance and quiet contemplation. German immigrants, in turn, organized to proclaim their right to spend their day off from work as they pleased, appealing to American separation of church and state and individual liberties to fight against Sabbatarians and blue laws.66 Jews, of course, traditionally observed the Sabbath on Saturday. But they too joined in the debates. On a practical level, New York Jews grappled with whether to work on Saturday, at once the Jewish day of rest and an important commercial day. The Jewish network of peddling and business failed to insulate Jewish workers and businessmen from the tug of the city’s commercial demands and the lure of its opportunities. As early as the 1840s, sermons and publications noted that Jews shirked their religious responsibilities. Jewish communal leaders denounced Sabbath desecration; but notably, an 1854 Sabbath debate among Jews actually addressed Christian worship patterns. This

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debate focused more on a Jew’s place in Christian New York society than on Jewish Sabbath observance. Indeed, just as German immigrants discussed the merits of the Continental Sabbath in their newspapers and in saloons, immigrant Jews considered the role of the Sabbath in secular spaces such as libraries and the Jewish weekly the Asmonean. In 1854, Professor Emanuel Brandeis delivered a lecture at the B’nai B’rith’s Maimonides Library Association, at 56 Orchard Street, in which he focused on Chatham Street, a mere ten-minute walk away. But this lecture addressed work, not leisure, and must have hit home as many in attendance either lived and worked or had lived or worked on Chatham Street. What was wrong with Chatham Street? Given the tenor of other lectures and articles on Jews’ neglect of their Sabbath, one might expect that Brandeis would have focused on Jews who opened their stores on Saturday, thereby disregarding the Jewish Sabbath. To the contrary, here, Brandeis lambasted those who opened on Sunday: “It is revolting to see people so regardless of public feeling as to desecrate a day of general worship, and to trade and deal openly, while the majority of inhabitants are going in pious devotion, to throw themselves at the feet of the divinity.” Brandeis excused Sabbath observers from his critique, targeting only Jews who kept their businesses open seven days a week and thereby made Chatham Street “a crying abuse, a foul spot upon the New York Israelites.” Brandeis chastised the seven-day-a-week storekeepers for disturbing the “pious devotion” of Christians on Sunday but ignored the distress that Saturday commerce must have caused Jewish Sabbath observers. Instead, Brandeis called on Jewish businessmen to close their shops on Sunday, to redress the fact that their commerce “lower[ed] [Jews] in the general esteem.”67 Sunday work raised a larger theoretical question about Jews’ place in New York and American principles. The Asmonean leveled a thorough critique of Brandeis’s arguments. Its columnist claimed that the Jews’ ability to open on Sunday was actually “an illustration of American freedom, a striking instance of independence and equality.” Brandeis rejected this comparison, characterizing Chatham Street as a “crippled monument of American freedom and equality” and a manifestation of the “European ghetto.” The Asmonean columnist took umbrage: “One of the most central, best located thoroughfares, tenanted on one side almost exclusively by Christians, a Ghetto! I could never have made that discovery.” Here, the Asmonean columnist argued, Jews, along with Gentiles, composed a thriving, core artery of New York commerce. Jew-

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ish Sunday commerce demonstrated America’s freedoms: “the real question at issue, namely the right, the inalienable right of every citizen to work or rest on the day he chooses!” Just as German immigrants invoked American freedom to justify their Sunday customs, so too did Jews turn to a language of rights. This debate suggests that the very presence of Jews, and of minorities, illustrated key principles of American identity even as they deviated from the social mainstream.68 The debate in the Asmonean demonstrates that even Jews who disregarded Jewish religious law had an identity as Jewish New Yorkers. Both non-Jews and other Jews considered them part of the Jewish community, and nonJews could be offended by their disturbance of the Christian Sabbath, while Jews could worry about the possibility that non-Jews might take offense. In other words, deviating from religious precepts did not necessarily distance one from Jewish identity or community.69

■ The Growth of the Garment Industry The Jewish arrivals of the mid-nineteenth century set many of the patterns followed by those who came later. Nowhere was this more visible than in the garment industry that became the basis of a large part of the New York Jewish economy. New York’s assets continued to facilitate the growth of the garment trade, enabling clothing manufacturing to increase 600 percent between 1860 and 1880. The city already had numerous garment firms, which took advantage of the city’s proximity to New England textile mills as well as European textiles and fashion ideas. New immigrants both provided cheap labor and fed a growing retail market in the city itself. And the simultaneous increase of catalogues, advertising, and department stores helped to expand markets across the nation. New York’s role as the financial capital also provided funds for new and old firms eager to grow. While New York’s lack of open space hindered other industries from taking root, the garment industry’s adaptability and flexibility with regard to production meant that it could be decentralized in the city. Manufacturers purchased, designed, and cut fabric but then relied on contractors who managed the assembly and production of the finished clothes in tenement apartments throughout the city.70 The Civil War demanded the production of uniforms, and Jewish merchants stepped in to meet the demand. This effort helped propel Jews from the margins to the center of clothing manufacture. Both Jewish merchants

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who had already been involved in the clothing business and those who lacked any clothing experience whatsoever jumped at the contracts and set up shop accordingly. Without time to measure every single soldier, suppliers developed a system of standardized sizes for the first time. This helped in the rapid production of uniforms but also made possible mass production for a civilian market.71 German Jews used their experience in the garment industry and wholesale and retail trade to direct this expansion, with the help of an influx of cheap labor that came in the form of eastern European Jews in the 1870s, 1880s and 1890s. As eastern European Jews arrived in New York and settled in the same neighborhoods that had once nurtured the central European Jewish secondhand market, they soon learned of the importance of the garment industry and used neighborhood networks to find their way into it. By 1890, one-half of all employed eastern European Jews in New York worked in the garment industry, and by 1900 they composed the majority of both workers and employers.72 Mary Wasserzug’s story illustrates the ways in which eastern European Jews followed the central Europeans into the garment industry. In 1876, a quarter century after Raphael and Julia Cowen settled in Five Points, twelve-year-old Mary Wasserzug arrived from Werbelow with her mother to find her elderly father living in a single narrow room on East Broadway. Having failed to launch a jewelry store, the father was barely getting by, and so Mary immediately sought employment. Neighbors secured her first position, as a domestic to established cousins on Grand Street, where she earned three dollars a week. As a newcomer, this position conferred certain advantages — despite demeaning treatment from the mother of the home, the older daughters, who also happened to be schoolteachers, helped Mary learn English. But almost from the beginning, Mary understood that the garment industry was the more respected occupational goal. With the knowledge that her older sister, Rivkah, a skilled seamstress, would be arriving, Mary saved money so that Rivkah could buy a sewing machine, bypass domestic work, and enter the garment industry. When tensions forced Mary to leave the domestic position, she too wanted to find work in the garment industry: she “tried hard to secure work in a shop, but alas, she could not sew.”73 Mary turned once again to neighborhood networks to find work as a domestic in New Jersey, with people from Werbelow, her hometown. But when she learned that the mother of the home was pregnant, “it occurred to Mary

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that she had made a mistake to enter domestic service. There would be much company when the child was born, they would discover who Mary was, and the news would travel as far back as Werbelow — Mary the rabbi’s grandchild had in America become a servant.” Jews in neither Europe nor America held domestic work in high regard. Having a job in the garment industry, on the other hand, was perfectly respectable. Again, Mary sought a job. She came at last to a buttonhole factory, where an old fellow-townsman was “boss.” He himself taught Mary how to hold a needle and sew with a thimble. In a week Mary had advanced to finishing machine-made buttonholes. After one week of the apprenticeship Mary got a dollar and a half. She joyfully ran home and gave her parents her precious earnings. Her industry was rewarded, for two weeks later she was earning three dollars a week. It was the busy season for buttonholes and she was offered $4.50 by another employer. Her countryman advised her to accept, since he himself was unable to pay that much.74

Though Mary advanced in this position, the slack season came, and she lost her job. And so Mary found a job with a landsman, working in a buttonhole factory at 4 Bayard Street. Within several years, she advanced to become a forelady at Schwartz’s buttonhole factory. Her mobility in the garment industry translated into increased income for the family and a series of residential moves within the Lower East Side. Eastern European Jews viewed the garment industry as a means to an end. As Jesse Pope explained, The statement has been repeated until it is trite that the Jew considers the industry as a stepping stone to something higher, and in no industry in this country has the upward movement been so pronounced as in this. Every year large numbers desert the clothing industry to go into such occupations as small shopkeepers, insurance agents, and clerks; the importance of this movement is seen by the study of the migration of the Jews into the better residence districts uptown. The Industrial Commission says: “Tailors who have been displaced by green immigrants of the same or other nationalities have found better positions as contractors, manufacturers or small tradesmen, or have created a new line of product of a better grade.”75

Many eastern European Jews remained in the garment industry only as long as they had to; economists found that the longer an immigrant lived in the United States, the less likely he or she was to work in the garment industry.76

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■ Rising in Retail While some of the Chatham Street shopkeepers and their descendants transformed their old-clothes trade into the ready-made garment industry, others charted their advance through retail. In 1902, to take one extraordinary example, Macy’s opened its stunning new department store, a nine-story castle of commerce on Thirty-Fourth Street. Two red marble pillars flanked the Broadway entrance, and overhead an arch showcased a bronze clock and statues of Greek maidens. Though bronze letters spelled out the name of the store’s founder, R. H. Macy, Isidor and Nathan Straus, the current owners, engineered the move and the $4.8 million construction.77 Their father, Lazarus, had come to the United States in 1852 and started a general store in Talbatton, Georgia. After the Civil War, Isidor brought the family to New York City to open a wholesale crockery business. In 1874, Lazarus Straus and his sons Isidor and Nathan acquired the concession for Macy’s china and glass department. Though many central European Jews had opened dry-goods firms, department stores represented the next rung in commerce. By the time Lazarus arrived in the United States, A. T. Stewart had opened his marble palace of commerce on Broadway and Chambers and collected a number of departments under one roof. In doing so, he transformed the shopping experience from one that involved inelegant traipsing from one retail firm to another to a fashionable, convenient experience in which New Yorkers found all their needs under one roof and could dine and socialize as well. By the time the Strauses acquired Macy’s in 1896, it had long surpassed A. T. Stewart’s and other New York department stores. The Strauses built on that success, continuing to innovate as well as moving uptown and constructing one of the largest department stores in the world. Macy’s enticed New Yorkers to pursue happiness through consumption, as they handled the finest linens, tried on the most fashionable dresses, and purchased English teas. An army of workers created splendid display windows and meticulously arranged departments. The frequent touting of best prices encouraged New Yorkers to shop with ease, reassured that they enjoyed luxury goods at decent prices. The move to Thirty-Fourth Street escalated the glamour of the shopping experience, as the increased space meant more goods to peruse (additional departments) and unsurpassed grandeur. Macy’s close attention to holidays, including its orchestration and extension of the holiday season, gave customers further rea-

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sons to return, enjoy, and shop. Macy’s continued success enabled the Straus brothers (a third brother, Oscar, did not join Isidor and Nathan in the business but went into law instead) to take a leading role in Jewish philanthropy and in public affairs. In the 1840s, Chatham Street Jews took over the undesirable secondhandclothing trade, a sector that others mocked and shunned. But secondhand clothes and dry goods offered hope for advancement, and many made the transition from peddler to owner of a small firm. The transformation of erstwhile peddlers into substantial merchants was symbolized by the loft buildings they began to build on Broadway. As early as 1850, the Asmonean carried an advertisement for cast-iron building construction. One can imagine the aspiring peddler eyeing the advertisement and imagining his own name on the pediment. By 1888, noted one observer, “Of the 400 buildings on Broadway, from Canal Street to Union Square, the occupants of almost all are Hebrews, over 1000 wholesale firms out of a total of 1200 being of that persuasion.” Moreover, the observer, added, it was not Broadway alone that bore witness to Jewish commercial mobility; “Hebrew firms also predominate in the streets contiguous to Broadway within the territory named.”78 In the course of several decades, Jews had moved beyond Chatham Street to Broadway. But even as these impressive buildings had risen, with the names of Jewish merchants above their doors, tens of thousands of Jewish immigrants were pouring into miserable tenements to the east on Orchard, Eldridge, Rivington, and Hester Streets. When the owners of the Broadway warehouses had lived on those streets, they had been a part of Kleindeutschland; now their employees found themselves on the Jewish East Side.

This late nineteenth-century print shows immigrants filing into the offices of the United Hebrew Charities for assistance. Several leading Jewish charities merged in 1874 to form the UHC, through which the more established, uptown Jews helped first central European and later eastern European Jewish immigrants. Compare the clean-shaven, Americanized clerks behind the desk to the bedraggled immigrants in line. (Photograph courtesy of Butler Library, Columbia University in the City of New York)

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2

“Radical Reform”: Union through Charity

In the late 1880s, Rebekah Bettelheim Kohut typically started her day at home on Beekman Place, a quaint two-block stretch of four-story brownstones between Forty-Ninth and Fifty-First Streets. Kohut described these houses as “a little world in themselves. High up above the East River, and seemingly cut off from the rest of the city, the residents were very neighborly. All of the houses were of the four-story brownstone type, with high stoops.” Jewelers, writers, doctors, judges, marble dealers, and musicians gathered on the stoops and in the bay-windowed parlors to enjoy the cool evening East River breezes that made bearable the hot city summers.1 But though she began her day in this serene residential outpost, midday often found Kohut walking briskly through the congested streets of downtown Manhattan, stopping at various tenement apartments to deliver aid and comfort to the city’s Jewish immigrant poor. Kohut and members of her congregation’s sisterhood climbed “flight after flight” of the East Side tenements’ “creaking stairs” and experienced firsthand how “spaces were divided and subdivided into tiny cubicles called rooms, without air or daylight.” In the tenements, they paid “friendly visits” intended to assess the state of immigrant families in need.2 What motivated Kohut to leave her sunny, refined, comfortable brownstone for a district of ramshackle tenements? Middle-class New York Jews like Kohut felt an obligation to help immigrant Jews and labored actively to forge the formal charitable channels needed to connect Jews now living in separate neighborhoods and inhabiting very different New York worlds. In 1890, a census study focusing on American Jewish families who had been in the country for at least five years found that they had achieved solid,

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middle-class standing. Throughout the nation, Jews had worked their way up from peddler to small businessman, wholesaler, and professional: of the 18,031 men surveyed, 5,977 were retail dealers; 3,041 were accountants, bookkeepers, and clerks; 2,147 were wholesale merchants and dealers; and 1,797 were commercial travelers. Nearly two-thirds of the families surveyed had at least one servant.3 Many New York Jews too had attained middle-class status, but the city likely had a heavier concentration of both the wealthy and the poor than did the American Jewish community as a whole. Just as the majority of the city’s eighty thousand Jews had achieved middle-class status by 1880, hundreds of thousands of newcomers arrived to reinforce the city’s Jewish working class. Central European and, increasingly, eastern European Jews streamed into the city with few material assets. At the same time, New York’s vitality as the nation’s economic center produced a wealthy elite. By the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the nation’s wealthiest and most illustrious Jews made their home in New York City, including department-store magnates such as Nathan and Isidor Straus of Macy’s and Lyman and Joseph Bloomingdale and such famed financiers as Joseph Seligman, Solomon Guggenheim, and Jacob Schiff. Communal leaders not only enlarged the agendas of congregations and other associations to include increased charity for newcomers but also created entirely new forms of charitable and communal support. They devised the charitable communal channels to connect brownstone Jews with tenement Jews and to bring Fifth Avenue Jews to East Broadway. At base, charity work underlined a sense of social responsibility toward the newcomers on the part of the more established. But translating charitable impulses into formal networks and institutions took years and sparked heated debates. Fraternal orders and communal defense organizations offered alternative models of communal organization. Nevertheless, the creation of a New York Jewish community owes much to the fostering of charitable networks and institutions, and they served as its core and structure. Established Jewish New Yorkers could look to broader New York charitable trends as well as their own tradition of giving. In nineteenth-century New York, as elsewhere in the country, philanthropic enterprises were organized along confessional lines. Even publicly funded services were often delivered by groups with religious affiliations, and, naturally, the majority of these agencies

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were Protestant. Missionary activity was never far from charitable work, and the Catholic and Jewish poor often received a dose of preaching along with whatever aid they sought. By the middle of the nineteenth century, as immigration swelled the potential clientele for aid, both the Catholic and Jewish communities began to expand and institutionalize their charitable efforts. The result was a “mammoth enterprise of social service” that sought to care for “the sick, the elderly, orphans, the unemployed, prison inmates, the hungry, and the destitute.” Severe economic downturns such as the Panics of 1857 and 1873 further spurred the creation of private charities to tend to the poor.4 By the fourth quarter of the century, New York Jews followed Protestant charities such as the Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor and the Charity Organization Society in instituting a modernized “scientific” approach to charity. As they did so, Jewish women’s role as actors and leaders in all these charitable endeavors assumed greater prominence. Women delivered goods to the tenement districts, staffed downtown offices, served as partners in the United Hebrew Charities, and held major leadership positions in the congregational sisterhoods that provided many of the direct services to the poor. As New York Jews adapted tsedakah, or charity, to the city’s economic and social circumstances, they not only cared for needy Jews but also began to reshape the entire Jewish community. In the early nineteenth century, synagogues and their associated societies directed the community’s charitable impulses. But when, in the mid-1850s, congregations strained to cope with seasonal rushes, such as the annual demand for Passover matzo, they tentatively began to join forces for specific efforts. Beyond the synagogue, benevolent and philanthropic associations as well as individuals sponsored a Jewish hospital, orphanages, and other charitable institutions. By the 1870s, the need for strong, centralized action, and models set by both the Jewish community in London and Christian New York, prompted Jewish communal leaders to campaign for a United Hebrew Charities to supplant a myriad of smaller charitable organizations.

■ Jews’ Hospital and the Hebrew Orphan Asylum A Jewish hospital seemed a particularly pressing need, since “sick and dying Roman Catholics and Jews” were especially vulnerable to the entreaties of

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“evangelically inclined Protestant clergy.” In an increasingly diverse religious and ethnic society, hospitals at midcentury had become “fields of religious combat.”5 Moreover, discriminatory hiring practices made it difficult for Jewish doctors and nurses to get training or to practice at the highest levels. In 1852, therefore, the Hebrew Benevolent Society called a meeting attended by delegates of the Young Men’s Fuel Association, the Hebrew Assistance Society, the Bachelors’ Loan Society, and the German Hebrew Benevolent Society to consider the creation of a Jewish hospital. The effort stalled, however, until seventy-two-year-old Sampson Simson stepped forward with an offer of land on which to build a new hospital on West Twenty-Eighth Street between Seventh and Eighth Avenues. An 1800 graduate of Columbia College, Simson had been the first Jewish attorney admitted to the New York State bar and a clerk to Aaron Burr. Now he took over leadership of the incipient institution, incorporated as Jews’ Hospital in 1852.6 With widespread support in the community, Jews’ Hospital opened in 1855. Its four-story building featured all the latest improvements, including gas lighting and water from the new Croton water system. The hospital’s founders originally intended it for an exclusively Jewish clientele (except, of course, in emergency). But the Civil War and New York’s Draft Riots of 1863 led to an increased demand for hospital beds and prompted the institution to accept patients of any religion. In 1866, Jews’ Hospital became Mount Sinai Hospital.7 Orphans were another vulnerable group, similarly at risk for evangelization, so it is no wonder that many New York orphanages operated under sectarian auspices — either Protestant or Roman Catholic. The city’s Jews lagged behind the times, even though plans for an orphanage had been mentioned at the time of the founding of Jews’ Hospital and Sampson Simson had endorsed the effort to build one. Only after Rev. Samuel Myer Isaacs, the Dutch-born cantor and preacher of congregation Shaarey Tefilah and editor of the Jewish Messenger, took up the cause did the movement for an orphanage pick up steam. Isaacs won over Jewish public opinion by publishing stories of Jewish orphans who converted after being raised in Christian institutions. The kidnapping and baptism of Edgar Mortara in Italy in 1858 further heightened Jews’ anxieties about the retention of their youth. In response, the Hebrew Benevolent Society undertook to open the Hebrew Orphan Asylum (HOA) in

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1860. The institution’s success helped make HBS for a time the most important Jewish philanthropic organization in the city. Over the succeeding decades, HOA grew steadily. Its first home, a brick row house on Lamartine Place in Chelsea, housed thirty boys and girls, who were escorted to school through hostile Irish streets by HOA’s superintendent (who, however, administered “black strap” discipline to them at home). Its next home, taking up an entire block on East Seventy-Seventh Street, housed about 150 orphans and boasted far superior facilities, including shoemaking and printing shops, where the boys learned these trades and prepared for future employment. In 1884, HOA moved into a forbidding Victorian home on the whole block at 137th Street and Amsterdam Avenue. With additions, it eventually housed a capacity of over twelve hundred, its pillared dining room serving hundreds of children at a time.8

■ Passover: New York, 1858 The movement for an orphanage had also been advanced by the Jewish response to the economic crisis of 1857 – 1858, a response that presaged efforts to unite an ever more complex Jewish community through its philanthropic institutions. On February 21, 1858, as Passover approached, Jewish communal leaders — merchants, synagogue leaders, and congregational presidents — convened at 107 MacDougal Street, the home of Rev. Dr. Morris Raphall, the leader of prominent congregation B’nai Jeshurun, to grapple with reverberations of the Panic of 1857. The businessmen among them — Harris Aaronson, Zion Bernstein, Michael Schwab, Phillip Levy — undoubtedly had already faced the effects of the Panic in their commercial dealings. That winter, a decline in international trade, the collapse of a building boom, and a slump in the textile industry had left reeling thousands of shipbuilders, construction laborers, garment workers, peddlers, and shopkeepers. The weakened economy not only contracted men’s occupations by 20 percent, but it also reduced by half the number of jobs available to women wage earners. Families pawned household goods to make ends meet. As communal leaders, Bernstein, Aaronson, and Schwab now contended with the downturn’s impact on the Jewish working class. In February, it was difficult to imagine how the Jewish poor would be able to afford the new dishes, thorough cleaning, and matzo and other foods essential to the proper observance of the holiday.9 Not only did

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Passover exact additional expense, but it also required taking time off from work. Those who were employed might have wondered if their liberation from work on four out of the eight days of the holiday might find them unwillingly liberated from a job completely by its end.10 The men gathered at the Raphall residence realized that the tradition of individual synagogues attempting to supply the needy with Passover provisions would not suffice. Current conditions demanded a more organized system, and more far-reaching resources. Accordingly, they formed the Association for the Free Distribution of Matsot to the Poor.11 The formation of this association was a radical step, as it united more than a dozen congregations that fiercely valued their independence and had contributed to communal fragmentation. But the men at the helm of many of these congregations possessed and often acted on strong communal impulses. Indeed, Zion Bernstein valued Jewish communal life so much that in 1838 he left New York City to establish Sholem, a Jewish agricultural community in Ulster County, in upstate New York. When Sholem disbanded in 1841, Bernstein returned to the city and turned his talents to the city’s Jewish organizations. He pursued an energetic career as a Bowery pawnbroker and devoted his profits and time to his role as congregational officer at Anshe Chesed.12 Michael Schwab, who owned a dry-goods business on Grand Street, spearheaded the formation of B’nai B’rith and served as an officer of Anshe Chesed. Harris Aaronson helped establish the Jews’ Hospital and held leadership roles in the Hebrew Benevolent Society and B’nai Jeshurun. Samuel Myers Isaacs led Shaarey Tefilah, and Jacques Judah Lyons led Shearith Israel. Together, these men represented the leading congregations and fraternal associations, and their Passover efforts bridged gaps between Bohemian Jews and English Jews, between long-established congregations such as Shearith Israel and relatively newly formed congregations such as Ahawath Chesed. Regardless of where these men had come from, they had made their mark in the city and represented an established class of Jewish merchants. Aaronson lived in the vicinity of stockbrokers and men whom the census identified solely as “gentlemen,” either American-born or successful Irish immigrants. Indeed, a survey of census material for men listed as the organizers of the Passover distribution revealed a fairly common pattern: they tended to live in their own homes and sire families of American-born and well-schooled

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children. Their neighbors were either American born or immigrants who had resided in America for fifteen years or more. In short, their residential and family lives unfolded in radically different ways than did those of their downtown coreligionists.13 People in need of Passover matzo that year were peddlers, glaziers, washerwomen, shoemakers, cap makers, tailors, cigar makers, and struggling shopkeepers who lived in buildings with Irish families, non-Jewish Germans, and usually at least one other Jewish family, often two or three. They tended to be more recent arrivals, many with older children born in Germany and younger children born in America. Widows headed approximately 22 percent of the households whose heads’ marital status was noted. Though their arrival was often too recent and their financial circumstances too unsteady to enable them to be leaders in the type of communal efforts led by such men as Schwab or Aaronson, these immigrant Jews formed informal communities.14 Jews who received matzo were bound by common neighborhoods, blocks, and, in many cases, even buildings. An analysis of the association’s 1858 matzo distribution list shows that certain blocks of Willett, Ridge, Pitt, Houston, Mulberry, Baxter, and Stanton Streets accounted for the lion’s share of matzo parcels. Analysis of census material and city directories indicates that immigrant Jews shared occupations with their neighbors and, in good times, perhaps helped them secure positions as peddlers, tailors, glaziers, cobblers, smiths, washerwomen, and tailors. But the Panic of 1857 had diminished the power of neighborhood networks; in those winter months, forty-one thousand New Yorkers requested shelter in police stations, and the Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor depleted its treasury.15 Furthermore, men such as Bernstein, Isaacs, and Schwab understood that a Protestant organization would not supply Passover matzos. Despite radically different occupational and residential situations, Aaronson, Bernstein, Isaacs, Schwab, and other leaders persuaded their congregations to unite to help the poor. Their Association for Free Distribution of Matsot to the Poor had to raise funds for a projected sixteen thousand pounds of matzo. Beyond this, it needed to streamline its distribution. Previously, individual congregations had tended to the needs of the poor, but that often created a situation in which individual applicants uncertain of receiving funds from any one congregation would be needlessly “compelled to apply to one

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congregation, and then to another, perhaps to be refused, from the many calls made upon them.”16 The fact that thirteen congregations — including the city’s oldest and youngest, Sephardic and Ashkenazic, German and Bohemian — united for this effort was impressive. But, unable to raise all the needed funds, the congregations appealed to the Jewish press, the Asmonean and the Jewish Messenger. Rev. Samuel Myer Isaacs of Shaarey Tefilah, editor of the Jewish Messenger, thus proved a more effective committee member than Rev. Jacques Judah Lyons of the more prestigious Shearith Israel, who chaired the committee. The press effectively extended the committee’s reach beyond the congregational audiences. On March 21, the Messenger printed an open letter to the “Hebrews of New York”: The number of poor unconnected with a Congregation is . . . so great, while misery and destitution are so much more widely and lamentably spread this year than ever before has been the case, that public charity — though carried by most of the united Congregations to an extent far exceeding that of any former year — is not sufficient to meet all applications, even in a limited degree. The present appeal is, therefore, addressed to private beneficence, as it is only by its aid that the funds placed at the disposal of the Committee can be raised to an amount at all adequate to the exigencies of the coming Passover.17

The need for Passover provisions thus proved to be a broader community problem — one for which the united congregations eagerly assumed responsibility but that they were unable to solve completely. In the absence of any larger organizational or communal framework, a union of congregations could steer the effort but still demand broader communal and financial support. The fact that the committee turned to the newspaper to rally the broader Jewish community signified demographic changes within the New York Jewish community, as well as new leadership opportunities. No longer composed of overlapping immigrant networks in Five Points and Kleindeutschland, the Jewish community had spread out geographically. The expansion of street railways hastened this development, and by 1864, more than half of all New Yorkers resided north of Fourteenth Street. With horsecars running up and down Third, Sixth, Eighth, and Ninth Avenues and across Eighth, Fourteenth and Twenty-Third Streets, middle-class New Yorkers could now afford to live farther from work and the working class.18 New residential neighborhoods

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beckoned more established New Yorkers of all backgrounds, separating them from newcomers — laborers, artisans, small shopkeepers — who could afford only the downtown districts and relied on their mix of commercial and residential space. As the Asmonean noted, “The wealthy do not come sufficiently into direct contact with the poor, and cannot realize the extent and intensity of misery that prevails.” Because the more established and the newcomers had fewer opportunities to meet at the local synagogue or kosher butcher store, the newspaper became the venue in which encounters might take place. By printing descriptions of the poverty of members of the Jewish community, the Asmonean amplified its reminder that “not less than eight hundred families of Yehoodim [Jews], equal to four thousand human beings, are utterly destitute.”19 The committee appealed through the newspapers to Jewish New Yorkers to generate communal and financial support. As important, it explained why they were all members of the same community — whether residents of Kleindeutschland or Gramercy, shirt manufacturers or laborers, employed or unemployed. The economic severity of the winter of 1857 – 1858 had created a caste of penurious people unaccustomed to asking for help: “The class of poor . . . is totally different from that of any former period. It is not the mendicant, the widow, or the orphan, but it is the sturdy mechanic, who is willing to work, but whose hands have found no employ from the scarcity of work.”20 Just as these people did not expect to find themselves in need of help, the article admonished its readers, you, too, might find yourself in need one day. Upward mobility or even economic stability in New York could not be assured, and the downturn that had hit as much as 10 percent of the Jewish community might spread. Jewish communal networks, therefore, proved necessary to help all members of the city’s Jewish community. Beyond providing practical reasons why individuals should help provide communal support to the needy, these articles and editorials also constructed a communal identity based on traditional Jewish understandings of charity. The Jewish press assured its readers that charity was not just for the recipient but also for the donor. In brief, proclaimed the Asmonean, only through charity could one fulfill a deeper, if not the deepest, religious and spiritual obligation to “love thy neighbor like thyself ” (Leviticus 19:18): “To ‘love’ is the command, and the practical manifestation of that love, the active obedience of that command is summed up in the one word charity.” The editorialist invoked the Talmudic sage Rabbi Akiva in claiming that charity is the “most

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comprehensive principle in the Torah” and urged readers to regard it as “the one most essential to the maintenance of society in general and to the Jewish community in particular.” Next, the article listed examples of European Passover charity efforts and lamented the situation in New York, where “each nationality” forms its own congregations, “with a love of independence and a distrust of dictation, that rendered united action extremely difficult.” The author conceded that the relative newness of New York’s Jewish communities partially accounted for this situation but prodded them to emulate the examples set forth by the Bible, the Talmud, and European Jewish communities. To do this, the New York Jewish community needed to limit the independence of individual congregations: “ ‘Union is force,’ says the old proverb; and if that be true, division must be weakness.” In this editorial’s depiction of general Passover obligations and the specific needs of the local poor, it aimed to convince New York Jews of their communal obligations and to show how charitable giving might offer opportunities for individual and collective betterment.21 By April, the committee had registered people in need, including, discreetly, those too embarrassed to sign up on their own; contracted with Canal Street matzo bakers Mark Isaacs and Robert Anderson; and arranged the distribution of matzo parcels for three dates at Congregation Shaarey Shamayim, at 122 Attorney Street. Through this effort, the committee distributed 14,330 pounds of matzo to an estimated 2,866 individuals, members of 640 families, or approximately 8 percent of New York’s Jewish population. Beyond the direct action of the Passover provisions, New York Jews accomplished a remarkable feat of union, with those of means attending to those in need.22 For some of these people, simply the donation of funds fulfilled their obligation to Jewish peoplehood awakened by the holiday; but for others, their involvement with charity encouraged a closer interaction with the poor. On the days of the matzo distribution, one could imagine Harris Aaronson, fortyfive years old, a prosperous shirt manufacturer and officer of B’nai Jeshurun, leaving his home at 170 West Fourteenth Street and heading downtown to the vestry rooms of Shaarey Hashamayim in the heart of Kleindeutschland to distribute Passover provisions. Aaronson had come to America from Posen but had lived in New York for at least twenty years. At five foot nine — relatively tall for that time — with a high forehead and roman nose, how dignified he must have appeared to twenty-six-year-old Sarah Meyer, a tailor residing a few

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blocks from Shaarey Hashamayim at 84 Ridge Street, the sole support of fiveyear-old William. Similarly, Bavarian-born Michael Schwab, the Grand Street milliner and dry-goods merchant, had been in New York for close to twenty years and might have passed provisions to a relatively newly arrived Bavarian, Joseph Mannheimer, a thirty-three-year-old who lived with his wife, Sophia; son, Marx, two; and daughter, Mina, a few blocks from the synagogue, at 228 Houston.23 Some recipients of aid had been in New York for as long as the donors but had apparently gained a tenuous hold on middle-class status, at best. Samuel Myer Isaacs had repeatedly reminded his readers that people in need of Passover charity that year included those who had already made it in America, only to find themselves in reduced circumstances or even back in the tenements. Isaacs, then, would not have been surprised to encounter Henry Berliner, who came to pick up thirty pounds of matzo for his wife, Sara, and their four children. The Berliners resided at 266 Third Street, and Henry worked out of their home as a tailor. Both he and Sara had been born in Bavaria and had lived in New York for at least twelve years, as their eldest son, Samuel, had been born in the city. Despite their class differences, then, donors and recipients shared backgrounds and experiences. Did their interactions remind some of the committee members of their own early days in New York, or did they seem remote? Did Michael Schwab treat Mannheimer as a fellow Bavarian, or was he more attuned to their now unequal stations in life? While we do not have the answer to these questions, we do know that Schwab and others spent hours canvassing the city, tracking the thousands in need, exerting their energies and funds to ensure that all of New York’s Jews had Passover matzo and provisions. The year 1858 was a milestone in New York Jewry’s gradual realization that charity was one of the means to transcend the limited bounds set by local mutual aid associations or neighborhood synagogues. No longer knit together through downtown Chatham or Kleindeutschland neighborhood networks, the growing and ever more complex community forged citywide charitable endeavors through unions of congregations and newspapers to help Jewish New Yorkers in need. But though the 1858 effort ended with a vow to reconvene the following year, attempts to revive it floundered, and the only vestige of the formerly successful union was a lament from a subscriber to the Jewish

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Messenger: “It is deeply to be regretted that the Union . . . will be discontinued.” The editor replied that it was his understanding that the individual congregations had taken up the matter.24 The 1858 matzo effort, a response to the Panic of 1857, was a remarkable success that Passover, even if it unraveled by the next season. It took another economic downturn — the Panic of 1873 — to bring about a more permanent union.25

■ Purim Balls Philanthropic enterprises served especially well to cement a sense of community among people affluent enough to provide for their support. Sponsorship of a philanthropic agency brought prestige, and as new leaders emerged from among the immigrant waves and the native-born, they sought to solidify their position by creating new organizations. In Europe, the community often possessed authority to tax its members, but in America, participation in communal functions was voluntary; so agencies had to work constantly to raise funds. In the middle of the nineteenth century, they encouraged widespread participation partly by tying fund-raising to the kind of extravagant leisure activities and entertainment that growing numbers of middle- and upper-class Jews enjoyed. Dinners, concerts, dances, theater and opera benefits, cornerstone layings, synagogue dedications, installations of rabbis, graduations, and even funerals became occasions for appeals for donations, often marked by great pomp and circumstance. Honors were distributed and social alliances made.26 One “American innovation” was the charity ball, often held to coincide with Purim.27 In 1862, an entire organization was founded dedicated to giving “social entertainments for charitable purposes.” The main social function of the Purim Association of the City of New York was its annual “fancy dress or civic ball.” The association’s first ball took place on Shushan Purim 1862 in the extravagantly festooned Irving Hall. The Seventh Regiment Band played a wide variety of dances, including polkas, waltzes, quadrilles, and reels. The revelers came in costume, dressed as Little Red Riding Hood, Hamlet, and Romeo, among others, though, interestingly, nobody dressed as characters from the Purim story. The ball lasted until four a.m. After the ball, the Jewish Messenger reported that it was “beyond a doubt the finest, most brilliant, and most successful affair of the season.” The profits were divided between Jews’ Hospital and the Hebrew Benevolent Society, with each organization receiving fifty dollars. In subsequent years, the balls grew larger and more lavish but also more

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closely tied to Purim themes. In 1866, for example, over three thousand people came to see the Academy of Music turned into a Persian temple, committee members dress as members of the Persian court, and the story of Purim acted out. The Purim Association of the City of New York created the model for Purim balls that became popular in other cities.28

■ United Hebrew Charities, 1874 The patterns and lessons of the 1858 Passover experiment and the charity balls of the 1860s charted a path even more promising and far-reaching than a union of synagogues, but it was an arduous process. As Samuel Myers Isaacs tried to revive the Passover union, he realized that the problem was more fundamental than the poor in need of matzo. Indeed, the Passover season exposed the fact that the poor needed an organized community “all year round”: “When will our communal authorities arouse to a proper sense of the benefits to be derived from united action?” he asked. “When will a central Board of Relief be organized, to take exclusive cognizance of the wants of the poor at all seasons of the year, and to seek out and relieve cases of genuine hardship and distress?” he demanded. “We begin to grow weary of perpetually admonishing our congregational authorities of the imprudence of persisting in the dubious method of extending relief. Shall we not soon have the satisfaction of finding our words producing an effect on their minds?”29 Failure to unite not only hampered the Passover season but also reflected a broader communal weakness. By 1865, Isaacs took matters into his own hands by circumventing the congregations and appealing to his readers for support: They [the congregations] should unite, but, as from various motives, they have not done so, let not the poor, nor ourselves, be the sufferers. We cannot send the poor away empty handed, and we certainly cannot from our limited means relieve all applicants. For this and other reasons we seek assistance from those who are desirous of alleviating the distress of the poor Israelite, so that he, too, may have a glimmering of joy at the period of national thanksgiving, the anniversary of our emancipation from Egyptian thralldom.

The Messenger thus informed interested readers that the paper “shall be happy to take charge of any donations that they may please forward to [its] office.”30 The Jewish Messenger repeated this service the following year, assuring its

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readers — the potential benefactors — that their action would not only “stanch bleeding wounds” but would be rewarded “by the blessing they will receive from those they have benefited, and by the approval of heaven.”31 Whereas in 1858, the committee had used the Jewish Messenger as an instrument to generate increased financial support, in the 1860s, Isaacs and the Messenger coordinated charitable efforts directly. In the absence of a united congregational front, or even a federation of benevolent or mutual aid societies, the newspaper knit the community together. The newspaper recognized the plight of the “unsynagogued” and spearheaded efforts to help them. With the rise of American newspaper culture, and in the absence of a strong rabbinate, editors assumed a significant leadership role. While a preacher might fear that his pulpit sermons might offend well-heeled congregants, an editor could be more critical of the community. Isaacs thus led the way with regard to Passover charity. By the early 1870s, his son, Myer Samuel Isaacs, helped him. As the Panic of 1857 fueled the formation of the Association for Free Distribution of Matsot to the Poor in 1858, the Panic of 1873 provided the immediate impetus for the foundation of the United Hebrew Charities the following year. The Panic of 1873 severely disrupted the lives of many New York laborers, Jews among them. Approximately 25 percent of New Yorkers lost their jobs, and those who held on to employment found their wages decreased by onethird. Among those affected by the crisis were the members of the Gumpertz family of 97 Orchard Street. Natalie Rheinsburg Gumpertz had arrived in the United States in 1857, in her twenties, from Ortelsburg, East Prussia. She met and married Julius Gumpertz, an immigrant from Silesia. By 1873, the couple had four children. Julius worked as a heel cutter, or shoemaker, and his profession had encountered setbacks even before the panic. Thus, while overall trends augured well for Kleindeutschland immigrants, and many advanced from peddler to dry-goods-store proprietor or grocer to the coveted saloon keeper, technological advances and boom and bust cycles jeopardized immigrants’ upward mobility.32 In fact, in 1871 and 1872, Gumpertz had tried his hand as a clerk but then went back to heel cutting. One day in October 1874, Julius Gumpertz left 97 Orchard at seven a.m. to cut heels at Levy’s shop on Dey Street and never returned. Natalie enlisted the help of John Schneider, the proprietor of the saloon downstairs, as well as the landlord, Lucas Glockner. They failed to find him. Not knowing the cause of

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Julius’s disappearance, Natalie was left to care for her three daughters, Rosa, Nanne, and Olga, and infant son, Isaac. New York City’s resources were severely taxed; in fact, due to the recent rush on the outdoor relief system, which provided food and coal, the city had circumscribed eligibility to include only the blind and “truly needy,” which excluded Natalie, considered able-bodied.33 We cannot know whether Natalie Gumpertz ever applied for help, but the plight of people like her prompted the Jewish community to act. Yet while it took the economic crisis to propel the Jewish community to reform its charitable societies, the plan and method had been patiently devised and vigorously publicized for years. The Jewish Messenger had been promoting a “radical reform” of the existing charitable societies. Typically, the Jewish press had used the term “radical reform” to refer to heated debates over ritual, belief, and practice between emerging Orthodox and Reform movements in Judaism. The Jewish Messenger, on the other hand, shifted the focus away from arguments over religious practice to the broader challenge and opportunity posed to the community by charity. While the newspaper praised the Jewish community’s generosity in supporting such organizations as the Hebrew Benevolent and Orphan Asylum Society, it questioned the lack of oversight of its funds. In its call for professionalization of charities, the Jewish Messenger criticized members of the merchant class who carelessly gave money to professional beggars who called with “some imaginary cause of distress.”34 Despite good intentions, the failure to pay attention to the ways in which the money was used allowed professional Jewish beggars to prosper, while deserving Jewish families suffered. Systematized charity would find employment for a head of household rather than simply doling out funds. The Jewish Messenger claimed, “It has always been our boast that, while the Israelites support the public charities, they take care of their own poor. What we lack is not the will of the spirit to give, but the knowledge how to give wisely.”35 Myer Samuel Isaacs contended that personal charitable impulses, no matter how praiseworthy, needed to be adapted to modern times. What might have worked in the old neighborhoods — giving money to a peddler to start out, for example — could not meet broader communal needs. Models among American Christian charities and Jewish charities in other cities, specifically London, deserved emulation for their systematized and scientific philanthropy. Addressing the desire of congregations and small charities to keep their independence,

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the Jewish Messenger showed that even under American conditions of voluntarism, other religious and ethnic groups had devised united charities: “The Hebrew denomination should study the progress of other sects in this country. It will be found that the secret of success has been union.”36 In praising the London system, the Jewish Messenger reiterated many of the same arguments it had raised over the course of the 1860s, as it had criticized the lack of a unified communal front in New York. First, it recognized the elemental social and economic conditions that sparked the need: “In a great city like London or New York . . . the ranks of the lower straits are recruited by the constant influx of foreign elements.”37 In other words, as long as there was immigration, there would always be a poor, working-class segment of the population. Moreover, though the city offered opportunity and mobility, its economic ups and downs created instability. The responsibility, then, of the more established Jewish community was to care for the poor in the most up-to-date manner, and here the Messenger held up the example of the London Jewish charity, which hired professionals to take charge of requests for aid and to determine in a scientific manner which should be approved and for how much. As part of the effort to systematize service delivery, the Jewish Messenger divided the city into districts and sent uptown women to take charge of the Jewish communities within an assigned district. Inspiration from Christian missionaries in New York, such as the New York Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor, whose leader, Robert Hartley, had divided the city into districts for oversight, may have inspired Isaacs. And, indeed, by the Civil War, many New York charities had adopted this model.38 Because many of the needy, especially those deemed “deserving” by their benefactors, were ashamed to ask for assistance, aid groups would send representatives to scout actively the various districts in search of the deserving poor. The emphasis on districts, too, pointed to the need to replace with a formal structure those social connections once fostered informally by neighborhood networks. As charity became more systematized, women assumed leadership roles. Here, too, Protestant groups provided models: the New York Ladies’ Home Missionary Society, for example, had been sending uptown women to Five Points since 1848.39 In 1864, Isaacs appointed the Ladies Benevolent Society, connected to his own synagogue, Shaarey Tefilah, to distribute matzos and groceries to over one hundred Jewish families.40 And in 1868, the Jewish

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Messenger described how members of Ladies Benevolent Societies visited the city’s “plague spots,” the neighborhoods of the Jewish poor, to deliver fuel and food and to help Jews find employment. At Passover time, these “women of Israel . . . neglected their domestic duties, devoting the whole of their time to rob sorrow of its smarting pain, and to infuse joy into the tortured breast.”41 While Isaacs issued the call for funds, and many male readers donated, women actually distributed the Passover aid. Now, Isaacs wanted to formalize their participation in the districts he proposed. As the momentum for a united Jewish charity built, leaders of congregations and independent benevolent associations chafed at the challenge to their direction. In response, the Jewish Messenger intensified its calls for action in the months preceding Passover 1873 and in advance of the annual meeting of the city’s largest charitable organization, the Hebrew Benevolent and Orphan Asylum Society. The Messenger realized the importance of the support of the leading Jewish philanthropy of the day and therefore crafted a message that at once praised the institution for the work it had accomplished and stressed the necessity of “radical reform.”42 At the annual meeting, Myer Stern, the president of the Hebrew Benevolent Society, acknowledged the pleading of the Jewish Messenger and introduced Myer Isaacs as the first speaker. Isaacs then recommended that a Committee of Fifteen be appointed to investigate the current method of “distribution of relief ” and the potential for cooperation among the city’s charities. While many members supported this motion, P. W. Frank, chairman of the Hebrew Benevolent Society’s Charity Committee, expressed his frustration: “It is useless to disguise the matter any further. A Jewish paper has been endeavoring to mislead the public, and claiming that our funds are not properly distributed. What does the editor know about it? We assist only the deserving, whereas it is the beggars and the bummers who go to Isaacs’ office, and there complain.” Though the meeting’s chairman called Frank to order, “he continued his tirade, exhibiting an extract from the Messenger which he had carried in his vest pocket, and he repeated that if any man said that the $19,000 have been expended for beggars, he says what is false from ‘bottom to top.’ ” Isaacs, in turn, defended himself, explaining that he was praising the work of the Relief Committee but encouraging it to investigate ways to be more efficient by establishing a “new and proper system.” Isaacs professed, “I simply want our

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poor Jews living in the byways of the city, in horrible poverty, to be raised from their condition and be made decent citizens, and that is the whole of the subject.” The meeting ended with an appointment of a committee to do just as Isaacs and the Jewish Messenger had encouraged for months, yet the resistance expressed by Frank and others shows just how formidable and radical the plan for union proved.43 The resulting study justified the formation of a United Hebrew Charities, but it was the Panic of 1873 that lent urgency to its formation. Isaacs described the severity of New York conditions that winter and turned to Jewish tradition as he invoked the Shema, the core Jewish prayer that proclaims the oneness of God: “As we have one God, one law, and are one people, so should we have one institution, where every case of distress might appeal with the certainty of immediate relief.”44 Finally, in October 1874, five core institutions — the Hebrew Benevolent and Orphan Asylum Society, the Hebrew Benevolent Fuel Association, the Hebrew Relief Society, the Ladies Benevolent Society (Gates of Prayer), and the Yorkville Ladies Benevolent Society — formed the United Hebrew Charities. In subsequent years, the United Hebrew Charities helped thousands of families facing plights similar to that of Natalie Gumpertz. The organization’s first annual report stated, “The character of the aid given has been largely in money to pay rent, to support neglected little children, and to relieve temporary wants.” Those “poor families” who received this aid lived “crowded in tenements, deprived of sufficient air, exposed to disease and crushed in spirit.” Further, the first set of problems to engage the UHC in its formative years included “ways to reduce desertion among Jewish husbands.” Thus, Gumpertz was not alone in her plight: economic vicissitudes, increasingly congested neighborhoods and tenement dwellings, and desertion plagued many Jewish New Yorkers.45 The UHC aimed to restore families to “self-support” and to that end purchased sets of tools, pushcarts, and, in some cases, stock for small stores. While an initial payment might have helped women such as Natalie Gumpertz pay rent and purchase food, it was not a long-term answer. She may have turned to the UHC for assistance in earning a living. Since Natalie had four children to tend to, becoming a tailor seemed the most sensible solution, as it would allow her to work at home, near her children. By 1875, thirty-five thousand women in New York worked as dressmakers or milliners.

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The UHC encouraged this trend: “Sewing machines were supplied to tailors and to tailoresses, who had been recommended by the respective district committees.”46 In 1878, Trow’s New York City directory listed Natalie Gumpertz as a dressmaker. Initially the United Hebrew Charities responded chiefly to the “effects of the panic of 1873,” with strong support from the Jewish community: subscriptions of $37,007 more than covered expenditures of $29,312. As the UHC report noted, while the five core institutions provided $18,238.89, additional individual and congregational support yielded $18,227.90: “It is therefore apparent that public opinion sustains the plan and action of the United Hebrew Charities.”47 Not until the 1880s, when hit by the sheer numbers of eastern European Jews, did the organization run into financial difficulties.48 Yet even then the UHC served one out of ten Jewish immigrants. By the first decade of the twentieth century, even as the UHC was overshadowed by newer, more innovative social welfare agencies, its building at 356 Second Avenue “gave the Jews a headquarters,” as one observer put it. This three-story structure, with its large arched windows and ornamental cornice that “suggested a Florentine Renaissance palace,” was situated at the corner of Twenty-First Street, in neutral territory, several blocks north of the teeming Lower East Side, where many of its clients lived, and well south of the fashionable upper Fifth Avenue neighborhood to which its patrons were then moving. A number of important Jewish social welfare agencies lined its corridors. It hosted important events, including the founding meetings of the American Jewish Committee in 1906 and the Kehillah in 1909, and projected an image of professionalism and solidity to Jews and non-Jews alike.49

■ From Beekman Place to the Bowery At the age of twenty-five, Rebekah Bettelheim Kohut ventured beyond her duties as rabbi’s wife and stepmother to eight children to forge a public career in social action. This was not necessarily a natural or easy transition. Not only did she have to tend to the children and manage her household, but when a speech she gave on behalf of a neighborhood association made the newspapers, tensions arose at home. “My husband,” she later recalled, “while rather proud that what I had said seemed worthy of quotation, was dubious of the wisdom of a public career for me. He felt that I had much to do at home, and

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Rebekah Kohut, when she was president of the New York section of the Council of Jewish Women. Kohut’s impressive career as a Jewish communal leader began when she organized a sisterhood at Ahawath Chesed (later renamed Central Synagogue). The sisterhood earmarked a district of responsibility in the downtown tenement districts. There, the uptown women provided classes and material assistance to immigrant families. (Photo by Underwood and Underwood, courtesy of Central Synagogue Archives)

was more or less jealous of any time I gave to others.” Yet precisely by virtue of Alexander Kohut’s position as rabbi at congregation Ahawath Chesed was Rebekah able ultimately to carve out and legitimate a markedly public role. At several meetings at nearby Temple Emanu-El, she had listened to Rabbi Gustav Gottheil address his congregation’s newly formed sisterhood. Inspired, she described her next step: “Realizing that an organization of this kind gave women opportunities for worthy service among the poor, I urged upon my husband that a similar institution be formed among the women of his congregation. It seemed to be the work that I could do for him, and he consented.”50 Like other clubwomen, who justified their expanded sphere by rooting it in domestic values, Kohut carefully framed her public work as a continuation of wifely and motherly virtues rather than a radical rupture; even in her autobiography forty years later, she emphasized her husband’s approval. However justified, the work took Kohut far from her parlor in the East Fifties all the way to the Bowery-district tenements. One of the genteel neighbors Kohut and her husband socialized with on summer evenings was Henry Harland, who, in a roundabout way, could take credit for the Kohuts’ residence on Beekman Place. Harland, a Protestant, assumed the more Jewish-sounding pen name Sidney Luska to detail the social and romantic lives of New York’s Jewish community in his popular novels. According to Rebekah, Alexander

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Kohut attached special meaning to Luska’s 1887 Yoke of the Thorah, as it was the first English-language novel he read upon moving to the city. Inspired by the heroine, who resided on Beekman Place, and taken by the coincidence of a “for sale” sign on the lot a month before his wedding to Rebekah, he purchased the corner home for the family in 1887. As Tillie, Harland’s heroine, described Beekman Place, “It’s fearfully out of the way, but it’s grand when you get there.”51 Scenes from the novel, as well as architectural descriptions of Beekman Place, indeed give one the sense that Rebekah Kohut’s domestic life, no matter how busy, was sheltered from the roughness of city life. In the novel, guests first gather in the back parlor and enjoy the “view from the bay-window — up, down, and across the river” and then reconvene in the backyard for an outdoor dinner: Elias thought it exceedingly pleasant thus to feast in the open air, while the sky and river glowed with the reflected splendor of the sunset; and said so to Miss Tillie. She replied that it was simply ideal, that they always did it in good weather, and that it was quite the rage among the residents of Beekman Place. Beekman Place, she went on, was the grandest street in the city, and she was awfully attached to it. She’d lived there most all her life, and all the memories of her childhood were associated with it. She remembered when she used to go fishing, with a thread and a bent pin, off the docks below there.52

Kohut’s routine was undoubtedly more encumbered than that of Luska’s Tillie — she battled constant financial strain and described a social life that revolved around her husband, not her. Still, the ability to gather people for a comfortable, airy summer evening or to gaze out of an oriel window onto the East River offered a middle-class lifestyle unimaginable to the Lower East Side tenement residents to whom she tended. Beekman Place also gave Kohut her first taste of public social work: in New York, increased opportunities for middle-class women were in the air, as evidenced by the fact that Rebekah had only to walk outside her home to be recruited to her first public project. Her neighbor invited her to work for the Women’s Health Protective Association, a secular organization that fought for more street cleaning and sanitation. But only when Rebecca linked her public work to religious duties did she win Alexander Kohut’s hearty encouragement.

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Though some of the women of Kohut’s sisterhood, such as Julia Richman’s family, had resided on the blocks surrounding Ahawath Chesed’s previous synagogue at Avenue C, the neighborhood that became the base of their sisterhood’s activities had changed considerably by 1889; so, too, did the nature of their religious activity. The downtown neighborhood had increased in population density, while the influx of eastern European immigrants steadily accelerated the German-speaking migration uptown and to Brooklyn. The formation of the sisterhood linked these women to the very neighborhood that they — or at least their congregational forebears — had left behind: the area bounded by the Bowery and the East River, from Houston Street to East Fourth Street, which had been part of Kleindeutschland but now was becoming the Lower East Side. Yet even if this journey to the neighborhood was not entirely new for them, since some had perhaps traveled to Avenue C for services, the nature of their engagement departed radically from their previous visits. Now their religious work and identity consisted not only of worship but also of direct interactions with the city’s working class and Jewish poor. The sisterhoods’ social work rested on the opportunities for service that arose from the dislocations brought about by the rapid development and growth of New York City. Between 1870 and 1915, the city’s population expanded dramatically from one and a half million (including the areas incorporated into New York in 1898) to five million. The inability of municipal government to keep up with the needs of a growing population opened opportunities for citizens of all backgrounds to forge distinctive charitable and social work roles and offered women the possibility of involvement in public affairs. Meanwhile, the city’s poor mushroomed in number, largely due to immigration from southern and eastern Europe. Jewish immigration tested the Jewish charities, and they sought ways to rise to the challenge.53 Jewish communal leaders redirected and reinvigorated preexisting organizations, shifted congregational charitable focus to the newly arrived, and established new settlement houses, hospitals, and schools. The UHC assumed the major responsibility of helping newly arrived immigrants by providing lodging, meals, medical assistance, and burial services and administering employment bureaus.54 As both a middle-class New Yorker and Jewish woman, Rebekah Kohut — and the other women in the sisterhoods — participated in broader urban trends charting new paths in the incipient professionalization of social work.

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In the past, women’s charitable work at Ahawath Chesed had consisted of sewing circles and raising money; but these efforts kept almost all members in their own neighborhood parlors. The growing women’s club movement propelled Jewish women outside their homes to work directly with the poor. They set priorities, managed budgets, and cast their net far beyond the confines of home, synagogue, or neighborhood. Though the sisterhoods drew inspiration from Christian women’s organizations, they distinguished themselves by emphasizing their Jewish identity. Their work benefited coreligionists; moreover, they viewed the nature of the work as religious. Rebekah Kohut thus exchanged her oriel window’s view of the East River boats and her placid Beekman Place for the hustle and bustle of pushcartpacked streets. More than simply an exchange of scenery, though, the distance of two miles brought her from a world in which Judaism towered above the streetscapes in the form of bronze minarets, and middle-class Jews casually gathered with Christian neighbors on brownstone stoops, into a world where people worked for fourteen hours at a time over sewing machines in tenement apartments, worshiped in spaces carved out of tenement halls, and socialized on tenement stoops. Indeed, this setting differed so remarkably from the sisterhood women’s accustomed territory that it transported them: “There was a fascination in walking along Hester, Canal, Grand, Allen, Varick and Essex Streets and East Broadway, and losing one’s self in the throngs of newcomers to America.”55 What distinguished the sisterhood women from other uptown visitors was how deeply they penetrated the downtown district. Not content, as others, merely to sample the “Oriental bazaar” of the market, Kohut and the sisterhood delved further into the heart of the downtown district. They established an office at 71 East Third Street and, from there, monitored their district, which covered the entire Lower East Side. This charity work differed qualitatively from past types of Jewish women’s charity with regard to both mission and organizational networks. “We do not wait until the poor come to our house but by means of our society we go out to meet the poor,” relayed the sisterhood’s annual report.56 In forming and leading the second sisterhood in the United States in 1889, Rebekah Kohut and her congregation used a shared religion, a heightened sense of women’s role in the world, and social work to build a more direct bridge to downtown’s Jews. By 1895, Kohut’s sisterhood had a membership of 350. They ran a kindergarten, a

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sewing circle for girls, and a religious school at their headquarters, and they dispersed throughout the neighborhood to “alleviate the misery and relieve the wants of 200 destitute families.”57 Ahawath Chesed’s sisterhood drew inspiration from Temple Emanu-El’s rabbi, Gustav Gottheil, and that congregation’s sisterhood, led by Hannah B. Einstein. In 1890, the sisterhoods joined forces with the UHC, and, in 1896, ten sisterhoods formally organized an umbrella organization, the Federation of Sisterhoods of Personal Service, with Einstein as president. As a measure of the respect earned by the sisterhoods, the UHC accorded to each its formal district of responsibility. From an early stage, sisterhood women discussed not only the work itself but also its larger significance with regard to class and religion. They emphasized that they performed the work in part to bridge class differences. As Hannah Einstein explained, the uptown sisterhoods aimed to forge genuine connections to the new immigrants not only in order to improve the charitable work but also “to overcome the estrangement of one class of the Jewish population from another and to bring together the well-to-do and the poor, in the relation, not of patron and dependent, but of friend and friend.”58 Ahawath Chesed echoed this notion that as coreligionists, the eastern European Jews merited real relationships: “These poor are in very truth our brothers and sisters; let us deal with them in brotherly and sisterly fashion.”59 In an 1899 report to the UHC, Einstein claimed that the moral, educational, and religious nature of the sisterhoods’ work proved more valuable than more easily measurable material goals and outcomes.60 In turn, communal leaders such as Shearith Israel’s Rabbi David de Sola Pool used language with a religious tone to describe these women, recounting the activities of his congregation’s sisterhood as focused on the “loyal conservation and transmission of Jewish religious values.”61 “Such personal service,” wrote UHC director Dr. Lee K. Frankel, “is a phase of the old Jewish idea of ‘gemilut hesed,’ and the modern development of the thought that the best aid that can be given to the poor is to help them help themselves.”62 The sisterhoods readily viewed their activities as religious in nature, and Ahawath Chesed’s president, Hannah Leerburger, concluded her reports with the following words of thanks: “Grateful to the Almighty for whatever good we have done.”63 But they also translated their spiritual goals into quantitative terms. Over time, sisterhoods raised and spent millions of dollars and aided

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tens of thousands of immigrant families. In 1896, Ahawath Chesed’s sisterhood distributed 109 pairs of shoes and 575 pounds of Passover matzo. In a given year, it might assist as many as 181 families and dole out close to $15,000 worth of clothing, food, and cash. While organizations such as the King’s Daughters or other Christian social service agencies could have likewise provided shoes to the eastern European Jews, they certainly would not have provided matzo. This work promoted the religious lives of eastern European immigrants. The Reform Temple Emanu-El created a religious school, and though the Reform movement aimed to instill the idea that the spirit of the law trumped the letter of the law, it accommodated requests of Orthodox immigrants even when they countered its own Reform practices. Though Reform at the time privileged English over Hebrew and preferred that confirmation ceremonies supplant bar mitzvah classes, the sisterhood’s religious schools leaned toward traditional forms.64 Thus, sisterhood members avoided the heavy-handed imposition of their own cultural assumptions on their immigrant clients. But sisterhoods proved powerless to resolve the fundamental fissure between Orthodox religious needs and the American workweek. As the daughter and wife of a rabbi, Rebekah Kohut developed an acute sensitivity to the fate of religious immigrants and expressed concern for the plight of Talmud scholars who could find no support for their study in their new country. She also noted that the American workweek collided with the Jewish Sabbath and discussed what the Sabbath, especially for the younger generation, often yielded: “Aside from the actual material suffering, the situation produced many a family tragedy. The younger generation was readier to adapt itself to American conditions, and while the old folk bitterly opposed their working on the Sabbath and in general assuming the ways of Gentiles, yet they found themselves dependent upon their children for support. It was a sad state of affairs.”65 In both cases, though, Kohut could not move beyond sensitivity; she had no solution and therefore could only focus on the practical side: the need for immigrants to make a living: “and I am willing to confess that I induced many an erudite scholar to join the army of sweatshop laborers in preference to being reduced to destitution.”66 Similarly, she lamented that though the sisterhoods devoted time to establish religious schools for immigrant children, they failed to provide much-needed spiritual guidance for adolescents and their parents.

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Maintaining religious values while helping immigrants fit into the American economic system posed the sisterhoods with a dilemma that they were unable to resolve. Uptown Jews and downtown Jews alike knew that immigrants needed to adapt to New York’s economy, which caused individuals to curtail or even to jettison religious practices and attitudes. While many of the uptown congregations had created a Reform Judaism that helped them fit into American society and maintain an identity as Jews, they knew their solution would not appeal to many eastern European Jews. These uptown women devised new models of Jewish womanhood. In their adoption of “scientific” methods of social work and expanded notions of women’s proper sphere, sisterhoods drew much from their Protestant neighbors, even as they retained, privileged, and created their own distinctive Jewish female identity. Whether uptown or downtown, New York City demanded a new form of Judaism — and this Judaism encouraged neither scholarly work nor Sabbath observance. New York’s economic cycle required constant energy and attention from immigrant businessmen, leaving little time to attend services, much less lead them. Downtown, ambitious immigrant men quickly learned to forgo the Saturday Sabbath in favor of an extra day of sales or payday in the shop or store. Yet in both cases, New York life allowed Jewish women, as guardians of the home, whether a brownstone or a tenement, the chance to continue and to embellish their religious duties and obligations. The second half of the nineteenth century was a period of great growth for New York City and even greater growth for its Jewish community. As the Jewish population expanded, it also became increasingly complex — internally differentiated by class, country of origin, religious inclination, and language. The face-to-face informal neighborhood networks that had characterized Jewish life at the beginning of the period continued to exist but proved inadequate to meet the community’s needs. So New York’s Jews began to elaborate a system of formal institutions to take care of the poor, the sick, the orphaned, and the widowed among them. In doing so, they reached beyond the boundaries of individual congregations and mutual aid societies, creating a broader communal structure that transcended internal differences and gave women a central role in the emerging core institutions of the community. They followed patterns common in the city as a whole, where social welfare agencies formed mostly along denominational lines. Continued immigration meant that the

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community’s needs remained great, but part of New York’s promise, largely fulfilled, was that Jews acquired the means to fill those needs. Philanthropy became one of the community’s defining characteristics, competing with, and ultimately winning out over, alternative models such as those set by fraternal orders and defense organizations.

Ahawath Chesed’s Moorish structure towered over its brownstone neighbors when it opened in 1872. Later renamed Central Synagogue, the building’s towers, keyhole windows, and arches distinguished it from contemporary religious and commercial buildings in New York City. (Photo by C. K. Bill, 1872; Central Synagogue Archives)

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Moorish Manhattan

■ Moorish on Lexington On December 14, 1870, close to five hundred New Yorkers — Christians and Jews alike — mounted a makeshift platform on Lexington Avenue and FiftyFifth Street. “Adorned with flags,” the platform covered a construction site for what was to become congregation Ahawath Chesed’s new synagogue. The December sun shone brightly as ticket holders filed in to take their seats for a cornerstone-laying ceremony.1 Though there was very little for the eye to behold — yet. The day’s speeches evoked pride in the heights achieved by an erstwhile tiny immigrant Kleindeutschland congregation and roused the attendees to look forward to the future structure that would soon tower over its brownstone neighbors. The nearby presence of the imposing Moorish-style Temple Emanu-El on Fifth Avenue and Forty-Third Street perhaps gave the group that was assembled an inkling as to the look and feel of the proposed building; newspaper articles promised that “when finished, [it] will be an ornament to this section of the City.”2 But precisely because there was little to see, words and symbolism carried the day. Many of those words resonated beyond that sunny Wednesday, finding their way into the city’s secular and Jewish newspapers. Isaac Mayer Wise, the country’s leading Reform rabbi, whose B’nai Yeshurun synagogue in Cincinnati was also built in the Moorish style, delivered the keynote speech. Wise directly addressed Christian as well as Jewish members of the “worshipping multitude”: You lay the cornerstone to a new temple in this Metropolis of our country, to rear upon it another proud structure beside all the gorgeous temples in this City and

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country to add another link to the blessed chain of sanctuaries which encircle all climes and zones, all authentic history, from the first altar erected by the Patriarch Abraham in yonder Palestine to the tabernacles of the modern Israel of the globe; to invite all the sons and daughters of your congregation, of all the families of man, to come worship the sole sovereign of the universe.3

Ahawath Chesed’s leaders used the onset of construction of their new building as an opportunity to invite the leading American figure of Reform Judaism, Christian neighbors, city politicians, and local religious and communal leaders to celebrate a tolerant, cosmopolitan city and nation. Together they affirmed that they shared an American identity elastic enough to contain individual and group differences. Those who were gathered did so ostensibly to witness the laying of a physical cornerstone for what was to be a grand Moorish synagogue. Yet the true cornerstone laid that day was Jews’ intangible but very real sense of security and confidence in their city and country. In this way, Wise’s use of the word “temple” could refer both to a chain of Jewish synagogues across time and place and also specifically to those forward-thinking and tolerant houses of worship in New York and America for “all the families of man,” Christian or Jewish. By the time Ahawath Chesed laid its cornerstone, New York hosted more Moorish-style synagogues than any other city in the world. On one level, “Moorish Manhattan” refers to the physical Moorish style as displayed by Ahawath Chesed. On another level, it refers to the openness, tolerance, and cosmopolitanism that enabled New York Jewish congregations to alter their rituals and customs to conform to American cultural standards, even as they maintained their distinctiveness. While many scholars have linked the Moorish style with the Reform movement, Henry Fernbach designed New York’s second Moorish synagogue, Shaarey Tefilah on Forty-Fourth Street, for an Orthodox congregation, whose rabbi, Samuel Myers Isaacs, ardently defended tradition and routinely criticized Reform. The use of the Moorish style marks a wider Jewish engagement with modernity and with the surrounding religious and secular culture.4 In the deliberate engagement with modernity, the Reform movement took the lead; but even many Orthodox synagogues, though hewing to Jewish law and tradition, similarly wished to adapt their Judaism to America. The flourishing of the Moorish style in New York speaks less to Reform or Orthodox denominational affiliation and more to the freedom

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and comfort experienced by Jews in the city. Congregations reflected a wide spectrum of religious identification, from Reform to Orthodox, but, with the exception of some eastern European rejectionists, they all sought to forge a workable New York Judaism. Within sixteen months of the laying of the cornerstone for Ahawath Chesed, architect Henry Fernbach’s design, the building committee’s fundraising, the congregants’ donations, and the labor of builder Samuel Cochran’s work crews left little to the imaginations of the three thousand congregants and guests celebrating the completed structure’s dedication on April 19, 1872. Set against those same rows of Midtown brownstones, a handsome structure of Belleville brownstone and yellow Ohio sandstone trim animated the skyline. People nearing the temple would catch sight of what looked to be fivepointed stars but were in actuality seven-pointed stars designed to give the appearance of having five points when viewed from any direction. These stars perched atop shiny, bulbous “ribbed globes of bronze.” Two sturdy octagonal towers and lively ivory crenellation along the cornice provided a frame for a “beautiful rose-window” composed of white pine tracery and forming circles of five-pointed stars. Keyhole windows and geometric patterns punctuated and enlivened the muted tones of the façade. While the domes and stars dominated the view from afar, up close, arches, formed by alternating light and dark stones, articulated five sets of wooden double doors, themselves carved with six-pointed Stars of David. At night, specially designed streetlights highlighted the façade’s patterns. Within the grand sanctuary, “rich glass” filled the shapely windows, and “profuse gilding” accentuated geometric patterns borrowed from Spain’s Alhambra mosque and stenciled on the walls in shades of ochre, azure, and red.5 Delicate-looking cast-iron pillars supported an arch, which in turn framed the bimah, or reader’s platform, situated at the front of the sanctuary. A cupola crowned the room’s focal point, the holy ark in which the Torah scrolls were kept. Overall the sixty-two-foot ceiling created a spacious feel for the sanctuary, with room for naves, an organ, and fifteen hundred men and women to sit together for decorous and inspiring spiritual services and sermons. Wise did not return for these dedication ceremonies, but we can imagine that he would have been heartened to read an account in the New York World that responded to the cornerstone messages of optimism and progress. The World reporter reflected on the synagogue’s meaning for Jews and for Judaism

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and also for America. In an article titled “Modern Judaism” that detailed the dedication ceremonies, he, like Wise, noted that this building represented progress for the Jewish people. The reporter viewed the structure as a source of pride to which Christian neighbors could likewise lay claim: “Such temples as Emanu-El and Ahawath Chesed are monuments of Christianity as well as of Judaism. They testify not only of constant Jewish zeal and munificence, but also of increased Christian humanity and tolerance.”6 The Moorish buildings that began to dot New York’s cityscape served as a reminder and source of pride for a tolerant, cosmopolitan American spirit, one that reveled in the march of both Gothic churches and Moorish synagogues down its prominent avenues. Before the Civil War, most Jewish congregations lacked the resources to build their own structures, instead buying downtown houses of worship from upwardly mobile Protestant congregations in search of more attractive uptown locations. Both Emanu-El (1847, Chrystie Street; 1854, Twelfth Street) and Ahawath Chesed (1864, Avenue C) remodeled downtown Protestant churches into synagogues. Many immigrant Catholic churches did the same; before the Civil War, 25 percent of Catholic congregations worshiped in former Protestant churches. But heightened economic activity in the wake of the Civil War positioned leading Jewish, Catholic, and Protestant congregants to funnel their success into the design and construction of magnificent houses of worship.7 Between 1860 and 1870, synagogue construction, chiefly in New York City, increased New York State’s synagogue property value by over 200 percent to $1,831,950 and doubled its seating capacity from 10,440 to 21,400.8 New York City had the most well-appointed synagogues in the country, and they attracted attention. In 1868, Temple Emanu-El, the city’s wealthiest congregation, constructed a striking Moorish temple on a prominent corner city lot on Fifth Avenue and Forty-Third Street. This was “the first building in New York that was clearly identifiable as a Jewish house of worship.”9 The Manufacturer and Builder hailed it as the “most important” of New York buildings erected that year, and praised it as “a fine example of the Moorish style of Spain and a very close copy of the Alhambra.” The New York Times described it as “magnificent” and “splendid.”10 Within four years, Emanu-El (1868), Shaarey Tefilah on Forty-Fourth Street (1869), and Ahawath Chesed (1872) created the first aggregation of Moorish synagogues in one city, located within blocks from one another.

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Moorish synagogues shared Gothic and Romanesque structural engineering with other religious institutions, but the decorations and details — minarets, finials, crenellations, domes, slender pillars, cusped arches, horseshoe windows — created an “all-over effect” of the “exotic.” Jewish congregations’ use of the Moorish style clearly distinguished their synagogues from the era’s Gothic and Romanesque churches.11 The Moorish style had rarely appeared in America until that time, including notable exceptions P. T. Barnum’s home in Bridgeport, Connecticut (1848), and the Crystal Palace built for the 1853 New York World’s Fair. The architects for New York’s Moorish synagogues thus drew inspiration mainly from several decades of synagogue designs in central Europe, as well as from brand-new synagogues in Cincinnati (B’nai Yeshurun, 1866) and San Francisco (Temple Emanu-El, 1866). Indeed, New York’s promise of freedom can be understood in part by comparing it to the European experience with regard to both Moorish architecture and religious expression. In central Europe, Enlightenment ideas of freedom and liberty gained momentum in the nineteenth century, but old prejudices barred complete social and political acceptance for Jews. This limited acceptance influenced the ways in which new synagogues were built. Beginning in the 1830s and 1840s, more affluent congregations had the opportunity, means, and tacit permission by a relatively more tolerant and enlightened society to build notable houses of worship. In what style, however, should these synagogues be built? Many leading Christian architects argued that Jews could not claim as their own the Gothic and Romanesque styles commonly used for churches. Though no record of the appearance of the ancient Temple or synagogues existed, architects speculated that the Temple would have resembled the religious structures of the Jews’ neighbors in “the larger Oriental world” of the ancient Near East. In the 1830s and 1840s, architects began to experiment with a Moorish, or Islamic, style; notable examples built during ensuing decades include synagogues in Dresden (1838), Vienna-Leopoldstadt (1858), Mainz (1853), Leipzig (1854), Budapest (1859), and Berlin (1866). Many leading Jewish congregations responded warmly to the appeal of the Orient — understood in Europe at that time to refer to the Middle or Near East — that the Moorish style evoked. The romanticism of Oriental roots offered an exotic identity that might find favor in the eyes of central European Jews’ Christian counterparts. In adopting the Moorish style, synagogues in central Europe “hoped that they could convince the public of

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the nobility of their Orient blood.” While many congregations found this concept intriguing and derived pride in the uniqueness of a heritage whose form was so beautiful and exotic, some German congregations rejected this style. If, it was argued, Islamic culture, however interesting and important in its time, had been superseded by European Christian culture, then to build in that style only gave concrete form to the idea that Jews, and Judaism, were less civilized and less worthy of the modern world. What was interesting and important about Judaism, they feared, would appear vestigial as opposed to operative, a curiosity rather than a vital element of modern European society.12 For the synagogues’ design and appearance, architects of the Moorish style in New York drew inspiration from Moorish synagogues in central Europe. But the context and, therefore, the style’s cultural meaning differed dramatically. In Europe, Christian architects had objected to the idea of Jews building synagogues in the Gothic or Romanesque style, but in New York City, Jewish congregations faced no such opposition, often meeting in former churches built in those styles. Further, when a few congregations in pre – Civil War New York had the funds to build a synagogue, they often chose the Gothic style (most notably Anshe Chesed’s Norfolk Street Synagogue, 1850) or the Romanesque style (Shaarey Tefilah’s Wooster Street Synagogue, 1837), resulting in structures that could be mistaken for churches. By the time congregations began moving uptown, and had the budgets for more substantial construction, they naturally looked to Europe for grand synagogue styles. Whereas in Europe centuries of discrimination and a separate status marked Jews as alien even as they became part of the emerging bourgeoisie, and even as political notables attended synagogue dedication ceremonies, in the United States tolerance rested on a firmer political foundation of equality and freedom of religion. In this way, Judaism could be understood as a crucial component in the creation of a cosmopolitan city. If Jews used the Moorish style to proclaim a sense of otherness, it was an otherness that did not threaten their social position. By the 1880s, Moorish synagogues helped to shape the New York urban landscape. An 1882 story in Atlantic Monthly depicts a young lawyer and an acquaintance strolling through New York: They went down, past the unfinished Cathedral, the Moorish Synagogue, and the Egyptian reservoir, with the castellated dwellings opposite, on the battlements of which an Ivanhoe or Sister Anne, or the yellow dwarf might have appeared; past the

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quaint tower of the Church of Heavenly Rest, with its angels trumpeting to the four corners of the heavens; past the incredibly tall hotels and apartment houses, past the scattered shop-fronts of the tailors, confectioners, and jewelers.13

“The Moorish Synagogue,” undoubtedly Temple Emanu-El, thus appears without remark in the same sentence as other New York landmarks, including several churches. The lack of judgment or comment that Moorish synagogues elicited demonstrates the extent to which they had become an accepted part of the cosmopolitan city. Charles W. Hobbs’s 1889 Illustrated New York City and Surroundings lauds the “beautiful and important” Temple Emanu-El and notes its Moorish architecture; it more quietly mentions the “Jewish Synagogue” on Lexington Avenue (Ahawath Chesed).14 Beyond simply hosting the most Moorish synagogues in the world, New York City’s tolerant and cosmopolitan atmosphere lent entirely novel meanings to the Moorish style and encouraged the development of new expressions of religiosity for the American Jews who congregated within them or even just walked by them. The very tolerance, freedom, and cosmopolitanism that made multiple New York Moorish styles distinct from those in Dresden, Budapest, or Berlin allowed for a broad range of American Jewish expressions. Ahawath Chesed’s Moorish synagogue on Lexington differed from Temple Emanu-El’s Moorish synagogue on Fifth Avenue or Shaarey Tefilah’s Moorish synagogue on Forty-Fourth and, in time, from Kahal Adath Jeshurun’s Moorish synagogue on Eldridge Street. They expressed a panoply of ways to be Jewish in New York, sometimes within blocks of each other. Freedom from state-sponsored religious authority allowed each congregation to develop independently, creating a competitive terrain in which each congregation defined itself not only though its endorsement of reform or defense of tradition but also in comparison with its neighbors. The pulpits of these congregations became stages for vigorous debate about the direction that American Judaism should take. While sometimes divisive, such arguments lent new meaning to Jewish life, regardless of congregational identification. New York congregations paid attention to each other’s choices, and the national Jewish papers and religious leaders did too. Like the Moorish style of synagogue architecture, Reform Judaism had roots in central Europe, but it, too, found new form and meaning once transplanted to the United States, where freedom encouraged dramatic changes. In

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This drawing of the Eldridge Street Synagogue predated the building and was used as an advertisement in the Yiddish press to attract members. Its Moorish architecture showed an awareness of uptown synagogue trends, but its retention of traditional rites spoke to its members’ desire to adapt Orthodoxy to American life. Yidishe gazeten, 1887. (Collection of the Museum at Eldridge)

Europe, Reform Judaism developed with the spread of Enlightenment ideas and in response to a protracted emancipation process in which Jews sought to effect reforms in part to gain approval from a non-Jewish society that withheld full citizenship. Reformers sought to adjust Judaism to modern behavioral norms and philosophy. Middle- and upper-class Jews in Hamburg and Berlin spearheaded initiatives to orchestrate what they considered to be more uplifting services, adopting stricter rules of decorum and introducing instrumental music. In the 1840s, a series of rabbinical conferences in Brunswick, Frankfort, and Breslau led to innovations such as reading the Torah on a three-year cycle as opposed to a one-year cycle and the abolition of the second day of festivals. Even as Reform leaders and their congregations embraced new opportunities posed by an increasingly emancipated and enlightened society, and incorporated such practices as German-language sermons, mixed choirs, and organ music into their religious services, they encountered resistance from established Jewish communities and rabbis as well as intervention by governments

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sometimes hostile to reform. Whether opposition came from Jewish or governmental authority, it hampered the “free development” of Reform.15 Though central European Jews cultivated many Reform practices and developed justifications for change, Reform found its fullest expression in the United States. Taking advantage of economic and social opportunities, American Jews had a harder time meeting the obligations of traditional Jewish practice. Though they established congregations that observed traditional rites, observers in the early years of the nineteenth century noted laxity in practice outside the synagogue, where individual proclivities determined levels and styles of observance. Many immigrants, intent on getting a business off the ground or enjoying newfound social opportunities, neglected synagogue attendance. Jewish communal leaders complained that perhaps America offered too much freedom altogether for the formation of Jewish communities; statistics suggest that half of all American Jews chose not to affiliate with any congregation by 1850. As congregations attempted to alter tradition to match practice by modernizing the services, no centralized authority guided them; few ordained rabbis had settled in America. Isaac Leeser, leader of congregation Mikveh Israel in Philadelphia, observed, “Each congregation makes its own rules for its government and elects its own ministry, who is appointed without any ordination.” This freedom resulted in variation, as each congregation found its own way to reconcile Judaism with American culture.16 As in Europe, young, upwardly mobile Jews led the charge for reform in New York City. In 1843, the same year B’nai B’rith was founded several blocks away, German immigrants, including Leo Merzbacher, who had served as rabbi at the leading German synagogues, formed a Cultus Society in Kleindeutschland to discuss change in synagogue practice. In 1845, they took the next step in establishing Temple Emanu-El. Emanu-El’s founders voiced concern that the existing synagogues repelled the youth. They also sought to keep Jews together as a community. But unlike B’nai B’rith, which adopted prayers, signs, and symbols from Jewish tradition to affirm a secular Jewish identity, the Cultus Society explicitly desired a new religious community. In choosing the name Emanu-El — “God is with us” — they expressed their fervent desire to stay within the bounds of Judaism. While they hoped that reform would enable them “to occupy a position of greater respect among [their] fellowcitizens,” they also desired to “worship better, with more devotion.” Even as they made changes to gain the respect of Americans, they wanted to keep

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Judaism relevant to other Americanizing Jews. Indeed, New York religious leaders such as Merzbacher and Max Lilienthal embraced reform in order to “save Judaism” from what they believed to be the straightjacket of outdated forms imposed by fanatical traditionalists.17 Like many other fledgling congregations, the founders of Temple Emanu-El rented rooms in a meeting hall, at the corner of Clinton and Grand Streets. As they undertook the formation of the first avowedly nontraditional, or Reform, congregation in New York, they could look to Charleston, South Carolina’s Beth Elohim, the first Reform temple in the United States, or Baltimore’s Har Sinai, the country’s second Reform temple. But for the most part, Emanu-El charted its own course. The congregation changed the service to make it more decorous, aesthetically agreeable, and accessible to New Yorkers. While it kept the traditional prayer book, it eliminated several prayers and added vocal music, German-language hymns, and a German-language sermon. Even as it made these minimal changes, the congregation upheld many critical elements of traditional Jewish life: Jewish dietary laws (kashrut), separation of men and women during prayer, and the prayer shawl and head covering for men. Overall, Emanu-El’s approach attracted new members, enabling the congregation to purchase a church on nearby Chrystie Street in 1847. Moving into the new building afforded an opportunity to introduce additional reforms; over the course of several years, Emanu-El adopted a German hymnal, decided to read the Torah on a three-year cycle, introduced an organ, and minimized the requirements for boys studying to become bar mitzvah. In doing so, the temple’s leaders intended to strengthen New York Jews’ Jewish identity. To this end, they hired the architect Leopold Eidlitz to renovate the interior of the church into a synagogue and to remove Christian markings from the façade of the building. Thus, they strove to modernize in order to strengthen, not diminish, Judaism.18 Though each of these changes alienated some congregants and drew ire from traditionalists in the press, Emanu-El flourished, attracting ever more worshipers and growing bolder in its reform initiatives. The growth of the city’s population and the economic and social advancement of its Jewish residents gave Reform congregations the means to increase the visibility of their ideals. In 1854, Emanu-El purchased a Gothic Revival church on Twelfth Street and introduced a new prayer book, Seder Tefilah, authored by Merzbacher, which banished the observance of the second day of festivals. Most boldly,

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the congregation introduced family seating. Emanu-El was the first Jewish congregation in New York, and only the second in the United States, to allow men and women to sit together during services, as worshipers did in mainstream Christian denominations. Indeed, Emanu-El’s purchase of a church with family pews made this transition seem almost natural. In many ways, for Emanu-El to introduce family seating seemed the next step in its efforts to meet the standards of American society. Congregations like Emanu-El enacted these changes chiefly to display their absorption of mainstream middleclass religious values and norms and to demonstrate that Judaism was modern and respectable.19 Yet these American norms directly conflicted with the Jewish tradition of seating women in balconies or behind curtains. To seat men and women together marked a radical and visible departure from tradition and even from Reform practice in Germany. Other New York congregations that had adopted some of Emanu-El’s reforms initially shied away from family seating. In 1850, Anshe Chesed moved into its newly built Gothic synagogue on Norfolk Street; here the congregation introduced a choir with men’s and women’s voices and had its prayer leader face the congregation instead of the eastern wall; yet it kept its traditional prayer book and maintained separate seating of men and women.20 Yet by the end of the Civil War, many of the reforms that Emanu-El had spearheaded had been at least debated, if not implemented, by many New York congregations. The city’s oldest congregation, Shearith Israel, remained Orthodox, with separate seating. But New York’s second-oldest synagogue, B’nai Jeshurun, adopted family seating in 1875 after a fight that led to a civil court case and attracted the attention of the Jewish world. Those in B’nai Jeshurun who desired change wanted to bring the congregation in line with “the requirements of modern taste and culture,” thereby making Judaism attractive to an American generation. The minority who opposed mixed seating expressed their view that bringing Judaism in line with American standards would erode its core values by making light of Jewish law and tradition. The judge refused to rule on matters of Jewish law but did uphold the majority’s right to change the congregation’s bylaws. By the 1870s, most New York synagogues, with the exception of a few Orthodox holdouts, such as Shearith Israel and the new eastern European congregations forming downtown, had adopted family seating.21

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While the absence of a centralized Jewish authority allowed congregations to go their own ways, they often paid attention to what their counterparts were doing. As the B’nai Jeshurun case showed, debates offered individuals the opportunity to air their beliefs. When the case went to court, traditionalists collected affidavits from Rabbi Abraham Ash of Beth Hamedrash Hagadol and Samuel Myers Isaacs of Shaarey Tefilah; likewise, those who favored family seating called on Rabbi Gustav Gottheil of Temple Emanu-El, Rabbi David Einhorn of Temple Beth El, and Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise of Cincinnati. As congregations enacted reforms in a piecemeal fashion, often led by the laity, strident voices for Reform and Orthodoxy battled each other in the Jewish press. The debates reached beyond the city’s limits. By 1855, Emanu-El was the leading German congregation in New York, its influence extending throughout the country. Congregations in Albany and St. Louis used its prayer book, and Chicago congregations turned to it for advice. By that time, New York Jewry in general considered itself the leader of American Jewry; it was natural, then, that its premier Reform congregation exercised similar clout over Reform congregations.22 What happened in New York attracted the attention of a national audience. By 1880, the vast majority of congregations in the United States considered themselves to be Reform. In the 1850s and 1860s, trained Reform rabbis arrived from Germany, assumed leadership positions in American synagogues, and worked with a lay leadership to steer congregations eager for change. The reforms that had seemed so radical were now commonplace: shortened and decorous services (typically two hours), choirs of men and women, and family seating. To signal this new direction, many congregations called themselves “temples” as a dignified term that also signaled rejection of the hope for the restoration of the Temple in Jerusalem. Yet though they had a name, and they shared common practices, they had yet to agree on an ideological rationale.23 Even as New York Jews brought their Judaism in line with modern sensibilities, one problem plagued all congregations, Reform and Orthodox. Maintaining the traditional Jewish Sabbath proved a difficult issue for all because it conflicted with the standard American workweek that included Saturday. Only so much accommodation could take place with American norms that so directly obstructed Jewish observance.24 Both Reform and Orthodox wrestled with the problems of Sabbath observance and synagogue attendance. Samuel Myers Isaacs chided Americans for their neglect of the Sabbath, reserving

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special ire for the comfortable classes who rode in carriages and sent their children to dancing lessons. Some Reform congregations experimented by offering Sunday sermons in addition to Saturday services. But even Emanu-El’s second rabbi, Samuel Adler, who succeeded Merzbacher in 1857, firmly opposed a proposal to shift the sermon from Saturday to Sunday.25 Even if congregants did not attend Saturday services, they often wanted their temples to hold them, loyalty to tradition outweighing accommodation. In 1876, Adler’s son, Felix, split from Reform Judaism to form the Society for Ethical Culture. This departure shocked the Jewish world, as Felix had been sent to Germany for rabbinical training and was slotted to take a leadership role at his father’s Temple Emanu-El. When Felix returned from Germany, he tried on this role but found it not to his liking. Enamored of the optimistic universalism of Reform thinkers, Adler lost faith in the particularity of Judaism. “The intellectual and ethical challenges of the day” demanded a strong, humanitarian, and truly universal effort. “Judaism is dying,” he pronounced as he gathered like-minded individuals, many of them young and Jewish, to form the Society for Ethical Culture. The Ethical Culturists met on Sundays to absorb the ideas of all world religions and to consider progressive ideas and deeds in their own city. In particular, they sought to model new forms of education for working people’s children, establishing a school that would teach the tenets of Ethical Culture. The society attracted only a small percentage of New York Jews (many of whom also retained their membership in Reform congregations). But Adler’s defection, as well as his religious challenge, disturbed Reform rabbis such as Kaufman Kohler, of Temple Beth El, who later provided an ideological response.26 Within this broadening spectrum of religious identification, debates over specific reforms shaped the trajectories of individual congregations. Ahawath Chesed, for example, embraced standard reforms such as mixed seating and a mixed choir, but it was never a leader in radical reform, as was Temple EmanuEl. When Rabbi Adolph Huebsch and his congregation moved into the Eleventh Presbyterian Church on Avenue C in 1864, Isaac Mayer Wise praised Ahawath Chesed’s installation of an organ, trained choir, and family pews. But in his dispatch to the Israelite, he scolded the congregation for not taking further steps toward Reform and urged it to rid itself of synagogue practices imported from Prague.27 The members of Ahawath Chesed did not heed his advice. Huebsch wrote a modernized version of the liturgy yet championed

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stricter Sabbath observance. After his death in 1884, the congregation turned its attention back to Prague, where it contracted with Alexander Kohut. The graduate of the Breslau Theological Seminary had already completed several volumes of a Talmudic dictionary, the Aruch Completum, and his selection signaled a more conservative direction. Ahawath Chesed’s choice of Kohut demonstrated a tentative stance toward Reform and a continued respect for tradition; it also showed how even one congregation might exhibit a range of behaviors and change course over time. Kohut’s first sermon at Ahawath Chesed acknowledged these ambiguities. He criticized those who did not uphold the importance of Jewish law but carefully clarified that he directed his attack only against those who deny Jewish law “on principle” and not those who transgress due to the “exigencies of life.” This distinction seemed designed to keep him in good favor with his congregation, many of whom did not follow Jewish law because of the demands of work and business. By isolating members’ good intentions and their admiration for Jewish law, he aimed to steer them toward fuller observance. It appears that he made some headway. Indeed, Kohut reintroduced the observation of certain holidays such as Purim, Chanukah, and Sukkot and returned to reading the Torah in the traditional annual cycle. The congregation accepted these changes, indicating its openness toward greater conservatism. Within weeks of Kohut’s New York arrival in May 1885, he commenced a series of lectures on the rabbinical text Ethics of the Fathers and used it to challenge Reform ideology and practice. Without Jewish law, he argued, Judaism was a “deformity — a skeleton without flesh and sinew, without spirit and heart. It is suicide, and suicide is not reform.” Kohut hoped to advance “the old and the new in happy and blended union,” along more “conservative lines” that recognized the importance of Jewish law.28 Rabbi Kaufman Kohler (1842 – 1926), leader of Temple Beth El (1874), just eight blocks north on Lexington Avenue, responded in kind, delivering five discourses, “Backwards or Forwards,” in which he defended Reform.29 These exchanges came to be known as the “Kohut-Kohler affair” and attracted press attention. Max Cohn, the editor of the American Hebrew, rushed to translate Kohut’s sermons from German for his weekly paper. The exchanges were commented on and debated in the papers and within synagogue halls. The New York Times covered the controversy as well, printing Kohler’s account: “In these discourses I defended my view, and Dr. Kohut responded each time from the pulpit at his

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temple; each with mutual recognition of the views and personal qualities of his opponent.”30 Not only does this affair show the fluidity within a congregation, but it also reveals the dynamism of the debate and the excitement New York offered to Reform and traditionalist leaders alike. Rebekah Bettelheim, a daughter of a San Franciscan rabbi and soon-to-be fiancée of Alexander Kohut, recorded in her memoirs the apprehension she felt upon attending an open meeting at Temple Emanu-El in which prominent rabbis, including Kohut and Kohler, had gathered to discuss “The Conflict between Science and Religion.” Bettelheim had been following the debates among rabbis in the press and feared experiencing the acrimony in action; however, she was pleasantly surprised by the proceedings: It was interesting to see all those rabbis of conflicting beliefs gathered in one assemblage, listening to their respective opponents. Face to face, people cannot hate each other as much as if either side recedes into a vague symbol of menace. Here were these men, leaders all, who had to state their viewpoint for their opponents. No flights of rhetoric, no appeals to lay prejudices and passions, no beclouding the issues were possible if these men were really sincere in their desire to arrive at amity.

In Bettelheim-Kohut’s account, Kohut’s address garnered the admiration if not the agreement of opponents such as Kohler and Gustav Gottheil. “I remember with what gratification I saw Dr. Kohler rush forward and congratulate his antagonist.”31 This action then caused Bettelheim-Kohut to reflect on the broader meaning of this open meeting and the stimulation the contestation of ideas provided. Despite antagonisms displayed in print, there seemed to be recognition at these cross-congregational meetings of the opportunity for collaboration, providing these men a chance to test and sharpen their viewpoints. New York’s geography — with diverse temples within blocks of each other — surely heightened this dynamic, and “each man’s synagogue was crowded to overflowing.”32 The impact of the debates spread beyond the synagogue halls, awakening public interest in the issues facing Judaism. The sheer concentration of leading congregations and rabbis made New York different from other Jewish centers. The Kohut-Kohler debates crystallized two important viewpoints, both of which asserted New York’s centrality in the direction of American Judaism. First, Kohler summoned like-minded Reform rabbis, including Isaac Mayer

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Wise, to Pittsburgh for a convention. While Reform leaders, including Wise, had previously attempted to unite rabbis around an ideological justification for Reform, they had never succeeded. This time they did. The resulting Pittsburgh Platform, an eight-point articulation of American Reform Judaism, wielded tremendous power through the 1930s. The platform rejected the Talmud’s hold on modern Jews, eliminating laws such as the regulations on diet and dress that did not meet the standards of “modern civilization.” The platform championed an enlightened and universalistic spirit that encouraged Jews to espouse Judaism’s moral and ethical teachings. Judaism, in the Pittsburgh Platform’s light, became a “progressive religion ever striving to be in accord with the postulates of reason.”33 Thus, the debates with Kohut prompted Kohler and his colleagues to hammer out the most decisive ideological statement of Reform and American Judaism up to that point, a milestone in the American Reform movement. In turn, the Pittsburgh Platform’s rejection of the Talmud and the binding force of Jewish law pushed Kohut to join with other rabbis — Sabato Morais and Marcus Jastrow of Philadelphia, Henry Pereira Mendes of Shearith Israel, Henry Schneeberger of Baltimore, Aaron Bettelheim of San Francisco — to establish a rabbinical seminary in New York City. At the Jewish Theological Seminary (JTS), students would learn to deliver English sermons and immerse themselves in Western thought but would continue to study Talmud and traditional texts. According to an American Hebrew editorial, JTS aimed to train American rabbis in “English culture” and to effectively blend the “American spirit” with “the strong historical armor of historical Judaism.”34 Kohut had preached this balance to Ahawath Chesed, and these rabbis hoped such a synthesis could ensure proper leadership for American Jewry. Initially, lack of funds limited JTS’s influence. But by the turn of the twentieth century, the eastern European immigration spurred demand for new leadership and prompted uptown leaders Jacob Schiff and Louis Marshall to support a renewal of the institution. Under Solomon Schechter’s leadership, JTS expanded its reach, training not just rabbis but also teachers through its Teachers Institute. By the second decade of the twentieth century, JTS had moved away from Orthodoxy to create Conservative Judaism, a third branch of American Judaism. As Rebekah Kohut recalled, “Thus one of the great seats of learning, the training-place of many of the most distinguished leaders of today, the home of the greatest Jewish library in the world, owes its existence to the fevered

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controversy of the 1880s.”35 What began as congregational sermons escalated into a nationwide dialogue and debate over the course of American Judaism. Wherever uptown synagogue members positioned themselves along the spectrum of religious practice, by the 1880s they surely reveled in their buildings’ beauty. The uptown addresses and the distinctiveness of the Moorish style in contrast to other churches and residences in the city announced that their Jewish congregants, many of them immigrants or the children of immigrants from central Europe, had integrated into the American economy and lived in and worked at the vernacular offices and homes in the neighborhood. These merchants and manufacturers desired to preserve their Jewish identity and to pass this identity to their children. Having a space to do this, particularly such fine spaces as these, demarcated a place to be apart in a city of such power and force. It reminded congregants of the importance of their Jewish identity. This New York Jewish identity, however, was never static; rather, it took new shape as congregants attended and discussed sermons regarding the direction of American Judaism, responded to the needs of the next generation, and managed shifting economic conditions. The next great challenge and opportunity came in the form of eastern European Jewish immigrants. These immigrants were arriving in multitudes and settling in the very same streets that had made up the former Kleindeutschland, now called the East Side, or the Jewish Ghetto. Five-story tenements housed Yiddish-speaking immigrants, and some of the garment shops owned by Ahawath Chesed’s members employed eastern European Jewish laborers. Just as Ahawath Chesed’s German-speaking immigrants had once gathered in a Ludlow Street hall to lead Orthodox services, these newcomers too adapted storefronts and tenements into houses of prayer. A church on Chrystie that had once been the home of Temple Emanu-El now housed the eastern European Orthodox congregation Mishkan Israel Suvalk.36 But in 1886, Beth Hamedrash, located at 78 Allen Street, just a few blocks from Ahawath Chesed’s founding home, bucked the trend, as it prepared to build its own new synagogue — and change its name to Kahal Adath Jeshurun — a few blocks to the south on Eldridge Street.

■ Moorish on Eldridge By January 1887, the trustees of Kahal Adath Jeshurun must have been somewhat anxious. Construction of their new synagogue was proceeding apace; a

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cornerstone had been laid in November. But bills were mounting, and synagogue officers pinned all their hopes on opening in time for the September High Holiday season. The disparity between the congregation’s 150 members and the new sanctuary’s capacity of 735 must have been daunting. Just as the lay leaders of uptown temples such as Ahawath Chesed had to calculate how they would finance and maintain their new structures, and used the sale of seats as their primary means to do so, so too did the leaders of Kahal Adath Jeshurun. Thus, in January 1887, the congregation crafted and circulated seat contracts. These stipulated terms and prices for the purchase of pews. By this time, the trustees of the synagogue had copies of the Herter Brothers’ watercolor plans for the synagogue structure; a black-and-white etching had also appeared in the Yidishe gazeten. One imagines they would have used these images when trying to sell the seats. After all, in a competitive market of 130 downtown congregations, one in which immigrants selected congregations based on hometown ties, the leaders of Kahal Adath Jeshurun needed to sell or market their congregation in novel ways. Eastern European Jews who settled in New York City tended to form small congregations and, lacking funds, rented halls for their worship services. They took turns leading services or, if more established, hired cantors and preachers to chant the prayers and deliver Yiddish sermons. Beth Hamedrash Hagadol, perhaps the largest eastern European congregation (which, along with Kahal Adath Jeshurun, could trace its roots to Beth Hamedrash, the Russian congregation that formed in 1852 in Five Points), took the eastern European synagogue to a new level when it purchased a church on Norfolk Street and renovated it into a handsome synagogue. But in general, most downtown congregations were hidden from view, distinguished only by a sign. So well did they blend into the Lower East Side streetscape that a New York Daily Tribune reporter assigned to report on the “Hebrew quarter’s” synagogues in 1896 characterized his quest as a veritable investigative endeavor: Scores, and even hundreds, of tiny synagogues [are] hidden away in this region of old buildings — synagogues consisting of a single floor, or at the most two, and giving no sign of their existence until they are stumbled upon. Some of the older tenements, dark of stairway and almost crumbling with age, have two, three and even four of these little worshipping places within their walls, where prayers are said thrice daily.37

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Another early twentieth-century observer noted that most of the more than one hundred synagogues he surveyed were not “anything more than halls or large rooms in tenement-houses, sometimes above or below a drinkingplace, and in a few instances in a ball-room, which on Saturdays puts off its unholy garb.”38 In some ways, these randomly located and chaotic venues reflected the state of much of immigrant Orthodox Judaism into the twentieth century. A vacuum of religious authority existed, which even the more established congregations could not fill. By the 1880s, central European Jews had close to half a century’s experience in creating congregations in America; the eastern European Jews were only beginning. But they had heard of the changes that uptown Jews had made, and to them Reform Judaism seemed utterly foreign, even heretical. The Moorish structure arising on Eldridge Street might have called to mind images of temples uptown. Was there going to be a Reform synagogue in the heart of the Lower East Side? Anyone with the funds to build such a structure surely was an uptown, German Jew. For those who had such questions or impressions, the seat contract offered swift and unequivocal reassurance: As it is the intention of all persons connected with said congregation to preserve, maintain and adhere to the strict Orthodox faith, it is hereby agreed, that, if at any time an organ should be used in connection with the service, if males and females are allowed to sit together during divine services; or if a mixed choir (males and females) is allowed to sing during divine services, the said [seat owner] shall have the right to recover from the said congregation, twice the amount which he may have paid to said congregation from the dates of these presents, exclusive of interest and dues.39

In the late nineteenth century, the women’s balcony guaranteed by this clause provided not just a physical separation of the sexes but a rigid conceptual dividing line between Reform and Orthodox Judaism. Ahawath Chesed’s mixed choir and mixed seating — all the elements that marked it as Reform — would not be countenanced at the downtown Moorish synagogue. By September 4, 1887, the hopes of opening in time for the High Holiday season were fulfilled. Throngs, including some uptown Jews curious to see what this new structure portended, assembled on Eldridge Street for a dedication ceremony. Regardless of their religious sensibilities, Jews gathered downtown in large numbers: in 1887, nothing in the neighborhood’s architecture

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announced the Jewish presence as strikingly as the Eldridge Street Synagogue. Though it lacked the corner lot that such uptown congregations as Emanu-El and Ahawath Chesed had secured, Eldridge’s three-lot perch in the center of the street was still impressive. Approaching from afar, one could detect the Stars of David atop finials, themselves lacier and more delicate than the solid masonry of Ahawath Chesed’s sturdy octagonal towers. In place of crenellations, more sprightly iron crestwork danced along the cornice. The materials of Eldridge Street, without question, were less expensive and less impressive. How could brick compare with Belleville stone, or terra-cotta with sandstone trim? Yet the effect delighted the eye; the terra-cotta floral designs and Stars of David articulated the placement of keyhole windows and doorways as nicely as the stone arches did uptown. Uptown visitors praised the building — the New York Herald considered it among the finest synagogues in the city. While the brownstone of Lexington’s synagogue matched its neighboring brownstone townhouses, here the brick of the Eldridge Street Synagogue aligned it with neighboring tenements; yet its use of cream-colored brick set it off in a distinguished manner. Once inside the sanctuary, an Ahawath Chesed member might have been reminded of his own synagogue’s stained-glass windows and delicate pillars but would have been discomfited by the bimah, or reading platform, set in the midst of the sanctuary instead of in the front of the congregation and by the seating of women in the balcony rather than on the sanctuary floor. Arriving on opening day, an uptown reporter from the American Israelite, a Reform publication with a national circulation, described the architecture as “elegant” and noted the “plentiful supply of air and light from the many and high windows.”40 But he complained that the serene setting failed to inspire decorum among the worshipers, and he sniffed at the women squabbling in the balcony, the babies crying, and the men grasping half-smoked cigars. In retaining Orthodoxy, and the habit of visiting the synagogue daily as opposed to a supposedly more reverential weekly or monthly basis, he suggested, the downtown Jews’ Judaism was just as un-American behind an ornate Moorish façade as it was behind a vernacular brick tenement one. Their behavior made him question their very ability to Americanize. Reform, he suggested, remained the only true form of American Judaism. In many ways, the Eldridge Street Synagogue and the wealth it represented stood as a rebuke to the ways in which uptown Jews like the Israelite reporter

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had reconciled their Jewish and American identities. While it was accepted that newly arrived eastern European Jews would form Orthodox prayer groups in tenements, Orthodox worship in an architecturally prominent building raised eyebrows. The ability to build such a synagogue implied that a significant segment of the congregation had Americanized sufficiently to raise funds and navigate courts. Should not these businesspeople and communal leaders have embraced Reform? Instead they used their American business sense to proclaim their Orthodoxy. The speeches that resounded throughout the handsome interior finishes of “cherry and ash” signaled the adamancy with which this congregation defined itself in contrast to Reform Judaism. Rabbi Henry Pereira Mendes, leader of the pioneer New York City synagogue Orthodox Shearith Israel, implored congregants in the Eldridge audience to instruct their children “in the teachings of religion and be made familiar with Jewish history, otherwise they [would], in growing up, leave the synagogue and join the temples up town.” Rabbi Bernard Drachman, another Orthodox rabbi, pleaded with his audience to maintain their traditions, lest “they might stand before their mirrors some morning and not recognize themselves as orthodox anymore.”41 These orators viewed Reform as a more profound threat than apostasy. In truth, lack of decorum at a synagogue dedication was not the exclusive province of the Orthodox; an account of Temple Emanu-El’s dedication in 1868 described how the crowd’s anxiety to find seats was so great that when “the doors were opened there was a crushing and a crowding in which ladies’ crinoline and gentlemen’s hats suffered severely.” Only the presence of a “large police force” maintained order. Yet beyond these shared infractions of decorum, both congregations strove for order. Downtown’s retention of the Orthodox liturgy did not stop it from hiring a renowned cantor to lead the prayer service. At Eldridge, the cantor helped avoid what some Jews considered a cacophony of worshipers reciting prayers at their own pace, the cantor’s status and control being further enhanced by the hiring of a “double male quartette.” In addition, the congregation apparently had created a system by which trustees stationed throughout the sanctuary could signal the shames, or sexton, if crowds became too noisy; upon receiving the signal, the shames would thump the reading table with his fist “and a sort of small thunder reverberated through the synagogue.”42 Like many downtown congregations, the Eldridge Street Synagogue did

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not have its own rabbi. In 1887, the congregation joined forces with fourteen other downtown congregations, including Beth Hamedrash Hagadol, to form the Association of Orthodox Hebrew Congregations (Agudes ha-Kehillos). They aimed to address the state of chaos in the regulation of kosher meat and the adjudication of other aspects of Jewish law. While many leading Orthodox downtown Jews had established important ties with uptown Orthodox rabbis, such as Drachman and Mendes, they knew they needed an eastern European luminary to rally the support of the downtown immigrants. Certainly, to their minds, the uptown Reform rabbis could not provide guidance. Thus, they resolved to import an eastern European rabbi, Jacob Joseph, from Vilna. Though they could import the rabbi and offer him a handsome salary, they could not import eastern European Orthodox communal structures. Joseph failed to gain widespread support in the New York community despite a warm initial greeting. Matters took a turn for the worse when the association decided to tackle the issue of kashrut. To help pay for Joseph’s salary, the association placed a tax on kosher meat. Unfortunately, the downtown consumers reacted with horror at the tax, which reminded them of the hated Tsarist meat tax known as the karobka. Rival rabbis elected themselves chief rabbis of their communities, and hopes for a citywide Orthodox Jewish authority disappeared.43 As a leading member of the association, the Eldridge Street Synagogue was forbidden to hire its own rabbi, as Joseph served as the spiritual leader of the constituent members. But Joseph’s expertise did not extend to the temporal affairs of running a congregation; he left this to the congregation’s lay leaders. Just as Ahawath Chesed had relied on the good judgment and devotion of its lay leaders, so too did Eldridge Street depend on men such as Sender Jarmulowsky, Nathan Hutkoff, David Cohen, and Isaac Gellis, and in later years Barnet Goldfein and Simon Lazerowitz. Lay leaders of the downtown synagogue were leading businessmen, and many had been in America for over a dozen years. In its first few decades, the Eldridge Street Synagogue constantly battled neighboring congregations for the allegiance of the Orthodox public, a competition that often hinged on who could import the most talented cantor. In later years, leaders struggled to update and maintain their beautiful building to keep its place as one of the city’s most attractive synagogues. The most pressing challenges occurred within a decade of its opening, as the most successful members began to migrate out of the Lower East Side to Harlem and

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the Bronx. Rather than move the synagogue uptown, the lay leadership constantly sought new ways to attract members and, when needed, secured mergers that maintained its downtown presence. Though Eldridge Street’s top leaders had established careers as bankers and businessmen and possessed the wealth to buy seats for hundreds of dollars, the congregation’s base was much more diverse. As Century Magazine reporter Richard Wheatley put it, “Lawyers, merchants, artisans, clerks, peddlers, and laborers compose the dense and changeful throng. All are one in respect to race and faith, but many in regard to birthplace and speech. E pluribus Unum receives a new meaning here.”44 A New York Herald reporter even claimed that a fair share of those who were present at the congregation’s opening were American born. Just as Ahawath Chesed became a place where Bavarian, Bohemian, and Prussian immigrants formed an American Judaism, so too did the Eldridge Street Synagogue become a place where Jews from throughout eastern Europe, along with some who were American born, undertook a similar project. To be sure, this Americanization occurred in steps; Ahawath Chesed relied on the German language to bind the newcomers from points throughout central Europe. Indeed, English did not become its official language until 1899. The unification of diverse groups of eastern European Jews rested heavily on the use of Yiddish in both congregational meetings and sermons. The congregation’s devotion to Orthodoxy did not mean it was unresponsive to American currents. On opening day, those who were assembled waved the Stars and Stripes; and in 1889, the congregation was decorated for the centennial of George Washington’s inauguration. In 1900, the congregation hosted a mass meeting on the topic of neighborhood crime; the guest speaker was Dr. Felix Adler, former Reform rabbi and founder of the Ethical Culture Society, which rejected Judaism for humanist universalism. While the congregation would never have permitted Adler to lead a religious service or to deliver a sermon, they allowed him, as a leader in the city’s progressive movements, to ascend the pulpit to hold forth on a pressing local problem. During World War I, the congregation showcased a specially designed American flag with stars representing children of the congregation who were now soldiers in the American army.45 Yet economic exigencies challenged Orthodox life. Even in a city like New York, with its enormous Jewish population, the Monday through Saturday workweek dominated; moreover, city blue laws expressly forbade Sunday

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commerce. Just as central European immigrants to New York often neglected strict Sabbath observance in favor of economic integration, so too did eastern European Jews grapple with the city’s blue laws and Saturday work. Eastern European immigrants proved powerless to change the city’s work tempo on a weekly basis; however, they did organize to demand recognition of their holiday observance. Consider the case of Morris Simons, a pawnbroker and longtime member of the Eldridge Street Synagogue. In 1897, Simons penned a letter to New York City Mayor William Strong, requesting that “Israelite” storekeepers be allowed to open their doors on Sunday, September 26. While city and state blue laws normally kept businesses closed on Sundays, the fact that Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, fell on Monday, September 27, that year threatened to create havoc. Sandwiched between a Saturday, the Jewish Sabbath, when Jewish storekeepers were obliged by their religion to stay closed, and the following Monday and Tuesday, when all the district’s stores would be closed in honor of the holidays, the Sunday in question was the only day in a four-day period in which Judaism permitted business. If Jews obeyed the Sunday blue laws and remained closed, not only would storekeepers lose a significant amount of business but Jewish households would be unable to prepare for the New Year. At this point, only the mayor’s secular power could provide the relief Jewish immigrants needed to prepare for their holiday. In perfect English, Simons assured the mayor both that “the population of that district are all Israelites and we have no other customers” and that he and his son had kept closed on Sundays as long as they had been in business.46 Simons, and Lower East Side Jews in general, must have been pleased with the official decision to grant all Jewish businesses permission to open their doors that Sunday. The New York Times reported, “Orders were issued from Police Headquarters to permit Jewish dealers to transact business yesterday, and the marts of Hester, Orchard, and Ludlow Streets presented their usual Friday afternoon appearance. Brisk trading was the order of the day and the tardy buyers took advantage of the leniency of the police. Even the stores on the Bowery were open all day and did quite a good business.”47 The exchange between the pawnbroker and the mayor highlights once again the central difficulty in reconciling Orthodox Judaism and American ways of doing business. That Sunday’s suspension of the blue laws was an exception, granted in honor of a once-a-year event, and failed to address the weekly dilemma prompted by the Jewish Sabbath’s collision with laws mandating a

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Sunday Sabbath. The clash of calendars forced Jewish immigrants who wanted to preserve their Orthodoxy to hunt for jobs that allowed them to rest on the Sabbath. If one did have to work on the Sabbath, how could one remain an observant Jew? Uptown, Ahawath Chesed and Emanu-El had responded in part by emphasizing Friday-night services and promoting a Reform agenda that minimized the centrality of Jewish law. Downtown, aside from proclaiming that members could not “publicly desecrate” the Sabbath, the Eldridge Street Synagogue had no official answer for Jews who worked on the Sabbath.48 In truth, only a minority of New York Jews observed the Sabbath or affiliated with a synagogue; observers estimated that perhaps 20 or 30 percent prayed weekly and that only 5 to 40 percent belonged to a synagogue. But they also agreed that many more, perhaps three-quarters, visited the synagogue annually on the High Holidays.49 The Eldridge Street Synagogue provided a venue for eastern European Jews who did not attend daily or even weekly to participate in services according to the holiday or life-cycle schedule. For example, in 1909, 72 percent of the Eldridge Street Synagogue’s income came from the sale of High Holiday tickets, many of them to nonmembers, Sabbath desecrators, who nevertheless desired to worship in an established synagogue during the High Holiday season. Likewise, a bar mitzvah brought fathers and sons in closer contact with the community. The 1913 constitution made special accommodations for nonmembers who needed a place for their sons’ bar mitzvah ceremonies and explained, “A Bar Mitzva whose father is not a member of this Congregation can be confirmed at the Synagogue on payment of such fees as the Board of Trustees may determine.” The constitution also suggested the ritual’s popularity, as it made provisions and rules for the order of honors and privileges on days with multiple bar mitzvah ceremonies.50 On Eldridge Street, Moorish finials and stenciled gilded stars shielded a congregation of Jews who strove to create an American form of Orthodoxy. Congregational leaders understood the broader challenges confronting Jews beyond the stained-glass windows. Though the congregation’s involvement in the chief rabbi experiment yielded no returns, it tried again to organize Orthodox Jewry by leading the initiative for the Orthodox Union in 1898. Several of the congregation’s leaders held office in the Orthodox Union, and the synagogue hosted the convention.51 The Orthodox Union brought together uptown Orthodox rabbis such as Henry Pereira Mendes and Bernard Drachman with downtown leaders such as Judah David Eisenstein from Beth Hamedrash

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Hagadol. The Orthodox Union defined itself in contrast to “the declarations of Reform rabbis not in accord with the teachings of the Torah.” It also worked as a lobby to defend the interests of Orthodox Jews to avoid as much as possible the kinds of conflicts that took place over Sabbath observance. But like the early leaders of Temple Emanu-El, the Orthodox Union leaders desired to guide immigrants in balancing “their allegiance to Judaism with the drive to Americanize.”52 Not all downtown Orthodox Jews shared the interest of Eldridge Street or the Orthodox Union in merging Americanism with traditional Judaism. The resisters, organized in the Agudath Ha-Rabbannim (Union of Orthodox Rabbis of the United States and Canada), viewed any compromise with American culture as a threat to traditional Judaism as practiced mainly in eastern Europe. They therefore lamented the introduction of English-language sermons in some congregations and fought a rearguard action against the modernization of the curriculum in Yeshiva Etz Chaim, an Orthodox day school established in 1886, and the Rabbi Isaac Elchannan Theological Seminary (RIETS), founded in 1897 and emerging as the primary training school for Orthodox rabbis. The rabbis of the Agudath Ha-Rabbannim considered their RIETS- and JTS-trained colleagues to be deficient in Talmudic learning, with the Americans’ ability to speak idiomatic English, if anything, a strike against them. Rabbi Jacob Willowski summed up the resisters’ attitude: “America is a treif land where even the stones are impure.”53 But the resisters were losing their hold on even the Orthodox segment of the community. The funeral of Rabbi Jacob Joseph demonstrated the extent to which Orthodoxy had gained recognition from the broader community. Largely ignored in life, in death Rabbi Joseph came to be viewed as a symbol of Orthodox Judaism in America. On July 30, 1902, tens of thousands of mourners turned out for the rabbi’s funeral, which wound its way, from his house on Henry Street, along Grand Street, toward the ferry to Brooklyn. The funeral has been remembered mainly for the melee that broke out between some of the mourners, the workers at the R. H. Hoe factory, and the police. But at the time, Rabbi Joseph’s funeral was also touted as a demonstration of the power and maturity of Orthodox Jewry in New York. Observers as diverse as the Orthodox Yiddish daily Tageblat and the New York Times stressed the simplicity and dignity of the funeral and procession, which was, according to the Tageblat, “without order and yet without confusion.” Moreover, a mayoral commission

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exonerated the mourners of any blame in the disturbance and disciplined a police captain.54 As represented by the leaders of the Eldridge Street Synagogue, the Americanizing Orthodox understood the importance not only of adapting the synagogue but also of supporting a wide range of Orthodox communal institutions. Just as central European leaders had turned to charity, so too did the leaders of downtown New York Jewry. The reach of the Eldridge Street Synagogue leadership throughout the community indicates the engagement of Americanizing Orthodoxy. Eldridge Street leaders also served on the boards of Jewish charities, from the Hebrew Sheltering House Association to the Beth Israel Hospital to an array of yeshivas and Talmud Torahs. In fact, a six-slotted tsedakah, or charity, box designated Yeshiva Etz Chaim as a beneficiary of the congregation’s largesse. One of the congregation’s first presidents, Isaac Gellis, served on the board of Beth Israel, Mount Sinai, and Lebanon Hospitals; the Montefiore Home; the Home of the Daughters of Jacob; and the Hebrew Sheltering and Immigrant Aid Association. Isaac’s wife, Sarah Gellis, who was “very religious,” left no record of formal organizational leadership but crafted her own charitable arrangements. On Friday afternoons, she not only prepared Sabbath meals for her family of seven children but also engaged two cooks to prepare foods for an “open house” throughout the Sabbath; her grandson recalled the “continuous run of people coming to sit and eat.” During Passover, Isaac regularly donated one thousand pounds of kosher meat to Eldridge Street for its part in the traditional maos khitim communal outreach at Passover. Sarah went from business to business, gathering donations of clothes, shoes, and hats for 350 children.55

■ Religious Education If Saturday work posed a problem for adult Jewish Sabbath observance, the popular American public school curtailed traditional religious study for children. Among the most important religious institutions elaborated by New York Jewry were thus those devoted to the religious education of its boys and girls. Running the gamut from Reform to Orthodox, religious institutions enthusiastically assumed the task of socializing the next generation in a synthesis of Americanism and Judaism. Others resisted accommodation with the local culture. Most took the form of supplemental schools that the children attended after the regular public school day: Sabbath and Sunday

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schools met once a week and were often tied to Reform congregations. Their curriculums included Jewish history, Hebrew language, and ethics, with the stress on history. Other congregational or communal “Hebrew schools” and “Talmud Torahs” met on weekday afternoons, after the regular public school day. An eclectic collection of institutions, they taught Hebrew language, the Bible, Jewish history, and “prayers, customs, and laws” in varying combinations. Some included music as well. Independent hadorim attempted to replicate the traditional eastern European style of elementary education and met in a variety of venues, including private homes and storefronts. Finally, secular Yiddish schools founded in the second decade of the twentieth century by immigrant radicals probably represented the greatest departure from educational tradition. These supplementary schools stressed Yiddish language (the Labor Zionist schools also taught Hebrew), modern Jewish literature, history, and folk customs, mixed with a healthy dose of socialism. Parents often sent their daughters to the secular schools to learn to read and write Yiddish. Boys went to religious schools for their bar mitzvahs.56 In 1917, not quite one thousand boys attended one of four all-day Jewish parochial schools, or yeshivas. In these schools, students studied traditional Jewish subjects including Humash with the commentaries of Rashi and Talmud, from nine in the morning until three in the afternoon. From three until seven, they studied secular subjects. The language of instruction for the Jewish studies was generally Yiddish. The oldest of the yeshivas was Yeshiva Etz Chaim, founded by eastern European immigrants in 1886, but the largest was the Rabbi Jacob Joseph School, with over five hundred students. In 1915, Etz Chaim merged with the Rabbi Isaac Elchannan Theological Seminary (RIETS) to form Yeshiva College. A year later, Yeshiva’s high school division reemerged as the Talmudical Academy, which, like Jacob Joseph before it, promised a first-rate secular, as well as religious, education. Ultimately, Yeshiva University, with its high school, undergraduate college, rabbinical seminary, and graduate schools, became the flagship educational institution of modern American Orthodoxy, striving to balance Torah u-mada, traditional Jewish learning with secular scholarship.57 With New York Jews’ diverse responses to the opportunities and pressures of American culture, religion ceased to unite them. Yet, beneath the surface, whether Reform or Orthodox, most New York Jews strove to fashion a new form of Judaism that suited their city and its lifestyle. In this respect,

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the Orthodox synagogue was as much an experiment as the Reform temple was. And for both, these experiments demanded certain essential ingredients, including congregational leaders who possessed legal and business acumen derived from experience in New York commercial life. This greatest asset paradoxically posed a challenge, as immersion in New York’s business and commercial life threatened to overwhelm traditional observances and lifestyles. The synagogue could not contain all of religious life. Home life, directed by immigrant women, became another site for religious expression and adaptation.

When longtime Lower East Side banker Sender Jarmulowsky opened his new building in the spring of 1912, he highlighted capitalism’s opportunities to the immigrant community. After the Jarmulowsky family was forced to sell the building in 1920, a succession of leading mainstream banks took over the first-floor banking hall. Factories filled the upstairs lofts, producing lace curtains, overalls, and nightgowns. By 1945, a piano manufacturer built and sold pianos — a hallmark of middle-class respectability — in the building.

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4

Immigrant Citadels: Tenements, Shops, Stores, and Streets

Though no one could trace the rumor’s origins, by the afternoon of Wednesday, December 11, 1901, the devastating news had been repeated by thousands of lips. It gathered a force of its own, wending its way through the Hester Street pushcart market, across tenement airshafts, from one stoop to the next, and up into the garment lofts. Sender Jarmulowsky’s bank had run dry! Shoppers stopped haggling, storekeepers shuttered their shops, and tenement housewives threw down their market baskets and formed “an excited mob, in which there were mingled shouts and cries of anger, pleading, grief, and despair.” The crowd converged at the bank’s entrance, on the corner of Orchard and Canal Streets. Though it soon appeared that the venerable Jarmulowsky had ample funds to satisfy all requests — he and his clerks disbursed $35,000 on Wednesday and kept their doors open past the standard closing hours — the lines showed no signs of abating. Rather, they continued to extend for blocks in several directions as “many terror-stricken depositors kept their places in line in front of the doors all night, and were desperate when the institution resumed payments at 10 o’clock [Thursday] morning, and other depositors by the hundreds arrived.”1 A New York Times journalist surveyed the scene that morning, noting the diversity of the crowd. Some passbooks showed accounts as large as $1,000, others as small as $5 or $6. But the depositors’ anxiety united them. The reporter sensed not just the sums of money involved but the many hours of rugged toil that those sums had exacted from the passbooks’ owners and the broader hopes and ambitions they promised. Mary Geltman, of 4 Orchard Street, arrived at six a.m. Thursday to relieve her brother and redeem her $68

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savings: “She blushingly confessed that she was going to be married soon, and wanted to take no chances on getting her bridal outfit.”2 Had the journalist elicited more “confessions,” he might have reported a young husband saving money for ship tickets for his wife and children in Europe, a presser laboring in a garment shop with hopes of buying a sewing machine and starting his own enterprise, a mother in need of cash for the next installment on the family’s prized piano, or perhaps a merchant who hoped to move his family beyond the teeming Lower East Side. These anxious East Siders, holding onto their passbooks like life preservers amid a swirling sea, were a microcosm not only of the neighborhood’s Jews that day but also of the collective strivings of the hundreds of thousands of Jews who made the Lower East Side their first home in America in the decades surrounding the turn of the twentieth century. For close to fifty years, the East Side was known as the city’s premier Jewish neighborhood, welcoming newcomers and sending the more Americanized on their way. Even as one family bade farewell to an East Side tenement apartment for the enticements of Harlem, Brooklyn, or the Bronx, a new family arrived to claim their apartment, perhaps applying a new layer of wallpaper but encountering similar challenges and nursing the same hopes for mobility as their predecessors. These immigrants sewed, hawked, and haggled to build better lives. Pious synagogue-goers, Yiddish-theater devotees, and Socialist firebrands alike dutifully visited the bank weekly to deposit portions of their own paychecks or the collective earnings of their family’s labor. On normal days, as they waited in line to deposit or withdraw, they perhaps entertained hopes for their future lives in New York. The potential for success was there, firmly rooted in the ethnic enclave. The story of Sender Jarmulowsky, reputed to be a “millionaire,” showed how a Talmud scholar with ambition could start a bank and forge a career as a philanthropist and benefactor of schools, hospitals, and synagogues. The people in line could surely see the rooftop finials of the Eldridge Street Synagogue, an early product of Jarmulowsky’s largesse. Businessmen also mingled with the crowd: “Several . . . Hebrews of the more intelligent class . . . told everybody that there was no need of uneasiness and cautioned all not to discount their claims.” Another real estate merchant cum philanthropist, Jonas Weil, had an “enormous roll of bills in his pocket,” and “whenever he saw a particularly tired and careworn woman with a baby in her arms or an old man in the surging line he took their pass books and gave them the

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amount of money called for out of his own pocket.”3 On the other hand, lacking the wealth of Jarmulowsky or Weil, but clearly desiring it, some East Side store owners took advantage of their neighbors’ frenzy and with much cooler heads offered ninety and ninety-five cents on the dollar to those who were too anxious to wait. In this way, the shopkeepers earned not only 5 – 10 percent of the passbooks but also the interest for the second half of the year. One claimed to have made $1,000.4 To those who waited, Jarmulowsky and his clerks paid one hundred cents on the dollar and finally dispelled the rumor of collapse, and the crowds dispersed, returning to their sewing machines, kitchens, stores, and pushcarts. By Monday, December 16, so thoroughly had Jarmulowsky snuffed out the rumor that some of the very people who had rushed to withdraw returned to reopen their accounts.5

■ Immigrant Bankers: Capitalism and Community A decade later, in May 1912, having withstood occasional runs on the bank and grown with the community, Jarmulowsky presented the neighborhood with its first high-class office skyscraper, proudly emblazoned with his name. Though he and other successful eastern European businesspeople and philanthropists no longer resided downtown, their banks and stores thrived on the burgeoning East Side, and they returned there each morning to serve, and profit from, their ethnic constituency. In many cases, they invested the money they had earned through business, whether dry goods, cigars, or the garment industry, in real estate, first on the Lower East Side and then uptown and in Harlem, Brownsville, and the Bronx. But Jarmulowsky was the first among them to introduce the relatively new “skyscraper” bank building to the Lower East Side. Jarmulowsky’s bank, just like his synagogue twenty years earlier, changed the physical landscape of the Lower East Side. No longer would Lower East Side banks operate from typical neighborhood three-story commercial structures or nondescript tenement storefronts. When enterprising bankers such as Max Kobre had festooned their buildings with terra-cotta beehives or wrought-iron initials, they had merely scratched the surface, dressing up ordinary structures but leaving the streetscape largely as it was. Jarmulowsky’s architect son, Meyer, upped the ante in 1903 when he designed a seven-story Moorish-style building, “a miracle of white enamel, gold paint, of Oriental

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balconies of brass,” for a branch he opened with his brother, Louis, on East Broadway.6 But when their father’s building opened nine years later, the New York Times described it as the East Side’s “first strictly high-class tall bank and office building,” akin to the “highest grade banking buildings” in Manhattan’s tonier business areas. Indeed, the 1906 J. & W. Seligman & Co. headquarters on William Street, in the Wall Street financial district, appears to have served as one inspiration for the design. Both banks had rounded corners, announcing their structures’ significance at street level, while circular towers at the roofline proclaimed their majesty far and wide. In modeling his bank after that of the “American Rothschilds,” Jarmulowsky signaled his admiration for these successful German-Jewish bankers. Jarmulowsky’s eye-catching rooftop, a domed circular pavilion wreathed by eagles, also elicited comparisons to McKim, Mead & White’s Municipal Building, perhaps indicating Jarmulowsky’s ambition to be viewed as the sovereign of the East Side.7 The bank’s popular neo-Renaissance-style skyscraper design thus linked the Lower East Side to the rest of the city. By the time the “temple of finance” opened to the public, Mary Geltman, like many of the alumni of the 1901 run on the bank, might already have been living in Harlem or Brooklyn, unable to view the skyscraper. Yet, if she read any of the Yiddish newspapers available in those neighborhoods’ candy stores, she could not have missed the full-page advertisements announcing the opening of the new bank building and proclaiming a “yontef, ” or holiday, for the East Side. The advertisements in the Jewish Daily Forward promised special promotions throughout the month of May. When the fall busy season hit its stride, Jarmulowsky urged workers to “save what you can for the future. Each man and each woman who works can save some of his or her wages for a rainy day.” As a convenience to workers, Jarmulowsky’s bank kept its doors open until nine p.m., so no one need “stop his work and lose time during the day.”8 Leaving the noise and chaos of Canal Street, immigrants entering Jarmulowsky’s bank gazed up to see the inscription “S. Jarmulowsky’s Bank, Est. 1873,” elegantly carved in stone, and a grand clock surrounded by rosettes and allegorical figures representing industry and commerce. The fact that the business had been around for nearly forty years must have been as reassuring as the solidity of the structure. But the two-story marble banking room, which rivaled those of established uptown banks, probably excited tenement dwellers even more.

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If the Eldridge Street Synagogue two blocks to the west represented immigrant religion, and the Forward building two blocks to the east represented immigrant socialism, then Sender Jarmulowsky’s bank symbolized both eastern European immigrant Jews’ thrift and their entrée into New York capitalism. A late nineteenth-century mass-circulation guidebook advised newcomers, “Do not take a moment’s rest. Run, do, work.”9 Regardless of background or occupation, immigrants worked day and night to maintain themselves and their families. In return for six days of running, doing, and working, they received a week’s wages or netted a sales profit, and after paying rent, shopping for food, and purchasing stock for the cart or placing a deposit on the next contract, some of this money found its way into the bank. In this way, local banks served as an expression of immigrant ambitions and disappointments. Whether Socialist, Anarchist, Orthodox, or atheist, all immigrants worked, and many of them availed themselves of opportunities to save their money. If New York was the “Golden Door,” then passbooks from Jarmulowsky’s bank were the keys for many immigrant families. Immigrant banks like Jarmulowsky’s point to the importance of neighborhood and ethnic economic niches that helped families of newcomers adapt to the city and that ultimately led them to become vital actors in its economy, especially in the garment trades, street commerce, and real estate. Yet as important as these neighborhood networks were, the bank also underscores the importance of the immigrant family, the basic economic unit that strategized to eke out a living in the tenement districts and negotiated the adaptation of traditions to New York. In the 1870s, approximately 15,000 eastern European Jews arrived in New York, the majority settling in the same downtown neighborhoods — between Five Points and Kleindeutschland — where central Europeans had originally resided before moving uptown. In 1873, Sender Jarmulowsky, a Russian-born Talmudic scholar turned Hamburg banker, decided to try his luck in New York City at Canal and Mott Streets, the heart of the old Jewish section of Five Points. In 1878, Jarmulowsky moved eastward, renting an office on the southwest corner of Canal and Orchard. There he catered to many New York representatives of the 240,000 eastern European Jews who arrived in the 1880s, 391,000 who arrived in the 1890s, and 1,387,455 who arrived between 1901 and 1914. In the early years, bankers served primarily as ship ticket agents helping immigrants in America send funds, and eventually tickets, to relatives in Europe. It was extremely important that a banker inspire trust, so an early

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advertisement promised that Jarmulowsky’s ship-ticket services were “Solid! Secure! Real!”10 In New York, Jarmulowsky cultivated a reputation as an honest businessman, becoming well-known to families on both sides of the ocean. Within a few years, as his own sons and in-laws joined his business, Jarmulowsky assumed a paternal persona to the entire community. In 1902, an English-language account hailed him as a “patriarchal gentleman,” an honorary relation to the “tailors and working girls” who constituted his clientele.11 Memoirs recall Jarmulowsky’s role in the lives of immigrant families. Abraham Goldman’s father arrived in New York from Lithuania, and his relative met him at Castle Garden and took him to the Lower East Side. The elder Goldman had earned a few dollars for some translation work he performed at Castle Garden and was anxious to send this home. Abraham remembered, “The next day Dad said he took a walk to see what New York looked like. . . . He saw a sign printed in Yiddish. It read ‘Jarmulowsky Bank, Money sent to all parts of Europe.’ Dad went in and sent the $15.00 he made to Mother in Neustadt.”12 This passage shows how quickly upon arrival immigrants encountered Jarmulowsky and how vital was the service he provided. Louis Lipsky recalled that Jarmulowsky helped his mother when she arrived and described the banker’s cumulative impact on the “whole Jewish migration”: “a simple, self-supporting, self-relieving operation with Jarmulowsky as the magician who made all the works go round.”13 By the time Jarmulowsky died in 1912, the Tageblat declared that “Sender Jarmulowsky was a name that was known to every Jew in the old and also in the new world. . . . His business brought him into contact with hundreds of thousands of immigrants to whom the name Jarmulowsky was the guarantee of honesty.”14 Even after his death, his name, now etched in English in Indiana limestone rather than printed on a Yiddish sign, continued for a time to preside over the first New York bank transactions of tens of thousands of immigrant tailors and working girls. Arguably the most influential and famous of the East Side bankers, Jarmulowsky was by no means the only one. Adolf Mandel started his business in 1883. His Rivington Street bank attracted notoriety during a February 1912 run; but his neighbors vouched for his “excellent reputation,” and he indeed fulfilled his assurance that their deposits were “as good as gold.” Like Jarmulowsky, Mandel by then lived uptown, on East Eighty-Seventh Street. A “large owner of Bronx real estate,” he continued to run his bank on the East Side, where he maintained “large financial interests.”15 A 1903 New York Tribune

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In February 1912, immigrant depositors stormed Adolf Mandel’s Rivington Street storefront, after hearing rumors that the bank had run dry. The Delancey Street Station promptly dispatched police officers to keep order while Mandel and his clerks patiently refunded depositors. (Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC)

survey of East Side banks likewise counted the hundreds of East Side bankers, some who had deep roots in the neighborhood, others who were “bankers by the grace of having come over a steamer or two ahead of the other fellow.”16 Bankers flourished in immigrant neighborhoods because they met critical needs of their communities. In New York, Hungarian bankers usually served Hungarian communities, Italian bankers Italian communities, and Jews Jewish communities, as the city’s “more established financial institutions .  .  . tended to eschew immigrant neighborhoods.”17 In place of the mainstream banks, immigrants who had already succeeded as grocers, saloon keepers, and merchants started banking as a side business. They sold ship tickets to newcomers anxious to reunite with family members they had left behind in Europe, featured installment plans that made many purchases possible, watched over their patrons’ savings, and offered business loans and credit to ambitious

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M. & L. Jarmulowsky (dinner), ca. 1906. The extended Jarmulowsky family gathered to celebrate the opening of Meyer and Louis’s branch on East Broadway. Sender is at far right. (Byron Co. Collection, Museum of the City of New York)

shopkeepers. In turn, the banks invested in real estate, spurring development of the Lower East Side and, increasingly, neighborhoods in Harlem and the Bronx. Some bankers would take funds entrusted to them to more established banking houses to collect interest, and some would “borrow” these funds for their own business needs. Overall, these immigrant banks became “reservoirs for local investment capital,” enabling small entrepreneurs to access capital and also to directly invest funds in real estate.18 Ultimately, the growth of immigrant businesses attracted the city’s larger banking houses. In 1903, a New York Tribune article noted that the Jefferson and Corn Exchange banks, the Van Norden and Mutual Alliance trust companies, and the Federal Bank of New

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York had recently opened branches on the East Side, having recognized that dealing with neighborhood resident merchants was a “profitable business.”19 Still, the majority of immigrants patronized immigrant bankers, who fulfilled an overarching social function, uniting friends and family, dispensing news, and selling ship tickets. Consider the role that Max Kobre’s Canal Street bank played in the lives of immigrants from the area surrounding Slutsk: When a letter arrived for one person, everyone read it. Letters were received at the address of Max Kobre’s bank on Canal Street. Kobre was like an older brother to all the Slutsker landslayt. As with the man of wealth in a town back home, everyone deposited their money with him. We also paid Kobre weekly installments for the ship’s tickets with which we ourselves had come and which we sent to relatives and family. Kobre’s was the “clearing house” where we exchanged news from the entire region.20

In addition to exchanging news and setting newcomers on their feet, the men of Slutsk gathered at the bank to discuss work and find positions for themselves and their friends.

■ In the Tenements Eastern European Jewish immigrants, uprooted by economic change in their home countries, came to New York seeking opportunities. Throughout eastern Europe — Russia, Austria-Hungary, Romania — industrialization had brought extreme dislocation as struggling merchants and artisans found their production of goods and services far outpaced by Western output. Overpopulation in Jewish communities compounded the economic stress, spurring migration to large cities throughout Europe and the United States. In Russia, outbreaks of pogroms in the aftermath of Tsar Alexander II’s assassination in 1881 and ensuing restrictions on Jewish educational, residential, and occupational options further stimulated Jews, especially the young, to seek a better life in America. Between 1880 and 1924, two and a half million eastern European Jews came to the United States. Close to 85 percent of them came to New York City, and approximately 75 percent of those settled initially on the Lower East Side, which by 1890 “bristled with Jews.” These huge waves of Jewish immigrants from Russia, Poland, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and Romania far outnumbered the previous ones. They also came at a time of unprecedented immigration to the United States; between 1880 and 1920, America became the new home for twenty-three million immigrants. And eastern European Jews arrived

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intending to stay, unlike many of their immigrant contemporaries. Strikingly, between 1908 and 1924, 33.3 percent of all immigrants returned to their home countries, while only 5.2 percent of Jews returned to eastern Europe.21 Jews also settled in New York City in larger numbers than did other immigrant groups arriving at the time. Jewish immigrants came in family groups, increasing pressure to find jobs immediately upon arrival. Each Jewish wage earner supported 1.8 people, as compared to a non-Jewish immigrant, who supported 1.3 people. Between 1899 and 1914, women constituted 30 percent of all other immigrant groups to the United States, while among Jewish immigrants, women accounted for 44 percent. In the same time period, children under the age of fourteen made up 25 percent of Jewish immigrants, but only 11 percent of non-Jewish immigrants.22 Often, Jewish families came as part of a chain migration, with husbands and fathers leaving first, securing a job and a place to live, and then sending funds home to bring over the rest of the family. The Jewish East Side served as a gateway to America. In addition to Irish, German, and Italian immigrants, many Jewish immigrants met Jews from different regions or towns. While a contemporary observer might consider the Lower East Side to be one homogeneous neighborhood, simply a “Jewish ghetto,” a Lower East Side resident from Hungary would have bristled at being lumped together with Russian or Polish immigrants. Indeed, a closer look at the Lower East Side, the stretch of territory bounded by Fourteenth Street, the Bowery, the East River, and Market Street, reveals multiple subethnic enclaves. Hungarian Jews clustered above Houston Street; Galician Jews in a section bounded by Houston to the north, Grand Street, to the south; Romanian and Levantine Jews between Grand and Houston, Allen and the Bowery; Russian Jews south of Grand Street. This enclave pattern recalled the one set by German-speaking immigrants — in the very same sections just a decade earlier, sons and daughters of Hesse-Darmstadt, Bavaria, and Wurtemburg found favorite blocks. These disparate backgrounds shaped their encounter with New York and the Lower East Side — they sought out former neighbors (landslayt) to share distinctive foodways and religious customs and to adapt old-world networks to their new geography. Of these various streams of Jews, Levantine Jews, those arriving from Greece and Syria, appeared most distinct, their difference reinforced by their language, Ladino, a Spanish-based Jewish language. Most of the eastern Europeans spoke Yiddish.23

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But though a Sephardic Jew might seek a particular block on Allen Street, while a Galician settled on Ridge Street or a Russian on Madison Street, they all became denizens of the tenement. For the many immigrants who arrived as children, and for those children born to immigrant parents in America, the tenement community offered more of an identity marker than did an increasingly remote Romanian, Greek, or Russian town. The tenement provided the stage for immigrants’ first encounter with American daily life, a remarkably consistent stage over the twenty-five blocks of Manhattan’s Lower East Side, where three hundred thousand Jews lived by 1893.24 By 1900, over 90 percent of Jews lived in tenement rooms. Tenements even blanketed many areas of secondary settlement, including Harlem and Brownsville, where 88 percent of the dwelling units were in tenements by 1904.25 Though tenements came to be synonymous with overcrowded and unsanitary conditions, the first tenement apartments were built in the 1860s and 1870s as a solution to the overcrowding of available housing stock. Irish and German immigrants had started then to subdivide one-family homes, stringing up sheets to serve as “walls.” The tall tenements, with five or six floors of apartments, offered each family its own space and kitchen and had the overall effect of dispelling the crowdedness of subdivided two-story homes. Imagine: in the same lot that uncomfortably held three families now stood a commodious and well-partitioned space for twenty families and two stores! But the aggregate growth of these tenements over a block severely restricted light and air. Tenement buildings filled 90 percent of the lot, leaving no room for side windows, and each new tenement further strengthened the barrier between tenement dwellers and sun and sky. While front rooms of the front apartments looked onto the street, and front rooms of rear apartments overlooked a rear yard, all interior rooms lacked direct light and air. Of course, the tenements did not grow on their own; landlords, many of them immigrants themselves who had accumulated some savings, bought narrow lots as investments and possible stepping-stones to prosperity. They hoped to reap as much profit as possible, and that meant creating as many rental units as feasible. Incoming immigrants provided the incentive to build, while the city did little to regulate this construction. Until 1879, very few standards applied to tenements. With each passing year, the housing stock deteriorated, as increasing numbers of immigrants created ever more crowding. In one tenement, apartments that held an average of three to four people in 1870 accommodated

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an average of six in 1900 and often as many as ten or twelve. This crowdedness, in tandem with a lack of regulation, created the most infamous housing stock in the nation’s history. In 1878, the Plumbing and Sanitary Engineer journal’s competition for a model housing type yielded Robert Ware’s “dumbbell tenement,” so named because the buildings’ shape resembled a dumbbell, narrow in the middle and wider at each end. When two such tenements adjoined, their narrow waists formed a shaft designed to let in light and air to interior rooms. Though this model became a law in 1879, its standards did not apply to the majority of tenements already standing. Even when it governed new plans, the resulting air shafts were too small to address effectively the ventilation issues and, in fact, could be faulted as combustible garbage receptacles.26 Before the 1901 Tenement Housing Law, a typical tenement hallway was dark, because wooden doors at both back and front blocked out the sun and no facility for gas lighting existed. One immigrant who arrived in 1880 recalled that in the first tenement he entered, the staircase was so dark that he had “to feel his way up.”27 In fact, at 97 Orchard, windows were cut into the walls of apartments next to hallways so that the unlit hallways could leech light from the apartments. Most immigrants lived in 325-square-foot apartments. They lacked indoor plumbing. Water needed for laundry, cleaning, and cooking had to be fetched from a faucet in the rear yard, which also housed laundry lines and privies. Bare-boned tenement kitchens had room for a coal — and later gas — stove and a sink (but no running water). There was no refrigeration at this point and very little storage, which necessitated daily shopping. Privacy was virtually impossible. Despite the hallways’ darkness, a tour through the tenement halls must have been an exercise in sensory overload: the aroma of a neighbor’s cooking, the screeching of toddlers, odors of chamber pots, the brisk footsteps of a contractor bringing in the next bundle of clothes to be assembled, a Yiddish conversation among third-floor housewives, echoes of children’s street games from street or roof, and the never-ending hum of sewing machines. The 1901 Tenement Housing Law, launched by Lawrence Veiller and Robert de Forest, the first comprehensive and retroactive law, led to radical restructuring of preexisting tenements, as well as molding the shape of those to come. Landlords of preexisting tenements now had to improve lighting in public hallways and individual apartments and to provide one toilet per two families. This often required adding skylights, installing gas lighting fixtures,

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and stealing space from bedrooms to create room for toilets and air shafts. This law finally had teeth, as it established the Tenement House Department to ensure that landlords complied with these standards.28 But many of these changes came too late to affect the first generations of immigrants, who had by the turn of the century moved to other neighborhoods. Those who remained now had running water, indoor toilets, and perhaps more light and air. But these features did not reduce overcrowding or poverty. Upon first glance, immigrants often registered dissatisfaction with their tenement apartments. Bessie Mischaloff and her husband and young child arrived in New York in the late summer of 1914. They initially stayed with her parents on Rutgers Place: “The heat was terrible. The rooms were small, and there were ten of us altogether. So people slept on the floor and on the fire escape.” The crowdedness on Rutgers Place propelled Bessie and her husband to hunt for a place the very next day. They found two rooms on Madison Street, borrowed money from a brother-in-law for the deposit, and rented a pushcart to bring over their belongings. When they arrived, the janitor took them first to the basement, where she sold them beds and a carriage that previous tenants had left behind. Once settled, Bessie surveyed the room: “My heart sank. The walls were painted dark green and spread gloom.” Yet she roused herself from these thoughts: “But I did not have that much time to think. I immediately went to work on the children.”29 Indeed, tenement conditions left little time and space for reflection; whatever one’s initial reaction, one was overwhelmed with figuring out how to manage a household and raise a family. But with time, even crowded tenement apartments sometimes reflected immigrant aspirations for respectability and material comfort. The right kinds of furniture set in rooms differentiated by function marked a family as having middle-class standards, if not income. Reformers from outside the neighborhood preached a “gospel of simplicity,” seeking to convince immigrant housewives of the aesthetic and practical virtues of mission-style furniture with “good, honest, straight lines,” muslin curtains, uncluttered shelves, whitewashed walls, and plain wood floors. But immigrant householders had other ideas, preferring “colored wallpaper, brightly patterned linoleum, and yards of lace and fabric trimmings.” Above all, they favored heavy, plushly upholstered furniture.30 Memoirist Aaron Domnitz recalled a cloak maker’s apartment on Cherry Street in which he lived as one of three boarders. Although the family slept in one room, two boarders in another, and the third boarder in the

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kitchen, “one room, the parlor was not used. Large pieces of furniture were set up in that room: a big round table with chairs and a cabinet with a mirror. In the cabinet stood a platter with a set of six large glasses with colored edges that they never used. On the table was a large lamp that they never turned on. One could barely push one’s way through all the furniture set up in there. That was the fashion in those days in immigrant homes.”31 Merchants in the immigrant neighborhood, such as Deutsch Brothers on Avenue A or Daniel Jones on Orchard Street, catered to these tastes, advertising their installment plans in the Yiddish press. As Jews moved to more commodious dwellings uptown or in the Bronx or Brooklyn, they brought their tastes in furniture with them: “Wherever there is an upholstered surface, it is tufted; wherever a wooden one, it is carved into sinuous outlines and adorned with gilded leather.”32 Another important acquisition for a family with ambition was a piano. A “piano in the parlor” became the sign of a rise to “the height of social respectability,” a rise made possible by the Steinway company’s development of an affordable and less space-consuming upright model, and installment plans offered by such merchants as Joseph Spector, who opened the first piano store on the Lower East Side at Grand and Orchard Streets. The piano served a number of purposes, all of them related to enhancing social status. Yiddish theater composer and conductor Joseph Rumshinsky recalled giving piano lessons in his youth: “I got busy, busy, busy. . . . From ten in the morning until three in the afternoon I taught young women, recently married, who wanted to show their husbands they play the piano. From three until seven I taught schoolchildren. And from then until ten or eleven in the evening I taught shop girls and office girls who wanted to get married.”33 The piano also opened the Jewish home to the influence of popular culture through the purchase of sheet music, not only of Yiddish songs such as those published by the Hebrew Publishing Company but also of those emanating from Tin Pan Alley for general audiences. But some basic adaptations took place in the tenement world even before the acquisition of a piano or tufted furniture. One of the first things an immigrant did after arriving in the neighborhood was to transform him- or herself from a greenhorn into an American via the acquisition of a new suit of clothes, often with the aid of already-settled friends or family. Having completed the transition, the new American then proceeded to a photographer’s studio to have his or her picture taken to send to relatives still in Europe. American

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goods were presumed to be superior to those of Europe, quite apart from the higher social status they implied. Aaron Domnitz recalled that landslayt, natives of the same hometown, “devoted” themselves to the greenhorn. When an immigrant arrived, Domnitz wrote, “we clothed him: Landslayt would go with the greenhorn to Canal Street to purchase a suit, a hat, and shoes. Everything had to be American. Clothes from home were defective, even if they were of good quality and well sewn. Going to the stores with the greenhorn was a joyful procedure, like a Jew back home picking out an esrog [citron used for the holiday of Sukkot].” Jews were not the only immigrants to reinvent themselves through dress, and of course, not all immigrant Jews cared for American fashion. But whether or not Jews were “unusually attuned” to American fashion, some contemporary observers thought that fashionableness marked the Jewish neighborhoods: The “wide sidewalks” of Grand Street, wrote a reporter for the New York Tribune in the summer of 1900, “show more fashion to the square foot on a Sunday than any other part of the city.”34 Just as new clothes promised to Americanize the immigrant, they also held open the promise of upward social mobility, symbolizing America’s open and apparently egalitarian class structure. New York Jews, of course, had already played, and were continuing to play, an important role in the revolution in garment production that made possible the democratization of clothing. With the advent and refinement of mass production, middle- and even workingclass people could lay claim to apparel that previously had been within reach only of the upper class. Some observers simply argued that with a keen eye, one could still distinguish clearly among the classes. In 1904, one wrote acidly, Purposeless imitation! . . . The Fourth Avenue shop says to the Fourth Avenue buyer: “Behold my clever imitation. For less than you could pay in a Fifth Avenue shop, I can give you a perfect imitation. You would not be behind the styles, I know. I can make you look like a real peacock.” The Third Avenue shop scans the windows of the Fourth Avenue shop and returns the same to its customers. The First Avenue shop has a still cheaper imitation, and in Hester Street, on the pushcarts, ghosts of the real are “Going, going, going” for thirty-nine cents.

Actually, since the working-class women wearing the “imitations” were often the same workers who had made the originals, the likeness was apt to be more exact than this snobbish writer wanted to admit. Moreover, the immigrants measured the transformation wrought by the clothes against the norms of

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the society they had come from, where lower-class women wore shawls and only ladies wore hats. Here, it seemed, virtually any woman could don a hat and become a “lady,” while her male counterpart became a “gentleman.” Selfreinvention — whether by means of a new suit of clothes or a piano — was another promise held open by America and New York.35

■ Work Neighborhood connections were also indispensable for finding jobs. While Jews arrived with more urban skills than other immigrant groups had, they still needed to adapt them to American industrial conditions. They could not simply be transferred. Charles Bernheimer’s survey of 333 Lower East Side wage earners in 1909 found that two-thirds of arriving immigrants secured jobs in occupations different from those they had held in Europe.36 Thus, social connections in New York were extremely important, and these could be rekindled in the immigrant neighborhoods and tenements.37 Landslayt helped newcomers find jobs. As Aaron Domnitz recalled, “We knew which landsman was looking for a new place and who could take someone in to work. To take someone into your shop was considered the greatest good deed, almost the only good deed, that the greenhorns performed in their new country. We mainly devoted ourselves to greenhorns.” Domnitz himself was aided by his landslayt in securing a position. He initially tried to find work as a plumber and then in the metal trades. But when these options did not pan out, he resigned himself to the overwhelming pressure to enter the garment industry: “I got tired of constantly changing jobs and looking for work. I felt the need to have steady employment with a more or less secure income. My relatives and landslayt lectured me that it was now time to settle down and do what everyone else did — become a tailor. I became a tailor.”38 Indeed, just as immigrants found their way to an immigrant bank, whether for a steamship ticket or to open an account, most immigrants secured their first employment in the needle trades. By the first decade of the twentieth century, observers noted that the garment industry employed 53 percent of Russian-Jewish men and 77 percent of Russian-Jewish women workers. Though many immigrants claimed to have been tailors or seamstresses in Europe, their former craft skills did not necessarily translate into job readiness for New York shops, due to garment industry mechanization and its breakdown of tasks. On the other hand, garment jobs in the United States could

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be learned fairly quickly, and many Jewish immigrants became “Columbus tailors,” discovering the needle in America. So thoroughly did this industry employ the Jews that it caused one observer to declare, “The needle has saved the Russian Jew in New York.”39 Weaving through the pushcarts, boys carried bundles of fabric already cut to pattern to tenement contractor shops throughout the neighborhood, where they were assembled into garments. The contracting system prevailed in the garment industry, relieving manufacturers of the responsibility of managing the workforce. Manufacturers hired skilled workers to design the garments and cut the cloth, which they then farmed out for assembly to an army of small contractors. The contractors hired the sewing-machine operators, pressers, basters, and finishers and organized the assembly of the garments, which were then returned to the manufacturer. This flexible system expanded during the busy season and contracted during slack season, leaving both workers and contractors bereft of work and pay but insulating manufacturers from any wasted expenditures for overhead and wages. Although the contracting system put relentless downward pressure on wages and conditions, it also allowed workers to become “bosses” by opening their own shops with little capital. All that was needed to do so were a sewing machine, a pressing table, and a stove for the irons. Sewing machines could be purchased on installment, and one could use a tenement apartment for space. Immigrants also needed a strong will to compete. At the turn of the century, a third of all contractors went out of business each year.40 These tenement sweatshops became infamous for their crowded and unsanitary conditions. Laborers worked up to fourteen hours a day during the busy seasons, and the stove, needed to heat the irons, operated even throughout torrid summers. Operators sat by the windows for the sunlight, but in winter this weakened by late afternoon, straining their eyesight. One tenement at 7 Ludlow Street held several small factories: The first shop that we entered consisted of a small room with two small grimy windows, and another room that had once been a bedroom. It was without windows, having only grates that looked out into the dark hallway. Several sewing machines stood in this small room. It was so crowded there that we could barely reach the operators, who sat closely together. Under the mantelpiece was a fireplace, where a lit oven was covered with pressing irons. Several girls sat working on the floor.41

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The term sweatshop applied not because of the heat but rather because of the manner in which manufacturers “sweated” profit from contractors, who in turn sweated profit from laborers. Given the close margins of this system, and the fact that contractors received from manufacturers a fixed price per garment that was often very low, contractors’ only chance of yielding a profit came from “sweating” as much work out of their workers for as little wages as possible. Though the garment industry offered opportunity for mobility, it also produced setbacks: “Today’s workers might become tomorrow’s bosses and today’s bosses could easily fall back into the ranks of the proletariat.”42 After the turn of the century, the growing availability of electric sewing machines, coupled with increasing regulation of tenement factories, stimulated manufacturers to relocate to more spacious uptown lofts with electricity. Between 1901 and 1911, eight hundred new loft buildings rose in Manhattan, providing ample space for garment shops.43 Compared to tenement sweatshops, these factories provided high ceilings and sun-washed spaces. They proved especially appealing to young women — often teenagers — who entered the garment industry and preferred these more modern spaces to cramped tenement sweatshops. But although physical conditions improved, exploitation continued to characterize the work. Jewish immigrants’ “restless ambition” propelled them to take advantage of the opportunities for advancement presented by the city. Some improved their status by remaining in the garment industry as contractors or even as manufacturers. But as one observer noted, “Every year large numbers [of Jews] desert the clothing industry to go into such occupations as small shopkeepers, insurance agents and clerks.” By the turn of the twentieth century, more and more Jews were entering the professions, though as a percentage, this number remained small until the 1920s. Most immigrants exited the working class by opening their own small businesses.44 According to one survey of the Lower East Side, 23.5 percent of the Jewish immigrants worked as “merchants,” half of whom, in turn, were pushcart peddlers and the other half proprietors of their own stores.45 If a newly arrived immigrant did not enter the garment shop, he or she often began as a pushcart peddler; one needed only ten cents to rent a cart and often could borrow a few dollars for the initial inventory. A peddler did not need to know English. In 1900, the city counted twenty-five thousand pushcart peddlers, many of them Jewish immigrants.46 While Italian and Greek peddlers were known for their

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fruits and vegetables, Jewish peddlers made their mark on the city by selling nonfood items as well. One could find Jewish peddlers selling apples and cabbages on Hester Street; one could also find them offering eyeglasses, shoes, fabrics, clothing, toys, books, and hardware at prices that attracted shoppers from beyond the East Side. A city survey of seven hundred vendors selling nonfood items found that 95 percent were Jews.47 A 1906 survey reported that peddlers earned fifteen to eighteen dollars a week, saving enough to open their own stores within five or six years.48 Indeed, many peddlers harbored the ambition to become a shopkeeper. With savings and perhaps a loan, a peddler might open up a store. Minnie Goldstein’s father, for example, left Warsaw for New York, where his attempts to make a living as a cobbler failed. He changed course: “He took a wooden box, bought some baby shoes, took up position on Hester Street, and sold shoes at a profit of five or ten cents a pair. . . . Before long the women of Hester Street found out that my father would sell them a pair of shoes for thirty cents, while they had to pay fifty cents in a store for the same pair of shoes. Well, he started to earn some money, so he rented a small store.”49 Storekeepers curried respect; they were their own bosses. One immigrant, Avraham Gollup, encouraged his teenage daughter, Rahel, to marry a young man who helped his mother run a grocery store: “He is a nice quiet man and the main thing, he is not a wage earner. The smallest businessman is worth ten workingmen.” Despite this relative prestige, shopkeepers often worked themselves — and their families — as hard as contractors drove their workers. The young suitor whom Abraham Gollup so admired for his independence actually lived in a few small, unfurnished rooms behind the grocery, and the arrival of a customer at any time dispelled any notions of privacy.50 Likewise, when Minnie Goldstein’s father sent for her and her mother, Minnie was immediately put to work: “I worked from very early to late at night with my mother at home and my father in the store. And there was no talk at all of sending me to school.”51 Indeed, family members played essential roles in the management of stores. When Rose Radin’s father, Louis Minsky, opened a store on Orchard Street, he sent for his wife and two children. His daughter recalled, “My mother would go into the store and sell. . . . And she had a way with her, a sweet way, and she sold, and then my father would come back and take over and she would go inside to take care of her children. . . . And she . . . took care of the store, took care of the children and she was a great help to him.”52

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Whatever job a Jewish immigrant took, when reunited with his family, an immigrant became saddled with additional expenditures. Simply put, the dollar went further in Russia than it did in New York, and the need to support a wife and children in the tenements strained resources. As Samuel Joseph explained in 1914, “Jewish immigrants are burdened with a far greater number of dependents than any other immigrant people.” Between 1899 and 1910, because of the high proportion of women and children, 45 percent of Jews arriving in the United States listed “no occupation.”53 Jewish immigrants negotiated this responsibility, in part, by taking in boarders and relying on the wages of their immigrant children.54 The 1910 U.S. Immigration Commission found that more than any other immigrant group, Russian Jews depended on their children’s income. Whereas foreign-born families in general derived 21.1 percent of their household income from children’s work, Russian-Jewish children brought in 30.7 percent of the household income. While mothers worked in the home or within the family businesses, fathers and the eldest children earned wages, and younger children attended school. Family members depended on one another as they formed an economic unit.55 Sociologist and settlement-house worker Charles Bernheimer’s investigation of 225 families on one block in 1907 found that families relied on teenage children for between 44 and 69 percent of their total income. So crucial was the presence of multiple wage earners that in the absence of the traditional family, economic imperatives forced immigrants to forge new sorts of family arrangements. In one apartment, Bernheimer found a woman working as a pants finisher, earning $150 a year. Since rent typically was $10 a month, and the woman had an eleven-year-old daughter to support, she took in a seventeen-year-old cousin, who earned $325 a year as a dressmaker.56 Moreover, the necessity to contribute to the family economy affected children’s long-term life prospects. Before World War I, Jewish immigrant children generally achieved only an eighth-grade education, if that. The age at which students left school correlated directly with the age minors could obtain working papers. Thus, in the 1890s, twelve-year-olds could obtain working papers, and so the sharpest decline in school enrollment in the Lower East Side school district happened at that age. By 1903, when the age for working papers rose to fourteen, the steepest decline in enrollments happened at that corresponding grade. A full 37 percent of working papers issued in New York City in 1914 – 15

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went to Jewish teenagers.57 As Samuel Chotzinoff recalled, “Of course, everyone over fourteen years of age was employed in gainful labor. Not before the age of fourteen could one obtain one’s working papers.”58 Keeping boarders also provided crucial income for many Jewish families. In 1910, 43 percent of Jewish homes had boarders.59 This mutually beneficial situation enabled a boarder to pay several dollars a week for room and board and not be bothered with housecleaning or food preparation, while a family earned extra income. For example, when Ben Reisman came to New York in 1896, he stayed with landsmen Yitskhok and Khanetshe Hammer. Yitskhok ran a soda stand on Essex Street, which apparently was not very profitable: “So they kept boarders. Six of us slept in a room. We paid three dollars a month with laundry, and one dollar thirty a week for supper.” Aaron Domnitz’s boarding situation included a landlady who did laundry and made nightly meals: “The main meal in the evening always consisted of the same courses, namely a piece of herring or chopped liver, pea or barley soup, cooked meat, and cooked plums, always accompanied by a pickle and a glass of beer.” Even more prosperous families kept boarders. Domnitz’s cousin earned fifteen dollars a week and even had a front room with fine furniture. But still, the cousin, wife, and two children slept in one bedroom, while two boarders shared a bed in the second and yet a third slept in the kitchen.60 The labor of tenement wives and mothers generated the income from boarders. Women handled the cash transactions and work involved in maintaining a boarder. Abraham Kokofsky’s recollections of boarder management identified his mother as the decision-maker. Their Clinton Street tenement accommodated Abraham, his brother, and his father in one room and his mother and sisters in another; a third room housed boarders: “I’m sure that the only reason my mother was willing to give up that bedroom [was] because without that money she couldn’t feed the family and pay rent.”61 Keeping boarders was thus closely bound to women’s role as chief manager of household funds. This work demanded physical strength and keen strategizing. According to Harry Golden, with regard to the household and the renting of apartments, “Mother made all the decisions.”62 Women shopped daily and lugged water for cleaning, cooking, and laundry up and downstairs. This work also involved constant social networking. Boarders, almost by definition, were transitory and would have to be replaced; rent, however, was not transitory.

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■ Remembering the Sabbath and Keeping Kosher Eastern European Jewish immigrants made their homes in Jewish neighborhoods and often rented their tenement rooms from Jewish landlords and purchased their meat from kosher butchers and their vegetables from Jewish peddlers. They often worked for a Jewish boss and deposited money with a Jewish banker. Their children attended public schools with other Jewish children. Yet American conditions challenged many time-bound traditions. Sabbath observance, for one, continued to be a contentious issue for the eastern Europeans, as it had been for the central Europeans earlier. The threat to the Sabbath came from several directions. After the turn of the century, finding jobs that allowed for Saturday rest became increasingly difficult due to the garment industry’s shift to the factory away from the neighborhood shop. As one garment worker recalled, [The garment trade] had started to migrate to new buildings uptown from the small, neglected little shops on Cherry, Forsythe, and Lispenard Streets. The migration brought with it small social transformations. In the old shops, people worked on Sundays. In the new ones, where the building had to be closed on Sundays, people started to work on the Sabbath. This caused something of a stir among workers and bosses alike.63

Thus, a changing factory system and the move to uptown factories greatly decreased chances of finding a job in a Sabbath-observant garment shop.64 Sabbath observance came with a cost. Wage-earning Sabbath observers worked in businesses that sold religious goods, such as sacramental wine stores or matzo factories, as well as Orthodox newspapers such as the Morgen zhurnal and the Yidishe tageblat.65 Sabbath observers in the building industry could find work with Harry Fischel, who not only offered his laborers Saturdays off but also paid them for a half day.66 Many memoirs, however, attest to the meager pay the more marginal jobs offered. Harry Golden recalled, The ragpickers and the peddlers who lived “in the back” were self-employed because they believed that was the only way they could observe the Sabbath which began on Friday afternoon. If they entered the open society they were afraid their employers would not forgive the necessary hours from sundown Friday until sundown Saturday, to say nothing of at least a dozen other observances during the year.67

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Samuel Chotzinoff recalled how his father, a Hebrew teacher, hardly earned any money. The family managed to buy food for the Sabbath only because Samuel’s three sisters worked in cigar factories while his brother worked as an assistant presser.68 One solution was to open one’s own business and therefore to be able to set one’s own hours. Anne Goldman surmised that her father started his own grocery store “as soon as he could because he was a strict Sabbath observer and would not have gone to work in a shop where you had to work on Saturday at that time.”69 But storekeepers still contended with unpredictable enforcement of Sunday blue laws that prohibited, or at least severely circumscribed, Sunday business. Enforcement seemed to depend on the whim of individual mayors or police commissioners. In some years, city officials strenuously enforced the laws; in other years, they did not. When Mayor Seth Low assumed office on a reform platform in 1902, his officials stringently enforced Sunday laws, leading one Canal Street storekeeper to exclaim, “They have spoiled the best day of business for us!”70 To rationalize working on the Sabbath, some immigrant Jews applied the concept of pikuakh nefesh — the understanding that one could break the Sabbath to save a life — to Sabbath work for family support. One Orthodox rabbi, Jacob Bauman, even wrote a responsum that used pikuakh nefesh to excuse Sabbath desecration by immigrant Jews who worked to support their families.71 While most rabbis rejected this interpretation, the immigrant community in America accepted it. When Livia Garfinkel asked her Orthodox father how he could work on Saturday, he responded, “We are not in Jerusalem, for survival we are permitted.”72 So strong was the necessity to work on the Sabbath to feed one’s family that it could be justified and excused in this way. Another kind of threat came from within the community. Although the Sabbath problem was a labor problem, few labor leaders, many of whom adhered to radical secularist ideologies, cared about the Sabbath. Some radical organizers actively railed against religion, going so far in the 1890s as to hold annual Yom Kippur balls, raucous celebrations heaping scorn on traditional piety. The Socialist-led fraternal organization the Workmen’s Circle forbade religious officials from holding office and regularly scheduled lectures to counter religion’s power. But by the turn of the twentieth century, even such Socialist organs as the Workmen’s Circle and the Jewish Daily Forward softened their

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stance on religion, in part because they embraced tolerance as an American principle and in part out of a practical recognition that the vast majority of immigrants fell somewhere along the middle of a spectrum that stretched from free thought to traditional Judaism, exhibiting interest and practices in both secular ideas and religious customs.73 In response, uptown Orthodox rabbis Bernard Drachman and Henry Pereira Mendes joined forces in 1905 with a downtown Jewish communal leader, J. H. Luria, to reorganize the Sabbath Association, an organization that aimed to encourage Sabbath observance and to counter the economic currents that militated against it. The organization strove diligently and creatively to address economic and political factors that made Sabbath observance difficult, negotiating with manufacturers to let workers stay home Saturday, organizing a boycott of bakeries that baked bread on Saturdays, opening an employment bureau to match Sabbath observers with sympathetic employers, and lobbying Police Commissioner Theodore Bingham for laxer enforcement of Sunday blue laws. Drachman also organized trips to Albany to persuade lawmakers to amend the blue laws permanently. Yet these efforts made little impact.74 In 1913, the Kehillah, the Jewish Community of New York, reported that 60 percent of Jewish Lower East Side stores remained open on Saturday.75 Drachman’s employment agency found that the demand for Sabbath-observant positions far outweighed jobs available.76 Despite all the difficulties, the Sabbath left a mark on Jewish neighborhoods and homes, in large part due to the labor of the neighborhood women. Beginning on Thursday nights and accelerating on Friday mornings, Jews poured onto the streets for heated rounds of shopping and bargaining. A New York Times reporter advised readers, “Step off a Third Avenue car at the corner of Hester Street and the Bowery some Friday morning and walk east along the former street. I say ‘Friday morning’ because the market, striking and characteristic of the ghetto and its life, is held on that day. This is done so that an ample store of eatables may be laid in for Shabbes (The Jewish Sabbath) on the morrow.”77 Even the tenements dressed for the Sabbath: “On Friday afternoons the facades of many of the tenements were almost obscured by pillows and blankets being freshened, in conjunction with other pre-Sabbath sprucing measures.”78 In 1902, a reporter from the Outlook wrote, “In the Ghetto, Friday, the day before the Sabbath, is a day of agitation, of scrubbing, cooking, baking.”79 One contemporary observer, a reporter of Century Magazine, in

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attempting to depict the woeful conditions of the tenement apartments, conceded that Sabbath preparations improved the “interior rooms that would be more filthy than they are but for the Sabbath.”80 Settlement-house and social workers reported how a flurry of street activity on Thursday and Friday transformed the homes. A University Settlement Society worker concerned about the haphazard serving of meals in a working family household acknowledged how Friday night was an important exception: “Great preparations are generally made for the Sabbath menu, which is in most cases the only day when meals are taken in degree of regularity.”81 During the week, Abraham Kokofsky’s family never ate meals together; the fact that they all held different jobs and would come home at various times made it impossible to do so. Friday, however, the family ate dinner together.82 That families could create such a distinct and meaningful Sabbath atmosphere in spite of contemporary currents testifies to their agency and continued respect for the Sabbath. Anne Goldman, who grew up on East Eighth Street, recalled how Saturday restricted children’s activities: “We were not permitted to do anything that was not traditional on Saturday, and our outlet was to go to the library and read.”83 Reading was a central part of the Sabbath for many immigrant children; Helen Rosenfield recalled, “I went to the library on Friday afternoon — all my sisters took out books. That’s all we did — we read books on Saturday ’cause we never went to a movie on Saturday.”84 Many children of immigrants remembered how Friday night marked the end of gaslight and recalled how dependence on candlelight affected their Sabbath: “When it came to be before candlelighting, we put out the light and we sat by candlelight. And when the candles burned out, we had to go to sleep because you couldn’t read and there wasn’t anything you could do.”85 Closely related to the question of Sabbath observance was the issue of adherence to the dietary laws, or kashrut. The arrival of millions of eastern European Jews created a large market for kosher goods, and many companies, whether owned by Jews or non-Jews, began to offer kosher products. As early as 1900, food manufacturers began to target Jewish consumers with advertisements explicitly touting their products as kosher. Some companies, such as Gellis, Horowitz-Margareten, Rokeach, and Hebrew National, were founded by immigrant Jews and catered mainly to a kosher market. They added rabbinic seals of approval to their packages, testifying to their ritual purity. Soon national brands such as Quaker Oats, Babbit’s cleanser, Borden’s Condensed

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Milk, Uneeda Biscuits, and many products from General Foods and Heinz 57 Varieties carried rabbinic seals as well.86 Just as immigrant housewives worked to bring the Sabbath to the tenements, so too did they fight to keep the cost of kosher meat affordable. In May 1902, when the price of kosher meat rose from twelve to eighteen cents a pound, women proclaimed a boycott, battling with butchers, uncooperative consumers, and police for control of the Jewish streets, first on the Lower East Side and later in Harlem, Brooklyn, and the Bronx. On May 15, thousands of women “streamed through the streets of the Lower East Side, breaking into butcher shops, flinging meat into the streets and declaring a boycott.” The rioters, termed “strikers” in the Yiddish press, attacked customers of those kosher butchers who remained open, seizing and destroying their purchased meat. “Women were pushed and hustled about [by the police], thrown to the pavement, . . . and trampled upon,” reported the New York Herald. Some seventy women and fifteen men were brought to court, charged with disorderly conduct.87 Over the next several days, mass meetings were held, and the Ladies’ AntiBeef Trust Association formed. Women canvassed the Jewish neighborhoods and visited synagogues across the city to gather support for their cause. The Socialist sector backed the movement, but so did a coalition of synagogues, mutual aid societies, hometown associations, and unions, headed by David Blaustein of the Educational Alliance. Orthodox leaders voiced their approval, as did even retail butchers, who hoped to deflect attention to the wholesalers. Taking advantage of a rift in the leadership in the Ladies’ Association, male supporters created the Allied Conference for Cheap Kosher Meat and seized control of the boycott, which finally came to an end on June 5 with a negotiated (but, as it turned out, temporary) reduction of the wholesale price of kosher meat. Although only temporarily successful, the boycott showed that immigrant women had adopted organizing methods from the labor movement to maintain their access to kosher meat, and it also demonstrated the power of dense Jewish neighborhood networks. In later years, it became easier to keep kosher. But a second, contradictory, trend set in at the same time. Fewer and fewer Jews kept strictly kosher, though they might prefer Jewish-style dishes and adopt stricter standards at holiday times. Between 1914 and 1924, consumption of kosher meat in New York City

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fell by 25 to 30 percent. At the same time, many Jews transferred their previous concern for ritual purity to an interest in high sanitary standards in processed foods. Advertisers soon recognized the implicit equation, and as early as 1912 Borden’s adopted the slogan “Pure Means Kosher — Kosher Means Pure.” By the 1920s, many Jews had abandoned kashrut altogether, embracing instead a modern preference for recognizable brands of packaged goods with reliably predictable quality.88

■ Mobility In 1920, Jarmulowsky’s bank was sold at a bankruptcy auction, a victim of a 1917 run on the bank and the mismanagement of his sons, who had taken over the business upon his death.89 This time when the crowds arrived, the sons could not even come close to paying the one hundred cents on the dollar as their father had done so efficiently. By 1920, the majority of New York’s Jews banked in the boroughs or in Harlem, a subway ride away from the oncebustling Lower East Side. Banks like Jarmulowsky’s helped spark these neighborhoods’ growth by fostering real estate development in Harlem, Brooklyn, and the Bronx. Throughout New York, immigrants invested in new neighborhoods by building tenements. On the Lower East side, Jewish names accounted for 9.2 percent of property owners in 1860; however, in 1900, they accounted for 62.8 percent.90 By the turn of the century, Jews had also begun to transform other parts of the city, as builders, landlords, and tenants. Jewish real estate speculators and builders filled in open spaces with tenements and tore down individual houses to erect apartment blocs. Forward editor Abraham Cahan recalled how in the 1890s Jewish real estate operators did business in cafes and restaurants: There was a fever of real estate speculation. Lots, completed buildings and halfcompleted buildings were bought and sold. Anyone who had even a couple hundred dollars took to real estate. In the Jewish quarters, the fever overtook quite a few of our immigrants. Sitting over a bowl of soup or a glass of tea in a restaurant, they would buy and sell lots or five-story buildings, or a written commitment to make such a deal. Brokers took commissions. Someone who put down a deposit and secured a contract might have sold the contract to someone else and made a couple thousand dollars profit before he ever finished the glass of tea.91

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The tenement real estate market’s hierarchy paralleled that of the garment industry — both had layers of investors and workers, and with so many investors and middlemen seeking returns, tenants suffered just as sweatshop workers did. While both investments offered opportunity for people with relatively small amounts of capital, both posed tremendous risks and challenges. In the working-class Jewish neighborhoods, landlords typically employed lessees to manage the property. While more established, uptown Jews bought large parcels of land along planned subway routes, they then divided them and sold them in lots to smaller investors, who in turn sold them to builders, often downtown Russian Jews with loans from immigrant bankers. The builders quickly erected tenements, which they often sold to purchasers, who in turn sought out lessees to collect rent and attend to maintenance. The lessees’ only hope of making some kind of profit was to raise rent and spend very little on repairs.92 More broadly, tenement construction along subway routes helped to create new working-class neighborhoods accessible to Lower East Siders. Almost as soon as the neighborhood started to make a name for itself — indeed, the term Jewish Lower East Side first appeared around 1905 — it began to diminish in importance, as satellite or secondary neighborhoods grew. In 1892, the Lower East Side hosted 75 percent of the city’s Jews. But the expansion of the elevated railroads, the opening of the East River bridges (Brooklyn Bridge in 1883, Williamsburg Bridge in 1903, and Manhattan Bridge in 1909), and construction of the subway system in 1904 led to the growth of Jewish neighborhoods in Central Harlem, Brownsville, Williamsburg, and, later, additional neighborhoods in Brooklyn and the Bronx. By 1903, the Jewish Lower East Side was home to only 50 percent of the city’s Jews, and by 1916 only 25 percent.93 In the 1920s, the Lower East Side’s Jewish population declined by 160,000, leaving behind a population of 100,000.94 Yet the neighborhood still proved to be an anchor. In the 1920s and 1930s, 39 percent of the Lower East Side’s residents were Jewish, but 75 percent of the businesses were owned by Jews. In fact, the commercial vitality of the neighborhood actually increased with the widening of streets and better transportation connections to the rest of Manhattan and Brooklyn. Those who had moved away continued to return to the Lower East Side to shop and to dine. Much in the same way that Philip Cowen remembers how his father returned to Mulberry Street and the Chrystie Street synagogue for religious goods or in the same way that Harris Aaronson left

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Union Square for Attorney Street to distribute matzos, communal affection and responsibility bound New York Jews to the Lower East Side. Communal organizations continued to flourish, as did the array of Yiddish newspapers. Meanwhile, new neighborhoods began to take on a Jewish caste. This was apparent not only in the stores and restaurants along the new shopping streets but in the very shape of local buildings. Despite all the speculation and subcontracting, the new buildings proved attractive to those who were looking to leave the Lower East Side. Cahan recalled that in the new Jewish sections of East Harlem, apartments had all the “latest improvements,” including bathrooms with porcelain tubs, electric lights and buzzer systems, hot and cold running water, dumbwaiters, and, especially, light and air. The new apartments were snapped up before they were even finished.95 By 1910, there were one hundred thousand Jews in Harlem, the better-off among them west of Lexington Avenue, the poorer to the east.96 Another immigrant quarter took shape in Brownsville, Brooklyn, named for developer Charles Brown, who had bought up farmland and subdivided it in the 1860s. By the 1880s, Jewish immigrants were moving to the area, attracted by the open spaces and garment factories opened by Elias Kaplan and other contractors who moved from the Lower East Side. By 1900, there were twenty-five thousand people in the area, mostly Jews living in modest woodframe, two-family houses. But even by that time, most of the new buildings being erected by the Jewish builders and real estate speculators who congregated at Mrs. Axelrod’s restaurant on Thatford Avenue were multifamily tenements. The population continued to grow, spurred by the construction of the Williamsburg and Manhattan Bridges. By 1910, one observer noted the transformation of what had been swampy wasteland into “rows miles long of four and five story modern pressed brick tenement houses.” By 1920, 80 percent of the 100,854 residents of Brownsville were Jewish, and the neighborhood resembled the Lower East Side in its density, poverty, and Jewishness.97 Not everyone greeted with equanimity Brownsville’s transition from semirural fringe of Brooklyn to Jewish tenement neighborhood. The Brooklyn Eagle complained early on that the area had “very much deteriorated by the settling of a low class of Hebrews who have disfigured many of the dwellings by converting them into small business places.” Clashes between Jews and non-Jews took place, especially along the shifting borders of the section. Jews complained of attacks by Gentile hooligans on Rosh Hashanah and Tisha b’Av.

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But if the Eagle was to be believed, the violence went both ways: “Since their advent to this portion of the town not a day has passed without a fight of some kind. In fact, many an unfortunate Christian who has had occasion to pass through the streets of Brownsville at night has been roughly handled.” Indeed, in later years, Brownsville gave rise to a number of “tough Jews,” including members of the mixed Italian-Jewish Murder Incorporated gang.98 Evidence of Brownsville’s Jewishness came in a number of forms. There were dozens of synagogues, most of them in storefronts or converted houses, as well as other religious institutions such as the Stone Avenue Talmud Torah and the Rabbi Chaim Berlin Yeshiva. There was the Labor Lyceum, where radical organizations such as the Workmen’s Circle met. But since Brownsville Jewish organizations erected few grand buildings, the neighborhood’s Jewish character was most marked in the informal interactions of residents on the streets and in their homes. The marketplace on Belmont Avenue, between Thatford and Stone Avenues, came alive on Thursdays and Fridays, as housewives and their husbands shopped for the Sabbath in the stalls that lined the sidewalks selling fish, live fowl, vegetables, salt herring, rye bread, and dry goods. A step up from the outdoor market on Belmont, Pitkin Avenue became Brownsville’s mile-long main shopping street, lined with food and clothing stores, as well as Jewish-owned banks, theaters where movies were shown and live Yiddish plays produced, kosher delis, and Chinese restaurants. Newsstands sold Yiddish as well as English newspapers, including the weekly Bronzviler Post.99 Meanwhile, settlement of the Bronx was just beginning, with the densest concentrations in two patches, one east of Crotona Park, between the park and the Bronx River, the other to the west, between Crotona and Claremont Parks. When Aaron Domnitz moved to the Bronx in 1907, he recalled it as “new territory for Jews,” who traveled to Harlem to get kosher meat. Little by little, however, signs of Jewishness appeared. Early on, the pioneers discovered which restaurants were Jewish owned and served “herring, borsht . . . , and Jewish bread if you asked.” Soon, however, “Jewishness was revealed in the windows of the butcher stores, on the shelves of the bakery stores.” Yiddish newspapers appeared on the stands. Jews brought urban development as well: “As the gentiles left, the grass on the hills, the bushes, plants, and flowers gradually disappeared. More stores and tenement houses grew up in their place.”100 Much of a district’s Jewish character came from the people walking the

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streets, and much of this traffic was prompted by the daily business of buying and selling. To some extent, it was the style of commerce that made a street appear Jewish — pushcart markets arose in neighborhoods such as Harlem (98th to 102nd Streets along Second and Third Avenues), Brownsville (Belmont Avenue), and Mott Haven (137th Street between Brook and St. Ann’s Avenues), as they became more Jewish.101 To some extent, it was the presence of goods aimed at a Jewish market. Yiddish newspapers, for instance, appeared on the newsstands. But more important, establishments aimed at Jewish culinary tastes provided the neighborhoods with their special quality. In 1899, the 631 food sellers in the Eighth Assembly District on the Lower East Side, according to one study, included “131 butcher shops which proclaimed their wares in Hebrew characters,” in addition to numerous bakeries, “bread stands,” delicatessens, fish stores, herring stands, “grape wine shops,” and two matzo stores.102 Besides kosher meat, certain foods stood out especially as Jewish favorites. Soda water, for example, which when unflavored became seltzer, the “workers’ champagne,” gave rise to more than one hundred Jewish-owned soda-water companies, 90 percent of such firms in the city. More than one observer noted that Jews also ate more fish than did “any other race in the city.” This proclivity for fish, along with the tradition of keeping milk and meat separate, led to the elaboration of the fish stores and herring stands noted in the 1899 survey into “appetizing stores,” which sold prepared fish, salads, and dairy products. Sausages and other prepared meats — salami, pastrami, corned beef, tongue, and bologna — were sold in delicatessens, which the Jews inherited from the Germans but which became such an iconic New York Jewish institution that their presence marked a Jewish neighborhood more clearly than even that of a synagogue.103 Full-fledged “sit-down” restaurants sometimes evolved out of the delicatessens, “coffee and cake parlors,” and Romanian wine cellars of the Jewish neighborhoods. A handful of large, elegant kosher restaurants even appeared in the Jewish sections and in Midtown Manhattan, where they served a clientele of businesspeople and upwardly mobile families. In addition to meat restaurants, “dairy restaurants” offered vegetarian dishes purported by their proprietors to be more healthful than meat. Even when they were not actually kosher, the division between meat and milk restaurants remained as a cultural trait. By 1920, though, another ethnic preference became apparent on the main streets of Jewish neighborhoods, where Chinese restaurants began to appear, especially

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popular among the more adventurous younger element. In time, the Jewish taste for Chinese food became a kind of in-joke among Jews, even if it was less well-known outside the community.104 Jews put public and semipublic spaces to different use than did other people. One common observation was that Jews avidly patronized local public libraries. The branch on East Broadway was reputed to be the busiest in the city. Similarly, when the Brownsville branch of the library opened on Glenmare and Watkins Streets in 1908, it was “immediately filled to capacity,” with the largest annual circulation in Brooklyn. To relieve the overcrowding, a separate children’s branch was opened, housed in its own imposing building. In the Bronx, too, the library became a livelier place as Jews entered the neighborhood, and tastes in reading matter changed as well, tending toward European literature and books on social problems.105 Jews also flocked to the city’s parks. Of course, parks in the Jewish neighborhoods — such as Seward Park opposite the Forward Building on East Broadway, Brownsville’s Betsy Head Park, completed in 1914, or Crotona Park in the Bronx — could be identified as Jewish spaces by the language or accents of the visitors or by the topics they discussed. To what extent did migration out of the Lower East Side signal a movement into the middle class? While Jews had started to enter the professions, most advanced due to business. The great immigrant Jewish working class proved to be a one-generation phenomenon. Their fathers had been petty merchants, and their sons became clerks, shopkeepers, and professionals. Building, social work, and law attracted Jews. By the 1920s, those still working in the garment industry benefited from the growth of unions. These advances also facilitated and generated movement out of the East Side. Seward Park Library’s annual report noted the movement of Jews out of the Lower East Side and explained that the only ones who wished to remain were older immigrants attached to neighborhood institutions. But even they might move on for family reasons. When the librarian asked one elderly man, a library regular, why he was moving to the Bronx, he responded, “Vell, I haf a daughter to marry”106 Some upwardly mobile Jews remained in the Lower Manhattan neighborhood, which included wealthier sections on the streets south of East Broadway, such as Henry Street and Madison Street. But many settled immigrants and their children moved out to newer sections of Brooklyn and the Bronx, where they sought recently constructed apartment buildings, complete with elevators.

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In adapting to the Lower East Side, Jews from the Russian and AustroHungarian empires, Romania, and the Levant had often relied on old-world communal networks to adapt to the world of the tenement, sweatshop, and pushcart. But by World War I, Jewish immigrants and their children lived well beyond the Lower East Side and constituted close to 28 percent of the city’s population. As they moved into neighborhoods of secondary settlement, they drew on East Side networks and underwent a new process of adaptation. Though they were entering white-collar as opposed to blue-collar work, and though their children now took full advantage of New York’s educational opportunities, they continued to live and work together. Just as they had in the Lower East Side, Jews now shaped a variety of American Jewish identities to fit the circumstances in their new neighborhoods in Harlem, Brooklyn, and the Bronx. The Jewish home was an important space, where families freely determined how Jewish they wanted to be and in what ways: how they dressed, what they ate, how they furnished their apartments, and what they did with their leisure time all contributed to a sense of identity conditioned by class and distance from the immigration experience. These domestic decisions reverberated well beyond the home, shaping neighborhood businesses, political clubs, and cultural associations. Jewish households, hundreds of thousands of them by 1920, thus helped define New York as a Jewish city through their creation of vibrant and distinctive neighborhoods.

During and after World War I, the American Jewish community, represented here by a female allegorical figure bearing a tray of food, raised tens of millions of dollars for the Jews of war-torn Europe. Note the New York skyline with the Statue of Liberty in the background. (Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC)

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Capital of the Jewish World

In 1918, the Kehillah (Jewish Community) of New York City published the Jewish Communal Register, a massive 1,597-page compendium of Jewish organizational life in the five boroughs. To compile the organizational directories at the heart of the Register, a cadre of male Jewish student census takers of “good appearance, personality and . . . knowledge of things Jewish” traversed one hundred specially demarcated districts. They combed every street of Manhattan, the Bronx, and Brooklyn, as well as selected areas of Queens and Staten Island, for signs of Jewish organizational life — literally, for one of their methods was to hunt for signs posted in Yiddish or Hebrew. They also approached proprietors of meeting halls, groceries, and kosher butcher shops for tips on local groups. They discovered an astonishing array of “religious, educational, recreational-cultural, economic, philanthropic, correctional, research and coordinating, central and national, and national and international agencies” — approximately four thousand in all, large and small, in all parts of the city.1 The dense and diverse network of organizations, institutions, and movements documented by the Jewish Communal Register contrasted starkly with the one synagogue and associated burial society that constituted the formal Jewish community a century earlier. In the meantime, of course, the city had absorbed a tremendous influx of central European and eastern European Jews. The tens and hundreds of thousands, and later millions, of Jews who made New York a Jewish city by the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries took advantage of the American promise of freedom by developing a communal structure to fit their many needs on their own terms. Often this meant

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a declaration of independence from traditional Judaism as much as from outside interference. By the early twentieth century, Jews often elaborated on patterns of organization established during the mid-nineteenth century. The same conditions that produced so much vitality also provoked a high degree of fractiousness within the community. Organizations reflected the religious, social, linguistic, economic, and political cleavages within the Jewish population. Conflict was common, as was duplication of effort. The ethos of voluntarism and pluralism that characterized New York’s Jewish community meant that true unity proved elusive. Not everyone believed unity was desirable in any case. Attempts to form an overarching corporate Jewish community organization, such as had existed in Europe but on a more democratic footing, failed. Federations and alliances for practical ends more often succeeded. But the freedom to remain outside the formal community was another of New York’s promises, and many individuals chose to do so. As New York Jews shaped their own local Jewish polity, they also took steps to aid Jews throughout the world. New York became the unofficial capital of the Jewish world. Not only was it now home to more Jews than any other city in the history of the Jewish people and not only did many of the world’s most prosperous Jews live there, but New York Jewry suffered none of the wars, famines, pogroms, and oppression that characterized the Jews’ lot in parts of Europe and elsewhere. From their relatively safe haven, New Yorkers took the lead in organizing American Jewry’s political and relief efforts for Jews abroad. Many of these same New York – based agencies mobilized to counter antiSemitism in the United States as well.

■ New York Jewry and Early Efforts at Jewish Defense Even before the Civil War, New York’s Jewish community began to establish itself as the capital of the Jewish world by asserting itself on behalf of threatened Jewish communities abroad and in defense of Jewish rights and interests at home. In 1840, when thirteen Jews were accused of ritual murder in Damascus, Syria, New Yorkers called a mass meeting to protest the accusation and to pressure the American government to intervene. Although too late to have much effect, the community’s efforts set a precedent for organizing across congregational lines to speak out in solidarity with persecuted Jews abroad. The aging Mordecai Manuel Noah provided the ideological justification for such actions:

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It may be said that we are remote from the scene of these cruelties . . . , that the Almighty has cast our lot in a country of laws administered alike to Jew and Gentile, that . . . we are exempt from such outrages. . . . We thank God that it is so. . . . But, sir, in every country on earth in which the Almighty has fixed the destiny of the Jew, . . . scattered by a wise Providence among every nation, we are still one people, governed by the same sacred laws and bound together by the same destiny.

Noah reminded New Yorkers, “the cause of one is the cause of all, . . . and if the time has not arrived when the strong arm of Israel can once more be uplifted in defense of the nation and its rights, we can yet raise our voice against . . . aggression.”2 The Damascus affair marked the first collective action by American Jews on behalf of Jews abroad and their “first effort at creating a distinctive political agenda.”3 Ten years later, when New York Jews similarly protested an American-Swiss trade agreement that allowed Swiss cantons to discriminate against American Jews, they were defending their own position as citizens deserving of equal protection from their government.4 If the Damascus and Switzerland affairs set precedents for ad hoc action, the Mortara affair led to the first successful attempt to organize American Jewry on a national scale, with New York as its headquarters. The move came in 1858, in response to the forcible separation of Edgardo Mortara from his family in Bologna, Italy. Church officials there revealed that a Catholic domestic servant had had the Jewish seven-year-old baptized in secret five years earlier. Outraged, American Jews engaged in public protests and once again called, unsuccessfully, for the U.S. government to intervene. In New York, more than two thousand people, Jews and non-Jews, attended a rally at Mozart Hall demanding Edgardo’s release. The affair pitted Jews against Catholics in a battle for public opinion and influence. During the uproar, Jewish spokespeople appealed for Protestant support by playing on prevalent anti-Catholic nativist themes. Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise, for example, railed against “the most odious act that ever emanated from the Prince of Darkness, . . . recently perpetrated in the dominions of Pio Nono, the Pope of Rome.” Warning Protestants that they might be the next victims, Rabbi Wise concluded, “The history of these incarnate fiends, written in the blood of millions of victims, fully justifies such a conclusion.” In fact, Jews largely won the battle for Protestant public opinion against Catholic attempts to defend, or to deflect attention from, the abduction. But Catholics won the political war, as the Buchanan administration’s

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refusal to intervene tacitly acknowledged rising Catholic influence in the Democratic Party.5 In the wake of the Mortara affair, New York began to assert its primacy as a Jewish center over such rivals as Philadelphia and Cincinnati. Rev. Samuel M. Isaacs of New York’s congregation Shaarey Tefilah raised the possibility of a national convocation of Jewish congregations to discuss how they might protect the civil rights of Jews around the world. The meeting in New York in November 1859 resulted in the formation of the Board of Delegates of American Israelites as a unified body empowered to speak for American Jewry. Regular meetings of the executive committee would also take place in New York. The varied agenda that the Board of Delegates set for itself touched on Jewish interests both domestic and foreign. In the United States, the board successfully lobbied Congress during the Civil War to permit Jewish clergy to serve as army chaplains and protested a proposed North Carolina constitution that would have restricted Jews from holding office. At the same time, the board came to the aid of Jews in Morocco, Palestine, Persia, Tunis, Galicia, East Prussia, and elsewhere; and lobbied to secure equal rights for Jews in the Swiss cantons. In 1867, the board offered support to the short-lived Maimonides College in Philadelphia and in 1872 reestablished a Jewish Publication Society. Lastly, in 1873 and 1877, the board undertook surveys of American Jewish congregations and communities to gather statistics about Jews in the United States. The Board of Delegates merged with the Union of American Hebrew Congregations in 1876.6

■ New Challenges Over the next several decades, New York Jewry faced three interrelated challenges: the rise of local anti-Semitism, the often violent persecution of Russian Jewry, and — linking them together — the question of mass eastern European Jewish immigration, which was spurred by economic dislocation and persecution and in turn helped fuel a new wave of nativism tinged with anti-Jewish sentiment. Both established Jews and new immigrants tried to deal with these issues, sometimes together and sometimes in conflict with each other. By 1910, the Russian issue in particular had demonstrated the increasing importance of American Jewry, led by New Yorkers, on the world stage. Ironically, the rising economic fortunes of the central European Jews and their children, coupled with increasing conformity to Anglo-American cul-

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tural norms, exacerbated hostility against them on the part of native Protestant elites. The Anglo-Protestant upper class, anxious in the face of tremendous social and cultural change in the last decades of the nineteenth century, came to view Jews as parvenu upstarts, vulgar and ostentatious symbols of class instability. Social discrimination now barred American Jews from clubs, hotels, schools, and professional organizations, even ones that they had previously had access to. In the most infamous incident, the Grand Union Hotel in Saratoga refused accommodation to Jewish banker Joseph Seligman in 1877, claiming that “colonies of Jewish people” would drive away Christian guests who felt that the Jews were simply “obnoxious.”7 The new wave of nativism featured an element of racialism previously muted by an obsession with the perceived religious dangers posed by immigrant Roman Catholics. Nativism in the 1850s had largely been directed against the Catholic Irish, and it had been possible occasionally, as in the Mortara affair, for Jews to make common cause with native Protestants against the Catholic threat. The new nativism, however, questioned the racial admissibility of Jews, along with Italians and other immigrants from eastern and southern Europe. Influenced by racist thinkers in Europe and the rise of social scientific thought, American nativists began to doubt whether Jews (and Italians and others) were genetically capable of ever assimilating into the American nation.8 The resurgence of nativism, not coincidentally, corresponded with an increased number of immigrants coming from the southern and eastern peripheries of Europe, including Russian Jews. In New York, unsympathetic observers noticed a new type appearing in the city’s public places. “Numerous complaints have been made in regard to the Hebrew immigrants who lounge about Battery Park, obstructing the walks and sitting on the chains,” reported the New York Tribune in 1882. “Their filthy condition has caused many of the people who are accustomed to go to the park to seek a little recreation and fresh air to give up this practice,” it continued. “The immigrants also greatly annoy the persons who cross the park to take the boats to Coney Island, Staten Island, and Brooklyn. The police have had many battles with these newcomers, who seem determined to have their own way.”9 The established Jewish community worried that their association with uncouth newcomers might undermine their already shaky social status. But Jewish leaders generally rejected calls for immigration restriction. On the

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contrary, in addition to lobbying to keep America’s borders open to Jewish immigrants, Jewish communal leaders such as Simon Wolf, Oscar Straus, Jacob Schiff, Jesse Seligman, and Louis Marshall strove to awaken sympathy for Russian Jewry among the American public and government officials. In the early 1890s, they successfully urged the appointment of a presidential commission on the sources of the mass migration from Europe to America, engineered the replacement of the American envoy to Russia with one more sympathetic to the Jews, and paid for New York Times correspondent Harold Frederic to go to Russia and report back on the dire Jewish situation there.10 Meanwhile, old and new social welfare agencies started to deal with problems of poverty, adjustment, and image posed by recent immigrants. Influenced by rising theories of scientific social work, for example, the United Hebrew Charities (UHC) attacked the behaviors and dysfunctional family structures that it saw as causes of poverty. In practice, this meant that indolence would not be tolerated among clients, whose worthiness for aid would be thoroughly investigated. It also meant an emphasis on productivization and self-help. In addition to distributing relief, the UHC thus founded the Hebrew Technical Institute in 1884 to provide young people with skills that would help them move beyond the garment industry. It established employment bureaus, loan funds, and scholarships. Its “work room” employed women while training them for industrial work. In the first decade of the twentieth century, the UHC saw the desertion by men of their families as a central problem, one that led to such additional social ills as prostitution and increased institutionalization of children. By 1911, desertion had become so serious that it warranted its own agency: the National Desertion Bureau. In its first six years, the bureau handled nearly ten thousand cases by hunting down husbands and either effecting reconciliations (some apparently forced), securing family support from the men, or remanding them to the authorities for prosecution under a 1905 law that criminalized nonsupport (17 percent of cases). The Jewish Communal Register recounted some typical cases: Man left family in Brooklyn without warning; had been away for almost a year and made no contribution toward their support. Through publication of the man’s picture in our “Gallery of Missing Husbands” he was located in Selma, Ala. He had established a business in that city and was induced through our correspondence with a

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rabbi there, to send for his family. The reconciliation was complete as our applicant later advised us. Family deserted in New York. Man located in Chicago, where it was ascertained he had instituted divorce proceedings. An indictment was secured under the Child Abandonment Law, and he was extradited thereunder. Man pleaded guilty; sentence suspended, family reconciled. Man had labored under the impression that the law was as light as his profession (he was a comedian). He had the audacity to institute a suit, alleging that his wife deserted him for a period of two years, although it was apparent that he left home but a month before. He has now learned his lesson and we have had no trouble with him since. Man deserted family in Russia in 1904. Family arrived here in 1911 and filed immediately a complaint with the Bureau. Applicant had not seen her husband since her arrival, but countrymen had advised him of her presence. Man located in Brooklyn, invited to call at the Bureau, where a complete reconciliation was effected. Charles W., a baker by trade, deserted the family in 1911 in New York. Three months later located in St. Joseph, Mo. He expressed regret for his act. Wished to return to family but was stranded without means. St. Joseph Charities communicated with Bureau and man returned at our expense. 1913, man deserted again. This time he was located in St. Louis, where he was living under an alias. He was indicted and rendition to this state followed. Sentenced to serve a term in the Penitentiary, but the Bureau secured his parole about six months thereafter.

The Desertion Bureau thus effectively worked with governmental and nonJewish private agencies, as well as with the Yiddish-language Jewish Daily Forward, in which the “Gallery of Missing Husbands” was a popular feature for years.11 By that time, however, more innovative social welfare institutions had eclipsed the UHC. One of the most remarkable was the “settlement house,” a concept imported from Britain, where East London’s Toynbee Hall had opened its doors in 1884. The settlement house differed from traditional charities in that its workers, usually idealistic young college graduates, the majority of them women, actually settled into houses in the midst of the teeming immigrant slums they hoped to improve. In 1886, Stanton Coit founded the first American settlement house, the Lower East Side’s Neighborhood Guild, later renamed the University Settlement. Motivated by the “social gospel,” which

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sought to apply Christian ideals to the social problems posed by urbanization, immigration, and industrialization, settlement workers brought English and citizenship classes and social services to the urban poor. But, influenced by moderate forms of socialism as well, they often worked in the political realm for social reform. Lillian Wald, founder of Nurses’ Settlement in 1895, became New York’s most famous settlement worker. Born to German-Jewish immigrant parents in Ohio in 1867, Wald came of age in Rochester, New York. Her father was an optical-goods salesman, and her mother was active in charitable work. Wald grew up on the fringes of the acculturated German-Jewish milieu in Rochester; her highly cultured family raised her in a universalistic spirit that drew more from liberal Christianity than from Jewish tradition. With her dark eyes and hair and full lips, Wald was self-conscious about her “oriental” appearance, which caused her to shy away from Jewish identification even more strongly during her long career. An ardent universalist, Wald believed in the “fundamental oneness of humanity.” She received what she called her “baptism by fire” in social work shortly after her graduation from nursing school in 1889. Wald recalled that she was asked to teach a class in home nursing for an East Side technical school and that a young girl entered the classroom and begged Wald to help her family: All the maladjustments of our social and economic relations seemed epitomized in this brief journey and what was found at the end of it. The family to which the child led me was neither criminal nor vicious. Although the husband was a cripple, one of those who stand on street corners exhibiting deformities to enlist compassion, and masking the begging of alms by a pretense at selling; although the family of seven shared their two rooms with boarders, — who were literally boarders, since a piece of timber was placed over the floor for them to sleep on, — and although the sick woman lay on a wretched, unclean bed, soiled with a hemorrhage two days old, they were not degraded human beings, judged by any measure of moral values.12

This experience convinced Wald to make a career of working with and for the poor and ultimately led her to the settlement movement. Wald’s Jewish social connections led her to the financier Jacob Schiff, who became her chief benefactor. After a stint at College Settlement, Wald opened Nurses’ Settlement in a house that Schiff bought for her at 265 Henry Street. The Henry Street Settlement, as it soon became known, offered all the services

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common to settlements: classes in English, citizenship, arts and crafts, and home economics; and a venue for youth clubs, lectures, and amateur theater. New York’s Visiting Nurse Service started as a program of the Henry Street Settlement before it became an independent agency. Wald also fought from her base at Henry Street to improve the neighborhood through parks and playgrounds, public health measures, and better housing and working conditions. She offered the Henry Street Settlement’s parlor to help launch the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. A pacifist, she actively opposed American entry into World War I and defended civil liberties.13 While the Henry Street Settlement was resolutely secular and nonsectarian, the Educational Alliance was founded earlier by Jewish philanthropists a few blocks away on East Broadway as an explicitly Jewish institution with Jewish concerns. In 1889, three prominent preexisting Jewish institutions — the Hebrew Free School Association, the Young Men’s Hebrew Association, and the Clara Aguilar Free Library — merged to form the Hebrew Institute, which became the Educational Alliance in 1893.14 Not technically a settlement house, since it lacked resident “settlers,” the Educational Alliance imaginatively blended Jewish education with Americanization. It shared lecturers with the University Settlement and, like the settlements, Americanized its clients through civics and English courses, flag-waving lessons, and exuberant celebrations of national holidays. But it also offered Hebrew lessons, Sabbath services, and Jewish holiday celebrations. This blending sometimes became apparent in small but immediate ways. For example, when Hebrewschool teachers noted with annoyance that young boys wore their caps inside the classroom in violation of American standards of decorum, the teachers distributed yarmulkes. As a board member reported, “It gives the classroom the appearance of uniformity and is a marked improvement over the former boorishness and un-American custom of wearing hats in the class room.”15 In 1891, the Educational Alliance moved into a magnificent new building that seemed to the New York Times to be “a magazine for the storage of air and sunshine.” The expansive five-story, “yellow pressed brick” corner building became an island of order, light, and American culture in a congested, dim, and chaotic neighborhood.16 There immigrants of all ages studied English, learned vocations, played ball, and discussed literature. In 1895, the Times surveyed the Educational Alliance from bottom to top. The lower level held a 710-seat auditorium, where immigrants and their children could enjoy concerts and

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lectures. The main floor housed offices, an industrial school, and kindergarten classrooms. On the second floor were additional classrooms, where students gathered after school for art and music classes, drama groups, and clubs of all kinds. The third floor included still more classrooms, a chess and conversation room, and the Aguilar Free Library and reading room, where visitors could choose from twelve thousand books. Those who climbed the stairway up to the fifth floor found a gymnasium “on the most approved plan” and “a series of baths, walled in with marble, and lockers with open wire panel construction.” Seeking open air, especially in short supply before the opening of Seward Park in 1903, local residents gathered in the Educational Alliance’s roof garden.17 While a tour through the building provides a sense of the range of activities, a glance at the weekly schedule of a single classroom shows the kaleidoscopic and wide-ranging nature of its educational offerings. Take, for example, classroom number 12. Monday through Friday, it housed a kindergarten class from 9:00 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. Then, from 1:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m., public school children learned Hebrew. By 7:15 p.m., men and women arrived for two-hour English classes. On Saturday nights, an American history class met at 7:00 p.m., and on Sundays, more Hebrew-school children filed in between 9:00 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. On Sunday evenings, a singing class for men and women convened from 5:00 to 6:00 p.m., a biology class at 7:00 p.m., and, finally, a literary society gathered from 8:00 to 10:00 p.m.18 The Educational Alliance altered its program to meet the desires of its clientele. Initially, religious activities reflected the founders’ uptown Reform sensibilities, but interaction with the immigrant population brought lessons and servics more in line with Orthodox Judaism. An early ban on Yiddish was soon lifted. Tsvi Hirsh Masliansky, half traditional preacher and half Zionist orator, regularly held forth in Yiddish at the Educational Alliance. Its programs thus bridged a generation gap between immigrant parents and children, a goal frequently enunciated by the settlement movement. Board members even proudly reported that the Socialist Forward, often suspicious of uptown interventions and generally indifferent to religion, had responded favorably to a Passover play and “commend[ed] . . . the work of the Educational Alliance.”19 With mixed motives of social concern and social control, the Educational Alliance had its critics on the Socialist left and the Orthodox right. But the masses spoke with their feet, and those feet actually wore out the Alliance

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building’s marble stairs within thirty years. In 1895, 26,600 people used the building each week.20 And the numbers kept growing. That a sizable proportion of its visitors were children and young adults spoke to its influence on the future of American Jewry. Across the river in Brooklyn, the Hebrew Educational Society (HES) played a similar role. Founded in 1899 on the initiative of the Baron de Hirsch Fund and Abraham Abraham, owner of Brooklyn’s Abraham & Straus department store and an in-law of the Manhattan Strauses, HES reflected many of the same concerns as the Educational Alliance. Brooklyn’s Jewish elite anxiously read editorials in the Brooklyn Eagle criticizing uncouth Brownsville immigrants. But its members also looked nervously over their shoulders at their richer Manhattan counterparts. At the founding of HES, Abraham thus called on the “well-to-do Brooklyn Hebrews” to show “that the Brooklyn Hebrew is not behind his New York brother.” The HES building at Hopkinson and Sutter Avenues housed “children’s and youth clubs, English and citizenship classes, religious instruction and worship, a gymnasium, a variety of manual training and vocational courses, a kindergarten, recreation rooms, a seasonal children’s farm garden, a summer roof garden, a milk station and baby clinic, a library, a branch of the penny provident bank, a music school, a citizenship bureau, community theaters in English and Yiddish, a study room, dances, and holiday celebrations.” As many as 360,000 people used the building each year.21 Like the UHC, the settlements, and the Educational Alliance, the National Council of Jewish Women (NCJW) saw family stability as a cornerstone of healthy communal life and undertook practical work with new immigrants on a national scope. NCJW arose from the Jewish Women’s Congress, which met during the World Parliament of Religions at the 1893 World’s Columbia Exposition in Chicago. Sadie American, a local activist with links to the Maxwell Street Settlement and Temple Sinai, delivered the final speech of the Congress. The thirty-one-year-old daughter of a successful German immigrant merchant ended her speech with an energetic call for a permanent Jewish women’s organization. Headquartered in Chicago, NCJW successfully organized sections in various cities among well-off Americanized women, many of them oriented toward Reform Judaism. Three years later, NCJW boasted more than four thousand members in fifty sections; by 1905, it claimed a membership of ten thousand.22 The outspoken and widely respected Rebekah Bettelheim Kohut led a New

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York Section filled with highly accomplished women. In addition to Kohut, the New York Section at various times included educator and writer Minnie Louis; prison reformer Alice Davis Menken; author and Barnard College founder Annie Nathan Meyer; future political figure Belle Lindner Israels Moskowitz; Consumers’ League leader Maud Nathan; and Julia Richman, the first Jewish principal and woman district superintendent in the New York City public schools.23 Soon, NCJW moved away from its early emphasis on religious self-education to focus on social service. In particular, it took an interest in the growing numbers of eastern European immigrants, work that embodied a combination of Progressive-era concern for efficient and systematic social work, Reform Jewish commitment to “universal ethics,” and a sense that women possessed a special talent for ameliorating social problems. As early as 1894, when the New York State legislature’s Lexow Commission had revealed the extent of Jewish involvement in prostitution, NCJW members decided to protect immigrant women from the dangers of the “white slave trade.”24 This emphasis on immigration moved NCJW’s New York Section to the forefront of the organization’s work. NCJW cofounder Sadie American relocated to New York in 1900, solidifying the section’s leading position. Indeed, the two were closely connected since “immigrant aid work” was in fact American’s “pet project.” American often served as NCJW’s public face. As corresponding secretary (1893 – 1905) and then as paid executive secretary (1905 – 1914), she presided over the organization’s growth in its early years, often traveling from city to city to establish new sections. With experience as an activist with the Maxwell Street Settlement, the Illinois Consumers’ League, and the Chicago Women’s Club, American had established her interest in social welfare and social reform by the time she reached New York. Within a couple of years, she became the New York Section’s president.25 American led NCJW’s efforts to aid immigrant women. In 1903, NCJW established a Department of Immigrant Aid and, two years later, an aid station at Ellis Island, staffed by Yiddish-speaking social workers. They interviewed every Jewish female immigrant between the ages of twelve and thirty, counseling them on the process and prospects for settlement and warning them emphatically about dangers posed by pimps and traffickers. NCJW’s station at Ellis Island became the “hub” of its programming, but it was only part of what American called “the complete chain of protection” that NCJW provided

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to vulnerable single immigrant women. NCJW workers helped women settle into their homes and continued to monitor their progress for as long as three years afterward.26 But American was also a lightning rod for controversy. Her “brusque manner and autocratic style” alienated some and, combined with resentment over the ascendancy of the New York Section and immigration work over religious education, led to calls for her ouster. That American was a “Sunday-Sabbath observer” did not help her image in some circles within NCJW. Nor did her reputation for extravagance on the organization’s budget. Finally, in 1914, allegations of financial mismanagement forced her out of her national position. Many local activists found her abrasive as well and eventually ousted her from her New York Section presidency too. She left NCJW and never returned.27 Meanwhile, the separate Brooklyn Section continued on its relatively more serene way. Its activities followed the priorities of the national and New York organizations: immigration work, much of it carried out at the Hebrew Education Society in Brownsville; assistance to Jewish women incarcerated or on probation; education in housekeeping; and aid to the blind. It also maintained the Council Home for Jewish Girls in Jamaica, Queens, for girls at risk of delinquency. Rose Brenner, elected section president in 1912 at the age of twentyeight, provided dynamic leadership, increasing membership fivefold during her tenure. A Brooklyn native, daughter of a local judge, and member of congregation Beth Elohim, Brenner went on to head NCJW in the 1920s.28

■ New Immigrants Organize New immigrants from the Russian and Austro-Hungarian Empires also organized on their own behalf. Many joined older organizations established by earlier immigrants. Jewish fraternal orders, for example, attracted a new cohort of members. In the second decade of the twentieth century, these orders peaked with half a million members nationwide. Two-fifths of the entire Jewish fraternal membership belonged to Independent Order Brith Abraham, and of IOBA’s total membership of over two hundred thousand, nearly half — or ninety thousand in 354 lodges — were in New York City. Officially, IOBA was bilingual, with German and English as its languages. In fact, as it recruited heavily among eastern European newcomers, it added Yiddish. One-third of IOBA’s New York lodges carried names of eastern European towns from which their members hailed. For example, the First Jablonower Lodge 447, made

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up of immigrants from Jablonow, Galicia (then Austria, now Ukraine), met on first and third Saturdays at 352 East Third Street, presided over by President Selig Fleisher, a thirty-five-year-old tailor just seven years in the country. Other lodges bore the names of American heroes and politicians (William Gaynor, President Wilson, George Washington), famous rabbis (Akiba Eger), modern Jewish cultural figures and heroes (Moses Montefiore, Moses Mendelsohn, Solomon Schechter, Mendel Mocher Sphorim), German cultural figures (Schiller, Heine), or local communal leaders (Judge Leon Sanders, Isidor Straus). Some simply designated the area where the members lived (Crotona, Williamsburg City, Yorkville, Star of Brooklyn). A few lodges catered to women, and this too was indicated in the name (Sarah Weinstock Ladies’, Lady Garfield, Lady Roosevelt).29 The number of independent mutual aid societies also exploded. The Jewish Communal Register located 1,016, certainly an undercount. Most were landsmanshaftn, made up of immigrants from a particular hometown in eastern Europe. Landsmanshaftn often reflected an array of political, social, religious, and gender divisions in the community, and as a result, one small European town could give birth to multiple societies in New York bearing its name. The town of Rakov, Belarus, for example, had three landsmanshaftn in New York: Chevrah Beth David Anshei Rakov (Congregation Beth David People of Rakov; religious), organized in 1890, whose fifty members met at 225 Clinton Street, presided over by seventy-year-old Samuel Berman, who had been in the country since 1877; Rakower Young Men’s Benevolent Association, founded 1904 (younger generation), which met down the street at 151 Clinton; and Branch 428 of the Workmen’s Circle, the labor fraternal order (Socialist). In 1931, women established their own Rakover Froyen Klub (Rakover Women’s Club). This dynamic increased among immigrants from larger cities, such as Warsaw or Minsk, which could have dozens of societies in their name.30 Surprisingly, landsmanshaftn and other societies served as schools for Americanization, albeit on terms defined by the immigrants. Their meetings alone constituted civics lessons, at which members learned the meaning of citizenship in a free republic. No matter their ideological orientation, they all possessed the same basic structure, derived from American sources, which immigrants learned from experience in older organizations or from a variety of instructional manuals and books published in Yiddish. One member recalled the profound transformations that could take place within the society.

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As a newcomer, he had been depressed about his lack of success in adjusting to America and had considered returning to Europe. But something else happened, something extraordinary, that affected me very strongly and completely knocked out of my head the idea of going back. This is what happened. During the months that I was hanging around like that, my landslayt brought me into a society. And there I was, sitting at a meeting when one of the members — a man with a very good appearance — was speaking about a question very intelligently, nicely, and logically in good . . . Yiddish. I asked who this man was. When I was told his name my mind was changed completely — my thoughts about going back disappeared. What had happened? Here I must tell a little of the past of the man, the speaker at the meeting, who had made such an impression on me. He was a childhood landsman of mine, from the same street and from the same synagogue. As children we kept far away from each other. He was very poor, of a bad, even ugly appearance — dirty and ragged. He did not study in either a heder or a modern school. It is likely that he could not even read the prayers, though he used to hold the prayer book open. I quickly left him behind and forgot about him until this encounter at the meeting. So my whole way of thinking took a turn. A poor boy there! A fine, intelligent householder here, with a nice family and fine children! Dirty there! How clean and neat he is here! Of ugly appearance there! How nice and respectable he is here! In my ears I can hear the words as he would have actually pronounced them: “Do not scorn me because I am swarthy,” and of course David’s verse: “The stone forsaken by the builder has become the cornerstone.” How could all of this have happened — this change from there to here? And then and there I decided no longer to think of going back. Here in America, in the free land with all opportunities for everyone equally, here is my home. I shook off the last bit of dust from the old country.31

The writer was not alone. Hundreds of thousands of immigrants “shook off the last bit of dust from the old country,” prepared to take advantage of New York’s social and economic opportunities surrounded by friends and acquaintances from the same old-country town. By the first decade of the twentieth century, the individual landsmanshaftn began to combine into federations based on country or region of origin. The Russian, Polish, Galician, and two competing Romanian federations amplified the voice of the societies in the larger Jewish community, emphasizing a synthesis of Americanism and Zionism. As constituents of federations, societies

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built practical institutions such as hospitals and contributed to efforts to forge larger Jewish communal structures such as the Kehillah. The federations pushed to the fore a new class of leaders to represent the immigrant masses. These leaders included physicians, lawyers, and politicians who had come to the United States at an early age. Fluent in English, they were comfortable interacting — and sometimes competing — with the established Jewish leadership, the wealthy “uptown” elite. One observer characterized landsmanshaft leaders as “a type of truly democratic servant of the people, a type which possesses American energy and Jewish loyalty.”32 Eastern European Jews also created their own philanthropic institutions, sometimes in direct response to perceived deficiencies in established agencies. Mount Sinai Hospital, for example, failed to meet the needs of all New York Jews. Indeed, its attitudes toward its immigrant patients often seemed indistinguishable from those of the Protestant missionaries whom it was originally designed to displace. The Americanized Jewish staff and lay leadership had especial contempt for the practices of the Orthodox eastern Europeans who composed an increasing proportion of their clientele by the 1890s. A particular sticking point was the lack of kosher food. As the Orthodox Yiddish daily Tageblat complained, “It is an open secret that in most of the Jewish hospitals in New York the food is not kosher, and that pious Jews who do not want to eat it are ridiculed.” Reports of hospital staff shaving the beards of pious patients further roiled Orthodox circles. Former Socialist firebrand turned Zionist Joseph Barondess referred to Jewish-sponsored hospitals such as Mount Sinai when in 1911 he decried the “plight of the Jewish patient who arrives at a hospital where they understand neither his language nor his psychology.”33 The eastern European community responded as early as 1890, when a group of forty Orthodox Jewish men met in a tailor shop to consider the need for a hospital to serve the impoverished Jews crowding into the Lower East Side. Though they possessed limited resources, founders of the Beth Israel Association of New York moved swiftly, opening Beth Israel Hospital in leased quarters at 196 East Broadway, the heart of the Jewish quarter, on May 10, 1891. Not only did the new hospital make a point of serving kosher food, but its doctors and nurses also conversed with their patients in Yiddish. Demand quickly outpaced the space available in the twenty-bed hospital, and Beth Israel expanded rapidly.

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By 1917, Beth Israel boasted not only of its hospital but also of its free dispensary, its work treating newly arrived immigrants threatened with deportation because of trachoma, and its training school for nurses. About to move into a new building just outside the Lower East Side at East Sixteenth Street, the hospital’s leadership represented the new elite emerging from the “downtown” community. While a German-born investment banker presided over Mount Sinai, Joseph Cohen, a cloak and suit manufacturer who had arrived in New York from Poland in 1874 at the age of ten, took the helm of Beth Israel. By that time, a number of other hospitals served the burgeoning Jewish population not only in Manhattan but in the Bronx and Brooklyn as well. Brooklyn’s own Jewish elite, headed by Abraham Abraham of the Abraham & Straus department store, opened the Jewish Hospital of Brooklyn to much fanfare in 1906. Lebanon and Montefiore Hospitals, the latter headed by Jacob Schiff, provided medical care in the Bronx. Several landsmanshaft federations also ran their own small hospitals.34 Likewise, dissatisfaction with established agencies, in particular the UHC, led to the establishment of the Hebrew Immigrant Sheltering and Aid Society, known as HIAS. HIAS had its origins in two separate organizations. One, the Hebrew Sheltering House Association — also called by its traditional Hebrew name, the Hakhnoses Orkhim — had been founded in 1889 under the leadership of Orthodox Yiddish newspaperman Kasriel Sarasohn and the following year opened a shelter for homeless immigrants. The other, the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (also called HIAS), came into being when a landsmanshaft committee sent to Ellis Island to investigate the pauper’s burial of a landsman who had died at the station decided to form a permanent agency to assist newcomers in need. Concerned that the UHC representative at the immigration station was unable to speak Yiddish, HIAS struck a chord in the immigrant community and raised enough money to place its own worker there. In 1909, the two organizations merged. Within a decade, HIAS headquarters occupied a four-story building on two tenement lots on East Broadway, with the word “Welcome” inscribed in English above the door. That year the agency maintained its Ellis Island bureau, as well as branches in other port cities; helped immigrants “to land”; provided information; guided newcomers to locate relatives, jobs, and lost luggage; assisted with the process of naturalization; offered free legal advice; looked after

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the transportation needs of immigrants proceeding beyond New York; sheltered thousands in its hostel; distributed clothes to the needy; and staffed a Social Service Bureau and an Agricultural Bureau. HIAS distinguished itself by its determination and energy to assert the immigrants’ rights — in appealing deportation orders, investigating conditions on arriving ships, and lobbying for proimmigrant legislation. Over time, HIAS helped hundreds of thousands of newcomers, winning the trust of the immigrant community.35

■ Jewish Defense at Home and Abroad By April 1903, when more than forty Jews were slaughtered in a vicious pogrom in the Bessarabian city of Kishinev, a large eastern European Jewish population in New York closely followed events in the “old home.” The Yiddish press broke the dreadful story of the pogrom, “galvaniz[ing]” the community and prompting it to wage an “unprecedented and vigorous campaign in American Jewish communal life.”36 The Socialist Forward called for a “monster demonstration,” collected funds for relief, and gathered signatures on a protest petition. Although some Jewish Socialists objected to what they saw as a wave of nationalist hysteria in Jewish responses to the pogrom, others, such as Abraham Cahan, defended their concern for their fellow Jews: “[Jews] are slaughtered and raped in Kishinev because they are exactly what I am. . . . Can a man who suffers nothing when people with his blood, with his looks, are hacked to pieces, really suffer with the problems of mankind?” Cahan struck some of the same themes as Noah had not quite a century before.37 The Jewish elite reacted more slowly but soon showed that they too had taken events at Kishinev to heart. Responding to a call from the Alliance Israelite Universelle, Schiff and others organized the so-called Bankers’ Committee that soon raised over $1 million, dwarfing not only the Forward’s $8,000 but British Jewry’s £4,000. The effort marked a milestone in establishing American Jewry’s preeminence. As even the Forward had to admit, the fact that the Jewish elite had the ear of some of their Gentile counterparts enabled them to make Jewish voices heard in high circles. Mayor Seth Low, facing a tough reelection battle, chaired a large protest rally, held at Carnegie Hall. Speakers included former president Grover Cleveland and Catholic archbishop John Farley. Meanwhile, B’nai B’rith initiated diplomatic efforts, presenting a petition to a sympathetic but reluctant President Theodore Roosevelt to convey to the Russian government, which refused to accept it.38

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If after Kishinev downtown and uptown had worked largely on parallel but separate tracks, they found a way to work together in response to waves of bloody pogroms that followed the failed Russian Revolution of 1905. At a meeting held at the elegant Temple Emanu-El, the flagship Reform synagogue, “There were the ‘native born,’ the German element, Nationalists, Zionists, Reformers, Orthodox, Social Revolutionaries — in short . . . a united Jewry.” The resultant American Committee for the Relief of Russian Jews quickly raised $1 million, half of which came from New York City. At the same time, a group of “Socialist Revolutionaries” issued a call for a Jewish Defense Association (JDA) to fund the purchase of arms for Jewish self-defense units. Under the slogan “The Jewish people is arming itself. We must create the means,” JDA came to include not only Socialists but also Zionists and others. Even Schiff gave a nominal hundred-dollar donation. Judah Magnes, a Reform rabbi and Zionist with radical inclinations and family ties to Louis Marshall, headed the effort. Magnes clearly hoped that JDA would evolve into a permanent organization that would bridge the gaps between uptown and downtown, Orthodox and Reform, nationalist and cosmopolitan, radical and conservative sectors of the community. JDA’s efforts peaked in a massive two-hundred-thousandperson march from the Lower East Side to Union Square, largely organized and attended by eastern European Jews.39 After Kishinev, and again in 1905 – 1906, various elements called for the establishment of a national representative Jewish body that might respond to crises in a more systematic manner than had the recent ad hoc campaigns. With many American Jews judging the response to Russian events inadequate, and calls for “organization in the air,” a small and exclusive monthly New York social and discussion group known as “The Wanderers” met to assess the situation. They concluded that a permanent national organization to defend Jewish rights was needed and that they should take the lead in establishing it to make sure that it be “free from all objectionable tendencies.” A committee headed by attorney Louis Marshall invited a small group of “leading Jews” from across the country to a closed-door meeting at the UHC building on Second Avenue. Most of the attendees were successful businessmen, lawyers, and rabbis of central European or American birth. Most adhered to Reform Judaism and rejected the nationalist view that Jews constituted a people apart from religious belief and practice. Several of them — Jacob Schiff, Marshall, Oscar Straus — had for decades acted as Jewish intercessors with the government on

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an unofficial basis. Only a small number represented the growing eastern European community or Zionist or radical political perspectives.40 After much debate over the course of several meetings, the assembled leading Jews rejected proposals for a democratically elected representative body — a Jewish “congress” — and settled on a small, self-selecting group of sixty. Although the American Jewish Committee (AJC) was to include members from all regions of the country, and its first president was a Philadelphian, New Yorkers formed the inner circle on its executive committee. In its early years, this inner circle represented a rather insular group, united by similar background and family ties. The location of AJC’s small office and staff in the UHC building bolstered their dominance, as did the New Yorkers’ tremendous individual wealth and personal influence. Jacob Schiff and Louis Marshall were the dominant personalities on the committee. Born in January 1847 into a prosperous family in Frankfurt-amMain, Schiff immigrated to the United States just after the Civil War. After a brief sojourn back in Germany, he returned to the United States, where he joined the investment bank of Kuhn, Loeb & Company, married Loeb’s daughter, and rose to head of the firm. “Medium in build and fastidiously groomed,” he sported a goatee, a walking stick, and a quick temper. As a leading financier and one of the wealthiest men in America, Schiff gave generously of his fortune to Jewish and non-Jewish causes. In fact, it sometimes seemed that there was scarcely a Jewish cause that did not receive funding from Schiff. Although a Reform Jew himself, he contributed liberally and ecumenically to any undertaking that he felt furthered Jewish learning or defended Jewish rights. In reaction to Russian anti-Semitism he had gone so far as to help finance the Japanese war effort during the Russo-Japanese War. With his extensive connections with Jews and Jewish organizations abroad, Schiff filled the role of the “elder statesman.”41 Louis Marshall, a close ally of Schiff, became AJC’s second president in 1912. A talented corporate lawyer, Marshall was born in 1856 in Syracuse, New York, to recently arrived German immigrants. A “short, stocky man of stern appearance,” Marshall was always “confident in his opinions” and impatient with those who disagreed. His dour public persona certainly did not recommend him for mass leadership, and he harbored a suspicion of too much democracy in Jewish life. But his tireless efforts on behalf of Jewish rights and interests,

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including an intervention to settle the 1910 cloak makers’ strike, elicited respect beyond the narrow confines of his social milieu. At one point, he even learned Yiddish and enlisted Tsvi Hirsh Masliansky to publish a Yiddish newspaper to reach the immigrant community. By the 1920s, he was so influential that critics complained that American Jewry lived under “Marshall Law.”42 The American Jewish Committee aimed to defend “the civil and religious rights of Jews in any part of the world,” to “secure for the Jews equality of economic, social and educational opportunities,” and to provide “relief from calamities.” It preferred to work quietly and politely, behind the scenes, through intercession with the people in power and through the force of moral argument based on carefully gathered and presented evidence. Accordingly, AJC established a bureau of statistics and undertook, together with the Jewish Publication Society, to issue the American Jewish Year Book. In AJC’s first decade, it opposed questions regarding race on the U.S. Census, limitation of naturalization rights to non-Asians, and local laws banning kosher slaughtering. It defended Russian-Jewish revolutionary exiles faced with extradition to Russia, the rights of Balkan Jews, and Mendel Beilis, accused of ritual murder in Russia. In 1913, it helped push through the New York State legislature a bill banning discrimination in “public resorts.”43 AJC also addressed the issue of Russian discrimination against Jewish travelers bearing American passports. Russian policy subjected American Jews traveling within the country’s boundaries to the same discrimination that Russian Jews faced, a policy that seemed to violate provisions of an 1832 commercial treaty between the United States and Russia. When the State Department announced that the United States would no longer issue passports to former Russian subjects or to Jews without Russian consent, AJC protests induced Secretary of State Elihu Root to reverse the policy. In a May 1908 memorandum to President Roosevelt, however, AJC went even further and called on the administration to abrogate the 1832 treaty. Though launched by the American Jewish Committee, the abrogation campaign gained the support of a wide swath of American Jewry, including B’nai B’rith and the Reform movement’s Union of American Hebrew Congregations. In January 1913, the United States terminated the treaty. From AJC’s inception, it fought to keep the borders of the United States open to Jews and all other immigrants. It lobbied Congress and presidents,

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testified before committees, produced proimmigrant studies, and interceded with immigration officials in procedural and administrative matters. Cooperating with B’nai B’rith, the National Liberal Immigration League, and other organizations, AJC for years managed to prevent the enactment of a literacy test for entry into the country and to fend off an explicit exclusion of “Asiatics” from citizenship.44 The American Jewish Committee’s position as representative of American Jewry did not go unchallenged. Although it claimed to speak for American Jewry as a whole, it was hardly a representative body. Wary of too much democracy, its members jealously guarded their status as the country’s “leading Jews.” Hostile to Jewish national aspirations, AJC expressed the opinions of those who regarded themselves Jews by religion, not nationality or ethnicity. The nascent Zionist movement, to the contrary, gave voice to those who hoped for a Jewish national revival. Although Zionism remained small in numbers until the time of World War I, it claimed a mass base among eastern Europeans and a small but intellectually impressive following among educated Americans. It was a force not only for a vibrant Jewish culture but also for the democratization of Jewish life. As in Europe, the Zionist movement emerged in America in the 1880s and 1890s. Some Americanized Jews responded enthusiastically. After reading Leo Pinsker’s proto-Zionist tract Autoemancipation, poet Emma Lazarus proclaimed herself “one of the most devoted adherents to the new dogma.” But at the grass roots, Hibbat Zion (Love of Zion) clubs began to form mainly in immigrant neighborhoods of New York and Brooklyn. After the first World Zionist Congress in 1897, these groups coalesced into the Federation of American Zionists (FAZ). Although most of its leaders were eastern European intellectuals such as Kasriel Sarasohn, the publisher of the Yidishe tageblat, FAZ attracted a number of American born or educated Jews, including its first chairman, Columbia University Semitics professor Richard Gottheil and Reform rabbis Judah Magnes and Stephen Wise. At first, FAZ adhered closely to Theodore Herzl’s political Zionism, but it soon embraced cultural concerns. It also developed a number of allied organizations, including a fraternal order, Sons of Zion, and a youth group, Young Judea.45 Other branches of the Zionist movement emerged outside the FAZ framework. The Mizrachi movement organized those who sought to combine mod-

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ern Jewish nationalism with traditional Judaism. It expressed its synthesis through the slogan “The Land of Israel for the People of Israel according to the Torah of Israel.” On the other side of the spectrum, Poale Zion (Workers of Zion) united Zionism with socialism. It aimed to effect the national and social liberation of the Jewish working class through a socialist Jewish state in Palestine. In the meantime, it participated in both the Jewish national and the labor movements. The tiny Poale Zion party expanded its reach through its respected journal, Yidisher kemfer (Jewish Militant) and its allied fraternal order, the Jewish National Workers’ Alliance.46 In 1912, the middle-class English-speaking members of one Zionist women’s study group, the Hadassah Study Circle, issued a call for women to “stop talking and start doing something” for the Zionist cause. Meeting at Temple Emanu-El, they founded the Hadassah Chapter of the Daughters of Zion, which evolved into Hadassah — the Women’s Zionist Organization of America. Hadassah eventually became not only the country’s most successful women’s association but also its largest Jewish organization. Although, as one of its founders put it, the women of Hadassah “did not stop talking,” they nevertheless accomplished much based on their dual ideology of “collective motherhood” and practical action. Despite occasional criticism from male Zionists that Hadassah was too practical and not ideological enough, Hadassah continued to educate its members and the public in Jewish history and culture and in Zionist philosophy.47 Henrietta Szold guided Hadassah in its early years. By the time she helped found Hadassah, the dynamic and determined Szold was an accomplished Jewish communal activist and probably the most influential female member of the Jewish establishment. Born in Baltimore in 1860, she had received an American high school education and a thorough Jewish education from her father, Rabbi Benjamin Szold, a “liberal-minded” traditionalist. For many years, she worked as executive secretary of the Jewish Publication Society and as a noted translator and author. It 1893, she joined the Hibbat Zion circle in Baltimore. As she recalled, “I became a convert to Zionism the very moment I realized that it supplied my bruised, torn, and bloody nation, my distracted nation, with an ideal — an ideal that is balm to the self-inflicted wounds and to the wounds inflicted by others — an ideal that can be embraced by all, no matter what their attitude may be to other Jewish questions.” Szold enrolled in

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FAZ and joined the Hadassah study circle in 1907. She held that Zionism was the only path to “the re-establishment of Jewish life for the Jews.”48 The promise of Jewish spiritual regeneration may have attracted Szold to Zionism, but a 1909 trip to Palestine with her mother turned her in a more material direction. Disgusted with the disease and poverty that she saw there and inspired by the American settlement-house movement, Szold devised a plan to aid the Jews of Palestine along similar lines. Szold and Hadassah volunteers, “influenced by their time and place,” thus sought to provide the best of American medical standards and practice to the Jewish communities of Palestine. With funding from the non-Zionist philanthropist Nathan Straus, Hadassah sent the first American nurses to Palestine in 1913, opening a clinic in Jerusalem. Hadassah continued over the coming years to send nurses, doctors, and medical supplies and to fund clinics and, eventually, a famous hospital; in short, it built a modern Jewish infrastructure in Palestine.49 In terms of formal membership, the Zionist movement remained small until the onset of World War I, when the war and ascension of prominent Boston attorney Louis D. Brandeis to head FAZ enrolled tens of thousands of new recruits. By 1917, hundreds of Zionist societies, branches, lodges, and even synagogues flourished in New York City. The largest numbers by far were located in the neighborhoods of the eastern European immigrants and their children — especially the Lower East Side and Brooklyn neighborhoods such as working-class Brownsville and middle-class Borough Park. Members gathered in “camps” of Order Sons of Zion, branches of Mizrachi, Poale Zion and the Jewish National Workers’ Alliance, and independent societies such as the fifty-member Hebrew-speaking B’nai Am Chai or the fifteen-member Tiphereth Zion Club of the Bronx. College students at City College, Columbia, Hunter, the Jewish Theological Seminary, New York University, and the Rabbinical College of America rallied to the Inter-collegiate Zionist Association. Two Hadassah sections covered “New York” and Brooklyn. Of the 119 Young Judea clubs in the city, 28 existed in Brownsville, where Zionist youth could be seen collecting money along Pitkin Avenue for the Jewish National Fund.50 While Zionists called for Jewish national revival in the Land of Israel, and the American Jewish Committee called for the integration of a Jewish religious community into the American nation, the Jewish Socialist movement harbored a range of attitudes toward the twin questions of the nature of

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Jewish identity and the shape of the Jewish future. Some Socialists, especially among the older comrades who had arrived in America in the 1880s and ’90s, struck a resolutely cosmopolitan stance, insisting that they spoke to and for the “Yiddish-speaking,” not the “Jewish,” proletariat. They looked forward to a world without national divisions and shared the assimilationism of AJC. Unlike AJC, however, they hesitated to join efforts they felt raised national, ethnic, or religious solidarity above that of class. But increasingly after the turn of the century, Socialists adopted a more positive stance toward Jewish national identity. The most important intellectual proponent of the synthesis of political radicalism and Jewish nationalism was Chaim Zhitlovsky, who visited New York in 1904 – 1905 and then settled permanently there in 1908. Born in 1865, Zhitlovsky grew up in a Hasidic family in Vitebsk. He had been radicalized in his youth and as a member of the Russian Socialist Revolutionary Party remained an adherent of a non-Marxist form of socialism. After experiencing a reawakening of his Jewish identity, he developed a theory of diasporic Jewish nationhood with the Yiddish language as its central expression. A “handsome man with sparkling blue eyes and thick blond hair and beard,” Zhitlovsky possessed a “sonorous voice” with which he spoke elegantly in Yiddish, Russian, and German. With a Ph.D. from the University of Berne, Zhitlovsky captivated audiences as a brilliant speaker and formidable debater. On one memorable occasion, he decisively defeated Cahan in a debate on the question “Is Marxism scientific?,” concluding witheringly, “Comrade Cahan, you do not understand what we are dealing with here.” Although he could be rigid and dogmatic in his espousal of a modern, secular Jewish culture in Yiddish, Zhitlovsky exerted enormous influence on a range of radical Jewish movements, including the Jewish Labor Bund (which saw itself as “national” but not “nationalist”), the Socialist-Territorialists (who believed that the Jews needed a territory but not necessarily in Palestine), and the Labor Zionists. Partly under Zhitlovsky’s influence, adherents of these movements saw no conflict between Jewish peoplehood and Socialist internationalism.51 The supporters of the national-radical synthesis grew in number in New York as many young Bundists and Territorialists joined the migrant stream following the failure of the 1905 Russian Revolution. Entering the immigrant labor movement, they made it more overtly Jewish. In the Socialist Party, for

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example, they helped form the Jewish Socialist Federation (JSF) in 1912, over the objections of the old guard that protested such a move as an expression of Jewish separatism. In the Workmen’s Circle, they pushed for more cultural projects — publications, classes, lectures, a theater, and, eventually, a network of children’s schools — that would further develop a modern Yiddish culture, “purely secular” and “thoroughly Jewish.” Although they still sometimes hesitated to join cross-class alliances, these Jewish Socialists spoke out vociferously on “Jewish issues” at home and abroad. They looked forward to the continued existence of a distinct Jewish people within an American “nation of nations.” In 1917, the non-Zionist labor movement, including JSF, the Workmen’s Circle, and other auxiliary organizations, still outdrew the Zionist societies.52

■ The Kehillah These trends toward general organization of the Jewish community, and efforts for its democratization, received an ironic boost when in September 1908 New York City police commissioner Theodore A. Bingham published an article in the North American Review, titled “Foreign Criminals in New York.” Backing up his accusations with statistics, Bingham blamed immigrant Jews for much of the crime in the city. “It is not astonishing,” he wrote, that with a million Hebrews, mostly Russian, in the city (one-quarter of the population) perhaps half of the criminals should be of that race when we consider that ignorance of language, more particularly among men not physically fit for hard labor, is conducive to crime. . . . They are burglars, firebugs, pickpockets, and highway robbers — when they have the courage; but though all crime is their province, pocket-picking is the one to which they take most naturally.53

The Jewish community reacted angrily, with the Yiddish press and many organizations and leaders demanding Bingham’s resignation. But questions lingered, even after Louis Marshall quietly arranged for Bingham to retract his statements in return for an end to the Lower East Side campaign against the commissioner. Many Jews suspected that Bingham told an unfortunate truth. Indeed, significant Jewish criminal activity among immigrants on New York’s Lower East Side had been the subject of several official inquiries since the 1890s. Two state investigations, those of the Lexow Committee in 1894 and the Mazet

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Committee in 1899, had revealed Jewish involvement in such criminal activities as political corruption, prostitution, and extortion. By the time Bingham made his accusations, Jews controlled much, though apparently not a majority, of the prostitution in the city. In response, the uptown Jewish elite began to build social welfare agencies specifically designed to “ ‘mitigate the dire consequences’ of Jewish criminality.” The question of Jewish criminality acquired increasing political importance as nativists sought to make a connection between immigrants and crime.54 The Bingham affair thus added fuel to the movement within the Jewish community toward greater centralized organization. Rabbi Magnes called on New York Jews to form a “permanent and representative organization that may speak on their behalf, that may defend their rights and liberties and that may also cope with the problems of criminality.”55 And a month later, a committee of downtown notables, headed by Magnes, convened a conference at Clinton Hall to discuss the creation of just such an organization. That meeting led to the official founding convention of the Kehillah (Jewish Community) of New York City, an attempt to merge traditional corporate Jewish communal organization with an American ethos of democracy and Progressive-era faith in technical expertise. The founding convention at the United Hebrew Charities building demonstrated that the Kehillah movement had a mass base, though not necessarily a majority of the community. Present were three hundred delegates representing 213 synagogues, charitable associations, mutualbenefit societies, lodges, educational institutions, Zionist groups, landsmanshaft federations, and other organizations. The leading lights of AJC, including Schiff and Marshall, also attended. Judah Magnes held together this fragile coalition of uptown and downtown, Zionist and anti-nationalist, Orthodox and Reform, radical and conservative. Born in San Francisco in 1877, he had spent his youth in Oakland, California, excelling in journalism, sports, and oratory. Ordained as a Reform rabbi by Hebrew Union College in 1900, he arrived in New York in 1904 and by 1908 was rabbi of Temple Emanu-El, the congregation catering to the city’s Jewish upper class. His marriage to Marshall’s sister-in-law and his membership in AJC cemented his personal and political ties to the elite. Yet Magnes hardly typified its social milieu. Indeed, he cultivated a varied range of connections with the immigrant community. Rabbi of the flagship Reform congregation,

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he nevertheless occasionally prayed at a small Orthodox congregation in a tenement basement. An outspoken Zionist, he had radical and pacifist inclinations and enjoyed the company of Yiddish intellectuals. During the crisis of 1905, he had led the largest demonstration against the Russian pogroms. A brilliant preacher, with connections to widely varying Jewish circles in the city, Magnes was uniquely positioned to lead the Kehillah experiment.56 Magnes compared the Kehillah to a municipal government. One arm represented the democratic polity. Affiliated organizations sent delegates to the annual convention, which, in turn, elected an executive committee of twentyfive. These bodies expressed Jewish public opinion and set policy for the community. The founding convention resolved, uneasily, two contentious issues: One was a clause in the constitution that barred noncitizens from serving as convention delegates, passed after Magnes argued that it was necessary if the Kehillah was to avoid the image of an imperium in imperio. The other involved the relationship of the Kehillah to the American Jewish Committee. AJC disliked the idea of a truly democratically run community but went along anyway. In the end, a compromise made the Kehillah’s executive committee the local district of AJC, giving AJC veto power over the involvement of the Kehillah in matters beyond New York City’s boundaries. As it happens, AJC need not have worried. Its members consistently fared well in elections to the executive committee, often much better than self-proclaimed tribunes of the Lower East Side. Based at the UHC building, the Kehillah’s professional bureaus constituted the second arm of Magnes’s Jewish municipal government. The first bureau, that of education, opened in 1910, and over the next several years the Kehillah established bureaus of social morals, industry, and philanthropic research. In addition, the Kehillah established the School for Jewish Communal Work and organized the Board of Orthodox Rabbis. Run by salaried staff, the bureaus attempted to coordinate, modernize, and professionalize Jewish efforts in their various fields. The Education Bureau created model schools and issued curricula and teaching materials; the Social Morals Bureau worked with police and maintained a staff of agents to gather intelligence on prostitution, gambling, and other vice in Jewish neighborhoods; the Bureau of Industry sought to mediate labor disputes. The Board of Orthodox Rabbis tried to set standards for the certification of kosher meat.57

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In 1917, Samson Benderly, an educational reformer who headed the Kehillah’s Bureau of Jewish Education, estimated that only 23.5 percent of Jewish children who attended public school received any sort of Jewish instruction at all at any given time. Though this meant that over the course of their school careers 68 percent of boys and 21 percent of girls would have acquired at least some Jewish education, Benderly also argued that what they got was dismally below the standards in the public schools. He had particularly harsh words for the traditional hadorim (classrooms), which he likened to “miserable holes.” At best, wrote Benderly’s associate Alexander Dushkin, the heder teachers were “earnest, mediaeval men, zealously trying to impart unwished for knowledge to the unwilling youngsters of the new world.” At worst, they were ignorant peddlers and shop workers who passed themselves off as teachers to equally ignorant parents. The problem, Benderly and Dushkin both believed, was lack of systematic coordination and professionalism. Through their bureau, they raised pedagogical standards in all forms of Jewish school, calling for more professional training and institutional coordination.58 But by the time the United States entered World War I in 1917, the Kehillah was in crisis. Many of its problems stemmed from its attempt to form an allencompassing corporate Jewish body in an open and pluralistic society. The community’s large labor and Socialist sector remained aloof, unwilling to commit to an exercise in class collaboration. Even at its height, the Kehillah never won over more than a tenth of the thousands of individual societies and congregations, who jealously guarded their independence. And even among those who did affiliate, it was hard to impose order. The Orthodox failed to understand why they should follow dictates of Reform rabbis, and AJC resisted democratically arrived at decisions of the conventions. The war further damaged the Kehillah, as issues arising from it increasingly absorbed the community’s attention. Having taken an outspokenly antiwar position, Magnes could no longer supply the glue to keep the enterprise together. It gradually dissipated, dissolving officially in 1922.59

■ World War I World War I devastated the dense Jewish communities of central and eastern Europe, where a majority of world Jewry lived. Armies fought their way back and forth through Jewish cities and towns; Jewish men fought against

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each other as combatants on both sides; Jewish civilian populations suffered from the general ravages of war and from attacks specifically directed against them as Jews. The war uprooted hundreds of thousands and transformed them into refugees in Russia and Austria. Material losses were estimated at $400 million. Moreover, the hostilities severed previous channels of aid, from Berlin, London, or Paris, to the poverty-stricken populations of eastern Europe and Palestine and disrupted communal structures, whether traditional or modern. American Jews almost alone remained unscathed by the war. Safe and relatively prosperous, they realized they had a special responsibility to aid their fellows in the war-torn areas of Europe and the Middle East. The Yiddish daily Tageblat expressed an opinion heard often as newspapers detailed the misery caused by the war: “It is important for American Jews to keep in mind that we are the only large Jewish community which is not caught up in the horrible tumult. We are the only part of the Jewish people which is living in peace and tranquility, so we should help, when we are able, the Jews on the other side of the ocean.”60 While connections between German Jews and Germany had weakened over time, those between recent eastern European immigrants and their home towns endured (though not necessarily with the governing authorities), and the detailed reports of devastation coming from those towns hit close to home. Landsmanshaftn responded quickly. In the months following the outbreak of the war, disparate societies overcame their ideological and other differences to form united relief committees for their towns. Radical Workmen’s Circle branches, Orthodox congregations, and everyone in between put aside their differences to raise thousands of dollars through mass appeals, theater parties, and balls. They held meetings where members heard firsthand accounts from recently arrived townspeople. The landsmanshaft federations channeled money to the old country and information to the new. The problem was getting the money across the frontlines to the intended recipients, who in many cases had fled and dispersed. By the end of hostilities, landsmanshaft relief committees had accumulated considerable sums. The war-relief crisis once again stimulated calls for more centralized organization. Three national relief committees raised funds from distinct constituencies: the Central Relief Committee for the Relief of Jews Suffering through

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the War (CRC), founded at a meeting at the offices of the Tageblat, approached the Orthodox segment of the community; the American Jewish Relief Committee (AJRC) worked mainly with those associated with AJC; and labor and Socialist activists formed the Jewish People’s Relief Committee of America (PRC). In an effort to rationalize the delivery of aid, however, CRC, AJRC, and PRC joined in the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC, or Joint) to give relief with the “greatest directness and least duplication.”61 JDC ultimately survived the immediate crisis and its founding committees to become one of the most important American Jewish organizations, symbolizing American Jewry’s role in providing material assistance to less fortunate Jews around the world. The war also led to renewed calls for a centralized national organization that would speak for American Jewry on political matters at home and, especially, abroad. Proponents of an American Jewish Congress favored a more democratic, activist, and militant approach than did the American Jewish Committee. The idea of a Congress garnered most support among those who were inclined toward Zionism or other national conceptions of Jewish peoplehood, thereby generating more enthusiasm from the eastern European community than from the well-established central Europeans. Nevertheless, such “uptown” Zionists as Rabbis Magnes and Stephen Wise, as well as the newly converted Zionist leader Louis D. Brandeis of Boston, outspokenly supported the Congress idea. The Zionist movement expanded greatly due both to the prestigious leadership of Brandeis, who stressed the compatibility of Jewish nationalism and American patriotism, and to American Jews’ reaction to the devastation the war visited on European Jewry. The membership of the Federation of American Zionists (from 1918, the Zionist Organization of America) soared from 7,000 in 1914 to 150,000 in 1918.62 New York also became the temporary headquarters of the world Zionist movement when the Provisional Executive Committee for Zionist Affairs (PEC) relocated there at the start of the war. Leading Zionists, such as David Ben-Gurion and Yitshak Ben-Tzvi, arrived in New York, having been expelled from Palestine by the Ottomans as nationals of a hostile power, and added prestige to the movement in the city. First under Brandeis and then under Wise, PEC played a leading role in raising funds for the Jewish community in Palestine and for refugees who had been expelled,

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negotiating with the British for recognition of Palestine as a Jewish national home and agitating for an American Jewish Congress. As Brandeis gradually withdrew from active leadership after his appointment to the Supreme Court, Rabbi Stephen Wise took the reins of the movement. Wise, who later emerged as the preeminent Jewish leader of his generation, had been born in Budapest to a rabbinic family and had come to the United States at the age of six. A graduate of City College, with a doctorate from Columbia University, he received private ordination and embarked on a career as a Reform rabbi. Wise rejected an offer of the pulpit at New York’s prestigious Temple Emanu-El because the trustees would not guarantee him enough independence to preach as he pleased. Instead, in 1907, he founded the Free Synagogue, “based on freedom of pulpit, free pews to all without fixed dues, outspoken criticism of social ills, the application of religion to their solution, and an extensive program of social welfare.”63 With his aquiline nose, jutting chin, and flowing mane, Wise became known for his soaring oratory and dramatic flair. An ardent liberal in politics and a passionate Zionist, he was, like Magnes, an uptown Reform rabbi who attempted to build bridges to the immigrant community downtown. For three years, the American Jewish Congress sparked wide-ranging debates within the Jewish community. A dizzying array of players held meetings, attended rallies, and attempted negotiations. Finally, they reached compromises: the congress would seek to protect Jewish civil rights. “Group rights” were out, but the “rights of peoples,” including the “Jewish people,” were in. Three-quarters of the delegates were to be elected in open balloting and the rest appointed by organizations. Elections occurred on June 9 and 10, 1917, at polling stations across the country. In New York City, close to fifty polling stations, located in public and Hebrew schools, synagogues, YMHAs and YWHAs, and club rooms, including Temple Emanu-El, the HIAS building, and the Hebrew Education Society building in Brownsville, involved upward of 130,000 Jews. Nationally, over 300,000 people took part. Women had equal suffrage, a right they had already gained in New York State but not yet in the country as a whole. “We underestimated our forces,” argued Yiddish journalist Joel Entin. As soon as the Sabbath was over, large groups of Jews thronged around the voting place. . . . There were many old people, Jews with beards, women in wigs and shawls.

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. . . There were socialists, young and old, union people, Arbeter Ring Jews. . . . There were American Jewish girls who — judging by their manners and behavior — think, one could imagine, of nothing but enjoying themselves and dancing.

But, in fact, fewer people voted than organizers had predicted, possibly because of a last-minute Socialist boycott of the elections. Labor Zionists were well represented among the elected delegates, but no mainstream Socialists. Nevertheless, the elections constituted an unprecedented demonstration of communal democracy.64 When the American Jewish Congress finally met in Philadelphia in December 1918, after the war had ended and after several postponements, it named a delegation to represent American Jewry at the Versailles peace talks. There, however, the experienced diplomats of the American Jewish Committee carried out the real effective behind-the-scenes work. American Jews, who had already been in contact with President Woodrow Wilson and with the heads of the Polish government in formation, worked to write minority rights into the agreements leading to the independence of Poland and the other new central and eastern European states that emerged from the ruins of the Russian and Austro-Hungarian Empires. Marshall himself averred, “I am perhaps more responsible for the Minority Treaties than any other man.”65 Unfortunately, these liberal provisions for minority rights were more often violated than honored over the next couple of decades, handing American Jewry plenty to do in defense of Jewish rights abroad.

■ Federation If the Kehillah and American Jewish Congress represented a vision of a democratic Jewish polity based on mass suffrage, the Federation movement based membership in the official Jewish community on the ability to provide charitable support to others. By 1916, dozens of Jewish philanthropic institutions, many of them with professional staffs, served a population of one and a half million and often competed for attention and dollars. Big donors, headed by German-born Felix Warburg of Kuhn Loeb, initiated a new round of centralization, this time in the form of a Federation for the Support of Jewish Philanthropic Societies. The Federation was intended as a joint fund-raising arm of its constituent agencies, which were to retain their autonomy in delivering services. The idea aimed to reduce duplication in fund-raising and to improve

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efficiency in service delivery by reducing pressure on organizations to raise their own money. New York was in fact a latecomer to the Federation model, which had been pioneered elsewhere. Even Brooklyn had a jump on Manhattan, having organized its own Federation of Jewish Charities in 1909. But the Manhattan and Bronx Federation dwarfed them all, raising over $2 million for eighty-four agencies by January 1917. (The New York and Brooklyn federations merged in 1943.) The Federation attempted to mobilize a broad cross-section of the community — the minimum contribution was ten dollars, and the initial campaign attracted ninety-five hundred subscribers, upped to seventy thousand in January 1918. The Federation thus began to establish itself as the basic means through which middle- and upper-class Jews “paid their dues” for membership in the Jewish community at large. But the Federation idea was not really democratic. Its leadership remained in the hands of the wealthiest Jews — mostly at first of central European origin. In fact, meetings often took place at President Warburg’s Fifth Avenue mansion, until they were moved to the nearby Harmonie Club in 1921. The Federation thus encouraged a “deferential community based on wealth.”66 When New York Jews first responded to the Damascus blood libel in 1840, they were a small and insignificant community, with a correspondingly small and undeveloped communal structure and no permanent mechanisms to aid their sisters and brothers abroad. What distinguished them even then was that they lived in a relatively stable society that offered security and equality. Over the next eight decades, as their numbers exploded, New York Jews took advantage of that stability, security, and equality to elaborate a nearly innumerable array of organizations, ranging from very large to very small, some concerned primarily with their members’ well-being and others with the state of the Jewish world. New York Jews sometimes sought unity, as when they established the Kehillah to speak for them in one voice, but most often their organizations divided them into multiple Jewries — English, German, Yiddish, and Ladino speaking; secular and Reform and traditionally religious; left wing and right wing; Zionist, Yiddishist, and assimilationist; uptown and downtown; rich and poor; immigrant and native born. One of New York’s promises was Jews’ freedom to organize their communal life as they saw fit and to be Jews as they wanted to define Jewishness. New York Jews took full advantage of that

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promise even as they also took advantage of the promise of security to make New York a base from which to aid Jews living in less favorable conditions abroad. In this way, New York became the capital not only of American but also of world Jewry.

In 1914, the Lower East Side sent Socialist labor lawyer Meyer London to the House of Representatives. His oratorical skills and ability to connect with the ordinary person helped propel Jewish immigrant Socialism to Washington. (Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC)

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Jews at the Polls: The Rise of the Jewish Style in New York Politics

Even before the polls closed on Election Day 1914, people began to stream from all corners of the Lower East Side toward the building of the Yiddish-language Jewish Daily Forward towering over East Broadway. By nightfall, crowds filled Rutgers Square and Seward Park and flowed into the surrounding side streets. Those in the throng jostled for a better view of the screen hanging on the façade of the ten-story Forward Building, on which election results were to be projected. They were hoping for a Socialist victory in the heavily Jewish Twelfth Congressional District, a seat long held by Democrat Henry M. Goldfogle. The Socialist candidate, a popular labor lawyer named Meyer London, had run twice before. This time, it seemed he might win. But for hours there was no news. Only partial returns trickled in, and rumors spread that the Democratic machine was up to its old tricks, falsifying returns to swing the election to Goldfogle. At eleven o’clock, the conservative Yiddish daily Tageblat came out with an “extra” announcing Goldfogle’s victory. But still the crowd stayed, waiting for word from the Socialist Forward. Finally, at two o’clock in the morning, the official results were projected on the screen. Goldfogle conceded. London had won. The crowd erupted. People danced, sang, embraced, and kissed. At four o’clock, London was brought to the square, borne aloft on supporters’ shoulders. A spontaneous procession snaked through the Lower East Side, the marchers waving brooms to signify a political housecleaning. At dawn, veteran Socialist Michael Zametkin, speaking from a balcony of the Forward Building, exclaimed, “Look, the sun is rising in the sky! And the sun is also rising on the Jewish Quarter, on the East Side!”1

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The Forward Building, in competition with Jarmulowsky’s bank to be the tallest on the Lower East Side, assertively proclaimed the rise of the Socialist sun in the Jewish community. Indeed, etchings of suns ran in bands along the top of the building, as if to proclaim the Forward’s illumination even on cloudy days. Looking out on the open spaces of Rutgers Square and Seward Park, the

The architecture of the Jewish Daily Forward’s building (1912) resembled that of the Evening Post’s building. But whereas the Post’s façade featured statues representing the spoken word, early written word, printed word, and modern editors, the Forward Building proclaimed its identity through busts of Socialist leaders and the name of the newspaper flanked by the Socialist Party’s raised torch emblem. (Forward Association)

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building visibly advertised the newspaper and its cause. The Forward’s name was emblazoned in large Yiddish and English letters on the top of the façade, along with the Socialist Party’s arm-and-torch emblem. Above the front doorway were four relief portraits of Socialist heroes: Marx, Engels, Lasalle, and perhaps (the identity of the fourth is disputed to this day) Liebknecht. As the builders had hoped, 175 East Broadway became the main address for the Jewish labor and Socialist movements upon its completion in 1912. In addition to editorial and business offices and the printing plant of the Forward, the building contained meeting rooms and a thousand-seat auditorium. The Jewish labor fraternal order the Workmen’s Circle was headquartered there, as were the United Hebrew Trades (a federation of predominantly Jewish trade unions) and the Jewish Socialist Federation. Union locals and radical landsmanshaftn used the meeting rooms.2 Not quite two miles to the north, at 141 East Fourteenth Street, stood Tammany Hall, headquarters of the controversial dominant faction of the Democratic Party in Manhattan. The three-story red-brick and marble edifice was actually owned by the Society of Saint Tammany, or the Columbian Order, a fraternal group that formed the political machine’s inner circle. The cornerstone of the order’s second “wigwam” had been laid with a great display of patriotic pomp in 1867, and when completed the following year, Tammany Hall also housed meeting rooms and a large auditorium, the scene of the 1868 Democratic National Convention. A pediment on the roof contained a largerthan-life statue of an American Indian chief — St. Tammany, the order’s legendary patron — and the inscription “Tammany Society, 1789 – 1867.” While Tammany’s chieftains were wheeling and dealing in their offices upstairs, the downstairs was leased out to Tony Pastor’s New Fourteenth Street Theater, a variety house. Tammany Hall, too, embodied the political power of an important ethnic group, for although the order was named for a legendary Indian chief and used pseudo-Indian lore, Irish dominated its leadership and political base.3 At Tammany Hall, as well as in its associated local clubs on the Lower East Side, the mood must have been rather glum on the night of November 3, 1914. Not only had Republican anti-Tammany crusader Charles Whitman won the governorship, but London’s victory exposed the Democratic machine’s weakness on its own front stoop. The immigrant communities in Lower Manhattan had long been Tammany bastions, and the machine had worked hard to

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Tammany Hall (1868) on East Fourteenth Street housed the most famous Democratic Party political machine in the country. Controlled primarily by Irish Americans by the turn of the century, Tammany nevertheless attracted some Jews as well. (Photographed by Irving Underhill in 1914; Library of Congress, LC-USZ62-101734)

build bridges to the newer ethnic groups pouring into the area, especially eastern European Jews. Nevertheless, the Socialists represented an ethnic as well as political challenge, injecting a whole new style into the New York political scene. The Forward Building and Tammany Hall symbolized opposing pulls on Jewish political allegiances, and each succeeded in attracting many Jews. Of course, there were other options as well: Jewish Republicans and antiTammany Democrats, reformers of various stripes, and other sorts of radicals. New York promised Jews that they would be able to participate in the city’s political life. And Jews did take part, as voters, activists, and candidates. But although individual Jews played important roles in New York politics through-

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out the nineteenth century, only with the creation of large and dense Jewish districts at the end of the century did a distinctive Jewish position in New York politics emerge. By the second decade of the twentieth century, Jews were poised to redeem the promise in full as a leading element on the New York political scene. Active on all levels, Jews’ real, though divided, vote influenced elections. But obstacles remained. Jews could become active in Tammany Hall but soon ran into an “emerald ceiling” that prevented non-Irish from gaining decisive power. They could join the Socialist Party, but Socialists could not break out of their Jewish electoral ghetto and so proved of limited use as a means for exerting influence. The Republican Party might have been more open to newcomers than Tammany was, but as a minority party in the city, it too was of limited value. Nevertheless, this period laid the foundation for the Jewish assumption of a full share of political power in New York (always in coalition with others, of course) in the 1920s, ’30s, and beyond. What was distinctive about Jewish politics became a hallmark of New York City’s general political culture — its practical use of governmental power to counter the capitalist market in favor of social justice, whether on the municipal, state, or national level. In alliance with such progressive politicians as Governor Al Smith, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, New York’s Jewish social reformers and even Socialists ultimately entered the mainstream to help build New York’s unusual social democratic polity. In the early republic, Jews had inclined toward the Jeffersonians, who had an anticlerical streak and were more open to immigrants than their opponents were. Jews were even among the early leaders of the Society of St. Tammany, or the Columbian Order, then a fraternal organization with Jeffersonian leanings. The Jeffersonians evolved into the Democratic Party, and many Jews retained their loyalty, reinforced by mercantile ties with the cotton South as the Democrats became the chief defender of the slave system.4 New York’s Representative Emanuel Hart, for example, became a leader of the conservative “hunker” faction that embraced the cause of the slave states and resisted the intrusion of antislavery sentiment into the Democratic Party. The Republican Party attracted support among central European Jewish immigrants and their children. New York Jews likely voted Republican in presidential elections between 1860 and 1916. In the late nineteenth century, a

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number of Jews occupied leadership positions in the party. Among New York’s prominent Jewish Republicans was Abram Dittenhoefer, a native of South Carolina. He joined the party against his merchant father’s wishes after hearing Republican Congressman Benjamin Wade’s rebuke of Democrat Judah Benjamin for his support of slavery as an “Israelite with Egyptian principles.” Later, Edward Lauterbach served as chair of the GOP in New York County in the 1890s. In 1892, former congressman Edwin Einstein became the first Jew to head a major-party local ticket when Republicans nominated him for mayor. Significantly, when he had first run for Congress in 1878, he was generally portrayed as a German, but now he was seen as a Jew. His candidacy had little hope of success and was meant primarily to attract Jewish votes to the state ticket. Tammany responded in part by increasing its nominations of Jews, most notably Ferdinand Levy, a multilingual immigrant and former coroner, for city register. Two years later, Tammany offered the mayoral nomination to the wealthy philanthropist Nathan Straus, but Straus withdrew when convinced by the editors of the American Hebrew that he was simply being used to draw votes for Tammany’s other candidates.5

■ Tammany and the Jews The heart of the Tammany Hall political machine was a fraternal order founded in 1786 and named for a semilegendary Lenape Indian chief. The Society of Saint Tammany, or the Columbian Order, was soon drawn into partisan politics, allied with the Jeffersonians. By the mid-nineteenth century, the Tammany Society became the nucleus of a powerful political machine that dominated the Democratic Party in Manhattan and, often, the government of New York City. Tammany cultivated a base of support among the city’s workingclass and immigrant communities, providing them with services, jobs, and entertainment, in exchange for the votes that kept Tammany in power. Some of the services and jobs came from the organization’s own resources or contacts in private businesses, but most came from the expanding bureaucracy and technical machinery of local government. With control of the growing resources of local government at stake, winning elections became vital to the politicians and their followers. When persuasion and patronage failed, Tammany resorted to violence, intimidation, and fraud. It thrived in a hypermasculine environment of saloons, volunteer fire companies, and blood sports. Constant association with corruption tainted Tammany, occasionally erupting

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in spectacular scandals, the biggest of which involved Boss William M. Tweed. Tammany’s leader between 1863 and 1871, Tweed headed a band of scoundrels known as the Tweed Ring, who looted the public treasury with great abandon. Their signature project, a court house behind City Hall, finished 5,100 percent over budget, with most of the excess cost lining the Ring’s pockets. The Tweed Ring garnered help looting the city from Judge Albert Cardozo, father of future Jewish U.S. Supreme Court justice Benjamin Cardozo. Tall and thin, with long thick curly hair and bushy eyebrows, Albert Cardozo was said to have had a face with “a slight Hebrew cast.” A less friendly observer claimed that he had the “eyes of a serpent looking from the face of a corpse,” an indication of a fatal character flaw. Cardozo displayed the “dignity and reserve” befitting a justice of the New York State Supreme Court, but as the Tweed Ring collapsed, he resigned in 1872 to avoid impeachment. Returning to private practice, he later became a “sachem” (executive committee member) of Tammany Hall.6 Tammany possessed the capacity to reform itself, and it did so periodically. By the twentieth century, it had muted the violence. But Tammany retained its special style of politics: as neither public service nor a means to change the world but as a business, with its chief trade in jobs and favors. In exchange for votes, supporters got aid in times of need or help with petty problems involving the courts or licensing authorities. Active members of the machine received jobs ranging from menial positions to commissionerships. Although Tammany leaders sometimes held public office, real power resided not in formal governmental positions but in party positions. These were organized hierarchically, from lowest-ranked election district “captains” or “ward heelers” through assembly district “leaders” to the chair of the county executive committee — the “boss.” International and national issues mattered little to Tammany; its politics was local, personal, and face-to-face. By the middle of the nineteenth century, Tammany Hall had become closely associated with the Irish Catholic community. As Irish immigrants and their children became Tammany’s primary base of support, they, in turn, saw the machine as a source of needed social services, jobs, power, and upward mobility. When Honest John Kelly took over as the first Irish Catholic boss in 1871, after the Tweed scandal, he cemented the relationship. By the turn of the twentieth century, Tammany was an Irish stronghold.7 Jewish Tammanyites accommodated themselves to the Hall’s largely Irish

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Catholic culture. Some Jews found Tammany’s highly personal, face-to-face, nonideological business model of politics very congenial, not to mention materially advantageous. As one early twentieth-century writer observed, The Russian Jewish young man, generally a lawyer, who casts his fortunes with Tammany Hall, gradually assumes the habits of his Tammany confreres. He chews, smokes, drinks, gambles, visits the clubrooms religiously, attends the politico-social functions of the year, is prominent in the purchase of chowder tickets, and is rewarded, perhaps, by being permitted to play at the Tammany chowder game of poker with the elite of the district. . . . As a rule, these young Russian Jewish men who make their way into Tammany Hall belong to a lower order. In some cases the office holders are taken from the most colorless class, having nothing but regularity and party fealty as their redeeming features.8

Along with easy sociability and a personal touch, Tammany’s Jews, like its Irish, valued loyalty and a certain kind of honesty. A good man delivered on promises of a job, emergency aid, or a kickback. Generosity was valued too, and knowing whether it should be given discreetly or ostentatiously became an important skill. Where the means for the generosity were attained was seldom questioned. Martin Engel emerged in the 1890s as one of the few Jewish influential Tammanyites when he became leader of the heavily Jewish Eighth Assembly District in the heart of the Lower East Side. Born in the neighborhood, Engel inherited his father’s butcher trade, becoming known as the “Kosher Chicken Czar.” “Stolid” and “squat,” Engel was “physically unattractive,” his face having been “smashed beyond all recognition” in a barroom brawl and then surgically reconstructed. A reporter noted Engel’s lawsuit against his surgeon on the grounds that his kosher meat market was losing business because his flattened nose had not come out “Hebraic” enough. What he lacked in native beauty, Engel made up for by ostentatiously flaunting his wealth. Social worker Mary Simkhovitch recalled that he “used to drive through in an open barouche, his fingers laden with diamonds, and more diamonds shone from his cravat.” At least some of that wealth was ill gotten, and for a time Engel personified Tammany’s close association with prostitution and other forms of vice. Engel was heavily involved in the illicit sex trade as owner and protector of brothels in his district and beyond. Among his other civic activities, he served as an officer of the Independent Benevolent Association, a mutual aid

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society for brothel owners and associated politicians, saloon keepers, and real estate agents. When Charles Murphy took over the reins as boss in 1902, he endeavored once more to clean up Tammany’s image. One of the first things he did was to depose Engel and install Florrie Sullivan, a member of the powerful — and Irish — Sullivan clan, in his place.9 Engel’s Jewish associate in the Eighth Assembly District was Alderman Charles “Silver Dollar” Smith, a burly former paperhanger turned saloon keeper whose original name was most likely Charles Solomon. Born in Germany, Smith had been brought to America by his family at the age of one. (Or perhaps he had been born in the Eighth Ward, as he once told a court.) He acquired his nickname when he opened his saloon opposite the Essex Market Court. Embedded in the floor of Smith’s establishment were one thousand silver dollars, a fifty-dollar gold piece in the center. The back room featured a chandelier with five hundred silver dollars, and the bar was decorated with a star and crescent made up of silver coins of various denominations. Smith claimed to have made back his investment within three days of opening, from trade brought by people who “wanted to see how this fool had wasted his money.” Elected to the New York State Assembly in 1888 initially as a Republican, Smith soon switched parties. Although prone to violence (he was arrested twice during his first campaign), Smith was not without his virtues. When he died in 1899, his obituary noted that he was “one of the few politicians in the district who understood the Hebrew residents and their language.” Rev. Gabriel Hirsch’s eulogy paid him the ultimate Tammany compliment. “He never broke a promise to a friend,” Hirsch averred, “and he had a warm and generous heart.”10 By the time of Silver Dollar Smith’s demise, many more politicians understood the “Hebrew residents and their language,” as Tammany recognized the growing importance of the Jewish population by naming more Jews to the ticket. In 1900, Tammany nominated Judge Henry M. Goldfogle for Congress. Though he was not the first Jew to represent New York in Congress, Goldfogle was the first Jew to go to Washington representing a recognizably Jewish district. Born in New York in 1856, Goldfogle had graduated from local public schools. He read for the law, entered private practice, and in 1887 was elected to the municipal court. He served in Congress until 1914, returning for one more term in 1919 – 1920. Goldfogle was the “typical son of typical Jewish immigrant parents,” according to Rabbi Stephen Wise, who eulogized him at his funeral

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in 1929. Tammany represented him as “not a Jewish congressman, but the Jewish congressman.” And Goldfogle indeed fought explicitly for Jewish interests, whether having to do with Russian anti-Semitism or open immigration.11 Despite more frequent nominations for public office, Jews remained subordinate within Tammany Hall. With few exceptions, Irishmen retained the district leaderships well into the twentieth century, even in areas with Jewish majorities. As one Tammany boss reputedly argued, “The Irish are natural leaders. The strain of Limerick keeps them at the top. They have the ability to handle men. Even the Jewish districts have Irish leaders. The Jews want to be ruled by them.” Whether or not it was true that the Jews wanted to be ruled by the Irish, the Irish district leaders managed to find enough Jewish support to keep their hold on the party. Partly, they did so by co-opting individual Jews into the machine.12 In the Third Assembly District, straddling the Bowery, for example, Big Tim Sullivan ruled until shortly before his death in 1913. According to his biographer, Big Tim “liked Jews generally, thought they were smart, and admired their energy.” As his district filled up more and more with Jews (and Italians, a group that fared worse than the Jews within the organization), he cultivated an image as a friend of the Jewish people. His associates liked to tell the story of how Sullivan had intervened with a street gang that had been harassing Jewish peddlers. Sullivan not only ousted the gang from its clubhouse but also had the venue turned into a synagogue. This act of philosemitism, according to the story, won for Sullivan undying admiration and support of his Jewish constituents. To cement their loyalty, he brought some in as captains. But Sullivan governed mostly with the help of an inner circle consisting mainly of relatives and other Irishmen.13 In the neighboring Fourth Assembly District, followers of leader John Ahearn and, after his death in 1921, his son Eddy told similar stories of their beneficence toward Jews: how the Ahearn Association made sure that firefighters hosed down the synagogue before Rosh Hashanah, distributed matzo and kosher food before Passover, and protected Jewish merchants from Sunday closing laws and wine-distributing rabbis from prohibition agents. Jewish club members became translators on the evenings when constituents would come to the club headquarters at 290 East Broadway to ask for help. “Mr. Ahearn would give a comforting nod,” remembered one longtime Jewish worker, “then turn to me and say, ‘Louis, talk to this man in his own language. He didn’t come here to see a show.’ ”14

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But the Ahearns also did more to incorporate Jews into the core of their organization. In fact, by 1920, most of the district’s office holders were Jewish, and the inner circle of the Ahearn Association included Judge Aaron Jefferson Levy, Assemblyman Harry Schimmel, and Leon Stand. Ahearn loyalist and ward heeler Louis Eisenstein became the Irish dynasty’s chronicler and Jewish apologist when he later wrote his memoirs. Eisenstein had an unusually benign view of Jewish-Irish relations. There was “never any religious friction,” in his view, between Jewish businessmen and the police, who “winked at Sunday closing laws.” Senator Barney Dowling was “our ‘Irish-Jewish senator,’ ” and Father Byrnes of St. Mary’s was “our ‘Catholic-Jewish priest.’ ” Indeed, Eisenstein epitomized the Tammany ethos of loyalty to one’s constituents and leaders. When he wrote that Jewish “assimilation into the club was complete,” he was describing his own adjustment to Tammany’s traditional political culture.15

■ Republicans Republicans in the immigrant neighborhoods often differed little from the Democrats, except that they had to content themselves with patronage leftovers. As one observer put it, The Republican Jewish politician is another remarkable product of the metropolis. Socially he is, perhaps, a grade higher than the [Democratic politician]; his parents, by dint of hard work, have amassed a comfortable fortune, and their offspring has possibly had the benefit of a better preliminary education and has come in contact with wealthier young men, who are Republicans in their political affiliations.16

The rise of Samuel Koenig to the leadership of the Republican Party illustrates the relative openness of the local GOP to Jewish leadership. Born in Austria-Hungary in 1872, Koenig came to the United States as a child. At the age of nineteen, he was already campaigning for the Republicans, and soon he had founded his own organization, the Federal Club in the Sixth Assembly District. By 1911, he was the leader of the Republican Party in Manhattan, a post he kept for twenty-two years. A “neat, trim man with rimless spectacles,” “without a trace of ruthlessness,” Koenig was well liked. He ran his organization, as his friend Tammany ward heeler Louis Eisenstein put it, “along the familiar lines cut by Tammany, with some of the coarser edges smoothed out.” Indeed, at one political dinner, Koenig told Eisenstein, “We Republicans and Democrats speak the same language. We fight only one day a year — from 6

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am to the hour the polls are closed.” The rest of the time, Koenig contented himself running the minority party in the city and collecting what patronage he could from federal and state governments when Republicans were in power and from Tammany for taking an occasional dive in an election.17

■ Socialists By the 1910s, Socialism seemed to offer a more robust alternative to Tammany Hall than did the Republicans. Socialist power resulted from a long process of movement building that began in the early 1880s with the arrival of large numbers of immigrants from eastern Europe. Indeed, the movement had gotten off to a slow start. The first radical Russian-Jewish intellectuals formed a series of short-lived organizations that preached a mélange of Socialist and Anarchist ideas mostly in Russian and German. Although they professed a desire to reach masses of Jewish workers, their resistance to using Yiddish, which they considered a debased jargon incapable of expressing serious ideas, put a barrier between them and their Yiddish-speaking intended audience. These early Jewish Socialists learned especially from the small but vibrant German radical milieu that already flourished in New York. The linguistic affinity between German and Yiddish aided the relationship, as did the Germans’ largely secular orientation. Forward editor Abraham Cahan recalled that the German newspapers, especially Johan Most’s Anarchist Die Freiheit and Sergei Schewitsch’s Socialist Volkszeitung “played a major role in [the] intellectual development” of New York’s Yiddish-speaking radicals.18 With the help of the Germans, most Jewish radicals found their way to Marxism and the predominantly German Socialist Labor Party. The year 1886 was a landmark one for the Jewish radicals, on both industrial and political fronts. Caught up in the mood of labor unrest that swept the city and the nation, over nine thousand mainly Jewish cloak makers walked off the job demanding an end to the contracting system. Other Jewish workers struck as well. On May 1, the Jewish Workers’ Association led some three thousand Jewish workers as they marched to Union Square together with tens of thousands of German, Irish, and native-born American workers to demand the eight-hour day. The Jewish Workers’ Association also organized support among immigrants for strikes of non-Jewish streetcar workers, waiters, and musicians.

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Outraged at the arrest of several strike leaders, the labor movement decided to organize its own political party to contest New York’s mayoral race that fall. The United Labor Party recruited as its candidate the radical social philosopher Henry George, who had begun to attract a following for his theories on the origins of poverty and inequality. The “short and scrappy redhead” ran on a platform calling for higher pay; shorter hours; better working conditions; public ownership of railroads, telegraphs, and streetcars; an end to police harassment of labor assemblies; and an end to collusion between politicians and business against workers’ interests.19 Above all, George stressed his signature issue, a single confiscatory tax on real estate, which, he believed, would finance a range of public welfare measures and end the monopoly on land that led to overcrowded housing conditions for the poor. George soon attracted a broad coalition of the disaffected, including most of the labor movement, Irish nationalists, middle-class reformers, German Socialists, and dissident Roman Catholic priests. Their vigorous campaign, featuring street meetings, rallies, and parades, rattled the upper classes, Tammany Hall, and the Catholic hierarchy, all of whom saw in it a threat to their control over the city. The Jewish Workers’ Association threw itself into the struggle. It opened an office on Canal Street and sponsored its own nightly rallies featuring Yiddish speakers. The highlight of the Jewish campaign for George came five days before the election, when George himself visited a rally in a Stanton Street hall and compared his movement to the exodus of the Israelites from Egyptian bondage. Despite his followers’ enthusiasm, George lost the election to Democrat Abram Hewitt, gaining just shy of a third of the vote and finishing ahead of Republican Theodore Roosevelt. George carried the solid German and Irish working-class neighborhoods and most likely won a plurality of the as-yetsmall Jewish vote. In the immediate aftermath of the election, the radical press hailed the results as a tangible demonstration of working-class mobilization. But soon the delicate coalition that had backed the campaign fell apart, and the movement, including its Jewish section, dissipated.20 Gradually, the Socialists overcame their resistance to using the language of the masses and attracted a following with their speaking and writing. Over the years, the migration of Jews already radicalized in Russia also augmented their numbers. Some immigrant Jews found in Socialism an answer to questions that plagued them — their downward social mobility in both the old country

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and the new, the long hours they worked in the factories, the miserable conditions in the tenements, and their marginalization as an ethnic minority. An immigrant sheet-metal worker recalled his first encounter with Socialist ideas shortly after his arrival in New York in 1896: The first couple of days after my arrival, my brother-in-law Motl took me to street meetings to hear various speakers about the election campaign. Suddenly, I heard a Yiddish speaker speaking from another corner of Suffolk and Rivington Streets. A young man was standing on a box and speaking full of enthusiasm. I pushed through the crowd to be closer to the speaker. . . . I had never heard such words in my town: “Worker freedom. . . . You toil bitterly in the sweatshops and your children go naked and barefoot. . . . Social, political, and economic equality and security” . . . It was the first time in my life I had heard the word “socialist.” Excited by the speaker, I went home to sleep. As I lay on my bed, my mind worked over the speech that I had just heard: Work should be based on justice and right. . . . Your children go around in the street barefoot and naked. . . . With these and similar thoughts, I fell asleep.21

He soon joined a local Socialist club and remained active in the movement the rest of his life. Others had similar experiences, whether in the United States or Europe. Socialists also began to build an organizational infrastructure that amplified their voice in the community and allowed them to touch directly the lives of tens of thousands of immigrants. On an April Sunday in 1892, ten workers met in an Essex Street tenement apartment to establish a class-conscious mutual aid society called the Arbeter Ring, or Workmen’s Circle. Like the thousands of other immigrant mutual aid societies, the Workmen’s Circle aimed to take care of its members in times of need, to provide medical care and burial expenses. More than the others, however, it explicitly emphasized education and solidarity with the working class in its “struggle against oppression and exploitation.” In 1900, the several existing branches of the society reorganized as a national fraternal order. By 1917, the Socialist-led Workmen’s Circle had 240 branches in New York City alone, with some twenty-five thousand members.22 The Jewish Daily Forward, or Forverts, established in 1897, influenced the rise of the Socialist movement even more than did the Workmen’s Circle. The

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Forward strove to be a lively and engaging newspaper, with language accessible to the average working-class immigrant reader and interests broader than orthodox Socialist doctrine or internecine party squabbles. For most of its first five decades, the Forward was led by Abraham Cahan, a veteran Yiddish Socialist propagandist and journalist with a talent for reaching a wide audience. By 1910, the Forward had become the most widely read Yiddish newspaper in the world and the most important Socialist daily in the country. Born in 1860, Abraham Cahan grew up in Vilna, the intellectual capital of Jewish Lithuania. He received a traditional education and then attended the Vilna Jewish Teachers’ Seminary, a Russian-language school that trained its students to become Jewish communal functionaries officially recognized by the Tsarist regime. Although he never attended university, Cahan fell in with a crowd of Russian-speaking revolutionary intellectuals, was forced into hiding, and in 1882 fled Russia. That same year, he gave the first Yiddish Socialist speech in America. In the 1880s and ’90s, he had a hand in several early Yiddish newspapers. He also quickly learned English well enough to teach it to newcomers and to become an accomplished English-language writer. The Forward’s founding editor, Cahan left after several months to join the staff of Lincoln Steffens’s Commercial Advertiser. In almost five years as an English-language reporter for one of the country’s premier muckraking newspapers, Cahan absorbed the methods of American popular journalism. When he returned to the Forward, he purposefully applied those methods to the Yiddish field. Dour and autocratic, Cahan was disliked by many of his writers, but he had a keen sense of his readers’ tastes and interests. His many detractors among the left-wing Yiddish intelligentsia grumbled that he neglected serious issues, pandering instead to his uneducated readers with sensational stories on tenement fires and celebrity love triangles. But despite the Forward’s critics, it continued to preach Socialism. It covered all the major events of the day from a radical perspective, and its inside pages contained analysis by leading European and American Socialists. It reported on labor struggles, Jewish and non-Jewish, not simply as an observer but as a passionate partisan — often raising money to aid striking workers. In fact, the Forward contributed some of its profits as a successful business enterprise to strike funds and Socialist campaign coffers. In election season, the Forward became a campaign sheet, urging its readers to vote the Socialist ticket.23

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The Socialist Party (SP) superseded the Socialist Labor Party (SLP) as the main Socialist political body after the turn of the century. In contrast to the doctrinaire SLP, the SP’s big tent accommodated progressive reformers and ardent revolutionaries, Christian Socialists and Marxist freethinkers, Oklahoma farmers and urban industrial workers. Joining the Socialist Party linked immigrant New York Jews to midwestern labor leaders such as Eugene Victor Debs, the party’s perennial presidential candidate, and political operatives such as Victor Berger, head of the successful Socialist political machine in Milwaukee. In New York, the party included members of all ethnic stripes, but as the German population dwindled, Jewish neighborhoods emerged as the main bastions of Socialist strength. The Socialist-led unions, especially in the garment industry, provided the final pillar of Socialist strength after the turn of the century. Throughout the 1880s and 1890s, Jewish workers had gained a reputation for waging spectacular strikes, only to let their unions dissipate once moments of acute conflict had ended.24 This started to change after the founding of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU) in 1900 and culminated in the “Great Revolt” that shook the garment industry and the Jewish immigrant community in general between 1909 and 1914. In those five years, the ILGWU and other unions waged a series of giant, mostly successful strikes, mobilizing tens of thousands of members. In 1909, the United Hebrew Trades enrolled just five thousand workers in 41 unions. Five years later, its 111 affiliates claimed a quarter million members. The opening battle of the Great Revolt came in late 1909, with the “Uprising of the 20,000,” a strike of shirtwaist makers, two-thirds of them young Jewish women and most of the rest Italian. That summer and fall, strikes had broken out at a number of shops. The ILGWU’s Local 25 began to press for a general strike in the industry, but the parent union held back, afraid that it lacked the resources to wage such a broad struggle. Finally, at a mass meeting at Cooper Union on November 22, a twenty-three-year-old member of Local 25’s executive committee interrupted the leaders’ speeches to appeal for a strike. “Curlyhaired, dark-eyed, flirtatious,” Clara Lemlich had arrived from Ukraine six years earlier. By the time of the strike, she had already established a reputation as a passionate Socialist street speaker in Yiddish and English and a militant striker willing to brave physical danger. Lemlich’s brief speech, recounted in many variations, became legendary in the Jewish labor movement: “I am a

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working girl, one of those striking against intolerable conditions. I am tired of listening to speakers who talk in generalities. What we are here for is to decide whether or not to strike. I offer a resolution that a general strike be declared — now.”25 The next day, the first fifteen thousand workers went out on strike. The strike was a qualified success. The largest companies held out longer than the small firms, resorting to violence and brutal arrests to intimidate the strikers. But the violence only helped to win over public opinion for the young women, especially when a notable contingent of middle- and upper-class allies from the Women’s Trade Union League, including Anne Morgan and Alva Belmont, joined the protests. The strike ended in February 1910, without an industry-wide contract or union recognition in the big shops, but the workers had made gains in pay and working conditions. Most important, the membership of Local 25, about five hundred before the strike, now stood at twenty thousand.26 Five months after the end of the waist makers’ strike, seventy-five thousand cloak-maker members of the ILGWU, most of them Jewish men, walked off their jobs. The cloak makers were more successful in gaining union recognition. In fact, with the intervention of Jewish lawyers and business leaders such as Louis Brandeis, Louis Marshall, and Jacob Schiff, union lawyers led by Meyer London forged an agreement with the employers’ association. The “Protocol of Peace” established the garment industry’s first permanent mechanism for settling grievances and disputes. By 1912, 90 percent of New York’s cloak makers had joined the union.27 The Socialists also boasted the most articulate and intelligent leaders of all the political factions within the community. The same observer who commented on Jewish Democratic and Republican politicians noted that the Socialists were “the most remarkable of all. . . . As a rule the Socialist leaders are students, whose collegiate course has been prematurely cut off by reasons of migrations caused by anti-Semitism, or economic distress.” Here they return to their studies and become “powerful debater[s] or excellent journalist[s].”28 Morris Hillquit fit that mold. Born in Riga, Latvia, in 1869 to a poor, German-speaking family, Hillquit (né Hilkowitz) received a Russian-language gymnasium education. He arrived in the United States in 1886 and went to work sewing shirts. Soon, however, he left the shops to work full-time in the labor and Socialist movement. After mastering Yiddish and writing for the Yiddish radical press, Hillquit turned to English-language writing and

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speaking, becoming a well-known popularizer of Socialist ideas. In the meantime, he graduated from New York University Law School and began to practice law. Hillquit made a good living as a corporate lawyer, even as he also took pro bono civil liberties cases and served as counsel to various unions. As he immersed himself in the Socialist movement on a national scale, he distanced himself from its specifically New York Jewish sector. He periodically returned to assist the garment unions in their struggles and to run for office. But although liked and respected, Hillquit never attracted a mass following in the immigrant community. One problem was his retiring public personality. Another problem was his ambiguous stance on immigration restriction, the result of an effort to find common ground with the prorestriction mainstream labor movement, but unpopular among immigrant Jews.29 Meyer London’s career resembled Hillquit’s in some respects but differed in that he continued to feel at home in the Jewish immigrant community and remained intimately connected with its life and its institutions. Born in 1871 in Kalvaria, Suwalki Gubernia, London grew up there and in Zenkov, Ukraine. He received both a traditional Jewish and modern Russian education and was hoping to enter gymnasium when his father, who had already emigrated to the United States, sent for the rest of the family. London arrived in New York in 1891, going to work in his father’s radical print shop. London learned English and soon entered New York University Law School, graduating in 1898. Quickly Americanized, London often addressed even immigrant audiences in English. Impatient with the SLP’s doctrinaire leadership, he was one of the first in New York to join up with the midwestern group headed by Debs. But, unlike Hillquit, he confounded expectations by continuing to live on the Lower East Side, where his saintly nature became legendary. As an attorney for tenants, workers, and unions, he often refused payment for his services, and over the years he worked for the ILGWU and the Workmen’s Circle. As the union’s counsel and chief negotiator during the 1910 cloak makers’ strike, London helped shape the Protocol of Peace. With his generosity, empathy with the powerless and oppressed, and devotion to the labor movement, London exemplified, in Irving Howe’s words, a great “Socialist man.” He spoke to audiences “from the heart to the heart” about the world’s injustice. He also saw himself as a member of the immigrant Jewish community, though he rejected Jewish nationalism. Unlike Hillquit, London consistently opposed immigration restriction. When World War I broke out, London headed the People’s

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Relief Committee, the labor movement’s effort to raise funds for Jewish war victims. Upon his election to Congress in 1914, he told a celebratory audience, “I hope that my presence will represent an entirely different type of Jew from the kind that Congress is accustomed to see.”30 Conscious of his visibility as a Jewish Socialist, London accepted his pioneering role in formulating a new form of American Jewish politics simultaneously committed to social justice and sensitive to ethnic concerns.

■ Reform A variety of reform movements — whether of the good-government or socialreform type — enlisted the energies of middle- and upper-class Jewish activists. Like the Socialists, these reformers put principle above personal gain, but they thought in terms of a generalized “public good” rather than working-class interests. Middle-class reform movements were especially important as vehicles for women’s activism before 1917, when women gained the right to vote in New York State. Jews among the reformers, wrote one observer, represented “the noblest type” of Jewish political activists, operating on the “highest planes of civic patriotism without regard to political preferment.”31 Jewish “good-government” reformers such as Simon Sterne helped to overthrow the Tweed Ring in 1871 and pushed for honest, cheap, and efficient local government. Sterne, a native of Philadelphia and graduate of the University of Pennsylvania Law School, was one of several prominent Jews who served on the Committee of Seventy, the organization of respected citizens that led the indignant charge against Tweed. As the committee’s secretary, he drafted a new charter for New York City that passed the state legislature but was vetoed by the Tammany-allied governor. Like many good-government advocates, Sterne believed in government by the “best men,” by which he meant successful businessmen and professionals like himself. A social conservative, he enunciated a doctrine that local government was designed to serve and protect property owners. A surfeit of democracy, he believed, would only benefit the interests of the “tax eaters.”32 But reform also elicited support among the broad Jewish electorate, including the new immigrants, especially if the candidates’ platforms added a measure of social reform to the good-government mix. Despite Tammany mythology of a contented multiethnic working-class machine bloc, Jews did not always see the political machine as a benevolent protector against Sunday blue

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laws and police harassment. Rather, they were as likely to perceive a protection racket in which the district leader and his cronies benefited from both the fines gained from police crackdowns and fees and bribes paid to annul those fines. Tickets for the annual club “chowder” represented another unwanted and illegitimate cost of doing business in Tammany-dominated districts. The cultural strangeness of Tammany’s ethos of politics as a slightly shady business enterprise, combined with its relative stinginess in doling out the proceeds of that enterprise to new immigrants, meant that working-class Jews often willingly followed their well-heeled brethren in voting for reform candidates. Indeed, the outcome of the 1886 George campaign brought home to reformers and Tammany alike that Jews could not be counted on to accept blindly the dictates of party loyalty. They were inveterate ticket splitters, open to dissident appeals. Jewish districts gave crucial support to the reform victories of mayors William Strong in 1894 and (after the consolidation of the greater city) Seth Low in 1901. In both cases, reformers targeted immigrant neighborhoods for special appeals and put together successful coalitions of non-Irish ethnic groups, middle- and upper-class advocates of good government, social reformers, and Republicans. The Low campaign opened an office on Delancey Street and even spawned a Yiddish-language campaign newspaper. In both cases, however, the coalitions crumbled under the pressures of governance, as both mayors proved friendlier toward business interests than those of their working-class constituents — and added a dose of Protestant moralism by rigorously enforcing Sunday closing laws. The Strong and Low mayoralties set a pattern of reform administrations unable to survive beyond one term, partly because they lost the Jewish vote. In 1905, working-class Jewish districts once again voted for reform, but this time in the form of the radical populism of publisher William Randolph Hearst, running for mayor on a platform of municipal ownership of public utilities. Like Henry George, he helped demonstrate the new Jewish voters’ unnerving propensity for radicalism.33 Reform politics also opened up space for women to participate in the public sphere, from which conventional morality barred them, by developing a sense of itself as essentially nonpolitical. Politics by definition was dirty, partisan, concerned with self-interest, and bound up with the masculine culture of vice. But reform was clean, nonpartisan, concerned with the public interest, and could be seen as an extension of women’s duty to safeguard the morality of the home. Especially after investigations in the 1890s revealed Tammany’s

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close connection with the commercial sex industry, groups such as the Women’s Municipal League took an active role in reform campaigns, even when women could not vote. Jewish women such as Lillian Wald and Maud Nathan worked with the league to bring reform’s message to immigrant Jewish neighborhoods, where, as Nathan recalled, residents had “confidence in [them] as . . . co-religionist[s].”34 Maud Nathan embodied the link often made by women between goodgovernment reform and social reform. Unlike some of her colleagues, she also attempted to draw an explicit connection between Jewish values and social justice. Born in 1862 to a prominent old Sephardic family, Nathan early imbibed the “spirit of New York’s social directory,” but her privileged upbringing was interrupted when her father’s business reverses forced the family to relocate to Green Bay, Wisconsin. After returning to New York as an adult, Nathan sought to leave the “narrow [Jewish] communal circle,” even while remaining religiously observant. She saw “righteousness and justice” as the “heart of Judaism” and applied these values universally in her public activity. A vice president of the Women’s Municipal League and an ardent suffragist, she left her deepest mark as cofounder in 1890 of the New York section of the National Consumers’ League.35 Under Nathan’s leadership, the Consumers’ League desired to improve the conditions under which women worked, especially in department stores and garment sweatshops. The league’s exhibits and publications educated the public concerning the problems faced by working women, appealing both to the conscience and self-interest of its middle-class audience. The league presented a twofold argument. First, it argued, “To live means to buy, to buy means to have power, to have power means to have duties.” And consumers’ duty involved making sure that their purchases did not support pernicious work environments or low wages. Second, the league reacted to prevalent fears of contagious disease by arguing that unhealthful conditions in tenement shops posed a threat to those who bought the clothing made in them. The league supported legislation, but its most innovative program was its label, issued between 1898 an 1918, to be sewn into garments produced under conditions it judged humane and healthful.36 Like Nathan, Belle Lindner Israels Moskowitz made connections between the causes of good government and social reform. But, unlike Nathan, Moskowitz came from modest immigrant stock, born in 1877 into the family of

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a watchmaker from East Prussia. Educated at the Horace Mann School and Teachers’ College, she dabbled in Ethical Culture but remained affiliated with the Jewish community, especially while married to her first husband, architect Charles Israels. She began her career as a social worker at the Educational Alliance and the United Hebrew Charities and first achieved prominence with the National Council of Jewish Women as a crusader against the menace posed to young women by unregulated dance halls. From dance halls, she moved on to fight prostitution, which put her in frequent conflict with Tammany Hall. Moved by the industrial struggles of 1909 – 1910 and the Triangle Fire of 1911, Moskowitz (then Israels; she married fellow reformer Henry Moskowitz in 1914) became involved in the “industrial field” and electoral politics. For several years during the period of the Protocol of Peace in the garment industry, she served as grievance clerk and chief clerk for the Dress and Waist Manufacturers’ Association, a job that propelled her into the center of bitterly contested industrial and labor questions. She also joined the Progressive Party crusade in 1912, campaigning for Theodore Roosevelt and Oscar Straus, whose nomination for governor she seconded at the Progressive state convention.37

■ The Triangle Fire The tragedy that brought Belle Moskowitz into the heart of New York industrial politics unfolded in the course of minutes late in the afternoon of March 25, 1911. A fire that day at the Triangle Shirtwaist Company influenced the direction of politics in New York for the next several decades and demonstrated the central role that Jews had come to play in the city’s economic, social, and political life. Within about half an hour, 146 workers, most of them young Jewish and Italian immigrant women, died, either in the flames and smoke or by jumping to their deaths. Devastating to the communities that suffered most of the losses, the fire shook the entire city and set it on a course of social reform under the unlikely leadership of a coalition of Tammany Hall stalwarts and earnest reformers. The fire also contributed to an upsurge of the Socialist Party in the Jewish community. Contrary to popular belief, the Triangle company did not run a sweatshop. Rather, Triangle employed hundreds of workers in a large (twenty-seven thousand square feet) factory on three floors of a modern (1900) loft building. The Asch building, a block east of Washington Square, was spacious, light, and

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airy. It had twelve-foot ceilings and elevators. It was considered fireproof. Unfortunately, the factory’s contents were not fireproof. A carelessly discarded cigarette close to quitting time ignited tons of cotton scraps and cloth bundles scattered around Triangle’s three floors. Panic ensued as workers tried to escape through locked doors or doors that opened inward, down inadequate fire escapes that buckled under the weight and heat, or down packed elevators that stopped running when the heat became too intense for their operators. Many victims fell eight, nine, or ten stories to their deaths, shredding fire department nets. Onlookers, including Consumers’ League activist Frances Perkins, who lived just blocks away, and policemen who just thirteen months earlier had battled some of these same workers during their great strike, watched with horror from the streets below. The irony was not lost that the Triangle company had been one of the large firms that had successfully resisted the union.38 The neighborhoods from which the dead workers had come were momentarily stunned. The Forward, under the banner headline “The Morgue Is Full with Our Sacrifices,” wrote on its front page, “Yesterday was one of the most horrific days in the history of the Jewish quarter. Our entire immigrant population moves about in a daze of horror and pain.”39 Then came a flurry of activity — protest meetings, memorial gatherings, relief drives — culminating in a symbolic funeral for the last unidentified victims and a mass meeting at the Metropolitan Opera House. Class tensions began to emerge. Jewish philanthropic groups, along with Mayor William Gaynor, feared that the mass funeral would get out of hand and tried to stop it. But a committee of Local 25, the Women’s Trade Union League, the Socialist Party, the United Hebrew Trades, and other unions, chaired by shirtwaist maker and author Teresa Malkiel, proceeded with plans for a procession to the Workmen’s Circle cemetery. When the day came, dreary and wet, thirty thousand people solemnly accompanied the carriages to the pier carrying their union banners. At the Metropolitan Opera House meeting, workers filled the galleries while the wealthy philanthropists and reformers sat in the orchestra. Rabbi Stephen Wise of the Free Synagogue pointedly reminded the crowd that the tragedy had not been an act of God but the result of “the greed of man.” But Rose Schneiderman captured best the defiant mood of the labor movement. At four foot nine, the redheaded Schneiderman, a former cap maker, a union activist, and Socialist, served as vice president and chief organizer of the New

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York chapter of the Women’s Trade Union League. Schneiderman made a career of forging cross-class alliances with middle-class friends of the labor movement. But that day she spoke bitterly to the assembled notables: The old inquisition had its rack and its thumbscrews and its instruments of torture with iron teeth. We know what these things are today: The iron teeth are our necessities, the thumbscrews are the high-powered and swift machinery close to which we must work, and the rack is here in the firetrap structures that will destroy us the minute they catch fire. . . . This is not the first time girls have been burned alive in this city. Every week I must learn of the untimely death of one of my sister workers. Every year thousands of us are maimed. The life of men and women is so cheap and property is so sacred!

Looking at her well-dressed audience, she bluntly told them, “I can’t talk fellowship to you who are gathered here. Too much blood has been spilled. . . . It is up to the working people to save themselves.”40 Schneiderman was not the only one to draw radical class-conscious conclusions from the fire. At a number of meetings, speakers made the connection even more explicitly than she did. At a cloak makers’ rally, a worker in the crowd shouted, “Why shouldn’t the working class elect its own candidates?” when a conservative labor leader called for the election of “honest men.” At another meeting, Socialist editor A. M. Simons similarly declared, “We have the votes,” and asked, “Why should we not have the power?” The SP staged a debate on the subject of how the Socialist victory in Milwaukee that year could be replicated in New York.41 Meanwhile, others closer to the political mainstream were also moved to action. Tammany Assemblyman Al Smith, who represented part of the Lower East Side in Albany, went to the morgue to talk with his constituents who had been affected by the fire. When a group of reformers approached him about setting up an investigative committee, he suggested it be made a committee of the legislature so that it would have political teeth. And when the Factory Investigating Commission (FIC) came into being at the end of June, Smith joined State Senator Robert F. Wagner as cochair. In the course of the commission’s four-year life, it heard hundreds of witnesses and compiled thousands of pages of testimony. Its members traveled around the state, visiting factories and other workplaces, viewing for themselves the conditions under which New York’s workers toiled.

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The FIC was a milestone. First, it proposed and saw passed dozens of new laws governing workplace safety and health issues, as well as wages and hours. Second, it brought elements of Tammany Hall into league with the sort of high-minded social reformers who would never have collaborated with them just a short time earlier. In part, this resulted from a conscious effort by Tammany to shore up its shaky support among Jews and the working class. But it also reflected a personal awakening on the part of Smith and Wagner, both of whom went on, Smith as governor and Wagner as a U.S. senator, to play central roles in the development of the welfare state on both state and national levels. Third, the FIC showed just how central Jews had become to the political life of the city and state. Of the FIC members, publisher and fire buff Simon Brentano and American Federation of Labor chief Samuel Gompers were Jewish, though they had little connection to the Jewish community or culture. But the FIC staff included a number of Jews, some closely identified with either uptown Jewish philanthropic circles or the immigrant labor community. Among the former were the FIC’s counsel Abram Elkus, a prominent jurist and member of the American Jewish Committee who later served as U.S. ambassador to Turkey. The investigatory staff was even more bound up with the Jewish labor movement. Its chief, Dr. George Price, an immigrant physician, had authored pamphlets and articles in Russian and Yiddish on Jewish immigrant life in America. Rose Schneiderman, Clara Lemlich, and labor activist Pauline Newman all worked for the FIC, with Newman especially important in guiding Wagner and Smith through the state’s industrial netherworlds.42

■ 1912 In the wake of the Triangle Fire, the 1912 election pitted a Tammany Hall newly committed to social reform against the new Progressive Party of Theodore Roosevelt, the surging Socialists, and the Republicans. For president, the Republicans renominated President William Howard Taft, who had disappointed many Jews by failing to fulfill his promise to abrogate the 1832 trade treaty with Russia after Russia refused to honor the American passports of Jewish travelers. The Democrats put up the southern-born governor of New Jersey, Woodrow Wilson. Wilson gained some Jewish support with his progressive positions and scholarly approach, as well as his opposition to the Russian policy. The charismatic and saintly Debs bore the Socialist standard for the fourth time.

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But former president Theodore Roosevelt, running on the ticket of the breakaway Progressive Party, attracted the most attention in Jewish districts. Roosevelt’s welcoming attitude toward the new wave of immigrants, and Jews in particular, had already made him a familiar and popular figure in the immigrant community. A native New Yorker, Roosevelt had appointed a number of Jews to the police department when he was commissioner in the 1890s. And, at Jacob Schiff ’s recommendation, he had named Oscar Straus the first Jewish cabinet secretary in 1906. Roosevelt advocated that immigrants become good Americans by conforming to Anglo-American culture and had supported measures to weed out the sickly and the politically dangerous. But Jewish voters focused more on his many statements criticizing anti-Semitism and on his opposition to immigration restriction on the grounds that the melting pot should include a healthy dash of Jewish and other new-stock ethnic groups. Likewise, his Progressive Party was just the kind of independent political movement that attracted Jewish support in local elections.43 The Progressive Party’s state convention tapped Oscar Straus for governor, his nomination seconded by Belle Moskowitz. The German-born Straus had grown up in Georgia, where he for a time attended a Baptist Sunday school. But though his Hebrew was said to be “rudimentary,” he expressed his strong Jewish identity by playing a leading role in Jewish philanthropy and communal affairs. As an amateur historian, he specialized in discovering Hebraic roots for America’s democratic institutions. More than some others of his social milieu, he was also willing to enter general politics. While his brothers Isidor and Nathan ran the family business, Macy’s department store, Oscar Straus served in a number of appointive posts, culminating in his three-year stint as secretary of commerce and labor under Presidents Roosevelt and Taft. Along with Isidor (who died in the sinking of the Titanic earlier in the year) and Nathan, Straus was already a popular figure in the immigrant neighborhoods. And although Straus refused to emphasize his Jewishness in the campaign, his party, whose theme song was the Protestant hymn “Onward, Christian Soldiers,” did not hesitate to do so. Ironically, Straus’s main opponent, non-Jewish Democratic Congressman William Sulzer, played the ethnic card more enthusiastically in Jewish districts than did Straus. Ruggedly handsome and “one of Tammany Hall’s leading orators,” Sulzer modeled himself after Henry Clay (with a dash of Lincoln). As representative of an East Side Manhattan district, Sulzer was outspoken in the

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fight to abrogate the Russian-American trade treaty and had won over many Jewish friends. In fact, Sulzer’s nomination partly reflected Tammany’s response to the Straus candidacy. Sulzer attacked Straus mercilessly from a Jewish point of view. The former secretary should “tell us what he ever did to aid his race at home or abroad,” Sulzer challenged. “Go and ask him how many Jews he sent back to be murdered by the Czar while he was secretary of commerce and labor.”44 Election results in the Jewish districts once again demonstrated that Jewish voters were willing to split tickets. Though Roosevelt barely edged out Wilson in most of the predominantly Jewish assembly districts in Manhattan and Brooklyn, Straus carried all of them with a healthy plurality. Meanwhile, Tammany Congressman Goldfogle won reelection, but with numbers that did not bode well for the future. In a four-way race, he received only 39.3 percent of the vote, while Socialist Meyer London took 31.2 percent and Progressive Henry Moskowitz took 22.3 percent. It seemed likely that a substantial number of Moskowitz voters would align with the Socialists next time.45 Sulzer was elected governor of New York. But he did not remain in office for long. He ran afoul of Tammany boss Charles Murphy, who orchestrated his impeachment. Jews once again played an array of important supporting parts in this unfolding drama. Sulzer’s trouble started when he started to think of himself as an independent progressive governor and not the Tammany tool that Murphy had hoped he would be. After Sulzer turned down Murphy’s offers of money, dragged his feet on recommended appointments, supported an open primary bill, and started an investigation into corruption that threatened Tammany interests, Murphy decided to get rid of the governor once and for all. Ironically, Sulzer was impeached for improprieties in campaign financing. The role of prosecutor fell to the majority leader, Ahearn protégé Aaron Jefferson Levy. Interviewed at the start of the process, Levy told a reporter, “If you knew what I do, you would know that Governor Sulzer hasn’t a chance.”46 In the course of the trial, it turned out that the uptown Jewish elite had rewarded Sulzer for his work on the Russian issue by tendering him considerable material support. Jacob Schiff, Abram Elkus, and Henry Morgenthau had all given him money. Herbert Lehman was an especially generous backer, testifying that he had given Sulzer $5,000 unconditionally, for whatever purpose he saw fit. As Sulzer’s counsel, Louis Marshall tried hard to get the governor off the

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hook, but in vain. The Jewish elite thus stuck loyally with Sulzer in a way that his Tammany prosecutors should have appreciated. The vote to remove Sulzer came in October 1913, less than a month before the general election, and Tammany’s attack on the governor backfired. The dynamic young reformer John Purroy Mitchel swept into the mayoralty on the Fusion ticket with substantial Jewish support.47 (Fusion, in New York political parlance, meant an independent reform ticket with support from elements of the Democratic and Republican Parties along with independents.) Sulzer returned to the Lower East Side triumphantly, winning election to the state assembly. Many Tammany men lost their races. Levy barely survived to gain a seat on the municipal court. But as late as 1923, when he sought to move up to the state supreme court, he worried that memory of his role in the Sulzer affair would cost him votes.48

■ Socialist Upsurge Even more disturbing to Tammany was the Socialist surge that began in 1914 with the election of Meyer London to Congress and continued for more than half a decade. The maturation of the Jewish labor movement contributed to London’s victory, but so did his personality and willingness to view himself as a representative of an ethnic as well as a class community. In contrast to Hillquit’s earlier campaigns for the same seat, London willingly appealed to a constituency beyond the proletariat by portraying himself as the most viable alternative to Tammany. As one shopkeeper who intended to vote for London explained, “The politicians sap the blood of us businessmen,” but London would “liberate us from graft.” Leftists in the Socialist Party criticized the London campaign’s personal and “racial” appeals and muttered about a supposed unofficial “split for London” strategy. But the voters responded, giving London 49.5 percent of the vote to Goldfogle’s 41.1 percent.49 The following year, Brownsville, Brooklyn, sent Socialist Abraham Shiplacoff to the state assembly, the first of a number of Socialists to represent Jewish districts in the state legislature and the city board of aldermen. For the next several years, the Socialists seriously contested every local election, sometimes as the largest party in the working-class Jewish areas of Manhattan, Brooklyn, and the Bronx. The Socialist movement maintained a lively presence in Jewish neighborhoods. In Brownsville, for example, the Russian-born Shiplacoff,

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a former shop worker turned teacher, and Barnett Wolff, son of a local grocer, organized the William Morris Educational Club to work among young English speakers. Later, they helped build the Labor Lyceum on Sackman Street, which provided programs in Yiddish and English. The neighborhood home of the Workmen’s Circle and the garment unions, the Lyceum offered concerts, lectures, debates, socials, dances, and holiday celebrations. At election time, it was Socialist Party campaign headquarters. The dense network of labor organizations based at the Lyceum sent Shiplacoff, Wolff, and others to the state assembly and board of alderman.50 The high point for the Socialists’ surge came in 1917, the year that Morris Hillquit mounted a vigorous “peace and milk” campaign for mayor. By that time, the “fighting” reform mayor, John Purroy Mitchel, had worn out his welcome among large swaths of the electorate through his inflexible and impolitic actions. A Catholic and grandson of a hero of Irish nationalism, Mitchel seemed to go out of his way to alienate fellow Catholics by attacking the Church. He lost Jewish support as well by implementing the “Gary Plan,” a system designed to enrich the curriculum in the public schools and to cut costs by accommodating more students, but which many people in the community feared would shunt children of immigrant parents into vocational tracks and obstruct their social mobility. While some reformers continued to believe that Mitchel’s nonpartisan, expert-driven administration was the best New York ever had, many voters had come to view him as an elitist snob and bigot. American entry into World War I earlier in the year also became a major bone of contention in the campaign. Attempting to seize the mantle of patriotism, Mitchel called himself a “100 percent American mayor” and attacked his Democratic opponents as allies of the Hohenzollerns and Habsburgs. Unfortunately for Mitchel, large sections of the Irish, German, and Jewish populations in New York harbored antiwar sentiments. The Democrats that year put up John “Red Mike” Hylan, a Brooklyn judge and machine mediocrity. On domestic issues, Hylan took a populist stance, vowing to hold down subway fares and calling for municipal ownership of public utilities. He tried to straddle the war issue, proclaiming his support for the war effort but decrying Mitchel’s militarism.51 Hillquit, for his part, criticized Mitchel’s “cold business administration” and pushed the traditional Socialist program of social transformation. But it

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was the war issue that really generated the tremendous enthusiasm around the campaign. With Hillquit voicing his party’s unambiguous opposition to the war effort, the campaign acquired such momentum that Tammany took fright. It responded by sending in “wrecking crews” to break up Socialist street meetings and soliciting warnings by Jewish Democratic stalwarts that a large Hillquit vote would stir up anti-Semitism. As the election became a referendum on the war, the Socialist Party expanded its support in German and Irish districts, but Hillquit only received a majority of votes in Jewish neighborhoods. In the end, Hylan beat Mitchel decisively. Hillquit finished a strong third in a four-way race, with over 20 percent of the vote. That year, the Socialists sent a delegation of ten to the state assembly and seven to the board of aldermen. Socialist Jacob Panken was elected to the municipal court for a ten-year term.52 Although the war helped propel the Socialists to their highest level of support in 1917, it also sowed the seeds of dissension within their ranks and contributed to their subsequent rapid electoral decline. London spoke out against the war, but he took what he saw as a responsible position as a member of Congress. In practice, this meant that he voted against the declaration of war and conscription but supported the sale of Liberty Bonds once the United States had entered the fray. The party’s left wing — soon to split to form the Communist Party — excoriated him for his compromises, while prowar groups attacked him as a traitor. In the meantime, London forfeited the support of Labor Zionists when he refused to endorse the British government’s Balfour Declaration favoring a Jewish homeland in Palestine. He lost his seat in 1918. London returned to Congress after the 1920 elections, which also sent five Socialists to the state assembly. This turned out to be the Socialist Party’s last hurrah. In addition to internal dissension over the war and the new Soviet government in Russia, the Socialists faced a stepped-up attack from their political opponents. Districts were gerrymandered to dilute Socialist voting strength. The board of aldermen refused to seat the two Socialists elected in 1919 until weeks before the 1920 election, and in a case that became a cause célèbre, the state legislature rejected the five Socialists elected to the assembly in 1920. Finally, the Democrats and Republicans took to running Fusion candidates against the Socialists. In the face of altered districts, fused opposition, state repression, and a dose of old-fashioned Tammany intimidation, the Socialists

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lost their toe-hold in the electoral system. By 1923, the only remaining Socialist elected official was Judge Jacob Panken, whose ten-year term ended in 1927.53

■ Woman Suffrage In the midst of the political ferment of the late 1910s, Jewish voters provided critical support for the 1917 referendum that gave women the right to vote in New York State. Indeed, the working-class Jewish districts of New York City were among the most prosuffrage. The Jewish labor movement and Socialist Party played a role in this victory, as did a decade of suffragist activity aimed directly at capturing immigrant Jewish votes. The spike in the Jewish and Socialist vote brought about by the Hillquit campaign for mayor helped push the 1917 referendum over the top. It is true that by that time Tammany Hall also favored votes for women, but Tammany’s core constituency — Irish Catholic men — remained the least favorably inclined toward female suffrage.54 Supporters of suffrage within the Jewish immigrant community stressed its link to the cause of labor. Outspoken labor suffragists such as Lemlich, Schneiderman, and Malkiel emphasized the importance of suffrage to women workers in their efforts to win better conditions in the shops and at home. As Lemlich put it, The manufacturer has the vote; the bosses have votes, the foremen have votes, the inspectors have votes. The working girl has no vote. When she asks to have a building in which she must work made clean and safe, the officials do not have to listen. The bosses can say to the officials: “Our votes put you in office. . . . Never mind what they say. . . . They can’t do anything.” That is true. For until the men in the Legislature at Albany represent her as well as the bosses and foremen, she will not get justice; she will not get fair conditions. That is why the working-woman now says that she must have the vote.

Some suffrage organizations issued Yiddish literature and held street meetings and parades in the immigrant districts. They successfully lobbied the Yiddish press, which, from left to right, supported suffrage by 1917. The ILGWU and the United Hebrew Trades endorsed suffrage. The Women’s Suffrage Party systematically canvassed the immigrant neighborhoods, finding widespread support among Jewish men as well as women.55 Maud Nathan was one of the few Jewish women to play a leading role in middle-class suffrage circles, but affluent Jews also supported the movement.

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The central body of Reform rabbis endorsed votes for women, and Rabbi Stephen Wise was outspoken in his support.

■ Al Smith New York women voted for the first time in 1918. That year, Al Smith was elected governor with widespread Jewish support. By that time, he had become a hero to many social reformers, who overcame their distaste for his Tammany roots to back his candidacy. His inner circle now included Jews, such as Abram Elkus, the lawyer for the FIC who became Smith’s campaign manager, and Elkus’s law partner, Joseph Proskauer. Perhaps most surprising, not only for her Jewishness and reform background but also for her gender, Belle Moskowitz emerged as Smith’s most trusted and influential adviser. During the campaign, Moskowitz joined a number of progressives who surprised themselves as much as anyone by creating the Independent Citizens’ Committee for Al Smith. Moskowitz headed the committee’s Women’s Division and during the campaign had her first “real personal meeting” with Smith to advise him on women’s attitudes toward the issue of prohibition. After the election, she pushed him to initiate a number of social reform projects. She also recruited Robert Moses, of Jewish origin though he did not think of himself as a Jew, to Smith’s administration. Smith’s embrace of structural governmental reform under the influence of Moses surprised observers even more than his espousal of social policies.56 By 1920, Jews were just beginning to make a distinctive mark on New York’s politics. In the following decades, Jews provided the most reliable constituency for a politics of social reform that helped make New York City one of the most advanced social democratic polities in the country. In the 1930s and 1940s, Jewish Socialists entered the mainstream first through the American Labor Party and then through the Liberal Party, which backed progressive candidates regardless of their party affiliation and commanded large minorities of the Jewish vote. In the meantime, Al Smith and Franklin Delano Roosevelt transformed the state’s Democratic Party into a more consistent advocate of social reform, attracting the bulk of Jewish support. Even the Republican Party in New York had its liberal wing, in which Jews played a prominent role. Herbert Lehman became the first Jewish governor in 1933, but nonJewish liberals Smith, Roosevelt, and Mayor Fiorello La Guardia also served

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as important vehicles for Jewish involvement in politics and government. By 1940, Jews’ numbers and activism made them one of the city’s most important voting blocs. The legacy of Jewish labor and reformist politics thus endured for the better part of the century in New York’s political culture.

Bertha Kalich arrived in New York City in the mid-1890s; there her great acting talent landed her prime roles in the Yiddish and, for a time, English-language theater. (American Jewish Historical Society, New York and Newton Centre, MA)

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Jews and New York Culture

On any day in 1905, any number of well-dressed, neatly groomed men — prosperous bankers, businessmen, and professionals — could be found in the sumptuous club rooms at 45 West Forty-Second Street. Depending on the day of the week and time of day, they might be reading in the library, smoking in one of the lounges, playing cards, bowling, or exercising in the well-equipped gymnasium. A few patronized the bar. Sometimes their wives and sisters might join them for dinner in the elegant dining room or for a dance in the palatial ballroom — though of late “stag” evenings, which brought men together for entertainments without the ladies, had become more popular. The men were members of the Harmonie Club, one of the oldest, most exclusive, and best-appointed social clubs in the city, with membership limited to 650 of those able to pay its high initiation fee and annual dues. Prospective members waited for places to open up. All the men were Jews, though this was seldom noted at Harmonie Club activities or even in the club’s official histories. Most were of German descent, and while English had become the club’s dominant language by 1905, one could still hear some older members conversing in German. One of the major topics of conversation that year must have been Harmonie’s impending move from its thirty-eight-year-old building on Forty-Second Street to new quarters on East Sixtieth Street. The old clubhouse, designed by Henry Fernbach, who was also responsible for Temple Emanu-El and Central Synagogue, had cost over $200,000 to build. In 1867, its three stories, plus basement and attic, and onehundred-foot front on the street impressed passersby. But as times changed, balls and “large entertainments” had fallen out of fashion. Now members’ own

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residences were so large and opulent that most major family social events took place at home. The new clubhouse, a tall Renaissance palace designed by Stanford White and built at a cost of $875,000, omitted the ballroom and catered mostly to the men alone. It guaranteed that Harmonie remained the leader among the approximately thirteen Jewish social clubs in the city.1 The social scene in the heart of the immigrant district downtown differed strikingly. On East Broadway, Jewish men and women, not so elegantly dressed as Harmonie Club members, though perhaps with a certain bohemian flair, might be seen descending the steps to Goodman and Levine’s basement cafe. Opening the door, they were assaulted by the “smell of roast herring and cooked fish, sour borsht, fried pancakes, bad coffee, scalded milk, as well as odors so intermingled that it wasn’t easy to say which was which.” Many cafe patrons had the calloused hands of building-trades workers or factory operatives, but some at Goodman and Levine’s knew that they were really something else — literary men and women, members of a new and revolutionary generation of Yiddish poets. Braving “barely endurable” food, a haze of cigarette smoke, the owners’ hostile stares when the poets did not spend enough money, kitchen heat in the summer, and icy drafts in the winter, the young writers — and those who liked to be among writers — came night after night to discuss literary theories and gossip.2 Goodman and Levine’s was one of nearly three hundred Jewish cafes on the Lower East Side. Also known as “coffee and cake parlors” or “coffee saloons,” eastern European Jewish immigrant cafes actually served up more tea than coffee, along with food and a lot of talk. These were working-class resorts, but unlike the saloons that traditionally served as American workingmen’s “clubs,” they offered little alcohol and attracted an intellectual and artistic clientele that established their reputation as vibrant centers of debate on politics, art, and society. Unlike the working-class saloons and the upper-class Harmonie Club, the cafes attracted women as well as men. As one sympathetic if slightly scandalized observer exclaimed, “And where the cigarette smoke is thickest and the denunciation of the present forms of government loudest, there you find women!” Each cafe had its specialty. Radicals congregated at the Monopole on Second Avenue. Theater people met first at Schreiber’s on Canal Street and later at the Café Royale on Second Avenue, which eventually became the preeminent cafe of the Yiddish-speaking intelligentsia. Goodman and Levine’s set aside several tables for the young poets who came there regularly,

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disdaining the better-established literary haunt Herrick’s (later Sholem’s) on Division Street, partly for ideological reasons and partly because Goodman and Levine’s was cheaper.3 Strikingly different in terms of class, language, customs, and ethos, the Harmonie Club and Goodman and Levine’s cafe represent only part of a vast range of Jewish cultural expressions in New York. Such venues contributed to a vibrant, dynamic urban scene that encouraged new ideas and cultural productivity. Indeed, as New York became both the nation’s cultural capital and its Jewish capital, Jews came to play a leading role in the production of all sorts of music, literature, drama, and visual art. Viewing art and ideas as vital elements of daily life, New York Jews expressed their earnest respect for cultural expression by becoming crucial consumers of the city’s cultural products. As artists, organizers, consumers, and critics, Jews thus produced a rich culture that was Jewish in medium, content, and intended audience. But they also contributed mightily to the general culture, not explicitly Jewish, indeed sometimes typically “American.” New forms of commercialized culture — popular music and theater, movies, the mass-circulation press — were especially open to immigrant participation. So were modernist movements in the visual arts and music. Significantly, fluid boundaries existed between the Jewish and the general, as well as among various genres. Arriving as these currents emerged and as New York developed into their center, Jewish immigrants and their children took advantage of the city’s relative openness to remake themselves, the city, and American culture as a whole. Even the borders between languages — especially English, German, and Yiddish — were porous. New York Jewry mainly spoke English at the beginning of the nineteenth century, but the subsequent central European immigration put German almost on a par with English as the community’s public language. Rabbis extolled its virtues from the pulpit, and organizations kept their minutes in it. Jews also participated in general German singing societies, theater, and newspapers. But a substantial proportion of central European Jewish immigrants were only thinly “Germanized.” Nearly half came not from Germany proper but from Bohemia and Moravia, regions of Poland under Prussian or Austrian rule, Hungary, and Alsace, all areas where most Jews still spoke Yiddish. Many of those from small towns in Germany spoke Yiddish into the middle of the century. Immigrants from these regions continued to speak Yiddish, or Yiddish-inflected German, at home and on the street, even

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when they used standard German in more formal settings. Despite the cultural prestige of German, however, English made steady inroads. The Harmonie Club’s linguistic evolution symbolizes this transition.4 But before New York Jewry could be thoroughly re-Anglicized, millions of immigrants poured in from the Yiddish-speaking heartland of eastern Europe. Yiddish now became an important language of public and private discourse in the city. Almost immediately, however, it began to absorb English influences. Many loanwords came from the sphere of work and business: shap (shop), payde (payday, meaning “wages”), opreyter (operator, of a sewing machine), nekst (next, meaning “turn”), sharup (shut up). Hybrid words included alraytnik (someone who has worked his way up). English also influenced Yiddish syntax. The effects could be comical, as in Yiddish writer Sholem Aleichem’s rendering of his character Motl Peysi’s mother’s American Yiddish speech (in the following excerpt, words in italics are given in English in the Yiddish original): [My mother] says that we earn our bit of bread fair and square, because at dawn, before the stand opens, we deliver the morning paper to our customers. Afterward, we go to school (yes, we are already in school). And when we come home from school, we help attend to the business. That is what my mother says, in those words. She already speaks half in the local language. She no longer uses the Yiddish words, “hun” and “kikh.” She says chicken and kitchen. So, what then? With her it comes out backward. A kikh is for her a chicken and a hun is for her a kitchen. “I’m going,” she says, “to the chicken to salt the kitchen . . .” Everyone laughs at her. She laughs too.

German further influenced New York Yiddish, especially in the press and in organizational life, where Yiddish-speaking lodges borrowed terminology from their German counterparts. Newcomers complained that they could barely understand the Yiddish spoken and printed in America, but they soon learned it too.5 One wonders whether people would have laughed so hard at Motl’s mother if they realized how much people like her were influencing American English, especially in New York. Henry James fretted over the immigrants’ propensity to “play, to their heart’s content, with the English language [and to] dump their mountain of promiscuous material into the foundation of the American.” James’s fears were borne out. The influence of Yiddish on American English appeared indirectly at first, via loan words in German in the mid-nineteenth

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century, partly through underworld speech but also because the German speech of Jewish immigrants was peppered with Yiddish: ganef (thief ), kosher (okay, reliable), mazuma (cash, from mezumen), meshugeh (crazy). H. L. Mencken, for whom Abraham Cahan was an important informant, reported that by the 1920s many New Yorkers, Jewish and non-Jewish, understood dozens of Yiddishisms. Yiddish influenced the New York accent as well, at least in the speech of English-speaking Jews. Just as English entered Yiddish through the shop, so did Yiddish enter English: for example, Mencken lists “schmoosing” as garment workers’ slang for “idling around and talking shop.” But entertainers did the most to spread Yiddishisms, especially outside the city. (See the Marx brothers: “Hurray for Captain Spalding, the African explorer. Did someone call me shnorer?”)6

■ From Chatham Street to East Sixtieth Street: Central European Jewish Identity Moves Indoors The roots of the Harmonie Club lay in the downtown immigrant cultural scene of the mid-nineteenth century, which more resembled its 1905 Yiddishlanguage successor than Harmonie’s current members would have liked to admit. In the early years, the Jewish clubs like Harmonie were very German in that they linked sociability to German Kultur. In addition to playing cards and billiards, common activities included attending lectures, musical and dramatic productions, singing circles, balls, libraries, and carnivals, all in German, the club’s official language. Founded in 1852 by six German-Jewish immigrants, the Harmonie Gesellschaft for some years rented a succession of modest quarters in and around the downtown immigrant neighborhood. In 1859, the club held a Mai-Fest in Conrad’s Park. Only gradually did Harmonie and other Jewish clubs become more purely social, relegating cultural activities to the sidelines in favor of athletics, card playing, and balls. Indeed, the evolution of the Jewish club marked not only the economic rise of the Chatham Street hawkers but also their attempt to establish themselves as socially respectable and culturally mainstream, on a par with the native Protestant elite. Muting their ethnic distinctiveness, Jewish clubs came to have much in common with those clubs of the Protestant upper class that excluded Jews. Indeed, what made a man “clubbable” was a quality of “gentlemanliness” and congeniality that for Jewish clubmen involved being “unobtrusive and discreet” in expressing their Jewishness. In 1893, English

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became the official language, and the name was changed officially from Harmonie Gesellschaft to Harmonie Club.7

■ New York’s Lecture Culture In moving uptown, Harmonie Club members all but abandoned the democratic, grass-roots network of cultural consumption that extended in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries from the educated English-speaking middle class to German and Yiddish working-class immigrants. Through the city’s myriad of literary societies, dramatic clubs, self-education associations, political movements, and adult education centers, New York Jews participated in a vibrant lecture culture that provided “entertainment and instruction” on everything from popular mechanics to contemporary political controversies. Jewish interest in public lectures long survived their “golden age” between the 1850s and 1870s.8 Indeed, eastern European Jewish immigrants of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries avidly consumed adult education programs produced largely by two sources: elite Americanizers and radical movements. The New York City Board of Education, for example, began its highly popular adult education program in 1888 and its Yiddish-language lectures in 1903. Headed by Henry M. Leipziger, an immigrant born in England to GermanJewish parents, the Board of Education programs stressed American citizenship, moral development, hygiene, and vocational advancement. Socialist educational efforts aimed to give workers the tools to understand the world, the better to change it. Toward this end, in 1913, the Workmen’s Circle made available lectures in “Ancient Greek Drama,” “Ibsen’s Contribution to Women’s Liberation,” and “The Bible, Not as Religion but as Literature,” among other topics. Young people on the Lower East Side and other immigrant Jewish neighborhoods flocked to these lectures in public schools, Labor Lyceums, settlement houses, and other venues. One immigrant, Moyshe Shapiro, maintained that common intellectual interests would secure a couple’s happy relationship, though his illiterate fiancée’s parents sneered, “Lectures, shmectures, whoever heard of a young man who likes a girl having lectures on his mind?” But Shapiro had plenty of company. One study showed that nearly a third of Russian-Jewish men, aged seventeen to twenty-five, attended at least one lecture every week.9 And, despite Shapiro’s in-laws’ attitude, so did many young women.

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■ Public Education for Children As important as adult education programs were, the New York City public schools did much of the work of creating several generations of Englishspeaking Jewish consumers of all the city’s cultural offerings. In fact, Jews began their “passionate love affair” with the public schools as early as the 1860s, taking advantage of the free school system while continually chipping away at Christian elements in the curriculum. Secularization of the public schools proceeded in fits and starts and was not completed until well into the twentieth century.10 But while overtly Christian elements diminished over time, the schools’ vaguely Protestant culture persisted because it dovetailed so closely with the educators’ conception of what constituted true Americanism. With the influx of immigrant children at the turn of the twentieth century, the public schools redoubled their efforts at Americanization, stressing instruction in the English language, hygiene, etiquette, citizenship, and vocational training. The children’s home language of Yiddish was denigrated. Teachers, few of whom were Jewish, served as “model[s] of good [read: “American”] taste [and] deportment.”11 Influential Jews who played a role in the system backed its mission of Americanization.12 The most influential Jewish educator was Julia Richman, New York’s first Jewish public school principal and district superintendent and also the first woman principal in Manhattan. The daughter of working-class Jewish immigrants from Bohemia, Richman grew up partly in the Long Island countryside and partly in New York City’s teeming Kleindeutschland neighborhood. Strong willed and ambitious, she reputedly told a friend at the age of eleven or twelve, “I am not pretty, my father is not rich, and I am not going to marry, but before I die, all New York will know my name!” After graduating in the first class from the Female Normal College (later Hunter College), she became a teacher. In 1903, after years as a principal, she was named superintendent for the districts that included the Jewish Lower East Side.13 Richman maintained Jewish involvements as a founder and board member of the YWHA and Educational Alliance. But despite her own immigrant background, Richman was an ardent Americanizer who sometimes found herself in conflict with the community she served. Concerned with raising “a race of worthy citizens,” she wrote, “Between the alien of today and the citizen of tomorrow stands the school, and upon the influence exerted by the

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school depends the kind of citizen the immigrant child will become.” This in itself would not have bothered Lower East Side parents, many of whom fully agreed with her sentiments. But a perceived lack of sensitivity to the sensibilities of the Jewish immigrant community sparked several unsuccessful campaigns to remove her from her post. In 1911, the Forward opined, “When she visits a school, it is like Yom Kippur.” Nevertheless, she retained the friendship and support of Louis Marshall and other uptown Jewish leaders. When she died in 1912, the New York Times decried the “cabal” that had opposed her “efforts to reform and purify the district and free its children from degrading influences.”14 While immigrant parents often shared the schools’ Americanization goals, they did not always agree that vocational education was most appropriate for their children. When New York attempted to import the Gary System, so called because it originated in Gary, Indiana, Jewish students and parents rebelled. The Gary System attempted to utilize the public infrastructure as efficiently as possible by organizing the school day in such a way that all facilities were constantly in use. At the same time, it claimed to enrich the pupils’ academic experience with shop and laboratory work, physical play, and service to the school community. But as the reform administration of Mayor John Purroy Mitchel implemented the Gary System in New York, it seemed much more concerned with cost savings than educational enhancement. And since the system called for a cut in hours that children spent on strictly academic work, many immigrant parents saw it as a move to shunt their children onto a vocational track. Students and parents demonstrated, and in some cases rioted, in front of schools where the Gary System had been put in place. An issue in the 1917 mayoral election, the plan died with Mitchel’s decisive defeat.15 Jewish children gained a reputation for intellectual precociousness, even aggressiveness, an image happily burnished in retrospect by American Jews themselves. There is some truth to the image — the Forward even found it necessary to warn Jewish parents not to push their children too hard to excel in school and extracurricular studies. But, raised to the level of myth, the image is also greatly exaggerated — for every Jewish youth debating Marxist doctrine or wiling away the hours in the Seward Park branch of the public library, more were wandering the streets, fighting with rival gangs, playing baseball in city sandlots, and swimming in the East River. Most young Jews left school before graduating in order to earn a living and contribute to the family economy.16

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City College for boys and, to a lesser extent, Hunter College for girls occupy a central place in the myth of Jewish intellectual accomplishment. By the first decades of the twentieth century, Jews did indeed compose more than three-quarters of the student body at City College. Still, with only 112 graduates in 1910, for example, CCNY could not really shape the lives of significant numbers of Jewish youth. This only began to happen in the 1920s and ’30s, by which time, despite attempts to limit their numbers, many Jews attended local private institutions such as Columbia and New York University as well.17

■ Anglo-Jewish Letters in the Nineteenth Century The periodical press offered another important outlet for public culture. The first independent Jewish newspaper in New York was probably the Jew, which appeared in 1823, but the Jewish press really grew in the middle of the century. The Asmonean appeared weekly between 1849 and 1859, published by the London-born Robert Lyon. Styling itself “a family journal of commerce, politics, religion, and literature, devoted to the interests of the American Israelites,” the Asmonean defended Judaism against incursions by missionaries, opposed nativism, and allied itself with the Democratic Party. It avoided taking sides in controversies between the Orthodox and Reform camps in the Jewish community.18 Beginning in 1857, on the other hand, Samuel Myers Isaacs’s Jewish Messenger argued against religious reform even as it fought the exclusion of Jews from the American mainstream and advocated a national body of American Jews.19 The American Hebrew, founded in 1879, raised Anglo-Jewish journalism to a new level. Edited for its first twenty-six years by Philip Cowen, the New York – born son of German-Jewish immigrants, the American Hebrew at various times published the writings of Emma Lazarus, Henrietta Szold, Cyrus Adler, Alexander Kohut, Kaufman Kohler, and Israel Zangwill. Sympathetic to tradition, it also advocated religious and cultural modernization and Americanization. It provided a forum for wide-ranging discussions on a broad variety of issues facing American Jewry.20 These and other periodicals also published the handful of writers who wrote fiction and poetry on Jewish themes in English, including Emma Lazarus, by far the most important American Jewish writer of the nineteenth century. In some ways, Lazarus’s life and career foreshadowed those of important American Jewish literary figures writing in English half a century and more

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after her death. She was not religiously observant but nevertheless had a strong Jewish cultural identity. Indeed, events in Europe and America strengthened her Jewish commitment in the 1880s. Moreover, Lazarus at once participated in New York’s general cultural scene, writing on a variety of topics for magazines with predominantly non-Jewish readerships, and she wrote on specifically Jewish issues for Jewish (and non-Jewish) publications. At the same time, however, she faced difficulties that her successors did not, including the fact that she was almost alone as a Jew in a genteel literary set that sometimes harbored subtle anti-Semitic attitudes. Though none of her close friends was Jewish, and her American ancestry extended as far back as most of theirs, she could never forget that her Jewishness set her apart. Lazarus was born in 1849 into a well-off, illustrious, but nonobservant, old-stock Sephardic family. She received little Jewish education but knew German and French well. Well integrated into New York high society, her family “groomed [her] to be noticed from an early age.” 21 In fact, when she was seventeen years old in 1866, her father proudly printed a volume of her poems. The book caught the attention of a number of prominent American writers, most importantly Ralph Waldo Emerson, who praised the young poet and adopted her as a kind of literary protégé. They began a long epistolary relationship, but when Emerson omitted her from his massive poetry anthology, Parnassus (1874), she reacted angrily. She may, however, have overreacted, for the good company excluded from the volume included Walt Whitman, Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, and Emerson himself. In any case, Lazarus continued her relationship with Emerson. By the time of his anthological snub, Lazarus was well established as a poet, essayist, translator, and member of New York intellectual society. The 1881 wave of pogroms in Russia and the subsequent refugee crisis and spike in Jewish immigration to the United States intensified Lazarus’s interest in Jewish themes. She had earlier written “In the Jewish Synagogue at Newport” (1867) as a poetic refutation of Longfellow’s view of the Jews as a backward-looking and dead nation in “The Jewish Cemetery at Newport” (1854). She had translated Heinrich Heine’s work as well as a number of medieval Hebrew hymns (from German translations). But beginning in 1882, she became a proto-Zionist, advocating havens in Palestine and the United States for oppressed Jews. Her book Songs of a Semite appeared that year, and a long

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series of articles in the American Hebrew followed. In Jewish publications, she called for Jewish communal solidarity in the face of oppression. In non-Jewish publications, she sought to elicit sympathy for the downtrodden Jews of eastern Europe. On a practical level, she participated in communal efforts to aid Jewish refugees and immigrants. But she did not have much time left, for during an extended stay in Europe, she fell ill. Returning to New York, she died in 1887. Emma Lazarus’s literary reputation suffered after her death, but one poem kept her name alive. Written in 1883 to raise money for a pedestal for the Statue of Liberty to be erected in New York Harbor, Lazarus’s poem “The New Colossus” was inscribed on a plaque mounted at the base of the statue in 1903. The statue, a gift from France, had originally been intended as a monument to free government, but Lazarus’s poem — with its call to “Give me your tired, your poor / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, / The wretched refuse of your teeming shore” — helped turn it into “the mother of exiles,” a beacon for the millions of immigrants who now sailed past it into the “golden door” of New York Harbor.22

■ Jews and German Culture A German-language culture thrived alongside New York’s English-language Jewish culture in the nineteenth century. The German immigrant community was distinguished by its singing and dramatic societies. Although German Jews formed their own organizations, they also joined leading German singing societies such as the New Yorker Sängerrunde, New Yorker Männerchor, Deutsche Liederkranz, and Arion Glee Club. The talents of writer Max Cohnheim, later a leading local German playwright, and musical director Leopold Damrosch helped make the Arion perhaps the preeminent Gesangverein in the city. At least one predominantly Jewish singing society, the Orpheus, participated in the great Sängerfeste (singing festivals), which were highlights of the German communal calendar. Tensions sometimes strained relations between German-speaking Jews and non-Jews. For a time, the Arion Glee Club apparently banned Jews and incorporated anti-Semitic ditties into its repertoire. But many of its satirical songs ridiculed a variety of groups, including Yankees, and some were even written by Jews. In any case, by 1895, Jews once again figured on the roster of the Arion club.23

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German societies also began to stage amateur theatrical productions, starting as early as the 1840s. Plays presented by Jewish clubs sometimes attracted derision, as in this description in the German-language Puck: They gave “Camille” the other night at our friend Dinkelspiel’s, with disastrous results. Almost every young lady with theatrical ambitions yearns to play Camille; and Miss Rebecca Dinkelspiel was no exception to this rule. Mr. Oppenheimer, her betrothed (fancy goods, Grand Street), likewise saw a future before him as Armand, and nearly all of the members of the Kosher Dramatic Club expressed a willingness to take the subordinate parts. The play was presented, after long and careful preparation, at Mr. Dinkelspiel’s residence, in 73rd Street. [The production was so disastrous that] the Kosher Club is dissolved; the engagement of Miss Dinkelspiel and Mr. Oppenheimer is off.

But despite Puck’s emphasis on the distinctive characteristics that differentiated Jews from other Germans (names, trades, residential patterns, dietary laws), Jewish amateur productions differed little in theme or quality from those of non-Jews.24 The opening of the Stadttheater on September 4, 1854, marked the beginning of the professional German-language stage in New York. Jews contributed to the professional German theater as actors, playwrights, producers, financiers, and, perhaps above all, audience members. Observers noted that Jews made up a large part of the audience — as much as 80 percent — and even attributed the success of New York’s theaters relative to those of other places to the city’s large Jewish element. Jewish shop clerks and peddlers loved to attend theater, especially when plays with Jewish themes were produced. Jewish organizations also helped keep German theaters afloat by buying blocs of tickets for benefits.25 The German stage gave rise to some of the earliest Jewish popular-culture celebrities. These included Max Cohnheim, whose melodramas and farces often had New York settings. For a time, though, actor Daniel Bandmann shone as the brightest star of the New York German stage. Born in Cassel, Germany, in 1840, Bandmann became known for his portrayals of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Richard III, Othello, and Shylock; the title roles in Karl Gutzkow’s Uriel Acosta and Emil Brachvogel’s Narcissus; and Mephistopheles in Goethe’s Faust. He soon crossed over to the English stage, receiving positive reviews, including one that called him an “artist of strong original genius.” (A less friendly critic,

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however, saw his fame as the “product of systematic puffery” and his popularity with Jewish audiences.) After several seasons in New York, Bandmann departed for London and Australia, before attempting a less-than-successful comeback in New York. He finished his days as a rancher and farmer in Montana, where he was known to watch visiting troupes with an especially critical eye.26

■ Yiddish Culture As Emma Lazarus penned “The New Colossus,” she knew of the arrival of masses of Yiddish-speaking immigrants. What she did not know was that the newcomers had begun to create the conditions for an American Jewish literature, first in Yiddish and later in English. In fact, New York became one of the main centers where a modern, secular Yiddish literature developed. New York Jews distinguished themselves especially in the areas of Yiddish poetry, journalism, and theater, learning much from American, as well as European, contemporaries and teaching them something as well. In fact, the Yiddish literary scene in New York cannot be seen in isolation from the Englishlanguage scene. The cafe devotees of the Lower East Side interacted on a regular basis with those of Greenwich Village, a short walk away. Several individual figures, most prominently Abraham Cahan and Emma Goldman, facilitated the exchange. A similar direct connection existed between the German theater and its Yiddish counterpart. In 1882, a thirteen-year-old cigarette maker named Boris Thomashefsky teamed up with a Jewish saloon keeper to import a troupe from London and mount the first professional Yiddish theater production in New York. The performance of Abraham Goldfaden’s Koldunye, at the German Turn Hall on Fourth Street, flopped according to Thomashefsky. But within a decade, Yiddish drama was firmly ensconced in its own theaters on the Bowery, Grand Street, and Second Avenue. Theaters later also appeared in Brooklyn and the Bronx. Rival troupes, led by stars such as Thomashefsky, Jacob Adler, and David Kessler, competed for a growing audience of avid theatergoers. Popular productions of low artistic quality, known as shund, marked early Yiddish theater. Writers such as Joseph Lateiner and “Professor” Moyshe Hurwitz churned out biblical spectaculars, domestic melodramas, and overwrought commentaries on current events. Often they simply plagiarized plays from German or Romanian, transposing the setting to a Jewish venue and

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giving the characters Yiddish names. In any case, the main attractions of the theater were the performers and the spectacle, not the scripts, which actors seldom followed closely anyway. The boisterous audience was a spectacle in itself, a common characteristic of nineteenth-century popular theaters catering to working-class audiences. Similarly, Yiddish music halls thrived along the Bowery, on Fourteenth Street, and in Coney Island, where for a third the price of the regular theater, whole families could enjoy “songs, dances, sketches, and jokes, usually spiced with double entendres and suggestive gestures.”27 Gradually, a “better” Yiddish theater emerged. When Jacob Gordin attended his first Yiddish play in 1891, he was astounded and dismayed: “Everything I saw and heard was far from real Jewish life. All was vulgar, immoderate, false and coarse. ‘Oy, oy!’ I thought to myself, and I went home and sat down to write my first play. . . . I wrote my first play the way a pious man, a scribe, copies out a Torah scroll.” Gordin, a highly Russified radical intellectual with deep-set eyes, a shock of curly hair, a full beard, and an aristocratic mien, advocated a “realistic,” socially conscious Yiddish drama. Gordin’s highly didactic plays offered a modern moralistic take on contemporary burning social and cultural issues. With time, the Yiddish theater outgrew him, but Gordin was an important transitional figure.28 Influenced by Russian and European trends, other serious playwrights followed, writing more naturalistic plays with plausible settings. Many dealt with vital issues in immigrant life. A new generation of actors and directors also promoted more sophisticated theater. In 1918, Maurice Schwartz took over the Irving Place Theatre, which had previously housed a German company, and founded the Yiddish Art Theater. Among the actors in the first Yiddish production at the Irving Place Theatre was Celia Adler, daughter of the great Yiddish actor Jacob Adler and one of several siblings (Stella, Luther) who made names for themselves on the English as well as the Yiddish stage. But despite critical acclaim, serious Yiddish plays struggled to find an audience outside small circles of Yiddish-speaking intellectuals.29 Shund retained its popularity. Some Yiddish actors moved over to the English stage. One of the most successful was Bertha Kalich, the “Yiddish Bernhardt.” Strikingly beautiful and regal in her bearing, Kalich began her career in the Polish, Yiddish, Romanian, and German theaters in Europe. Fearing an assassination plot by jealous rivals, she came to the United States sometime in the mid-1890s. A leading advocate of better Yiddish drama, she starred in plays by Gordin, Zalman Libin, and

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Dovid Pinsky. She first appeared on the English stage in 1905, in the title role of Fedora, by Victorien Sardou. After laboring to correct her foreign accent, she worked with the American dramatist Harrison Grey Fiske. For a time, Kalich received wide acclaim, but soon her emotional style became obsolete, and she found it harder to get roles. She then returned to the Yiddish theater, where her experience on the general American stage gave her more cachet.30 Much of the debate over the role of the Yiddish theater occurred in the Yiddish press, which became a major enterprise in the first decades of the twentieth century. The Yidishe tsaytung, the first Yiddish periodical in the United States, appeared irregularly between 1870 and 1877. Other Yiddish publications followed but failed to find enough readers to survive.31 The first giant of Yiddish journalism, Kasriel Zevi Sarasohn, founded the weekly Yidishe gazeten in 1874; his Yidishe tageblat absorbed the Gazeten in 1885, becoming the first commercially successful Yiddish daily. Born in 1835 near Suwalki, in northwest Russian Poland, into a rabbinical family, Sarasohn absorbed much of the spirit of the haskalah, the European Jewish Enlightenment, but remained traditionally observant. A portrait of him as an older man reveals a determined gaze and set jaw, with a clipped beard and large round yarmulke. In 1874, he was a thirty-nine-year-old printer, in America just three years. His newspapers, first the Gazeten and then the Tageblat, were Orthodox in religious orientation and conservative politically. Sarasohn and his chief editor, Johan Paley, a pudgy former yeshiva student rumored to have converted to Christianity as a teenager, pioneered the use of Hearst- and Pulitzer-style yellow journalism in the Yiddish press, making the Tageblat an odd mixture of piety and sensationalism. Throughout the 1890s and into the 1900s, the Tageblat remained the leading Yiddish daily.32 Meanwhile, the immigrant community’s radicals gained journalistic experience with a series of their own newspapers, including the Nyu-Yorker yidishe folkstsaytung, named for the sheet of the local German Socialists, and the first Yiddish Socialist daily, the Abendblat. Finally, in 1897, factional squabbles within the Socialist Labor Party, with which the Abendblat was aligned, led one group to break away and form a new newspaper, the Forverts, named after the organ of the Social Democratic Party of Germany. The founders of the Forverts hoped to create a Socialist newspaper that would appeal to the masses of Yiddish readers and avoid the Abendblat’s sectarian and pedantic tone. The new paper’s first editor, the by-now-veteran Yiddish Socialist propagandist

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Abraham Cahan, left after a few months, frustrated at his comrades’ inability to transcend old sectarian habits.33 When Cahan returned five years later, he brought with him many journalistic methods he had learned during a sojourn in the world of English-language journalism. Under Cahan’s stern, some said dictatorial, editorial control, the Forverts became both the premier Yiddish daily in the world and the country’s leading Socialist daily. It gained this position with a shrewd mix of political earnestness and sensationalistic reporting on crime and vice. The Jewish Daily Forward, as it was known in English, printed Cahan’s high-minded realist drama and literary criticism alongside installments of trashy novellas. News analysis by some of the leading Socialist thinkers of Europe appeared alongside local human-interest stories. Cahan’s most famous innovation — an advice column called the bintl brief (bundle of letters) — featured letters from readers seeking solutions to their problems. Many reflected the peculiar cultural crosscurrents at work in the lives of working-class Jewish immigrants, including shop romances, conflicts between traditional parents and radical or Americanized children, tensions between husbands and wives, and worry about family members left behind. By 1911, the Forverts claimed a circulation of 122,532 (compared to the Tageblat’s 69,000), and the following year it erected its tower on East Broadway.34 The Jewish Communal Register estimated that between 1872 and 1917, some 150 Yiddish publications had appeared in New York at one time or another. At least twenty-nine still published in 1917, including five daily newspapers, with a combined circulation in New York of over three hundred thousand. The most significant dailies besides the Forverts and the Tageblat were the Morgn zhurnal, which had supplanted the Tageblat as the city’s leading Orthodox newspaper; the Varhayt, founded by former Forverts editor Louis Miller; and the Tog (Day), founded in 1914. The Tog adopted a liberal, Zionist editorial stance and boasted of an impressive array of columnists with a wide range of views. The motto on its masthead read, “The Tog is the newspaper for the Jewish intelligentsia.” In addition to the dailies were many weekly, monthly, annual, and occasional publications ranging from the Anarchist Fraye arbeter shtime (Free Voice of Labor) to the Vegvayzer in der amerikaner biznes velt (Guide to the American Business World).35 The Yiddish press also provided a stage for the early Yiddish “sweatshop poets,” who got their nickname not only because most of them put in time in

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the shops themselves but also because the travails of the shop worker often provided much of the material for their poetry. Influenced by Russian, German, and American writers, as well as by Anarchist and Socialist ideas, Morris Winchevsky, Dovid Edelshtat, Yoysef Bovshover, and Morris Rosenfeld penned melancholy laments over the plight of sweated workers, stirring calls to revolutionary action, and an occasional anthem of Jewish nationalism. They intended their poems to be declaimed or sung. Many were indeed set to music and became standards at Socialist meetings in the United States and Europe. Edelshtat, who died of tuberculosis at age twenty-six, and Bovshover, who spent his last years in a psychiatric hospital, were viewed as martyrs of sorts to the poverty of the immigrant years as well as to their sensitive artistic natures. Rosenfeld, on the other hand, became the first Yiddish writer to attract an audience in English. “A man of flamboyant temperament inclined to lapses into depression,” Rosenfeld was born in a village near Suwalki and received a traditional Jewish education. He settled permanently in New York in 1886, becoming a presser in the garment industry. A charismatic orator with a fine tenor voice, he became a popular presence at Socialist and union meetings declaiming and singing his own poems, which were printed in the radical Yiddish press. His poems, highly formal in style, expressed his identification with his audience of poor workers: The groans of slaves, when they are tired, awake my songs; it’s only then that I’m inspired: I reckon up their wrongs.

Rosenfeld struggled until Bialystok-born Harvard professor Leo Wiener “discovered” him and published a volume of translations of Rosenfeld’s work, Songs from the Ghetto (1898). A success, the book led to translations into German, Polish, Romanian, Czech, and Hungarian. For a time, Rosenfeld earned a living speaking and reading at colleges and settlement houses, while also writing for the Yiddish press. But a series of reverses embittered Rosenfeld, and changing literary styles deepened his isolation. When he died in 1923, thousands turned out for his funeral, but the mainstream of Yiddish literature had passed him by.36 In fact, a revolution took place in Yiddish poetry around 1907 – 1908, led by some of the regulars at Goodman and Levine’s. Grouped around the journal Di

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yugnt (Youth), they came to be known as di yunge, the young ones. Most of di yunge made their livings as manual workers — garment workers, cobblers, and construction workers. Some participated in radical politics. But they sought to separate their art from political engagement, disparaging the older sweatshop poets as nothing more than “the rhyme department of the Jewish labor movement.” Instead of slogans or lamentations over the fate of the proletariat, they sought poetry for poetry’s sake. “Poetry was for us young ones the entire content of our lives,” recalled one of their leading lights, Mani Leyb. “Poetry illuminated our gray days of hard physical labor at the sewing machine, the scaffolding, or the hatter’s block.” They found inspiration in Jewish folksong and modern European poetry, especially Russian, German, and French.37 “Tall, thin, somewhat slouching and handsome,” Mani Leyb (Brahinsky) was perhaps the “most attractive member of the group,” not only for his prominent chin and high cheekbones but also for his dreamy “poetic personality.” Mani Leyb’s autobiographical poem “I Am . . .” expresses a sentiment almost exactly opposite that of Rosenfeld’s “Teardrop Millionaire.” While Rosenfeld denied any aesthetic intention apart from giving voice to the suffering of his class, Mani Leyb, a shoemaker by trade, proclaims that no matter what the appearance, his poet’s heart sets him apart from his fellow shoemakers: In Brownsville, Yehupets, beyond them, even, My name shall ever be known, oh Muse. And I’m not a cobbler who writes, thank heaven, But a poet who makes shoes.38

Di yunge thus strove to create a new kind of literary art in Yiddish, one that depended on an elite audience of refined taste and sophistication. The sophisticated milieu that nurtured this new generation of Yiddish writers formed a subculture within the immigrant Jewish community. The Lower East Side remained its hub, but as with the population as a whole, its members increasingly lived elsewhere. The Bronx possessed an especially lively cultural scene. Aaron Domnitz recalled that his friend the poet I. J. Schwartz moved to the Bronx to escape the stultifying atmosphere in Brownsville, Brooklyn. Gradually, “circles started to form”: “People would go for walks and sit in the park in the evenings dreaming and scheming about how to build a new Yiddish literature. . . . New talents could be found in the Bronx. We looked up to each other and put out for each other, creating an atmosphere of creativity.” Domnitz

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lived in the same apartment house as Joseph Opatovski, a young engineering student who later achieved fame as the novelist Yoysef Opatashu. Some mornings, before Opatashu left for his job as a newspaper deliverer, he would enter Domnitz’s room through the fire escape to show his friend his latest draft.39 Before 1920, fewer distinguished Yiddish prose writers than poets made their homes in New York. Sholem Aleichem, the folksy Yiddish writer renowned as one of the founders of modern Yiddish literature, arrived at the end of 1914, only to die a year and a half later. Like Rabbi Jacob Joseph, Sholem Aleichem suffered from neglect in America, only to be mourned with a massive funeral procession in May 1916. Altogether, somewhere between 150,000 and 250,000 people took part.40 Besides Opatashu and Sholem Aleichem, the most important novelist was probably Sholem Asch, who came to New York in 1914 and stayed until 1924 (he later returned). Both Opatashu and Asch treated eastern European and American themes, but Asch became the Yiddish writer most widely read in English since Rosenfeld. The world of Jewish immigrant letters extended beyond Yiddish to other languages. In the 1870s, a news and literary weekly, Ha-tsofe ba-arets hahadasha, appeared in Hebrew, and in 1880, a short-lived Hebrew literary society, Shocharei S’fath Eber, counted Jacob Schiff as a member. But only the eastern European migration brought sufficient numbers of committed Hebraists to sustain stable cultural organizations and publications. Beginning in 1902, the Mefitsei Sefat Ever ve’Sifrutah sponsored lectures in and about Hebrew. The lectures “created a veritable sensation,” with hundreds of people attending at the Educational Alliance. One member recalled that the society was composed of “students, teachers, workers, merchants, professionals, peddlers”: “For people like me, who were slaves all week in factories, the Sunday meetings of Mefitsei Sefat Ever were truly refreshing.” A younger cohort of Hebraists founded a second organization, Achiever, in 1909 to use “more aggressive methods” to further the revival of Hebrew as a vehicle of modern cultural expression. This group, in turn, founded Ha-toren, a high-quality weekly literary journal, in 1913, and a national organization, the Histadrut Haivrit, three years later. American Hebraists saw America as an important potential center of Hebrew renaissance and sometimes turned to American themes in their writing. The Hebraists never attracted large numbers, but they exerted an influence on American Jewish culture — especially in education — disproportionate to their numbers.41

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Surrounded by well over a million Ashkenazi Jews, New York’s estimated twenty thousand recent Sephardic immigrants lived as a minority within a minority. Most spoke Ladino (Judeo-Spanish), and they too established their own press: the weekly La Amerika, founded in 1910, was traditionalist in orientation; La Boz del Pueblo (1915) was Socialist. A satirical journal, El Kirbatch Amerikano, followed in 1917. The Ladino press had a limited circulation (a total of perhaps fifteen hundred, according to the Jewish Communal Register, though this number apparently increased by the late 1920s), but, like the Yiddish press, it guided new immigrants, offered advice columns, and covered communal activities.42 Jewish journalists contributed to immigrant publications in non-Jewish languages as well. Most importantly, Jews were responsible for much of New York’s Russian-language journalism in the period before World War I. In fact, in the 1880s and 1890s, the local Russian press was mainly produced by Jewish radicals for Jewish readers, and many pioneers of Russian journalism went on to write for and edit Yiddish publications. Jews continued to contribute to later Russian-language newspapers, including the most important, Novy Mir (founded as Russkoye Slovo in 1910, a daily from 1913).43

■ New Jewish Cultural Expressions in English The new Yiddish bohemia reflected in miniature a larger English-language scene centered in Greenwich Village, in which Jews also participated. The Village had its own cafes, where writers, artists, patrons, and intelligent consumers met to eat cheap food and discuss modernism and social problems. These new bohemians, some of them with impeccable pedigrees and Ivy League educations, were drawn to New York, where, they felt, “something considerable may happen.” As the greatest immigrant city in the country, New York seemed exciting and full of promise. In contrast to most of New York society, the bohemians were open to Jews. Some of these Jews, such as Walter Lippmann, Waldo Frank, and James Oppenheim, were American born and hailed from affluent backgrounds. (Frank and Oppenheim helped found the magazine Seven Arts in 1916.) Others, such as Ariel Durant and Konrad and Naomi Bercovici, came from immigrant families. Viewing Jews as important carriers of new and vibrant ideas in literature and politics, the bohemians sometimes took a direct interest in the immigrant community and culture. Many visited

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the Lower East Side, the Yiddish theater, and Jewish cafes, often with a suitable guide, such as Konrad Bercovici or Abraham Cahan.44 Indeed, Cahan and Emma Goldman symbolize in different ways the highly politicized connections between the immigrant and native intelligentsias. Cahan in particular mediated between the two cultural worlds, often guiding American intellectuals who wanted to get to know the immigrant quarter. Cahan first met the dean of American letters, William Dean Howells, in 1892, when Howells sought him out as an informant on working conditions and the labor movement on the Lower East Side. The two hit it off, partly because of their shared admiration for Russian realist writers. Later, Cahan shepherded Hutchins Hapgood through the Yiddish cafes when Hapgood was researching his book Spirit of the Ghetto (a chapter of which is devoted to Cahan). Cahan played a similar role as a reporter for the Commercial Advertiser from 1897 to 1902. In addition to Cahan’s journalism, he wrote realist fiction in English about the immigrant experience. His first story, “A Providential Match,” appeared in Short Stories magazine in 1895 and caught the eye of Howells, who became Cahan’s “discoverer” and sponsor, helping to find a publisher for Cahan’s Yekl: A Tale of the New York Ghetto (1896). Viewing Cahan as “fully American and fully Russian,” Howells introduced Cahan to the New York literary scene in the hope that Cahan would become a “cultural mediator” between foreignborn and native, rich and poor. Cahan happily accepted this assignment — as English-language writer interpreting “the ghetto” to literate native audiences and as Yiddish editor interpreting America to the immigrants. The title of Cahan’s English magnum opus, The Rise of David Levinsky (1917), echoed that of Howells’s The Rise of Silas Lapham. Levinsky tells the epic story of Jewish immigration through the eyes of one immigrant who rises to wealth as a garment manufacturer but loses his soul in the process. Many critics have asserted that the character of Levinsky is a thinly veiled stand-in for Cahan himself. But the character was actually the opposite of the author as he saw himself; whereas Levinsky was morally compromised and deficient in culture, Cahan devoted himself to social justice and cultural pursuits.45 Fiery and charismatic, the Anarchist Emma Goldman was temperamentally the opposite of the dour social democrat Cahan. Born in Kovno, Lithuania, in 1869, Goldman moved with her family to St. Petersburg at the age of

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twelve. There she became a factory worker and gained a revolutionary education through reading Russian literature. In constant conflict with her father, disgusted by the oppressive Tsarist system, and facing an arranged marriage, Goldman fled Russia to join a sister in Rochester, New York. But she found Rochester and a brief marriage there stultifying as well, and she once more escaped, this time to New York City. In the meantime, the execution of the Chicago Haymarket martyrs in 1886 had cemented her commitment to Anarchism. When she arrived in the city, she made her way to the Anarchist cafes, Sachs’s and Schwab’s, where she met the leading Anarchist of the day, Johan Most, and the youthful Alexander Berkman, who became her lifelong friend, comrade, and sometime lover. Though detractors suggested that she was best before “neophyte” audiences, preaching the “a, b, c’s” of radicalism, there was no doubt that she was a “mesmerizing speaker,” and in 1897 she undertook her first national speaking tour.46 Soon Goldman acquired a reputation as “the most dangerous woman in the world,” an image enhanced by her implication in Berkman’s attempted assassination of steel-industry magnate Henry Clay Frick in 1892 and the confession of President William McKinley’s assassin Leon Czolgosz that he had been inspired by Goldman’s writings. Her reputation undoubtedly grew through her own “relentless fascination with herself ” and knack for self-promotion. Her lectures were as much spectacle as edification, and for a time she even appeared at Oscar Hammerstein’s theater, between a dog act and a dance routine. Her physical appearance belied her great energy: “Spectacled and severe, [she] dressed in a simple shirtwaist, tie, and skirt, her hair pulled back in a bun.” She reminded Mabel Dodge, the wealthy bohemian and patron of the arts, of a “severe but warm-hearted school teacher.” Although she professed a sense of solidarity with the downtrodden masses and espoused a form of stateless collectivism, her Anarchism owed much to an American tradition of individualism. She placed more stock in a spirit of personal rebellion against constraint than in collective class action. She attacked conventional institutions, such as marriage, as particularly oppressive to women and advocated free love and birth control. She viewed suffrage as a trap by which women would become coopted by the state. Cultural issues interested her as much as economic ones. She often lectured on literature and art, and her magazine, Mother Earth, combined political commentary with cultural analysis.47 Fluent in Russian, German, and Yiddish, in addition to English, Goldman

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quickly distanced herself from the Lower East Side and its Jewish milieu. She believed that “real social changes could be accomplished only by the natives” and so set out to spread “propaganda in English among the American people.” In fact, she expressed contempt for her Jewish comrades, whom she accused of “sell[ing] their Anarchism in real estate, or in playing dominoes in restaurants.” Anglo-Americans, by contrast, “live Anarchism and thereby are having a moral influence, of greater [and] more lasting value, than 10 years publication of a F[raye] A[rbeter] S[htime].” She did occasionally return to the immigrant quarter to dance at an Anarchist Yom Kippur ball or to speak in Yiddish, but even then she avoided Jewish or Russian themes.48 Like Cahan and Goldman, Anzia Yezierska made a mark on American culture. Like Cahan, she wrote fiction about immigrant life, and since, like him, she often wrote in the first person about characters who at least superficially resembled the author, her work is often taken to be autobiographical. But while her work clearly draws on her own experiences in the tenements and shops, she just as clearly differs from her characters. For example, she graduated from college and spoke educated, unaccented English, whereas her heroines often speak in Yiddish cadences. Indeed, having arrived in the United States as a child, Yezierska was really more of a pioneer second-generation writer than an immigrant one, and her work expressed her generation’s sense of alienation from both her old-worldly parents, on the one hand, and the new world’s culture, on the other. Yezierska shrouded her early life in a mist largely of her own creation. Born in Poland sometime between 1880 and 1885, she came to the United States with her family in the early 1890s. Her father is usually described as a traditional scholar too otherworldly to make a living but not too distant to rule over his family despotically. Anzia frequently fought with him, and he often appears in her stories as a misogynistic petty tyrant. Yezierska attended public schools, worked at a variety of menial jobs, and gained a degree in home economics from Teachers College of Columbia University. She taught in the public schools but disliked both the profession and her subject. Charismatic, vivacious, and beautiful, with “thick red hair, prominent blue eyes, and a creamy complexion,” she briefly aspired to a stage career. In 1915, Forum published her first story, “Free Vacation House,” which describes the disappointment and humiliation of a poor Jewish immigrant woman faced with the condescension of charitable do-gooders. The attraction of the young, Jewish, female protagonist

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to an Anglo-Protestant intellectual mentor/lover is a recurrent theme in her work, though any such liaison is usually stymied by racial and cultural differences. In real life, Yezierska was already a published author when she met the philosopher John Dewey, “the love of her life.” Their relationship, though intense, apparently remained platonic and ended after about a year.49 Yezierska’s stories often depict the tortured ambivalence of the heroine, longing to escape a suffocating Jewish culture but feeling alienated from mainstream America. Her story “Fat of the Land,” about the loneliness of an immigrant woman supported by her successful American children, won the 1919 Edward J. O’Brien Award for best short story of the year. The following year, her collection of stories Hungry Hearts appeared to generally positive reviews but little commercial success. Still, Samuel Goldwyn not only bought the movie rights for Hungry Hearts but also brought Yezierska to Hollywood to help write the screenplay. Repelled by the crass commercialism and mercenary attitudes of the writers in Hollywood, she soon returned to New York. After some continued success in the 1920s, her fame faded, until women’s historians rediscovered her in the 1970s.50 Jews also influenced New York’s mainstream English-language press as it emerged into the twentieth century. A look at three different newspapers — the New York World, the New York Times, and the Commercial Advertiser — illustrates how varied that influence was. Joseph Pulitzer was a thirty-six-year-old immigrant from Hungary with a background in German-language journalism in St. Louis when he purchased the flagging New York World in 1883. With the World, Pulitzer helped to revolutionize American journalism. The newspaper introduced banner headlines, pictures, color cartoons, and a sports page. Pulitzer wanted punchy language, ran more human-interest stories, and focused his newspaper’s attention on the details of violence, scandals, and executions. While it is not even clear whether Pulitzer knew that both his parents were Jews, his adversaries sometimes added a dose of anti-Semitism to their critiques of his journalism, and his immigrant background colored the World ’s populist approach. With sympathetic writing about the working class and immigrants, the paper played to ethnic tastes and prejudices. By appealing to the first- and second-generation Irish, Germans, and Jews who made up a majority of New York’s population, Pulitzer raised his newspaper’s daily circulation from 15,000 to 450,000 by 1895.51

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Adolph Ochs had a different Jewish background and path to journalistic success. Born in Cincinnati to German-Jewish immigrant parents, Ochs moved with his family to Knoxville, Tennessee, in 1865. His father was a poor businessman, and Adolph was forced to leave school to help support the family. He entered journalism as a delivery boy and subsequently worked as a printer’s helper, business manager, and (briefly) reporter. By 1878, when he was only twenty years old, Ochs managed to acquire the Chattanooga Times, turning it into a respected local newspaper. He married Effie Miriam Wise, the daughter of Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise, the leading figure in American Reform Judaism, and remained an active Reform Jew the rest of his life. In 1896, Ochs took over the ailing New York Times, with a circulation of just nine thousand and on the brink of bankruptcy. Realizing the futility of competing with Pulitzer’s World and William Randolph Hearst’s Journal on their own terms, Ochs decided to rebuild the Times as a “high-standard newspaper, clean, dignified and trustworthy” for “thoughtful, pure-minded people.” The following year, he introduced the Times’s now famous motto, “All the news that’s fit to print.” Conservative and stodgy, serving the educated upper-middle and upper classes, the Times kept a studied distance from the urban crucible in the working-class immigrant neighborhoods. Nevertheless, under Ochs, it established itself as the standard for honest, objective reporting, the “newspaper of record.” Jewish critics complained that Ochs failed to take strong and open stands on Jewish issues. Indeed, the Times carefully avoided taking any stands that would call attention to itself as a Jewish-owned newspaper, refusing, for example, to editorialize in favor of the French Jewish officer Alfred Dreyfus, whose unjust conviction for treason became an international cause célèbre in the late 1890s. The one exception came during the Leo Frank case in 1913 – 1915. Frank, the Brooklyn-bred co-owner and manager of an Atlanta, Georgia, pencil factory, stood accused of murdering Mary Phagan, a teenage employee. Frank was the president of the local B’nai B’rith chapter, and his arrest and conviction shook southern Jews especially profoundly. Perhaps because of Ochs’s own southern roots, he took a personal interest in the case, and the Times printed dozens of articles that pointed toward Frank’s innocence and the blatant unfairness of the proceedings against him. Ochs went so far as to try to persuade southern newspapers to reprint Times editorials, one of which concluded that the trial had been “about everything a murder

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trial ought not to be.” Frank’s eventual lynching, and the callous response from southern journalists, disturbed Ochs deeply. He reacted by further distancing the Times from subsequent Jewish causes.52 Meanwhile, a third newspaper with Jewish influence, the Commercial Advertiser, provided an intelligent alternative to both the yellow sensationalism of Pulitzer and Hearst and the stuffy high-mindedness of the Times. Under the leadership of the non-Jewish Californian Lincoln Steffens, who became city editor in 1897, the Commercial Advertiser strove to bridge the gap between the immigrant working class and the educated middle class. Steffens attracted a coterie of Ivy League graduates with aspirations toward serious writing. They reveled in the “hard, beautiful city” and saw its foreign quarters as the main crucibles of a cosmopolitan urban future. The Commercial Advertiser’s reporters penned detailed and sympathetic accounts of immigrant life in an effort to reach the hearts and minds of their educated readers.53 Their chief guide in this undertaking was Abraham Cahan, the erstwhile and future Yiddish journalist, who joined the staff of the Advertiser shortly after Steffens took over. Cahan contributed stories himself, showed his colleagues around the Lower East Side, and in the Commercial Advertiser newsroom assumed the role of lecturer, educating the Americans on Russian literary realism and Socialist theory. When Steffens left the Commercial Advertiser in 1901, Cahan followed, returning to his perch at the Forward, to which he brought his experiences in English-language “new journalism.”54

■ The Visual Arts A Jewish presence in the visual arts emerged closely tied to the literary scenes in both Greenwich Village and the Lower East Side. Only a handful of American Jews rose to prominence in the visual arts in the nineteenth century (one of them was Jacob Hart Lazarus, Emma’s uncle), but at the beginning of the twentieth, a generation of Jewish painters and sculptors helped to revolutionize American art. Most were either immigrants from eastern Europe or children of immigrants. Their experiences as newcomers and their relationship with the diverse, turbulent city informed their art, leading them away from academic tradition toward modernism in style and subject matter. They found an openness in New York’s art scene. Despite complaints of antimodernist and anti-Semitic critics such as Royal Cortissoz of the New York Herald-Tribune, who decried “Ellis Island art,”55 Jewish artists received support from a number

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of established artists, critics, gallery owners, and teachers who shared their aesthetic sensibilities and interest in urban themes. Some of those mentors were not Jewish, such as Robert Henri and Henry McBride; others, such as Alfred Stieglitz, were second-generation German-Jewish Americans. New York native Jacob Epstein (1880 – 1959) achieved artistic acclaim, one of the earliest of this new wave of New York Jewish artists, though he did not stay in the city or a Jewish milieu for long. Hutchins Hapgood, whose sympathetic if romanticized portrait of the Jewish immigrant community Epstein illustrated, discovered Epstein in a shedlike room on top of a “pestiferous and dingy” staircase in “a tumble-down rickety building” at the corner of Hester and Forsyth Streets. The artist told Hapgood that he had tried for a time to paint country scenes but had difficulty: “It was only in the Ghetto . . . that I have ideas for sketches. . . . It is only the minds and souls of my people that fill me with the desire to work.” Although Hapgood extolled Epstein as one of a rising generation of vibrant “ghetto” artists, Epstein soon left for Paris and then London. There he became a sculptor of note, seldom touching on Jewish themes in his art or writing. He later recalled a reaction to his early environment quite at odds with what Hapgood had reported: “I saw a great deal of Jewish orthodox life, traditional and narrow. .  .  . As my thoughts were elsewhere, this did not greatly influence me.”56 Other New York Jews followed Epstein to Paris but then returned to influence American developments. Abraham Walkowitz, for example, traveled abroad in 1906 – 1907, and Max Weber did between 1905 and 1909. Walkowitz came back as what one art historian called the “first American modernist,” staging a one-man show at Julius Haas’s frame shop. Weber, a friend of di yunge who in Paris fell under the influence of Cezanne, Matisse, and Picasso, exhibited at Haas’s as well. Stieglitz — whom one hostile critic referred to as a “Hoboken Jew without knowledge of, or interest in, the historical American background” — was a pioneering modernist photographer. But he also played an especially important role in introducing European modernist currents to American audiences. At his Photo-Secession Gallery, known as 291, he exhibited Rodin drawings and Matisse paintings for the first time in the United States. He also championed young American modernists. The journal Seven Arts, edited by James Oppenheim, Paul Rosenfeld, Waldo Frank, and Van Wyck Brooks — the first three of German-Jewish origin — also promoted the new wave. Walkowitz and others were featured in both the 1913 International

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Exhibition of Modern Art — the famous “Armory Show” — and the 1916 Forum Exhibition of Modern American Painting, which highlighted American artists slighted at the Armory Show. That one-third of the organizing committee and nearly a quarter of the artists featured in the Forum show were Jews demonstrated their growing importance in the New York art scene.57 An eclectic combination of settlement houses, radical activists, and nonJewish art teachers nurtured immigrant Jewish artists. In 1892, the Educational Alliance, as part of its mission to Americanize immigrants and improve their “standards of taste,” inaugurated a series of annual exhibitions of pieces loaned from private collections. The tremendous response demonstrated a thirst for serious art among the immigrant population — in 1895, attendance topped 106,000 in just under five weeks. That year, the Alliance augmented the exhibitions with art classes. When artist and critic Henry McBride came to the school in 1898, he added life drawing, industrial design, and painting to the curriculum. But the Alliance suspended art classes in 1905, when an increase in the number of immigrants entering the country taxed its resources.58 The Anarchist Ferrer Center (also called the Modern School), founded in 1911, stood at the “nexus between radical politics and the artistic avant-garde,” as well as between Greenwich Village and the Lower East Side. Most of its teachers and leaders, including prominent Ashcan School members Robert Henri and George Bellows, were not Jewish. Most of the students were Jews. Under Bellows and Henri, instruction was antiacademic and included techniques such as “rapid sketching and the short pose,” intended to encourage freedom and discourage academic rigidity. Henri was a brilliant teacher. The artist Moses Soyer, a teenager when he attended Henri’s class, recalled that Henri’s critique of his work permanently altered his approach — and those of his brothers Raphael and Isaac, whom he told about his experience.59 Between 1915 and 1918, a related organization, the People’s Art Guild, strove to make art part of the lives of the working classes and to create a market for the work of member artists. Although the Guild held most of its sixty exhibitions at settlement houses, it strenuously objected to the settlement view of art as uplift. Rather than distance the masses from their daily lives, the Guild argued, art should empower workers by bringing them “into closer touch with their own circumstances.” The Guild was a Jewish organization, with its constitution printed in Yiddish as well as English, but it opened its activities to non-Jews as well. Its largest undertaking — a 1917 exhibition at the Forward

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Building — involved eighty-nine artists. Yiddish writer David Ignatoff remembered, “The crowds who came were so great that it became necessary to call the police to hold back the people who sought to push their way into the hall.”60 By the time of the Forward Building show, the Educational Alliance had reestablished its art school down the block. The new director was Abbo Ostrowsky, an immigrant from Russia who had studied at the National Academy of Design and taught previously at the University Settlement. Uninterested in avant-garde art, Ostrowsky had radical political leanings. According to artist Louis Lozowick, who taught at the Alliance, the art school fostered a “definite social orientation. [The student] is made to feel his identity with the community of which he is a product by drawing inspiration from its life, reflecting the peculiarities of its environment and embodying in permanent form its cultural heritage.” Although conceived as a “community art center,” the art school assumed a more professional character under Ostrowsky than it had under McBride. A number of prominent Jewish artists trained there, including Chaim Gross, Elias Newman, Philip Evergood, Ben Shahn, Leonard Baskin, Moses Soyer, Isaac Soyer, Jo Davidson, Dina Melicov, Leo Gottlieb, and Peter Blume.61

■ The Performing Arts By the time Bertha Kalich debuted on the English-language stage, Jews played an enormous role in the New York theater world. Nowhere was this more striking than in vaudeville, the popular form of variety show that featured a mix of singing, dancing, comedic and dramatic sketches, acrobatics and gymnastics, and animal acts, generally performed continuously and for a low price. By the twentieth century, the American vaudeville empire centered in New York’s Times Square, where the largest circuits had their offices and the most opulent theaters enticed audiences. In New York, other centers of vaudeville performance developed in the Bronx, at the “hub” around 149th Street; on Fulton Street and in Williamsburg and Coney Island in Brooklyn; on the Lower East Side; and in Queens and Staten Island.62 A cosmopolitan lot, vaudeville performers arose mainly from working-class backgrounds and ethnic minorities. If in the nineteenth century the Irish dominated, Jews became the most visible group in the early twentieth. Eddie Cantor, a son of the Jewish Lower East Side, typified the stars emerging out of vaudeville. Born in 1892 and orphaned at the age of two, Cantor

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flirted as a youth with a life of crime. He entered show business as a performer at weddings and bar mitzvahs but got his first break when he won an amateur contest at Miner’s Bowery Theater in 1908. Over the next few months, he toured the circuit, worked as a singing waiter in Coney Island, and sang at weddings. Then he signed on as a valet to one of the top jugglers in vaudeville, gradually working himself into the act. By 1917, he reached the big time, performing with Ziegfeld’s Follies.63 Sophie Tucker’s victory in an amateur contest launched her show-business career as well. Born in Russia in 1884, Tucker grew up in Hartford, Connecticut, where her parents ran a delicatessen and restaurant. Among the customers were some of the biggest names in the Yiddish theater as well as in vaudeville. Tucker impressed them with her singing, and when she decided to enter show business in New York, Jewish vaudevillian Willie Howard gave her a letter of recommendation to top songwriter Howard Von Tilzer. In 1907, she entered Chris Brown’s amateur night, where she made a hit singing in blackface. She soon became famous as “a world renowned coon singer.” Only after losing her makeup on tour did she jettison the façade and perform as who she was — a Jewish woman. Even without blackface, Tucker continued to be known for her bluesy style and risqué lyrics replete with double entendres. She sometimes sang in Yiddish dialect.64 By the 1910s, Jewish performers such as Tucker, as well as composers and lyricists such as Irving Berlin, saw themselves and were seen by others as having a special relationship to African American music. Adopting syncopated rhythms and slangy idioms, Jews played a leading role in injecting them into the mainstream of American popular music. But the relationship was not always free of exploitation. A propensity for singing in blackface was a disturbing aspect of the Jewish rise to success. White American performers had been “blacking up” and performing pseudo – African American music, with varying degrees of grotesquery, since at least the 1830s; Jews joined this wellestablished tradition, becoming premier blackface performers by the 1910s. In addition to Cantor and Tucker, Jewish performers George Burns and George Jessel painted their faces. But no one surpassed Al Jolson, whom Jessel called “a no-good son-of-a-bitch” but “the greatest entertainer” he had ever seen. Born in Russia and brought as a child to Washington, DC, where his father was a rabbi, Jolson retrieved blackface from low-class variety obscurity and returned it to big-time vaudeville, the legitimate stage, and eventually to the

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silver screen. Perhaps the most dynamic performer of his generation, Jolson made a career of portraying pseudo-black characters longing for the antebellum Southland and for “mammy.”65 The Shubert brothers — Sam, Lee, and J.J. (Jacob) — promoted Jolson from the vaudeville circuit to the “legitimate stage,” where unified casts presented plays with continuous story lines. Indeed the Shuberts, Polish-Jewish immigrants who had grown up in Syracuse and arrived in New York City around the turn of the century, became the most powerful theatrical producers of their day. To reach that position, they overcame their archrivals in the Theatrical Syndicate, a combination headed by the Jewish Abraham Lincoln Erlanger and the non-Jewish Marc Klaw, which monopolized bookings, and therefore ultimately production, of plays in theaters in and out of town. Erlanger and the Shuberts — along with Oscar Hammerstein, David Belasco, and the team of Joe Weber and Lew Fields — helped define Broadway for the twentieth century, in both drama and musical comedy. In the process, they built Times Square into the city’s premier popular entertainment center.66 Many of the songs for both vaudeville and the legitimate stage came from the new popular song industry based on West Twenty-Eighth Street and composed mainly of Jewish-owned firms. “Tin Pan Alley” got its start in 1886,

Considered by many people the foremost entertainer of his generation, Al Jolson also brought blackface from vaudeville to the legitimate stage and, eventually, to the silver screen. (Theater Collection, Museum of the City of New York)

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when the Jewish-owned printing company specializing in sheet music Witmark and Sons moved to Twenty-Eighth Street. It acquired its nickname from those who likened the disparate sounds emerging from the street’s brownstone studios to a cacophony of tin pans. One observer described the Tin Pan Alley songwriters as “a clever group of scoundrels that monopolize the lyric-writing game at present — all Jews.” He exaggerated, though Jews did play a disproportionate role. When asked to sum up the secret of Tin Pan Alley success, one of the “scoundrels,” Gus Kahn, answered, “Oh, that’s a cinch. ‘Mother,’ ‘Sweetheart,’ ‘Home,’ and ‘Yearning For You.’ All these simple heart tugs have infinite variations.” Some songs transcended the formula, becoming classics of American popular culture. Moreover, these themes transferred easily, and a side industry arose translating Tin Pan Alley hits into Yiddish or writing original Yiddish songs in a Tin Pan Alley style.67 The most important of the Jewish songwriters to emerge from Tin Pan Alley was Irving Berlin. Called the “Norman Rockwell of melody,” Berlin epitomizes the way in which New York Jewish songwriters reached well beyond the boundaries of their own ethnic and geographical origins. Berlin, of course, crafted such patriotic classics as “God Bless America” and such tinselly songs as “White Christmas” and “Easter Parade,” both of which portrayed essentially secular visions of their respective, traditionally Christian, holidays. He also wrote “coon songs” for blackface performers, drawing from African American sources (though he sometimes denied the real black influence on his music). But Berlin composed in all sorts of ethnic idioms as well, including Irish songs in brogue, Yiddish-accented Jewish songs, and Italian-themed lyrics. So pervasive was Berlin’s influence that his colleague Jerome Kern could plausibly claim that “Irving Berlin has no place in American music; he is american music.”68 Young people heard the new music in the numerous dance halls that dotted the city. By 1910, as social worker Belle Moskowitz noted, “The town [was] dance mad.” From the working-class immigrant districts of all ethnicities to the poshest precincts, young people flocked to venues ranging from small rented lofts and the backrooms of shady saloons to grand “dance palaces” in Midtown. But however large or small, fancy or plain, dance halls represented a loosening of Victorian morals and an arena for a new public culture of sexually charged freedom that became associated with New York and other large cities. Social dances performed to the syncopated rhythms of ragtime music

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encouraged close physical contact between the sexes. Since dance halls could be found in many neighborhoods, they became popular and convenient places for young people to meet, flirt, touch, and sometimes engage in more overt sexual activity.69 Young women exhibited particular enthusiasm for dancing. One young immigrant, Minnie Goldstein, later recalled the thrill of being singled out by the “professor” of a dance class: It always happened that the “professor” of the class . . . took me himself to dance with. Once, the “professor” said to me, “Minnie, we are having a ball in a large hall, and I am going to lead the march. Do you want to go with me?” I could not believe my ears. Such a handsome young man! Many girls considered it an honor when he said a word to them. And he was inviting me — of all people — to lead the march with him! .  .  . I felt so happy that I could not even think straight.70

It was the inability to “think straight” that concerned the guardians of morality, who feared that young women would be led astray by such “professors” or by ordinary young men who plied girls with drink. Immigrant lodges and societies sponsored balls that offered a more respectable venue for young people to meet and dance under the watchful eyes of parents, friends, and landslayt. Incidentally, these lodge balls provided employment to immigrant musicians capable of playing both traditional Jewish folk tunes and up-to-date American dances.71 While young people of all classes danced, those with more serious musical tastes attended the opera. Here, too, the careers of two impresarios — Heinrich Conried and Oscar Hammerstein — illustrate not only the important role that Jews played in the organization of a cultural enterprise but also links between immigrant and “mainstream,” popular and high culture. A native of Silesia, Conried was born in 1855, the son of a Jewish weaver. After beginning a career as an actor, theater director, and stage manager in Vienna and Bremen, he arrived in New York in 1878 to manage and act in the Germania Theatre. In 1893, Conried took over the Irving Place Theater and transformed it into the city’s leading German-language venue by introducing a more modern naturalistic style influenced by up-to-date trends in Germany. Finally, in 1903, he became director of the Metropolitan Opera, where he endeavored to improve the quality of productions. He brought Gustav Mahler from Europe to conduct the orchestra and produced the New York premieres of Wagner’s Parsifal

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and Strauss’s controversial Salome. He retired in ill health in 1908 and died the following year.72 At the time Conried retired, the Met was locked in battle with the rival Manhattan Opera Company, led by Hammerstein. Also a German immigrant, the colorful and energetic Hammerstein had been a cigar maker, inventor, real estate mogul, composer, playwright, builder of theaters, and theatrical producer before opening the Manhattan Opera in 1906. Hammerstein and Conried hated each other, an enmity apparently stemming from a brief association in the German-language theater. More than Conried, Hammerstein aimed to shake up the opera world by downplaying its association with high society; as he put it, “It is society in the broad sense that I hope to attract and please.” With an emphasis on modern works and aggressive marketing, the Manhattan Opera gave the Met a run for its money. In 1910, though, Met president Otto Kahn negotiated a merger of the two companies. Though the period of competition was brief, Hammerstein influenced the Met’s development over the long term, partly because Kahn sympathized with Hammerstein’s approach.73

■ The Movies In 1905, vaudeville and variety shows still used moving pictures merely to fill the time between acts. But within two or three years, movies became the main attraction themselves in dozens of “nickelodeons,” storefront theaters that charged five or ten cents for admission. Hundreds of thousands of people flocked to the movies each day, with Jews and other immigrants the prime audience for this new cheap and thrilling form of entertainment. Of the 123 nickelodeons that operated in Manhattan in 1908, nearly half were located on the Lower East Side or in Jewish East Harlem. The Forward reported, “When you go through the streets of our neighborhood you will be amazed by the mass of moving picture houses. Four or more ‘shows’ can be found on one street. In some streets, there are even two ‘shows’ on one block, facing each other.” The small theaters, each seating between two and three hundred, became neighborhood gathering places, with an informal atmosphere resembling that of the Yiddish theater, which encouraged socializing.74 Jewish entrepreneurs quickly stepped into the market. Adolph Zukor was a thirty-year-old immigrant from the Carpathian Mountains and a successful furrier when, with a partner, he opened an arcade on Fourteenth Street with kinetoscopes (very short peep-show films). He later operated conventional

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nickelodeons as well. Likewise, Marcus Loew, a native New Yorker who had grown up in an immigrant family in the heart of Kleindeutschland, opened his first nickelodeon in 1905. Three years later, he branched out into vaudeville and Brooklyn, and by 1911, Loew owned forty theaters throughout the city. William Fox, born in Hungary and brought to New York as an infant, had already experienced success in the garment industry when he began to renovate dilapidated theaters in Brooklyn. Zukor, Fox, Loew, and others changed the way movies were made and exhibited, pioneering the production of feature films and showing them in ever larger and more luxurious surroundings. As Zukor later put it, the “nickelodeon had to go, theaters replaced shooting galleries, temples replaced theaters, and cathedrals replaced temples.” As early as 1908, Fox’s thousand-seat Dewey Theater on Fourteenth Street offered programs of vaudeville and movies for as little as a nickel or a dime, all under the watchful eyes of reduniformed ushers. At the same time, Loew methodically expanded his chain, which at first showed a combination of vaudeville and movies, until it spread throughout the United States and Canada. Loew’s large, luxurious, and conveniently located theaters attracted respectable middle class families. In New York, they dotted the entire city, reaching into outer borough neighborhoods where their patrons increasingly lived.75 Zukor and German-Jewish immigrant Carl Laemmle also concluded that audiences would be more than willing to sit through longer movies, especially if drawn by the names of famous stars. Zukor first began importing features from Europe. Then he formed Famous Players Film Company together with the older Jewish American theatrical impresarios Daniel and Charles Frohman and David Belasco to produce their own films, releasing the tremendously successful Prisoner of Zenda in 1913. By 1916, Famous Players had merged with Jesse Lasky and Samuel Goldwyn’s successful company to create the Famous Players-Lasky Corporation, which in turn took over the distribution company Paramount Pictures Corporation. Enlisting the help of the Jewish Wall Street firm Kuhn Loeb to raise the capital to open a string of first-run movie palaces across the country, the company thereby combined production with marketing and distribution.76 As early as 1910, movie production began to shift to Hollywood. Although executive offices remained in New York for a time, by 1922, the city’s share of the industry dropped to only 12 percent. Still, New York remained an

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important factor in American film. Jews contributed to the American film industry’s early years, not only as producers and exhibitors but also as audience members. And the city proved a powerful presence in American movies, fully a third of which in the 1920s and ’30s featured New York as their setting. Moreover, Hollywood became a sort of colony of Jewish New York, broadcasting New York Jewish style throughout the nation.77 In the 1920s and ’30s, New York Jewry gradually edged away from its immigrant roots. The community’s German-speaking element had faded away almost entirely (to be revived on a smaller scale by refugees in the 1930s and after). The Yiddish sector shrank as well, although it retained some heft and much creativity through the interwar years. The modernists of the in zikh (introspectivist) group superseded di yunge as the vanguard of Yiddish poetry. And the brothers Israel Joshua and Isaac Bashevis Singer arrived to bolster Yiddish prose. The Yiddish art theater maintained high standards, attracting the admiration of critics from beyond the Yiddish-speaking world. But audiences peaked in this period and then declined. Although the Yiddish press continued to count its readers in the hundreds of thousands, it, too, peaked as early as 1916, as readers deserted to English-language newspapers. Yiddish culture was marginalized as its public contracted. Though American Jewish culture retained a Yiddish substratum, its future lay in English.78 Indeed, by the interwar period, the association of Jews with New York culture was so pervasive that for many Americans the two were nearly synonymous. Jewish influence existed on a number of levels: Yinglish slang fused with earlier Irish and German elements in New York speech; Jewish nervous energy contributed to the speed with which events seemed to move in New York compared to the rest of the country; Jews in the New York garment industry set the style for other Americans. Whether cultivated by the Jewish labor movement or the public schools, Jews formed much of the market for both popular and “high” culture: In the 1930s, Jews made up more than half the subscribers to the New York Philharmonic; in the 1960s, they constituted half of Broadway’s audiences.79 With Hollywood, and later radio and television, helping to broadcast Jews’ handiwork to the country and the world, they supplied much of the creative talent as well. A new generation of Jewish songwriters, composers, and performers arose in New York. George Gershwin, whose first hit, “Swanee,” sung

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by Jolson, appeared in 1919, contributed to show, jazz, and classical music. Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II, grandson of the impresario, collaborated on Showboat (based on a story by Edna Ferber), revolutionizing the Broadway musical in 1927. Showboat, along with George and Ira Gershwin’s musical Porgy and Bess, also helped shift Jewish artists’ relationship to African American culture away from blackface to a more respectful stance, even injecting explicitly antiracist themes into popular culture. The Jewish presence also grew in American classical music, literature, dance, and the visual arts.80 It was not that any of these fields lacked non-Jewish artists or even that there was anything identifiably “Judaic” about the contributions made by individual Jews. But as key players in the arts, New York Jews infused American culture with a range of expressions influenced by their own experiences as immigrants or children of immigrants in the nation’s largest, most cosmopolitan, and most multiethnic and multireligious city. As New York became the cultural capital of the United States (with Hollywood its colony), Jews thus brought their sensibilities to bear on American culture in powerful ways.

Raphael Soyer’s 1929 “East Side Street Scene” shows the remnants of the once bustling neighborhood. The Yiddish sign at the left announces “corner floor for rent.” As transportation lines and upward mobility propelled longtime Jewish residents to Brooklyn and the Bronx, new quota laws vastly reduced the number of newcomers flowing into the neighborhood, leading to its decline as a Jewish population center. (Courtesy of Joseph S. Lieber)

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Conclusion: The Jewish Metropolis at the End of the Immigrant Era

By 1920, New York’s Jews numbered over 1.6 million, making the city the greatest Jewish metropolis of all time.1 But New York Jewry’s growth had been fueled by a massive, nearly century-long wave of immigration that diminished suddenly to a trickle, at first temporarily when World War I obstructed paths of migration and then permanently as a result of two acts of Congress. The cessation of immigration led to the gradual transformation of New York’s Jewish community from one largely working class and immigrant in composition into one with an American-born, middle-class majority. As New York Jews entered the middle class, they developed a range of neighborhoods in Brooklyn and the Bronx, where they expressed their New York Jewish identity in increasingly diverse ways.

■ Closing the Golden Door In April 1924, Passover sermons in New York synagogues drew parallels not between the Pharaoh and the Tsar as they did on Ellis Island in 1906, but between Pharaoh’s oppressive policies and new immigration quotas that were gaining momentum in Congress. At Shearith Israel, the nation’s oldest synagogue, now located on Central Park West, Rabbi David de Sola Pool explained, “The opening chapters of Exodus give us the earliest examples of anti-alien legislation on record,” and then he warned, “While the measures which Pharaoh took were barbarous, the spirit of the Egypt of his day is not dead.” Dr. I. Mortimer Bloom, rabbi of the Hebrew Tabernacle of West 116th Street, was more direct:

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The immigration restriction bills are a denial and reversal of long-cherished American ideals and traditions, an affront to the memory of the founders of the Republic, a dagger thrust into the hearts of thousands of human beings who yearn for an opportunity to lead the normal decent life which their own lands deny them and a staggering blow to humanitarians everywhere. . . . Not as a Jew, not as one whose co-religionists happen to be seriously affected by the proposed legislation, but as an American steeped in the best traditions of his land, an American who craves for his country to be true to the high and holy mission for which she was called into being, do I cry against these discriminatory, heartless, un-American bills.2

As anti-immigrant sentiment peaked in the form of severely restrictive immigration laws, New York Jewish congressmen, rabbis, and communal leaders joined other New Yorkers to champion a pluralist vision of an American nation made richer by their own and other immigrants’ experiences. Though they failed, and Congress ultimately enacted anti-immigrant quotas, their fight speaks of their deep faith in the promise of inclusion and tolerance best fulfilled in New York City. Despite quotas and nativist sentiment, New York Jews continued to fashion American identities rooted in the city’s pluralist cosmopolitanism. The passage of immigration restriction marked the triumph of a nativist movement that had originally arisen in response to the growing European immigration of the 1830s and ’40s. The movement had waxed and waned over the decades but emerged from World War I much strengthened. In the atmosphere of supercharged patriotism during the war, German Americans (with whom Jews were sometimes still associated) came under attack, as did radicals who opposed American entry into the war and “hyphenated Americans” who were seen to have loyalties outside the borders of the United States. After the war, many Americans feared that immigrants would spread the revolutionary contagion sweeping Europe. During the “tribal ’twenties,” the reemergence of the Ku Klux Klan epitomized the reactionary, antimodern, antiurban, racist, and xenophobic mood of much of the country.3 In this atmosphere, an anti-Semitic strand of nativism flourished in certain respectable circles. Madison Grant, a patrician New Yorker and founder of the New York Zoological Society, expressed some of the racial anxieties of the times when he wrote, “The man of the old stock is being crowded out of many country districts by these foreigners, just as he is to-day being literally driven

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off the streets of New York City by the swarms of Polish Jews. These immigrants adopt the language of the native American; they wear his clothes; they steal his name; and they are beginning to take his women, but they seldom adopt his religion or understand his ideals.” In Brooklyn, a group of citizens published the Anti-Bolshevik, which described itself as “A Monthly Magazine Devoted to the Defense of American Institutions against the Jewish Bolshevist Doctrine of Morris Hillquit and Leon Trotsky,” two Jewish New Yorkers, as Trotsky had lived briefly in the Bronx. The most admired industrialist of the time, Henry Ford, further emphasized the political dangers posed by a secret, international Jewish cabal. Beginning in 1920, Ford’s Dearborn Independent began a campaign against Jewish influence. Distributed in the hundreds of thousands through his car dealerships throughout the country, it even reprinted an adaptation of the Tsarist forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.4 The main Jewish defense agency, the American Jewish Committee, was in a quandary about how to deal with this upsurge in anti-Jewish sentiment. It vociferously denied any Jewish link to Communism but hesitated over how to respond to Ford. Although anti-Semitic conspiracy theorists named the AJC’s chairman, Louis Marshall, as the chief Jewish conspirator in the United States, the organization ultimately maintained its standard low-key, reasoned approach. Appealing to “enlightened” public opinion, it commissioned and distributed several books and pamphlets rebutting the Protocols and highlighting Jewish contributions to American culture and Western civilization. It lobbied former and sitting presidents, with some success in enlisting their support. However, against Marshall’s advice, Jewish journalist Herman Bernstein sued Ford for libel after the Independent named him as its source for the Protocols. Based partly on a 1913 New York State group-libel statute drafted by Marshall, Bernstein’s suit went nowhere. But one by California attorney Aaron Sapiro, accused by Ford of dominating American agriculture on behalf of the Jewish conspiracy, forced the industrialist to retreat. Although the matter was settled out of court, Ford issued an apologetic statement in 1927 that had been written for him by Marshall.5 But by that time, much legislative damage had been done. Since 1875, Congress had been slowly adding categories to the kinds of people barred from entering the country. By the time of World War I, laws banned convicts, prostitutes, “idiots,” “lunatics,” contract laborers, polygamists, Anarchists, Chinese laborers, and people deemed likely to need public support. In 1917, Congress

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added illiterates to the list and created an “Asiatic barred zone” that effectively excluded almost all Asians. The Immigration Act of 1921, sponsored by Representative Albert Johnson of Washington, went further by setting an overall numerical limit of 350,000 immigrants each year. Johnson’s concern was not strictly quantitative, however. Afraid that the nation would be polluted by an influx of “abnormally twisted,” “unassimilable” Jews, “filthy, un-American and often dangerous in their habits,” Johnson also aimed to shape the flow qualitatively. His bill, passed overwhelmingly despite objections by Meyer London and other immigrant and Jewish representatives, established annual quotas for each country equaling 3 percent of the number of individuals from that country present in the United States in 1910.6 But when the 1921 law failed to stem immigration to the extent desired, Congress reexamined the issue in 1924. The new proposal, named again for Johnson and for Senator David A. Reed of Pennsylvania, cut national quotas to 2 percent of the number from a given country in the United States as of 1890. This was a blatant attempt to exclude southern and eastern Europeans, along with Asians, who were barred altogether. In the halls of Congress, where the bill’s proponents attacked its opponents as a “foreign bloc,” the representatives of immigrant districts put up a last-ditch defense. By this time, New York’s delegation included four Jewish members — Democrats Samuel Dickstein, Emanuel Celler, and Sol Bloom, and Republican Nathan Perlman. Significantly, Dickstein and Perlman were foreign-born, while Bloom was the son and Celler the grandson of immigrants. Much of the debate centered on the effects that the bill’s anti-Asian provisions would have on U.S.-Japanese relations, but New York City’s Jewish congressmen joined with most of their New York colleagues, as well as Catholic and Jewish representatives from other states, to defend immigrant contributions and to criticize nativist bigotry. Notably, twenty out of twenty-two of New York State’s Democratic house members issued a public statement opposing the Johnson-Reed Act. But they failed to convince their fellow legislators; the bill passed both the House and Senate overwhelmingly.7 The nativist triumph after World War I overshadowed persistent alternative visions championed by many New York Jews. Some held on to their faith in the power of the melting pot to Americanize immigrants and their children. Some, such as Horace Kallen, an active Zionist and from 1919 a founding member of the faculty of the New School for Social Research, argued for a

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more radical notion of cultural pluralism, according to which America should be a nation of diverse ethnic groups that would maintain their distinctiveness. Kallen believed it impossible for an individual to shed his or her inborn ethnic identity. Columbia University anthropology professor Franz Boas, on the other hand, believed environment more important than birth in determining individual and group characteristics. Of Jewish origin, though uninvolved in the Jewish community, Boas attacked the racialist ideas that underpinned the new restrictive laws. But in the anxious times that followed the world war, Americans outside of places like New York were little inclined to heed these more inclusive visions of national identity.8 The new laws dramatically affected immigration in general and Jewish immigration in particular. The numbers of new arrivals plummeted, from over 800,000 altogether, including almost 120,000 Jews, in the year before the passage of the 1921 law, to slightly under 295,000 altogether and just over 10,000 Jews in the year after enactment of the Johnson-Reed Act.9 Without the massive influx that had characterized the previous century, New York Jewry began a slow transition from a Yiddish-speaking immigrant community (German had been largely jettisoned long before) to a native-born and English-speaking one. Of course, despite the sudden shift in the numbers entering the country, the community’s demographic transformation occurred gradually. Not only did a trickle of legal immigrants continue to arrive, but so did smaller numbers of illegals. A predominantly Jewish network of smugglers that until this time had focused its energies on helping migrants sneak out of Russia now turned its attention to enabling its clients to enter the United States, often through either Cuba or Canada. Minnie Kusnetz, one such illegal immigrant, paid $200 to be driven over the border from Canada. She left Montreal at eight one morning and arrived at her sister’s home in Brooklyn twenty-two hours later. New York thus remained a magnet for Jewish immigrants, as much now because of ties with family there as because of economic opportunity. Kusnetz, for example, had thrived in Canada for several years but longed to join her sisters in New York. A few years later, Kusnetz was informed on by a Jewish employer who resented her union activism. Held at Ellis Island for deportation, she enlisted the help of her fiancé and her brother-in-law, both citizens, who in turn hired a lawyer and contacted local politicians with whom they were acquainted. Their efforts helped her legalize her status. Kusnetz’s story

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thus illustrates not only the vulnerability of the undocumented immigrant but the degree to which Jews were integrated into the local power structure, even as they remained politically marginal nationally.10

■ From Chatham Square to Jewish Metropolis When Minnie Kusnetz crossed the border and arrived in New York City, her smuggler dropped her off, not on the Lower East Side but in Brooklyn, where her eldest sister lived.11 By that time, Jews had spilled over the edges of their original areas of settlement and lived throughout the city. Whereas mid-nineteenth-century New York Jews had found their niche in and around Chatham Square, in the Five Points neighborhood and Kleindeutschland, interwar-era New York Jews resided in a wide variety of neighborhoods in Manhattan, the Bronx, Brooklyn, and to a much lesser extent Queens. These Jewish neighborhoods included grimy tenement districts, blocks of wellappointed elevator apartment buildings, and leafy streets of single- and twofamily homes. Some housed poor Yiddish-speaking immigrants and their children, others a striving middle class, and still others those who had already made their way to the top. Just as these various and variegated Jewish quarters separated out by class, they took on different religious, political, and cultural attributes. The business streets in these neighborhoods marked them as integrally Jewish. As memoirist Ruth Gay recalled, “The neighborhoods of the Bronx and Brooklyn were lined with little shops minutely divided by specialization, each one just barely supporting a family by offering an indispensable service or selling necessary goods.”12 Delicatessens, “appetizing” stores, cafeterias, and Jewish bakeries catered to Jewish culinary tastes, doubled as local gathering places, and added an ethnic ambiance to the neighborhood. Candy stores — with newsstands and lunch counters — were ubiquitous in New York, usually run by Jews even in non-Jewish neighborhoods. They, too, served as meeting places, especially for young people. Brownsville, Williamsburg, and the East Bronx all had pushcart street markets as well, something that the residents of the Upper West Side and the Grand Concourse happily lacked. Synagogues, of course, clearly marked a district as Jewish. But the specific mix of Orthodox, Conservative, and Reform varieties differentiated Jewish areas from one another; in some sections, Jewish life revolved around the synagogues, and in others, they usually sat empty, while radical fraternal orders dominated the

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scene. The archipelago of neighborhoods in which Jews were segregated from non-Jews even more thoroughly than they had been in older areas of immigrant settlement thus constituted a kind of city within a city. By 1920, Manhattan had already begun to decline as the center of Jewish residential life, a process that continued in the 1920s before stalling in the Depression decade. (Most, though not all, of Manhattan’s overall demographic decline in the 1920s is attributable to the exodus of Jews.) In 1892, some 75 percent of the city’s Jews had lived on the Lower East Side. But by 1930, the old immigrant quarter’s share had fallen to one in twenty. In fact, Manhattan’s three hundred thousand Jews made up only a little over a quarter of New York’s Jewish population, and many of them lived uptown, on the Upper West Side, in Washington Heights, Yorkville, and, in diminishing numbers, Harlem. The Lower East Side remained the seat of much of the Yiddish-speaking sector’s communal and cultural life, but only the poorest of the city’s Jews resided there. The Upper West Side, whose cavernous streets were lined with elegant apartment buildings, epitomized the “opposite of the Lower East Side.” The city’s wealthiest Jewish community, it included prosperous manufacturers, professionals, and other businesspeople, with a median family income almost seven times that of the older area.13 Brooklyn and the Bronx succeeded Manhattan as centers of Jewish residence. Almost half the city’s Jews lived in Brooklyn, almost three times as many as in Manhattan. Brooklyn neighborhoods ran the gamut: Williamsburg, just over the bridge from the Lower East Side, and Brownsville continued to be inhabited by working-class immigrants and their children, the poorest Jews outside of Lower Manhattan. While Williamsburg gained a reputation as a bastion of Orthodoxy, Brownsville harbored a strong radical contingent. Meanwhile, Flatbush and Borough Park, their leafy streets lined with stately one- and two-family houses, and Eastern Parkway, its apartment buildings resembling those of the Upper West Side, attracted more Americanized businesspeople, professionals, and white-collar workers. Borough Park, especially, was a stronghold of Zionism. A typical path of social ascent might take a Jewish family from Brownsville to East Flatbush to Flatbush or Eastern Parkway.14 Similarly, in the Bronx, where Jews made up nearly half the population, an upwardly mobile family would move from east to west. In the largely workingclass but heterogeneous East Bronx, some areas were “duplications of the ghetto,” gritty industrial and tenement districts inhabited by Yiddish-speaking

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manual workers and their families. Irving Howe recalled that Fox Street symbolized for his parents the depths to which one might fall during the Great Depression. “At least we’re not on Fox Street,” his father would say philosophically during a crisis. Better-off workers occupied the blocks around Crotona Park, on the other hand, living in moderately priced modern apartment buildings with all the latest improvements. The East Bronx had a reputation for radicalism, the Workmen’s Circle and garment unions maintaining an active presence there. To the west lay the Grand Concourse, the Bronx’s “Fifth Avenue,” though in truth its white-collar residents were more middle class than wealthy, with average incomes lower than those of Brooklyn’s better neighborhoods. As bourgeois and American as the Concourse seemed, moreover, it was 75 percent Jewish, one of the most solidly Jewish neighborhoods outside of Brownsville.15 Some Jewish families traversed these neighborhoods as they climbed the socioeconomic ladder. Recall Mary Wasserzug, who arrived from Verbelov, Lithuania, in 1876 at the age of thirteen to join her father in the Chatham Square area. When Mary went to work, first as a domestic and then as a buttonhole maker, the family moved to slightly improved lodgings on East Broadway. Several years later, neighborhood networks connected her to Sam Natelson, a young man with a reputation as “a good businessman.” The couple moved to tenement rooms on the corner of Orchard Street and Rivington, and while Sam worked as a peddler, Mary kept three boarders. As they became more rooted in the city, they in turn helped other newcomers settle in by clothing them, finding them places to live, and getting them jobs. The Natelsons moved to Williamsburg, while Sam worked as a salesman for the Singer sewing machine company. When a cutters’ strike halted business, Mary compensated by taking in boarders. She then persuaded Sam to open an office, where they sold sewing machines, coal, insurance, and real estate. Noticing the arrival of new immigrants in need of assistance, Mary organized the Williamsburg Ladies Aid Society, which negotiated with landlords on behalf of tenants, made loans, and helped the unemployed find jobs. The business flourished, and the Natelsons eventually found their way to Borough Park. By the 1920s, their American born and educated children embarked on successful careers; their son, Nathan, ran a glass business, while all four daughters became public school teachers. One daughter, Rachel, became “swept up in Zionist activity under the leadership of Miss Szold, the founder of Hadassah.”

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As the family achieved stable middle-class status, it thus not only settled in appropriate neighborhoods but joined appropriate organizations.16 These neighborhoods gave their residents a sense of being at home within a broader city that often seemed remote, unwelcoming, inaccessible. As Alfred Kazin wrote of the second generation, “We were of the city, but somehow not in it. I saw New York as a foreign city. . . . New York was what we put last on our address, but first in thinking of the others around us. They were New York, the Gentiles, America.” Other children of immigrants echoed this sentiment, whether they were from Brownsville, like him, or from the East Bronx. Vivian Gornick recalled that Manhattan was like “Araby,” exotic and enticing. This sense of alienation from the city as a whole underlines the fact that Jews remained a minority of New York’s population at 29 percent.17 Wide swaths of the city — most of Queens and Staten Island and pockets of Manhattan, Brooklyn, and even the Bronx — remained the property of others, not just, or even primarily, of established Anglo-American Protestants but of the various Catholic ethnic groups who by this time together constituted the majority. The Lower East Side remained an island of familiarity. Though Kazin described Manhattan as “foreign,” he acknowledged that the East Side, at least, was part of his childhood. From an early age, he attended meetings with his father in the Jewish Daily Forward building. Later, when he had become separated from his class on a field trip to Manhattan, he decided to cross the Brooklyn Bridge alone. As he made his way through the crowds, shaken by the traffic and visual stimulation, he noted, “Only the electric sign of the Jewish Daily Forward, burning high over the tenements of the East Side, suddenly stilled the riot in my heart.” Though Ruth Gay grew up in the Bronx, she also recalled the Forward Building in the 1920s, “its name emblazoned in lights across the sky on East Broadway.” No longer the thriving residential neighborhood it had been a quarter century before, the broader Lower East Side still held many of the Jewish institutions — the Educational Alliance, a host of synagogues, and union halls — that had given the second generation’s parents a leg up. It also remained a center of Jewish commerce.18 Growing older, members of the American-raised generation began to feel impatient with their confining neighborhoods. Eager to claim the cosmopolitan opportunities offered by Manhattan, they discovered that these had been shaped in many ways by the cumulative impact of immigrant Jews. As Kazin

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and others became “walkers in the city,” they could see how generations of immigrant Jews had bequeathed to New Yorkers enduring patterns of association, labor, culture, politics, and religion. Moorish synagogues in Midtown spoke to the way Jewish houses of worship helped cultivate New York’s tolerance and cosmopolitanism; Macy’s and other department stores showed how Jews had shaped the city’s patterns of commerce and consumption; garment factories in the West Thirties attested to the maturity of the industry; rallies in Union Square pointed to the enduring strength of radical and labor movements. Despite Jewish New Yorkers’ feeling that their neighborhoods stood somehow apart from the city as a whole, New York had already become in some senses a “Jewish city.” At nearly a third of the population, Jews were New York’s largest single ethnic group, and they profoundly influenced the city’s culture, politics, and economy. Of course, the city shaped them as well. This was especially true of the second generation, those born or raised in New York, who in the 1920s came into their own as the dominant segment of the community. Jewish immigrants had laid the foundation for the Jewish metropolis. Their American-born children and grandchildren built on that groundwork for the remainder of the twentieth century.

VI SUAL

ES SAY

An Introduction to the Visual and Material Culture of New York City Jews, 1840 – 1920 DIAN A

L.

LINDEN

What can a mass-produced postcard tell us about New York City Jewish life? In the late nineteenth century, concurrent with the great exodus of eastern European Jews to the United States, postcard designers and printers created a niche market targeting Jewish consumers, in particular women, offering a range of illustrated cards for Jewish holidays and life-cycle events. Many of the cards pictured Jewish women, except for scenes set in synagogues. These cards brought Jewish women into “the visual universe of Jewish experience,” writes historian Ellen Smith.1 Women purchased the cards and exchanged them with friends and family, both in America and back in Europe. The cards illustrated Jews — both women and men — of all ages engaged in observing holy days and using modern inventions (including ocean liners and telephones) that bridge distances and create a transnational Jewish world. Communication by postcard with “A Happy New Year” written in Hebrew and English across the front image permitted Jews on either side of the ocean to send inspirational pictures and words of good cheer in observance of their common holidays. In the postcard on the following page, at left, we see confident New York Jews who had previously made the voyage to America. The men and women wear fine, brightly colored outfits and lack any obvious religious garments or objects, and though they wear hats, some of the men are clean shaven, a sign of their modern Orthodox Jewish practice. The American Jews extend their arms to the eastern European Jews to welcome them. Perhaps, also, they intend to grasp their hands to pull these “greenhorns,” whose arms hang limply at their

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“A Happy New Year,” New Year’s postcard, c. 1900. (Alfred & Elizabeth Bendiner Collection, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC)

sides, into the modern world. Holding bundled parcels of their few belongings, wearing weathered hats or scarves, with rounded shoulders and faces cast slightly toward the ground, the newcomers express stasis rather than motion. These picturesque holiday cards provide clues into the lives of New York City Jews and how they represented themselves to other Jews. The images on the front of the cards — pleasing, fanciful, and picturesque — are equal in value, despite their mass production, to the handwritten notes on their backs. If we read the cards and images literally, all was well for Jews in New York. Postcards,

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greeting cards, and the like allowed Jewish purchasers to choose how they would be represented. Such mass-produced cards satisfied the group’s desire to be seen at its best: without stereotypes, looking healthy and fashionable, aware of holidays and traditions, and making good in the United States. The picture postcard was often prettier than the lives Jewish consumers actually lived, and in a manner served as a note of self-congratulation on their new lives. Newly arrived New York Jews faced myriad challenges but did not passively accept the status quo. They formed and participated in labor unions, social clubs uninflected by anti-Semitism, and Jewish-focused charities as they strove to maintain their community and heritage while controlling their representation to the larger social world. These nascent New Yorkers published newspapers in Yiddish and Ladino for their own communities. They fought to reform American capitalism with the theories and direct action of Socialism and Communism. These efforts at building an institutional Jewish culture in New York did not occur in a vacuum. Americans have been shaped by different levels of social, political, and economic institutions. From the moment that Jewish newcomers — and all other New York – bound immigrants — landed at either Castle Garden or Ellis Island, they were scrutinized by health officials, evaluated to see if they could read, and assessed for their possible employability before traveling to the tenements of Brownsville, Brooklyn, and the Lower East Side. Such street names as Orchard and Cherry must have sounded lush and idyllic to the immigrants — until they arrived at their new homes. The process of Americanization, at times heavy-handed, included mandatory lessons in patriotism for public school children accompanied by saluting the American flag. Working classes and immigrants were often unable to maintain either privacy or respect for the independence of their family units. Social workers, reporters, medical professionals, teachers, and politicians freely entered tenement apartments in order to help and instruct newcomers on correct American household practices. Along with lessons on citizenship and English, public school teachers taught immigrant children about the proper way to brush teeth, dress, and decorate one’s home. While many of these lessons improved the health and welfare of the poor, they were often instilled without regard for cultural and religious traditions. As both established Jews and “greenhorns” strove to become Americans, they worked to accommodate themselves to American social standards.

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Christian merchants often closed their stores on Sunday in observance of their Sabbath, for example, but remained open on the Jewish Sabbath. This posed a quandary for Jewish workers. These social norms shaped Jewish aspirations for their new lives in New York. Often these new Jewish Americans, especially the younger generation, picked up American cultural norms without much coaxing. They clambered onto subway cars to escape the summer heat at Coney Island’s beach and amusement park and became avid fans of American sports; men excelled in boxing and basketball. Women heightened their skirt lengths to just above the ankle and became their own political advocates by joining unions. New York’s Jews took pains — as shown in the postcard — to represent themselves in particular ways, showing off in many cases their new American identities. The objects and images that follow offer a visual travelogue of tradition and change, cooperation and conflict, promises fulfilled and broken, as New York’s Jewish immigrants refashioned themselves into Americans. They invite close examination of details that enhance our understanding of Jewish New York City during the era of mass immigration. In this key period in the growth of New York as a “Jewish” city, the institutions Jews developed, the reforms they were subjected to and sometimes contested, and the caricatures they battled against all worked together to forge a new Jewish American identity and helped to establish New York as the capital of the Jewish world. Thousands of German Jews traveled to the United States between 1840 and 1860, driven by political, economic, and social instability in Germany.2 German Jews left behind or sold most of their worldly goods, sometimes in order to afford the price of their passage. Many brought small personal items such as the miniature book of prayers shown on the facing page. Its cover, written in Hebrew, German, and Yiddish, states, “especially for travelers by sea to the state of America.” Upon arrival to New York, many Jewish immigrants struggled to uphold religious traditions and sought out other German Jews for mutual support and familiarity. Small and personal sized, this prayer book traveled easily from Germany to America, providing spiritual and religious continuity in a new land. It helped Jewish immigrants to find their way as they sought to build an urban community in New York. Artist Samuel B. Waugh’s The Mirror of Italy, an approximately eighthundred-foot-long survey of the Grand European Tour, belongs to the era of mass German-Jewish migration. The Bay and Harbor of New York (c. 1853 – 1855)

Top: Tefilah mi-kol ha-shanah: Minhah Ketanah (Prayers of the Entire Year, Minor Offering) (Fürth, Germany: Zurndoffer & Sommer, 1842). (Library of Congress, Washington, DC) Bottom: Samuel B. Waugh, The Bay and Harbor of New York, c. 1853 – 1855, watercolor on canvas. (Gift of Mrs. Robert M. Littlejohn, Museum of the City of New York, New York)

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was the final canvas in Waugh’s fifty-scene panorama. Waugh painted the lower left part of the canvas with dark tones to contrast with the foreground at right, which is brightened by sunlight, drawing attention to the wealthy passengers disembarking who will next journey to their well-appointed homes. But there were others who disembarked from the same ship, including Jews, Lutherans, and Catholics from Germany, as well as Irish immigrants, whose immediate futures were uncertain.3 The most pronounced ethnic stereotypes Waugh reserved for the newly arrived Irish farm boys, shown in the lower right with apelike faces. As each immigrant group entered American society, it was subjected to a visual hazing by being rendered as the new subject of caricature.4 Waugh differentiates between social classes and nationalities through the use of light and color, the comportment of individuals’ bodies, and the condition of their possessions. America offered its promises to both working class and well-to-do, but Jews figured more prominently in the former category. They faced the challenge of moving from the darkness in which Waugh paints them to a light of their own making. Alfred Stieglitz later credited The Steerage as his first modernist photograph and added, if all his work were lost except for The Steerage to represent his career, “I’d be satisfied.”5 In recalling the making of the work in 1942, the German-Jewish photographer stated that at his wife Emily’s insistence, the couple, their baby, and their nanny traveled to Paris on a luxury ocean liner. Bored by the nouveaux riche of the first class, he wandered down to the steerage class, where he seems to have noticed the poor for the first time.6 While Stieglitz and his family enjoyed a pleasure trip, they shared the ship with men and women being repatriated after being turned away from Ellis Island. The title The Steerage suggests a historical narrative of the hardships and conditions under which immigrants journeyed to America. Often, the photograph is reproduced in American history textbooks to represent the history of immigration, but this photograph is not a celebration of American immigration. But in truth, the journeys taken by those in steerage and by the Stieglitz family differed enormously. Stieglitz possessed education and wealth that allowed him to create a new modern New York photographic aesthetic; it took several more decades before those Jews who came as newcomers from eastern Europe succeeded in picturing New York on their own.

Alfred Stieglitz, The Steerage, 1907, photogravure. (Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, New York)

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Frederic Auguste Bartholdi, Arm of the Statue of Liberty, 1876, photo, Centennial Exhibition, Philadelphia. (The Granger Collection, New York)

The monumental uplifted hand of the Statue of Liberty is that of a woman, but neither her ethnic heritage nor her cultural roots are apparent. In nineteenth-century America, the artistic vocabulary of the neoclassical was understood as white, European. Yet the poetry of Emma Lazarus, a New York Sephardic Jew descended from one of the oldest Jewish families in America, bonded the monument to American Jewish history. Frederic Auguste Bartholdi intended his sculpture as a gift to America from the people of France to commemorate the enduring friendship of the two countries, as well as France’s participation in America’s War for Independence.7 Bartholdi never intended his statue either to celebrate American immigration or to serve as a welcoming figure to America. Lazarus recast the Statue of Liberty’s meaning in a way that endures today. In order to raise funds to build a pedestal and to place the monument in New York Harbor facing out to seaward, a planning committee approached her to write a sonnet. Lazarus wrote her fourteen-line “The New Colossus” in November 1883. Her words, affixed to the statue’s base in 1903, transformed the Statue of Liberty into a welcome to “the wretched refuse” to America’s “golden

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door.” Despite the sculptor’s intentions, Lazarus’s words articulated the statue’s message. It became a beacon for people seeking self-determination and a new life in America as well as a New York City icon. Let your eye travel the length of this smooth wooden buttonhook that ends with a steel loop, cold to the touch. Immigrants dreaded the “buttonhook men,” as they called the Ellis Island health inspectors who controlled whether they could remain in this promised land. With one deft move, inspectors would slide the metal tip just under the eyelid and with a quick yank flip the eyelid back on itself to check for inflammation. Red swelling indicated trachoma, a highly infectious disease that causes blindness. The use of a buttonhook as a medical device reveals both the haste and misinformation guiding immigration officials, who readily saw “foreign bodies” (immigrants) as the carriers of “foreign bodies” (bacteria and viruses). Jews were blamed for cholera, tuberculosis (known as “the Jew’s disease” or “the tailor’s disease”), and trachoma.8 If trachoma was suspected, the agent would chalk a “CT” on the immigrant’s outer garments. Eastern European Jews nicknamed Ellis Island Trernindzl, or the “Isle of Tears,” to express the strong emotions they felt upon arrival. Suspicion of trachoma resulted in the greatest number of exclusions to entry. If diagnosed with trachoma, an immigrant would spend six months in the trachoma ward on Ellis Island before being repatriated to his or her port of origin, dashing his or her hopes for starting a new, freer life in America. Although Jews traveled to New York’s Ellis Island determined to start life anew, they encountered demands of medical officers whose views reflected stereotypes. These challenges required Jews

Buttonhook designed to fasten shoes, late nineteenth to early twentieth centuries, wood and metal. (Collection of Carol Hamoy, New York; courtesy of Carol Hamoy)

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Carol Hamoy, Welcome to America: An Installation Documenting Jewish Women’s Immigration to America, 1996, mixed media, Ellis Island Immigration Museum, New York. (Courtesy of the artist)

to respond to Americans’ perceptions even as they fashioned new images of themselves as American Jews.9 Contemporary artist Carol Hamoy’s installation Welcome to America (1996) weaves together two strands of American Jewish history: immigration and the garment industry. As had many of the new immigrants, Hamoy’s family labored in the needle trades, and as a young girl she played with buttons, lace remnants, and scraps of textiles rich in pattern and texture.10 In 1996, the Ellis Island Immigration Museum invited Hamoy to participate in an art exhibition on Jewish women’s immigration. Hamoy chronicled and celebrated just some of the thousands of Jewish women who made New York their new home and found themselves among the working class in New York’s garment center. Hamoy has represented these women’s stories and journeys posthumously, bringing back to public attention how women experienced Ellis Island and immigration. Those stories, shaped equally by poverty and aspiration, differed from men’s in terms of emotion, financial self-determination, marital status,

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and motherhood. They let us feel and imagine what it might have been to be a young working-class Jewish immigrant woman entering an utterly new world of experience. Hamoy studied archival documents and oral histories of immigrants to inform her work and carefully crafted garments onto which she affixed gilded text documenting each émigré’s personal story. In total, she constructed thirty dresses from fragments of aged lace, flimsy gauze, antique wedding dresses, and table scarves, all considered feminine objects. When walking through the installation, a viewer’s slightest movements would stir up air currents, animating the dresses as if reawakening spirits from the past. For young immigrant Americans, a jaunty escape from the stifling slums to the ocean breezes, wide beaches, and ocean waves of Coney Island with its amusement parks meant a day of freedom and delight. The first sight of the Statue of Liberty was a cherished memory recalled over the years by immigrants, reaching mythic status with each retelling. But immigrants arriving at Coney Island first spied a monumental elephant, from 1885 until 1896, when it burned to the ground. The Colossus of Coney (following page), a gigantic fabricated pachyderm, was a 122-foot-tall seven-floor hotel and brothel that featured thirty-one body-part-themed guest rooms including the Stomach Room and the Shoulder Room. While the Statue of Liberty stood for political freedom, Coney Island and its jumbo elephant expressed personal freedom and a sense of selfdetermination. Coney Island offered an escape from oppressive factories and crowded tenements and also from traditional sexual and social mores, which the older, more traditional generation struggled to maintain.11 On the beach and cuddled together in swan boats, young Jewish Americans could flirt with whomever they fancied, dance with bodies pressed close together, frolic in the ocean waves, and steal kisses on amusement rides. Some German Jews who had arrived at Castle Garden in the midnineteenth century went on to become prestigious, wealthy New Yorkers. Still, the doors of the city’s posh Metropolitan Club and other men’s clubs remained tightly closed to Jews despite their deep pockets. In 1852, six German Jews established their own club, which they called the Harmonie Club (page 267).12 Inside, members reveled in their German heritage, hosting boisterous communal singing and declamatory contests in German, the club’s official language. By the century’s end, such members as financer Joseph Seligman and

James V. Lafferty, The Colossus of Coney, 1885 – 1896, wood and tin covering, 122 feet high, located on Surf Avenue, Coney Island, Brooklyn, New York. (Courtesy of Charles Denson, www.coneyislandhistory.org)

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Harmonie Club, established 1852, postcard of the new Dining Room, 10 East Sixtieth Street, designed by architect Stanford White, 1906. (Picture Collection, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations, New York Public Library, New York)

the Lehman brothers felt it time to bring the building in line with the style preferred by high society. The club members awarded the commission to the premier architectural firm of the Gilded Age, McKim, Mead & White, whose patrons included Vanderbilts and Whitneys. In a 1906 article about the new Harmonie Club, architectural critic Herbert D. Croly crowed, “No firm of architects in this country has had anything like the experience which McKim, Mead & White have had in designing club houses.”13 White’s interpretation of an Italian palazzo fit for a Medici was lavishly decorated throughout with neoclassical details, such as here in the dining hall. Located at 4 East Sixtieth Street, uptown German Jews distanced themselves by geographic location, class, and money from the newly arriving immigrants on the Lower East Side and sought to represent themselves as firmly belonging among the city’s elite.

Top: George Wesley Bellows, Forty-Two Kids, 1907, oil on canvas. (Museum purchase, William A. Clark fund, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC) Bottom: Purim Association Fancy Dress Ball, March 15, 1881. (American Jewish Historical Society, New York, NY, and Newton Centre, MA)

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Forty-two boys, or “kids,” swim in the dirty waters of the East River to escape the stifling heat of ill-ventilated tenement apartments. Where are their parents? Where are their clothes?! Under the dark cover of night at the city’s edge, the boys use a modified dog paddle as their stroke to push floating garbage out of their way.14 George Bellows’s brushy, rough application of paint marked the boys’ social class onto their bodies, which are nude and scrawny. Bellows did not record any of the forty-two boys’ names, but the painterly manner in which he depicted them and what he titled the canvas suggest that none of the boys bore the last name of Morgan, Frick, or Stuyvesant. The term “kid” was popularized by the cartoon Hogan’s Alley, whose protagonist was “The Yellow Kid,” a slum-dwelling hooligan.15 Bellows’s depiction of city boys diving off splintered piers and reveling in their freedom, coupled with his bravura, painterly style, appalled several New York art critics. One caustically appraised Bellows’s canvas, asserting that “most of the boys look more like maggots than humans.”16 Yet while many other critics employed similar derisive words that denigrated poor immigrants, the boys themselves are clearly enjoying their escape from their families’ and society’s scrutiny as they take control of their own physical comfort and social life. In 1861, at the start of the Civil War, ten “jovial Hebrew young men,” all bachelor sons of Harmonie Club members, formed the Purim Association. Over the decades, the annual ball, such as the one held in 1881, became the highlight of the Jewish social calendar.17 The men designed their Purim Masquerades and Fancy Dress Balls as fund-raisers for Jewish charities, rather than simply youthful bacchanals of dance and drink. Seated at center, Queen Esther directs the proceedings with masked revelers at her side. She raises her richly decorated arm with golden bracelets in the classic “orator’s pose,” as if to announce the evening’s start. Just below the Queen, in the shadows, are plainly dressed children in need of charity. The Punchinello and Esther drop coins their way, and at the composition’s left, a girl lifts her skirt to form a basket to catch them. Uptown Jews envisioned the Purim Association’s charitable dances as a retort to those who criticized Jewish “extravagance and propriety in public amusement.” Myer S. Isaacs, whose father edited the Jewish Messenger, cautioned that the Purim Ball must proceed in a “refined way that should fittingly represent the social side of Judaism.”18 Despite America’s freedoms, New York Jews remained conscious of their minority position in

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society as they negotiated the tricky terrain of proper American Jewish forms of socializing. “Doing the Slums: A Scene in the Five Points” offers a visual commentary on the dramatic social and economic differences that distinguished residents of the Five Points in Lower Manhattan from a group of upper-class New Yorkers partaking in a leisurely “slumming” tour.19 Small stifling apartments forced immigrant families to live some of their private lives on their doorsteps and out on sidewalks, where voyeuristic uptown women and men were free to observe and pass judgment. Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper permitted thousands of Americans to become armchair tourists, to observe the poor without leaving their parlors. While the wealthy voyeurs were able to enter the neighborhoods of the poor, here accompanied by a policeman, it is doubtful that residents of the Five Points were free to promenade Upper Fifth Avenue. One of the most frequently reproduced photographs by social reformer Jacob Riis is of a Jewish cobbler preparing for the Sabbath in his Ludlow Street coal cellar. The picture has carried different titles over the years. Some focus on the man’s poverty, while others highlight his religious observance in a most inhospitable setting; and occasionally his trade as a cobbler is mentioned. Over the decades, the photograph has been cropped, or edited, proving how malleable “realistic” photographs can be.20 In uncropped versions of this photograph, a second person stands next to the seated man, neutralizing the overwhelming sense of loneliness that Riis wanted to convey. Aided by an assistant, Riis would burst into tenement apartments, shocking his subjects by shooting off a magnesium flash explosion. In a manner, Riis held people’s public presentation hostage, denying them the right to control their own representation or even the publication of their photograph. Riis reproduced this photo for the first time on page 6 of an eight-page special Christmas edition of William Randolph Hearst’s The Journal, on December 22, 1895,21 in a photo essay entitled “Where Santa Will Not Go.” When the fa c i n g pa g e : Top: “Doing the Slums: A Scene in the Five Points from a Sketch by a Staff Artist,” Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, December 5, 1885, 243. (Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC) Bottom: Jacob Riis, “Where the Sound of Church Bells Never Goes,” c. 1890, from “Where Santa Will Not Go,” The Journal: Christmas Edition, December 22, 1895, 6. (Jacob A. Riis Collection, Museum of the City of New York, New York)

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photograph was first reproduced, it was titled “Where the Sound of Church Bells Never Goes” and bore the legend “especially for the Journal.” The Christmas edition totaled forty pages in all, so almost one-fourth of the newspaper presented Riis’s views on those who were excluded from the joys of the Christian holiday. All of the people Riis photographed for this piece, with the exception of the Jewish cobbler, were denied the visit of Santa because of poverty or immoral behavior. Bearing the original title highlighting the man’s exclusion from joyous church bells, and focusing only on his image, it is possible that conveying a sense of social isolation due to his Jewishness, rather than loneliness, might have motivated the highly moralist Riis. In contrast to those who lived in the Five Points or to Riis’s subjects, Jewish Freemason Levi Isaacs controlled how he was visually represented, by whom, and for what benefit. A portrait serves both to depict an individual and also to inscribe social identity. A commissioned portrait was a commodity, a luxury good whose patronage itself announced status.22 Isaacs, who had recently been appointed as Lodge Master and was also a sexton of congregation Shearith Israel, placed his body a bit on an angle in relation to the camera lens, making his ring, his lapel badge, and the symbolic Masonic apron across his lap easier to view. Calm and composed, Isaacs insists that we look at him, that we admire his accomplishments, and that we recognize him as an important man.

Levi Isaacs in Freemason Regalia, photograph, c. 1895. (American Jewish Historical Society, New York, NY, and Newton Centre, MA)

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Bakers and the Big Loaf, New York City, photograph, May 1, 1909. (George Gratham Bain Collection, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC)

Over the course of the nineteenth century, New York Jews circulated and participated in organizations, many of which were not specific to Jews.23 American Jewish men saw Freemasonry as “a means for social integration and an ideological system sympathetic to and derived from traditional Judaism,” writes Alice M. Greenwald.24 A family man, a businessman, a sexton at his synagogue, and leader in his Masonic lodge, Isaac took control of his multifaceted identity in America, ensuring that viewers saw him as he wanted to be seen. From uptown on the East Side to the Lower East Side and from Brownsville to Williamsburg in Brooklyn, workers, including American Jews, marched the wide boulevards of the city and then gathered at Union Square each May 1 to celebrate May Day. This workers’ holiday was founded in 1886 in America as part of the labor movement’s fight for an eight-hour workday.25 Approximately thirty to fifty thousand laborers filled the streets of the city each May Day in the early 1900s. In the photograph above stand three bakers as a united entity, on strike to demand a maximum ten-hour day, a minimum wage, recognition of the union, and the right to use the union’s label.26 On their shoulders, the

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Customers at the Main Entrance Waiting for Opening, Abraham & Straus, Brooklyn, NY, undated. (Personal collection of Ron Schweiger, Brooklyn Borough Historian, Brooklyn, NY; courtesy of Ronald Schweiger)

men balance a large wooden platform on which rests a gigantic loaf of bread measuring fifteen feet long and five feet wide; you can sense a bit of strain on the face of the man at the left. Rather than industrial workers, these men were artisan bakers fighting to maintain their craft, which included making bagels, which vanished from the city during the strike. In the early twentieth century, New York City acquired prominence as a national center of bread baking. But for the workers, the bread that they held aloft communicated two meanings: first, an example of their extraordinary talents and, second, the bread that they wanted to provide to their families with a decent wage. A large clock, situated just below the store’s name, Abraham & Straus, is forever frozen at 8:30 a.m. in the postcard above, as a crowd of customers — mainly women dressed in long skirts and coats, with large hats on their heads — wait eagerly for the shopping day to begin.27 For immigrants, consumerism enabled women to buy and announce their status as Americans through purchasing just the right hat, shoes, and handbag to match.28 Young Jewish women flocked to these Jewish-owned department stores. They, like most

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young urban women, wanted to purchase the most popular women’s garments of the time, shirtwaists. These blouses tucked in at the waist created the muchdesired slenderized “wasp waist,” with a neat row of buttons down the front and a crisp snap to the shoulders. Although the term department store was not in use prior to 1887, by the late 1860s, the concept of a grand shopping emporium had caught on with Americans.29 Brooklyn’s Abraham & Straus and other magnificent department stores employed young Jewish women as sales help. This particular postcard was sent from one woman to another to share news about Bessie, a friend the women had in common. The first woman wrote along the right side of the card, “This is where Bessie works.” Immigrant women, especially those with a good command of English, could hold respectable jobs in stores like A&S, as it came to be known, enabling them to contribute to their family’s finances and, perhaps, saving a bit of money for their own clothes and fun. In speaking with a New York Times reporter in 1910, illustrator Charles Dana Gibson explained that the singular beauty of the “Gibson Girl,” his idyllic and iconic image of American womanhood, which was widely reproduced on magazine covers, in illustrated newspapers, and even as wallpaper and other decorative and collectable items, derived from her Anglo-Saxon, Protestant, and white heritage. “The best part of the American girl’s beauty will and had always come from our nation of origin, Great Britain.”30 Such standards and sentiments left Jewish women named Lottie, Rose, Margit, and Bessie, who were not of British ancestry and whose bodies and faces differed from the Gibson Girl, outside the markers of both beauty and Americanness.

Charles Dana Gibson, Patience, drawing, pen and ink, date created/published 1910? (Cabinet of American Illustration, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC)

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The Gibson Girl, with her pert upturned button nose, alabaster skin, and trim waist, was often pictured wearing a shirtwaist paired with a long skirt that hit just above her ankles. The fictive Gibson Girl inspired the vogue for shirtwaists, which were manufactured by young Jewish and Italian women in sweatshops, such as the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory. Jewish women, including those who sewed in sweatshops, also purchased or sewed their own shirtwaists, as they strove to present themselves as modern Americans. Yet although working-class women’s paychecks allowed them some purchasing power, the ideals of Gibson Girl beauty and virtue were not for sale, nor did fashionable wear release the young women from the wage system. Echoing the rogues’ gallery of photographs maintained by the New York Police Department, the “Gallery of Missing Husbands” published by the Jewish Daily Forward depicted wanted men. All were Jewish husbands and fathers who had deserted their families, perhaps having gone out for a pack of cigarettes one day and never coming back. In the early twentieth century, New Yorkers’ expanding consumer culture was redefining the masculine ideal from producer/laborer to consumer. But in truth, the family system with the husband as the lone breadwinner rarely worked because working-class men either did not earn enough or did not share their wages with their wives and children.31 The frequency of desertion became of great concern to the Jewish community and also to social reformers who wanted to protect the “public purse.” The National Desertion Bureau (NDB) worked to reunite Jewish families, to secure financial support for abandoned wives and children, and also to push Jewish families to conform to middle-class American standards. Abraham Cahan’s Jewish Daily Forward, in cooperation with the NDB, started to publish “The Gallery of Missing Husbands” as a weekly column accompanied by photographs of the deserters.32 The first “Gallery” debuted on March 26, 1911, although it is doubtful that missing men were the Jewish community’s primary focus that day. Jewish daughters, most likely, occupied utmost concern, because of the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire that happened one day earlier. On March 25, 1911, a fire broke out in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory on the edge of Washington Square Park, which culminated in the worst labor tragedy to that date. The garment factory was littered with inflammable scraps of fabric and rags, so the fire spread like quicksilver. The building’s locked exits and inadequate safety measures led to the deaths of 133 young Italian and

“Gallery of Missing Husbands,” Jewish Daily Forward, March 26, 1911, 8. (New York Public Library, New York)

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Jewish women, including teenagers, and 13 young men — a total of 146 workers. Many jumped from the windows in an attempt to save their lives, only to die upon impact with the sidewalk. The broken and burned corpses were lined up in rows along the sidewalks so that relatives could identify their daughters. Immigrant Jews from Russia and Galicia had previously witnessed mass deaths, as in the Kishinev Pogrom of 1906, which in comparison had killed approximately forty-six Jews. Far from the tsar’s army in the United States, immigrant Jews suffered under the oppressive owners of garment factories, who frequently were also Jews who had arrived in the mid-nineteenth century and advanced to middle-class and managerial status. Responses to the tragedy in New York City sharply divided along class, religious, and geographic lines, with newspapers catering to each group. AngloSaxon Protestants, the city’s wealthy and powerful, believed that, as with many emotions, grief should be kept private and under control. While they empathized with the mourning families’ losses, they also sat in judgment of how they should behave in public. William Randolph Hearst’s New York American expressed support for the workers; his writers and photographers sensationalized an already sensational event, deploying features of period melodrama.33 Hearst’s staff “preyed on families,” as art historian Ellen Wiley Todd writes, staging pictures at the morgue before and after the victims were identified, such as the two photographs shown on the facing page. The papers read by the survivors, such as the Jewish Daily Forward, saw no need to sensationalize or criticize the mourners’ behavior. As a mouthpiece of Jewish immigrants, it denounced the heartless capitalist Jews whose failure to recognize the Jewish union led to the tragedy. And it mourned openly and sorrowfully the promising innocent lives lost. Approximately twenty-five thousand Levantine Sephardic Jews entered the United States between 1899 and 1925, and most of them settled in New York. A minority within the Jewish minority, they were less educated and less prepared to succeed in the United States. Many spoke Ladino (Judeo-Spanish); others spoke Greek or Arabic. Even under the umbrella term Sephardic Jews, these immigrants came from numerous countries, with different cultural and religious traditions.34 But the needs of these differing groups were the same: to secure work, to find housing, to practice their religion, to maintain ties with their homelands, and to succeed as Americans. The Ladino press was a key medium that Sephardim used in order to secure recognition as Jews by the

Top: “Awaiting Their Turn to Seek Lost Relatives,” New York American, March 27, 1911, 2. (New York Public Library, New York) Bottom: “Grief Stricken Relatives Leaving the Morgue,” New York American, March 27, 1911, 3. (New York Public Library, New York)

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Moise Gadol, La America, May 12, 1911, 1. (New York Public Library, New York)

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dominant Ashkenazim. The particular issue of La America shown on the facing page was written in both Ladino and Yiddish; prominent on the first page is an article, “To the Ashkenazic People,” demonstrating Sephardic desire to connect with their coreligionists.35 La America was just one of nineteen Judeo-Spanish periodicals published between 1910 and 1948, and its editor was Moise Gadol, a Sephardic Jew from Bulgaria. All but two of the nineteen newspapers were published in New York City. As German Jews and eastern European Jews had also done, these Jews from lands such as Turkey and Syria established self-help charitable organizations, Etz Ha-hayim (Tree of Life) and Rodfei Tsedek (Seekers of the Truth), to help their own. In 1911, the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS) opened its “Oriental Bureau” to serve the needs of the Sephardic Jewish Community.36 Look deeply into the composition of the photograph below, a picture documenting a Jewish family doing piecework at home around a table. As background to the scene, Hine has chosen the tenement door, the entry to this family’s modest home. Placing the family between him and the locked door

Lewis Hine, Jewish Family Working on Garters in Kitchen for Tenement Home, NYC, November 1912. (National Child Labor Committee Collection, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC)

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clarifies that Hine is a welcomed guest of the family, which is working in cooperation with him to create this lasting image.37 The family members are all neatly, but modestly, dressed; the young boy wears a tie and a yarmulke on his head. Originally from the Midwest, Hine came to New York to teach at Felix Adler’s Ethical Culture School. When he started teaching a class in photography, he increasingly found himself drawn to picture immigrants and child laborers. In 1908, he published in Charities and the Commons his photograph collection documenting sweatshops and tenements. The same year, Hine went to work for the National Child Labor Committee (NCLC) documenting child labor. This 1912 photograph was commissioned by the NCLC. Discarding the aesthetics of sentimentalism and sensationalism that clouded most photography of the poor, Hine instead encouraged his subjects to express their individualism. He recorded portraits of individuals rather than of anonymous social types. Kheyders or homers? Which will the young American boy choose in the cartoon on the facing page? Many a Jewish parent and rabbi wrung their hands anxiously over such questions, as the younger generation was seduced by popular and secular culture. The artist Isidore Busatt pokes fun at the separation of generations and the perceived friction between religious orthodoxy and orthodoxy of quite another kind — the secular worship of baseball, America’s game. The headline states, “With great pity, in honor of the rabbinical convention held in New York last week, at which hundreds of rabbis wracked their brains over the difficult religious issues as to how to get American youths into kheyder [religious school].” Instead of a Yidisher kop (an intelligent head), the young boy’s head is swelled up into an oversized baseball on which a sporting cap perches. The old rabbi, recoiling at the young boy’s power and height, literally cowers in his shadow. The American religion of sports challenged Judaism, enticing boys and men with an appeal that cut across class lines and provided moments of solidarity with other Americans rooting for the same home teams. “This is a wonderful age we are living in,” proclaimed the Jewish American artist Max Weber in 1915. “Surely there will be new numbers, new weights, new colors, and new forms.”38 Weber gave visual form to his passion for the urban and the modern in Chinese Restaurant (1915), one of the artist’s most heralded and reproduced works. Born in Bialystok, Weber’s family settled in Brooklyn when he was ten years old. In his midtwenties, Weber moved to Paris

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Isidore Busatt, “A Difficult Path,” in the Yiddish humor magazine Der Groyser Kundes (The Big Stick), 1914. (Courtesy of Eddy Portnoy)

(1905 – 1909), where he trained with Matisse and also fraternized with the leading modern artists who formed the School of Paris. For the composition of Chinese Restaurant, Weber displays his command of Picasso’s Synthetic Cubism in its carefully arranged but seemingly haphazard placement of forms and the manner in which he breaks apart the face of the Chinese waiter, placing facial elements away from each other. The distinct red and gold lacquer that decorated many Chinese restaurants, along with the black-and-white checkered floor linoleum, typifies the many chop suey houses that had sprung up in

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Max Weber (1881 – 1961), Chinese Restaurant, oil on canvas, 1915. (Whitney Museum of American Art, New York)

Lower Manhattan. Weber, along with Alfred Stieglitz, was an early champion of modernism and influenced other Jewish New York artists to experiment stylistically. Their works in painting and photography signaled the rise of Jewish involvement in modernism in the city. For Weber, the exotic and the modern are represented in the restaurant’s cuisine and staff. Unlike Stieglitz, both Weber and the waiter he has depicted were immigrants to America. But they were not equal. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 prohibited most Chinese immigration, while Jews remained on the “white” side of the color line.39 Weber created his work using modernist experimentation within shifting ideas of race, class, and gender. The elegant calling card on the following page, with italic type on crème paper, passed between women of differing economic situations and, ultimately,

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became the ticket for a young mother of eight who desperately needed help for her family. Professional settlement-house workers, social reformers, and home economists — all new professions that women dominated — dedicated themselves to helping the ghetto poor. On the reverse of her business card, Harris wrote on behalf of the mother, “the bearer Mrs. J. Goldfarb of 1o1 Willet Street is absolutely in need of help. She has eight children and no money. Help her with matzos and other things if possible. She is no shnorer [beggar]. Yours Ida Harris.” The presence or the absence of a father is not noted. Despite the class differences between the social worker and the mother, each was part of a supportive network among Jewish women. Birth-control pioneer Margaret Sanger relied on these same networks of female mutual assistance. Although a non-Jew, Sanger, along with Harris and other social activists, provided muchneeded help for Jewish American women.

Business card: Ida Harris, Independent Social Worker of the East Side, 55 ½ Madison Avenue, New York, n.d. (Archives of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, New York)

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News photograph, “Margaret Sanger’s Brownsville Clinic, 46 Amboy Street, Brownsville, Brooklyn,” New York World-Telegram, October 27, 1916. (New York World Telegram & Sun Collection, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC)

In this newspaper photograph, cloth draperies cover each area of glass of this unidentified storefront, which effectively denies the photographer his or her desired shot. This purposeful act of concealment to maintain privacy opposes the purpose of storefront windows to display enticing merchandise. The arrangement of this photograph draws us into the cloistered and nondescript doorway of Margaret Sanger’s family-planning clinic, a small two-room curtained store on Amboy Street in Brownsville, Brooklyn.40 In the days prior its opening on October 16, 1916, Sanger, her sister, and Fania Mandell, a translator, canvassed ghetto neighborhoods with flyers written in Yiddish, Italian, and English that announced, “mothers! Can you afford to have a large family? Do you want any more children? If not, why do you have them?” The three women carefully worded the flyer without ever using terms such as birth control or abortion. Instead, the activists presented the clinic’s services as a way to help women to be better mothers by limiting the number of their children.

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What the poster avoids saying is that some women might not want additional children for their own sake; nor is having sex except for reproduction mentioned. Over one hundred women visited the clinic on its first day. An additional four hundred sought Sanger’s help until October 26, when police shut down the clinic ten days after it had opened. Consistent with the Jewish Daily Forward’s “Gallery of Missing Husbands” and the card of social worker Ida B. Harris (both shown earlier), Sanger’s clinic, and the five hundred women she helped, acknowledges the economic burdens that kept immigrants chained to poverty and reflects an organized approach to efforts for social reform. “A prizefighter you want to be?” Benny Leonard’s mother demanded of her son. “Is that a life for a respectable man? For a Jew?” Leonard, who was considered the greatest lightweight champion to ever live, and one of the greatest fighters of any weight class, learned to fight out of necessity. He lived near the public baths on the Lower East Side and recalled, “You had to fight or stay in

Boxing gloves worn by Benny Leonard in his lightweight title defense against Joe Welling, 1920. (American Jewish Historical Society, New York, NY, and Newton Centre, MA)

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the house when the Italian and Irish kids came through on their way to the baths.”41 Jewish fighters had to prove themselves worthy of the sport, given stereotypes of Jewish men as either bookish intellectuals — and therefore passive and feminine — or factory workers whose bodies were weakened by tuberculosis. In Leonard’s choice of blue and white boxing trunks decorated with a large Mogen David, he wore his Jewish identity in the ring for all to see. Arthur Brisbane, Hearst’s main editor, claimed the boxer had done “more to conquer anti-Semitism than a thousand textbooks.” Leonard, through his example and words, asserted the naturalness of being a Jewish boxer. “I believe that the Jew,” said the champion, “is especially adapted for the sport of boxing because, in the final analysis, it is the most elemental form of self-defense.”42 Leonard took control of his own representation and also served as a role model, disrupting prevailing ideas about Jewish bodies. In 1924, the United States closed its borders and ended the mass immigration of European Jews that had begun back in the 1840s. The overwhelming majority of Jewish immigrants, no matter their country of origin, chose to settle in New York City and strove to make a better life for themselves and their families. The city served both as their benefactor, with its free schools, libraries, and parks, and as their demon, due to substandard living and working conditions. In order to maintain control of their lives and their communities, Jews created their own social organizations, cultural institutions, charities, and means of mass communication. At times, they had to relinquish privacy and self-determination to immigration officials, social workers, anti-Semitic club owners, and others, but when they could, they took control of their selfrepresentation. Jews participated in what the city already had to offer while at the same time helping to introduce some of the visual perspectives of modernism in photography and painting. Their creativity also expressed itself in radical politics and communal organizing, in religious innovations, and in print culture, producing a new Jewish capital of the world on the banks of the Hudson and East Rivers.

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NOTES TO THE FOREWORD

1. Milton Lehman, “Veterans Pour into New York to Find That Its Hospitality Far Exceeds Their Dreams,” New York Times, 8 July 1945, 51. 2. Ira Rosenwaike, Population History of New York City (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1972), 98, 101. 3. Robert A. M. Stern, Thomas Mellins, and David Fishman, New York 1960: Architecture and Urbanism between the Second World War and the Bicentennial (New York: Monacelli, 1995), 10, 13 – 19, 27 – 28. 4. Moses Rischin, The Promised City: New York’s Jews, 1870 – 1914 (1962; repr., Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977), 294. 5. “Levi Strauss,” Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levi_Strauss (accessed July 13, 2011). 6. Rischin, “Preface to the Paperback Edition,” in The Promised City, vii. 7. Ibid. “City of Ambition” refers to the 1910 photograph by Alfred Stieglitz taken approaching Lower Manhattan from New York Harbor. 8. In this and the following pages, the text draws on the three volumes of City of Promises: A History of the Jews of New York (New York: NYU Press, 2012).

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1. Y. Pfeffer, “Pesakh in Nyu York un Elis Ayland: Yetsies mitsrayim dertseylt in onkel sem’s hoyz,” Morgen zhurnal, April 12, 1906. 2. Carol Groneman and David Reimers, “Immigration,” in Kenneth Jackson, ed., Encyclopedia of New York City (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 581. 3. CastleGarden.org, “Timeline,” http://www.castlegarden.org/timeline.php (accessed May 31, 2011). On Castle Garden generally, see Vincent Cannato, American Passage: The History of Ellis Island (New York: HarperCollins, 2009), 30 – 49; George Svejda, “Castle Garden as an Immigrant Depot, 1855 – 1890,” report, Division of History, Office of Archeology and Historic Preservation, National Park Service, U.S. Department of Interior, 1968, especially 34 – 47, http://www.nps.gov/history/history/online_books/elis/castle_ garden.pdf (accessed May 31, 2011); Andrew Dolkart, “Castle Garden,” in Jackson, Encyclopedia of New York City, 188. 4. New York Times, December 23, 1866. 5. Cannato, American Passage, 108 (quotes); Barbara Blumberg, “Ellis Island,” in Jackson, Encyclopedia, 372 – 373; Virginia Yans-McLaughlin and Marjorie Lightman, Ellis Island and the Peopling of America: The Official Guide (New York: New Press, 1997), 64 – 70. 6. Aaron Domnitz, “Why I Left My Old Home and What I Have Accomplished in America,” in Jocelyn Cohen and Daniel Soyer, eds., My Future Is in America:

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Autobiographies of Eastern European Jewish Immigrants (New York: NYU Press, 2006), 138 – 139. 7. Minnie Goldstein, “Success or Failure?,” in Cohen and Soyer, My Future Is in America, 28. 8. Ben Reisman, “Why I Came to America,” in Cohen and Soyer, My Future Is in America, 66; Domnitz, “Why I Have Left My Old Home,” 139, 141 – 145.

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1. Asa Green, Travels in America (New York, 1833), 43, quoted in Rudolf Glanz, Studies in Judaica Americana (New York: Ktav, 1970), 127; George G. Foster, New York in Slices: By an Experienced Carver (New York, 1849), 14 – 15, quoted in Egal Feldman, “Jews in the Early Growth of New York City’s Men’s Clothing Trade,” American Jewish Archives 12:1 (April 1960): 6 – 7. 2. Isaac Mayer Wise, Reminiscences, ed. David Philipson (Cincinnati: L. Wise, 1901), 17. 3. Cornelius Mathews, A Pen and Ink Panorama of New York City (New York, 1853), 164, quoted in Glanz, Studies in Judaica Americana, 127. 4. Hyman Grinstein, The Rise of the Jewish Community of New York, 1654 – 1860 (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1945), 263, 586. 5. Mary Wasserzug Natelson, “The Rabbi’s House (Story of a Family),” trans. Rachel Natelson, manuscript in authors’ possession. 6. Philip Cowen, Memories of an American Jew (New York: International Press, 1932), 24 – 26. 7. Stanley Nadel, Little Germany: Ethnicity, Religion, and Class in New York City, 1845 – 80 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990), 99. 8. Grinstein, Rise of the Jewish Community, 469; Nathan Kantrowitz, “Population,” in Kenneth Jackson, ed., Encyclopedia of New York City (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 922. 9. Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 739. 10. Naomi W. Cohen, Encounter with Emancipation: The German Jews in the United States, 1830 – 1914 (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1984), 29. 11. Burrows and Wallace, Gotham, 1116. 12. Ibid., 456 – 459. 13. Grinstein, Rise of the Jewish Community, 41 – 49; Jonathan Sarna, American Judaism: A History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 53 – 55. 14. Edmunt Blunt, Picture of New York (New York, 1828), 228, quoted in Glanz, Studies in Judaica Americana, 124. 15. Grinstein, Rise of the Jewish Community, 48. 16. Burrows and Wallace, Gotham, 476. 17. Hasia Diner, A Time for Gathering: The Second Migration, 1820 – 1880 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University, 1992), 42 – 49. 18. Cowen, Memories of an American Jew, 20 – 21. 19. Tyler Anbinder, Five Points: The 19th-Century New York City Neighborhood That

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Invented Tap Dance, Stole Elections, and Became the World’s Most Notorious Slum (New York: Free Press, 2001) 17, 45. 20. Ibid., 17 – 19. 21. Robert Ernst, Immigrant Life in New York City, 1825 – 1863 (1949; repr., Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1994), 69, 72. 22. Phyllis Dillon and Andrew Godley, “The Evolution of the Jewish Garment Industry, 1840 – 1940,” in Rebecca Kobrin, ed., Chosen Capital: The Jewish Encounter with American Capitalism (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2012), 42 – 44; Glanz, Studies in Judaica Americana, 126; Avraham Barkai, Branching Out: German Jewish Immigration to the United States, 1820 – 1924 (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1994), 86; Grinstein, Rise of the Jewish Community, 128; Nadel, Little Germany, 63. 23. Anbinder, Five Points, 47, 98. 24. Dwelling 28, Fourth District, Sixth Ward, 1860 U.S. Census. Also, the Isaacs family was listed as #40 on the Passover matzo distribution list in 1858, “List of 665 Individuals and Institutions,” folder 1, Association for Free Distribution of Matsot to the Poor, I-106, American Jewish Historical Society 25. Dwelling 736, Fourth District, Sixth Ward, 1860 U.S Census. 26. “List of 665 Individuals and Institutions,” folder 1, Association for Free Distribution of Matsot to the Poor, I-106, American Jewish Historical Society. 27. Dwelling 608, Second District, Sixth Ward, 1860 U.S. Census. 28. Natelson, “The Rabbi’s House,” 64. 29. Ernst, Immigrant Life in New York City, 63 – 64. 30. Cowen, Memories of an American Jew, 24 – 26. 31. Ibid., 24. 32. Ibid., 36 – 37. 33. Wise, Reminiscences, 18 – 19, 26. 34. Grinstein, Rise of the Jewish Community, 128. 35. Letter from Dr. Waterman, Asmonean, May 4, 1855, quoted in Ernst, Immigrant Life in New York City, 85. 36. Nadel, Little Germany, 44 – 46; Dorothee Schneider, Trade Unions and Community: The German Working Class in New York City (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1994), 9, 14 – 16. 37. Cohen, Encounter with Emancipation, 29; Feldman, “Jews in the Early Growth,” 9; Dillon and Godley, “The Evolution of the Jewish Garment Industry,” 6, 8 – 9. 38. Mathew Hale, Wonders of a Great City (Chicago, 1877), 845, quoted in Glanz, Studies in Judaica Americana, 126; Cohen, Encounter with Emancipation, 29; Jesse Pope, The Clothing Industry in New York (Columbia: University of Missouri, 1905), 5 – 7. 39. Feldman, “Jews in the Early Growth,” 5; Barkai, Branching Out, 45 – 46; Nadel, Little Germany, 81; Pope, Clothing Industry in New York, 7 – 8. 40. Anbinder, Five Points, 242; Grinstein, Rise of the Jewish Community, 473. 41. Jay Dolan, The Immigrant Church: New York’s Irish and German Catholics, 1815 – 1865 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975), 58; Grinstein, Rise of the Jewish Community, 53 – 55; Anbinder, Five Points, 242 – 243; Judah Eisenstein, “The History of the

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First Russian-American Jewish Congregation: The Beth Hamedrash Hagadol,” Publications of the American Jewish Historical Society 9 (1901): 63 – 74. 42. Grinstein, Rise of the Jewish Community, 53 – 55. 43. Ibid., 106 – 109. 44. Ibid., 306. 45. Ibid., 64, 575; Hasia Diner, “Buying and Selling ‘Jewish’: The Historical Impact of Commerce on Jewish Communal Life,” in Jack Wertheimer, ed., Imagining the American Jewish Community (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England / Brandeis University Press, 2007), 29, 32. 46. Jewish Messenger, May 18, 1864, 141; Grinstein, Rise of the Jewish Community, 470 – 471. 47. Grinstein, Rise of the Jewish Community, x; Asmonean, September 27, 1850, and September 28, 1855; Jewish Messenger, September 21, 1860. The advertisements were located through a search through the Asmonean and Jewish Messenger for September 1850, 1855, 1860, 1865, 1870, and 1875. 48. Jewish Messenger, September 1860. 49. Burrows and Wallace, Gotham, 745. 50. Ernst, Immigrant Life in New York City, 96. 51. Mayer Stern and Jacob Abraham were on the list for free matzos in 1858, which included their wives’ names and their addresses. Further information about their households was gleaned from the 1860 U.S. Census; for Abraham, Dwelling 23, Second Division, Eleventh Ward; for Stern, Dwelling 116, Fourth District, Eleventh Ward. 52. Nadel, Little Germany, 49. 53. Congregation Kahal Adath Jeshurun with Anshe Lubz, Constitution, June 22, 1913, Collection of the Museum at Eldridge Street, Hebrew section. 54. Dolan, Immigrant Church, 58; Nadel, Little Germany, 91; Grinstein, Rise of the Jewish Community, 340 – 344; Max Lilienthal, letter, Israelite, November 17, 1854; Anbinder, Five Points, 242 – 243. 55. Schneider, Trade Unions and Community. 56. Harriet Waine McBride, “Fraternal Regalia in America, 1865 – 1918: Dressing the Lodges; Clothing and the Brotherhood” (Ph.D. diss., Department of History, Ohio State University, 2000). 57. Dale Knobel, “To Be American: Ethnicity, Fraternity and the Improved Order of Red Men,” Journal of American Ethnic History 4:1 (Fall 1984): 68 – 69. 58. J. T. Kennedy, “Report of the Eighth Sanitary Inspection District,” in Citizen’s Association, Report of the Council of Hygiene and Public Health of the Citizen’s Association of New York of the Sanitary Condition of the City (New York: D. Appleton, 1865). 59. Deborah Dash Moore, B’nai B’rith and the Challenge of Ethnic Leadership (Albany: SUNY Press, 1981), 6 – 7. 60. Ibid., 11. 61. Ibid., 1 – 10 (quote on 7); Edward Grusd, B’nai B’rith: The Story of a Covenant (New York: Appleton-Century, 1966), 12 – 24. 62. Albert Stevens, Cyclopedia of Fraternities, 2nd ed. (1907; repr., Detroit: Gale

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Research, 1966), 206 – 210; Grinstein, Rise of the Jewish Community, 112; Daniel Soyer, Jewish Immigrant Associations and American Identity in New York, 1880 – 1939 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), 38 – 40; Daniel Soyer, “Entering the ‘Tent of Abraham’: Fraternal Ritual and American-Jewish Identity, 1880 – 1920,” Religion and American Culture 9:2 (Summer 1999): 166. 63. Cornelia Wilhelm, “Independent Order of True Sisters: Friendship, Fraternity, and a Model of Modernity for Nineteenth Century American Jewish Womanhood,” American Jewish Archives 54:1 (2002): 45; Kehillah (Jewish Community) of New York City, Jewish Communal Register of New York City, 1917 – 1918 (New York: Kehillah, 1918), 957. 64. “The Sabbath,” Jewish Messenger, February 12, 1858, 28; “To Correspondents,” Jewish Messenger, November 25, 1859, 158. 65. Bernard Drachman, The Unfailing Light: Memoirs of an American Rabbi (New York: Rabbinical Council of America, 1948), 227. 66. Alexis McCrossen, Holy Day, Holiday: The American Sunday (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000), 41 – 46. 67. “The Jew Wot Goes Ahead,” Asmonean, May 19, 1854; Emanuel Brandeis, “Desecration of Sabbath,” Asmonean, May 22, 1854, 46. 68. “The Jew Wot Goes Ahead”; “Progress and Its Necessity,” Asmonean, June 1854, 78. 69. Nadel, Little Germany, 101; Schneider, Trade Unions and Community, 32. 70. Daniel Soyer, “The Rise and Fall of the Garment Industry in New York City,” in Daniel Soyer, ed., A Coat of Many Colors: Immigration, Globalization, and Reform in the New York City Garment Industry (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 4. 71. Pope, Clothing Industry in New York, 8. 72. Soyer, “Rise and Fall of the Garment Industry,” 8. 73. Natelson, “Rabbi’s House, 64. 74. Ibid. 75. Pope, Clothing Industry in New York, 106 – 107. 76. Dillon and Godley, “The Evolution of the Jewish Garment Industry,” 21. 77. George R. Adams, National Register of Historic Places Inventory, Nomination Form for R. H. Macy and Company, United States Department of the Interior, National Park Service, 1977. 78. Isaac Markens, Hebrews in America (New York: Isaac Markens, 1888), 151.

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1. Rebekah Kohut, My Portion (New York: T. Seltzer, 1925), 121; “Streetscapes: Beekman Place: A Two Block Street by the East Riverside,” New York Times, November 30, 1997. 2. Kohut, My Portion, 179. 3. John S. Billings, Vital Statistics of the Jews in the United States, 11th Census, Bulletin No. 19 (Washington DC: U.S. Census Bureau, 1890); Hasia Diner, A Time for Gathering: The Second Migration, 1820 – 1880 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 65. These findings include all American Jews.

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4. Hasia Diner, The Jews of the United States, 1654 – 2000 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 100; Tyler Anbinder, Five Points: The 19th-Century New York City Neighborhood That Invented Tap Dance, Stole Elections, and Became the World’s Most Notorious Slum (New York: Free Press, 2001), 254. 5. Alan M. Kraut and Deborah A. Kraut, Covenant of Care: Newark Beth Israel and the Jewish Hospital in America (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2007), 3. 6. Tina Levitan, Islands of Compassion: A History of the Jewish Hospitals of New York (New York: Twayne, 1964), 27; Burrill B. Crohn, “The Centennial Anniversary of the Mount Sinai Hospital (1852 – 1952),” American Jewish Historical Society Publications 42 (September 1952 – June 1953): 113 – 130. 7. Levitan, Islands of Compassion, 31 – 59. 8. Hyman Bogen, The Luckiest Orphans: A History of the Hebrew Orphan Asylum of New York (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992); Kehillah (Jewish Community) of New York City, Jewish Communal Register of New York City, 1917 – 1918 (New York: Kehillah, 1918), 1057 – 1058. 9. Edward G. Burrows and Michael Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 845. 10. “Passover and the Poor,” Asmonean, March 18, 1858. 11. “Matzo Distribution,” Jewish Messenger, February 26, 1858, 36 – 37. 12. Hyman Grinstein, The Rise of the Jewish Community in New York City, 1654 – 1860 (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1945), 119 – 122. 13. “List of 665 Individuals and Organizations,” folder 1, Association for Free Distribution of Matsot to the Poor, 1855 – 1858, I-106, American Jewish Historical Society; Harris Aaronson, Dwelling 1000, Fourth Division, Ninth Ward, 1860 U.S. Census; Michael Schwab, Dwelling 380, Fourth Division, Thirteenth Ward, 1860 U.S. Census; Zion Bernstein, Dwelling 406, Second District, Fourteenth Ward, 1860 U.S. Census; Judah Jacques Lyons, Dwelling 100, First District, Sixteenth Ward, 1860 U.S. Census; Morris Raphall, New York City Directory, 1859, p. 698; Samuel Myers Isaacs, New York City Directory, 1859, p. 402. 14. “List of 665 Individuals and Organizations.” 15. Burrows and Wallace, Gotham, 833, 846. 16. “Matzo Distribution,” Jewish Messenger, February 26, 1858, 36 – 37. 17. “To the Hebrews of New York,” Jewish Messenger, March 21, 1858, 46. 18. Burrows and Wallace, Gotham, 727. 19. “Passover and the Poor,” Asmonean, March 18, 1858. 20. “Union of Congregations to Supply the Poor with Matsoth,” Jewish Messenger, March 21, 1858, 44. 21. “Passover and the Poor.” 22. “Agreement with Matzo Baker, March 18, 1858,” and “Final Report of the Executive Committee of the Association, April 21, 1858,” folder 1, Association for Free Distribution of Matsot to the Poor, I-106, American Jewish Historical Society. 23. Harris Aaronson’s passport application, May 26, 1870, U.S. Census, 1860, Fourth Division, Ninth Ward, pp. 261 – 262; Michael Schwab, U.S. Census, 1860, Thirteenth Ward,

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Fourth Division, p. 124; Zion Bernstein, U.S. Census, 1860, Fourteenth Ward, Second District; Judah Jacques Lyons, U.S. Census, 1860, Sixteenth Ward, First District, p. 201; Morris Raphall, New York City Directory, 1859, p. 698; Samuel Myers Isaacs, New York City Directory, 1859, p. 402. 24. Letters, Jewish Messenger, March 25, 1859, 91. 25. Grinstein, Rise of the Jewish Community, 406. 26. Diner, Time for Gathering, 104; Jacob Rader Marcus, United States Jewry, 1776 – 1985, vol. 2 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1991), 223. 27. Diner, Time for Gathering, 104. 28. Philip Goodman, “The Purim Association of the City of New York (1862 – 1902),” American Jewish Historical Society Publications 40 (September 1950 – June 1951): 135 – 172 (quotes on 139, 145). 29. Samuel Myers Isaacs, “New York City,” Jewish Messenger, April 25, 1862, 120. 30. “The Poor Require Assistance,” Jewish Messenger, March 31, 1865; March 23, 1866. 31. “Remember the Poor,” Jewish Messenger, March 23, 1866. 32. Stanley Nadel, Little Germany: Ethnicity, Religion, and Class in New York City, 1845 – 80 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990), 66, 71. 33. Orchard Former Residents/Owners/Shopkeepers, Gumpertz Family, RG 3.6.1, Box 3: 97, Archives of the Lower East Side Tenement Museum. 34. “Shall We Foster Pauperism?,” Jewish Messenger, March 14, 1873. 35. “Hebrew Benevolent and Orphan Asylum Society,” Jewish Messenger, March 7, 1873. 36. “Co-operate!,” Jewish Messenger, February 28, 1873. 37. “True Brotherhood,” Jewish Messenger, March 21, 1873. 38. Anbinder, Five Points, 244. 39. Ibid., 245. 40. Jewish Messenger, May 18, 1864, 141. 41. “Our Poor,” Jewish Messenger, March 27, 1868. 42. “The Hebrew Benevolent Society,” Jewish Messenger, April 25, 1873; “Remember the Poor!,” Jewish Messenger, December 19, 1873. 43. “Our Leading Charity,” Jewish Messenger, May 2, 1873. 44. “Remember the Poor!,” Jewish Messenger, December 19, 1873. 45. Jewish Social Service Association, Fifty Years of Social Service: The History of the United Hebrew Charities of the City of New York, Now the Jewish Social Service Association, Inc. New York City (New York: C. S. Nathan, 1926), 22, 25. 46. First Annual Report of the Board of Relief of the United Hebrew Charities, 1874 – 1875, 4 – 7. 47. Ibid., 1. 48. Jewish Social Service Association, Fifty Years of Social Service. 49. Kehillah, Jewish Communal Register, 994 – 997; Arthur Goren, New York Jews and the Quest for Community: The Kehillah Experiment, 1908 – 1922 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1970), 58 – 59. 50. Kohut, My Portion, 173.

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51. Sidney Luska (Henry Harland), The Yoke of the Thorah (New York: Cassell, 1887), 195. 52. Ibid., 228. 53. Moses Rischin, The Promised City: New York’s Jews, 1870 – 1914 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962), 10; Elizabeth Blackmar, “The Congregation and the City,” in Arthur Goren and Elizabeth Blackmar, Congregating and Consecrating at Central Synagogue (New York: Central Synagogue, 2003), 16. 54. Rischin, Promised City, 98 – 99. 55. Kohut, My Portion, 175. 56. Quoted in Jenna Weissman Joselit, “The Special Sphere of the Middle-Class American Jewish Woman: The Synagogue Sisterhood, 1890 – 1940,” in Jack Wertheimer, ed., The American Synagogue: A Sanctuary Transformed (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England / Brandeis University Press, 1987), 209. 57. “Souvenir,” membership and Summary of Activities, 1895, 106, Women’s Organizations, RG 4, Central Synagogue Archives; Blackmar, “Congregation and the City,” 16. 58. Hannah B. Einstein, “Sisterhoods of Personal Service,” in The Jewish Encyclopedia (New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1901 – 1906), 398, quoted in Felicia Herman, “From Priestess to Hostess: Sisterhoods of Personal Service in New York City, 1887 – 1936,” in Pamela Nadell and Jonathan Sarna, eds., Women and American Judaism: Historical Perspectives (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England  / Brandeis University Press, 2001), 154. 59. Hannah Leerburger, “President’s Report, 1913,” in Annual Report of the A.C.S.H. Sisterhood of Personal Service, 1913, 5 – 8, Women’s Organizations, RG 4, Central Synagogue Archives. 60. Hannah B. Einstein, “The Federation of Sisterhoods,” in Twenty-Fifth Annual Report of the United Hebrew Charities of the City of New York (New York: United Hebrew Charities of the City of New York, 1899), 58. 61. Quoted in Jonathan Sarna, American Judaism: A History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 143. 62. Jewish Social Service Association, Fifty Years of Social Service, 50. 63. Leerburger, “President’s Report, 1913,” 8. 64. Herman, “From Priestess to Hostess,” 161. 65. Kohut, My Portion, 247. 66. Ibid., 178.

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1. “Temple Ahawath Chesed,” New York Herald, December 15, 1870. 2. “Architectural Improvements,” New York Times, December 3, 1870, 6. 3. New York Times, December 15, 1870. 4. Ivan Davidson Kalmar, “Moorish Style: Orientalism, the Jews and Synagogue Architecture,” Jewish Social Studies 7:3 (Spring – Summer 2001): 84. 5. New York Times, April 20, 1920. 6. “Modern Judaism,” New York World, April 24, 1872.

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7. Leon Jick, “The Reform Synagogue,” in Jack Wertheimer, ed., The American Synagogue: A Sanctuary Transformed (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England  / Brandeis University Press, 1987), 89. 8. Uriah Zvi Engelman, “Jewish Statistics in the U.S. Census of Religious Bodies (1850 – 1936),” Jewish Social Studies 9:2 (April 1947): 130 – 133. 9. Andrew S. Dolkart, Central Synagogue in Its Changing Neighborhood (New York: Central Synagogue, 2001), 20. 10. “New City Buildings,” Manufacturer and Builder, January 7, 1869; “A Synagogue Dedication,” New York Times, May 12, 1869. 11. Rachel Wischnitzer, Synagogue Architecture in the United States: History and Interpretation (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1955), 75; Kalmar, “Moorish Style,” 72; Dolkart, Central Synagogue, 18. 12. The earliest examples of Moorish synagogue architecture were in the 1830s by Friedrich von Gartner in Ingenheim (1832), Binswangen (1835), Kircheimbolanden (1836), and Speyer (1837), and by Gottfried Semper for the interior of the Dresden synagogue (1838 – 40). Kalmar, “Moorish Style,” 69, 72, 84 – 88; Carol Krinsky, Synagogues of Europe (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985), 82 – 84. 13. William Henry Bishop, “The House of the Merchant Prince,” Atlantic Monthly, April 1882, 499. 14. Charles W. Hobbs, Illustrated New York City and Surroundings (New York: Charles W. Hobbs, 1889), 53. 15. Jonathan Sarna, American Judaism: A History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 85; Steven Lowenstein, “The 1840s and the Creation of the German-Jewish Religious Reform Movement,” in Werner Mosse, ed., Revolution and Evolution: 1848 in German-Jewish History (Tübingen: Mohr, 1981); Michael Meyer, Response to Modernity: A History of the Reform Movement in Judaism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 225 – 226. 16. Meyer, Response to Modernity, 225; Hyman Grinstein, The Rise of the Jewish Community of New York, 1654 – 1860 (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1945), 333 – 352; Hasia Diner, A Time for Gathering: The Second Migration, 1820 – 1880 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 114 – 116; Sarna, American Judaism, 73; Jick, “Reform Synagogue,” 87. 17. Grinstein, Rise of the Jewish Community, 354, 368. 18. Ibid., 355 – 358. 19. Jonathan Sarna, “Mixed Seating in the American Synagogue,” in Wertheimer, American Synagogue, 368, 372; Karla Goldman, Beyond the Synagogue Gallery: Finding a Place for Women in American Judaism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), 8 – 17. 20. Grinstein, Rise of the Jewish Community, 364. 21. Sarna, “Mixed Seating,” 374 – 379. 22. Ibid., 376 – 377; Grinstein, Rise of the Jewish Community, 364, 410 – 412, 535. 23. Jeffrey Gurock, American Jewish Orthodoxy in Historical Perspective (Hoboken, NJ: Ktav, 1996), 71; Jick, “Reform Synagogue,” 90 – 92.

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24. Jick, “Reform Synagogue,” 91. 25. Grinstein, Rise of the Jewish Community, 370. 26. Sarna, American Judaism, 132; Meyer, Response to Modernity, 266. 27. Arthur Goren, “Public Ceremonies Defining Central Synagogue,” in Arthur Goren and Elizabeth Blackmar, Congregating and Consecrating at Central Synagogue (New York: Central Synagogue, 2003), 49. 28. Barnett Elzas, “Memoir of Alexander Kohut,” in Alexander Kohut, The Ethics of the Fathers (New York: Publishers Printing Company, 1920), xxxi. 29. Sarna, American Judaism, 147 – 148. 30. “Orthodoxy and Reform: The Controversy between Rabbis Kohut and Kohler,” New York Times, June 28, 1885. 31. Rebekah Kohut, My Portion (New York: T. Seltzer, 1925), 100 – 114. 32. Meyer, Response to Modernity, 267. 33. Jick, “Reform Synagogue,” 90 – 92. 34. Sarna, American Judaism. 150; “More Rabbis Needed,” American Hebrew, September 23, 1887. 35. Kohut, My Portion, 115; Hasia Diner, The Jews of the United States, 1654 – 2000 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 124 – 127. 36. Allon Schoener, Portal to America: The Lower East Side, 1870 – 1925 (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1967), 156. 37. “Tiny Places of Worship: The Humble Synagogues of the Poorer East Side,” New York Daily Tribune, February 16, 1896. 38. Edward Steiner, “The Russian and Polish Jew in New York,” Outlook, November 1, 1902, 533. 39. 1887 Seat Contract, signed by L. Matlawsky, secretary, Collection of the Museum at Eldridge Street. 40. “Mi Yodea,” American Israelite, September 16, 1887, 4. 41. Ibid. 42. “New Jewish Temple,” New York Times, September 12, 1868; “Mi Yodea.” 43. Abraham J. Karp, “New York Chooses a Chief Rabbi,” Publications of the American Jewish Historical Society 44 (1955): 129 – 198; Annie Polland, Landmark of the Spirit: The Eldridge Street Synagogue (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 41 – 42. 44. Richard Wheatley, “The Jews in New York,” Century Magazine, January 1892, 330. 45. Polland, Landmark of the Spirit, 12. 46. M. Simons and Sons to Mayor Strong, September 20, 1897, Collection of the Museum at Eldridge Street. 47. “The Jewish New Year,” New York Times, September 27, 1897, 3. 48. Constitution of the Kahal Adath Jeshurun with Anshe Lubz, 1913, Collection of the Museum at Eldridge Street. 49. “New York on Yom Kippur,” American Hebrew, October 13, 1905; “Hebrew Use Churches,” New York Daily Tribune, September 20, 1903; Edward Steiner, “The Russian and Polish Jew in America,” Outlook November 1, 1902; Kehillah (Jewish Community) of New York City, Jewish Communal Register of New York City, 1917 – 1918 (New York:

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Kehillah, 1918), 125 (insert); Solomon Foster, The Workingman and the Synagogue (Newark, NJ, 1910), 6. 50. Constitution of Kahal Adath Jeshurun. 51. Polland, Landmark of the Spirit, 11. 52. Gurock, American Jewish Orthodoxy, 82 – 83. 53. Jeffrey Gurock, Orthodox Jews in America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009), 109 – 147 (quote on 133). 54. Leonard Dinnerstein, “The Funeral of Rabbi Jacob Joseph,” in David A. Gerber, ed., Anti-Semitism in American History (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986), 275 – 301; Edward O’Donnell, “Hibernians versus Hebrews? A New Look at the 1902 Jacob Joseph Funeral Riot,” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 6:2 (April 2007): 209 – 225; Arthur Goren, The Politics and Public Culture of American Jews (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 51 – 56 (quotes on 56). 55. Eldridge Street Synagogue, Minutes, April 27, 1891, Collection of the Museum at Eldridge Street. 56. Kehillah, Jewish Communal Register, 368 – 370, 389 – 390, 396 – 398; Zalmen Yefroikin, “Yidishe dertsiung in di fareynikte shtatn,” Algemeyne entsiklopedia: Yidn hey (New York: Dubnov Fund and Encyclopedia Committee, 1957), 198 – 199. 57. Kehillah, Jewish Communal Register, 394 – 395, 1201 – 1202; Jeffrey Gurock, Men and Women of the Yeshiva: Higher Education, Orthodoxy, and American Judaism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 11, 16, 52 – 53; Yefroikin, “Yidishe dertsiung,” 172.

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1. “Frantic Depositors Plead for Their Savings,” New York Times, December 13, 1901. 2. Ibid. 3. Ibid. 4. “Run on Jarmulowsky’s Bank,” The Sun, December 12, 1901, 2. 5. “Frantic Depositors Plead for Their Savings,” New York Times, December 13, 1901; “Jarmulowsky’s Bank Run is Over,” Evening World, December 16, 1901, 10. 6. “Banking on the Densely Populated East Side Is a Serious Business, but Has Amusing Features,” New York Tribune, May 15, 1903, B4. 7. “Latest Dealings in Realty Field,” New York Times, May 28, 1911, XXI; Michael D. Caratzas, “Research Report,” Landmarks Preservation Commission, October 13, 2009, Designation List 419, LP 2363. 8. Jewish Daily Forward, October 4, 1912. 9. Quoted in Moses Rischin, The Promised City: New York’s Jews, 1870 – 1914 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962), 75. 10. This ad ran in the Yidishe gazeten throughout 1887. 11. David Warfield, Ghetto Silhouettes (New York: James Pott, 1902), 81 – 82. 12. Abraham Karp, Golden Door to America: The Jewish Immigrant Experience (New York: Viking, 1973), 233. 13. Louis Lipsky, Memoirs in Profile (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1975), 12 – 13.

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14. “Reb Sender Yarmulowski: Banker and Philanthropist Has Died,” Tageblat, June 2, 1912. 15. “Run on East Side Bank,” New York Tribune, February 17, 1912, 11. 16. “Banking on the Densely Populated East Side Is a Serious Business.” 17. Jared N. Day, Urban Castles: Tenement Housing and Landlord Activism in New York City, 1890 – 1943 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 37. 18. Ibid., 37 – 41. 19. New York Tribune, May 15, 1903. 20. Aaron Domnitz, “Why I Left My Old Home and What I Have Accomplished in America,” in Jocelyn Cohen and Daniel Soyer, eds., My Future Is in America: Autobiographies of Eastern European Jewish Immigrants (New York: NYU Press, 2006), 143. 21. Ira Katznelson, “On the Margins of Liberalism,” in Pierre Birnbaum and Ira Katznelson, eds., Paths of Emancipation: Jews, States, and Citizenship (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 186. 22. Simon Kuznets, “Immigration of Russian Jews to the United States: Background and Structure,” Perspectives in American History 9 (1975): 94 – 100. 23. Stanley Nadel, Little Germany: Ethnicity, Religion, and Class in New York City, 1845 – 80 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990), 30 – 31; Rischin, Promised City, 79 – 80. 24. Katznelson, “On the Margins of Liberalism,” 184. 25. Nancy Foner, From Ellis Island to JFK: New York’s Two Great Waves of Immigration (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 43, 45 – 47. 26. Andrew Dolkart, Biography of a Tenement House in New York City: An Architectural History of 97 Orchard Street (Santa Fe, NM: Center for American Places, 2006), 61. 27. Rose Radin, American Jewish Committee Oral Histories, New York Public Library, I-8 – 9. 28. Dolkart, Biography of a Tenement, 81 – 84. 29. Quoted in Nancy Green, ed., Jewish Workers in the Modern Diaspora (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 17. 30. Jenna Weissman Joselit, “A Set Table: Jewish Domestic Culture in the New World, 1880 – 1950,” in Susan Braunstein and Jenna Weissman Joselit, eds., Getting Comfortable in New York: The American Jewish Home, 1880 – 1950 (New York: Jewish Museum, 1990), 27 – 33; Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, “Kitchen Judaism,” in ibid., 77 – 105; Joselit, The Wonders of America: Reinventing Jewish Culture, 1880 – 1950 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1994), 137 – 140. 31. Domnitz, “Why I Left My Old Home,” 143. 32. Joselit, “A Set Table,” 33; Joselit, Wonders of America, 148. 33. Andrew Heinze, Adapting to Abundance: Jewish Immigrants, Mass Consumption, and the Search for American Identity (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 133, 134, 138 – 140; Joselit, “A Set Table,” 35. 34. Domnitz, “Why I Left My Old Home,” 144; Heinze, Adapting to Abundance, 89 – 104 (Tribune quote on 93). 35. Nan Enstad, Ladies of Labor, Girls of Adventure: Working Women, Popular Cul-

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ture, and Labor Politics at the Turn of the Twentieth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 22 – 31 (quote, from Bertha Richardson, on 29); Heinze, Adapting to Abundance. 36. Charles S. Bernheimer, “The Jewish Immigrant as an Industrial Worker,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 33:2 (March 1909): 177. 37. Eli Lederhendler, Jewish Immigrants and American Capitalism, 1880 – 1920: From Caste to Class (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 41. 38. Domnitz, “Why I Left My Old Home,” 142, 145. 39. Isaac M. Rubinow, “Economic and Industrial Condition, New York,” in Charles S. Bernheimer, ed., The Russian Jew in the United States (Philadelphia: John C. Winston, 1905), 112 – 113. 40. Daniel Soyer, “Cockroach Capitalists: Jewish Contractors at the Turn of the Twentieth Century,” in Daniel Soyer, ed., A Coat of Many Colors: Immigration, Globalism, and Reform in the New York City Garment Industry (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 92 – 93. 41. Bernard Weinstein, Di idishe yunyons in Amerike (New York: United Hebrew Trades, 1929), 48. 42. Soyer, “Cockroach Capitalists,” 98 – 108. 43. David Von Drehle, Triangle: The Fire That Changed America (New York: Grove, 2003), 47. 44. Burton J. Hendricks, “The Jewish Invasion of America,” McClure’s Magazine, March 12, 1912, 126; Jesse Pope, The Clothing Industry in New York (Columbia: University of Missouri, 1905), quoted in Karp, Golden Door to America, 111; Benjamin Stolberg, Tailor’s Progress: The Story of a Famous Union and the Men Who Made It (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Doran, 1944), 9. 45. Alan M. Kraut, “The Butcher, the Baker, the Pushcart Peddler,” Journal of American Culture 6:4 (Winter 1983): 76. 46. Rischin, Promised City, 56. 47. Andrew Heinze, “Jewish Street Merchants and Mass Consumption in New York City, 1880 – 1914,” American Jewish Archives 41:2 (Fall – Winter 1989): 206 – 207. 48. Ibid., 204. 49. Minnie Goldstein, “Success or Failure?,” in Cohen and Soyer, My Future Is in America, 24 – 25. 50. Rose Cohen, Out of the Shadow (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), 205. 51. Goldstein, “Success or Failure?,” 28. 52. Rose Radin, American Jewish Committee Oral Histories, New York Public Library, I-8 – 9. 53. Samuel Joseph, Jewish Immigration to the United States from 1881 to 1910 (New York: Columbia University, 1914), 140, 145. 54. John Bodnar, The Transplanted: A History of Immigrants in Urban America (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1986), 57 – 84; Susan A. Glenn, Daughters of the Shtetl: Life and Labor in the Immigrant Generation (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,

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1990), 66 – 67; Judith E. Smith, Family Connections: A History of Italian and Jewish Lives in Providence, Rhode Island, 1900 – 1940 (Albany: SUNY Press, 1985), 23 – 82. 55. Joseph, Jewish Immigration, 156 – 157. 56. Bernheimer, “Jewish Immigrant as an Industrial Worker,” 179 – 180. 57. Foner, From Ellis Island to JFK, 189 – 191. 58. Samuel Chotzinoff, “Life on Stanton Street,” in Harold U. Ribalow, ed., Autobiographies of American Jews (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1968), 264. 59. Glenn, Daughters of the Shtetl, 68 – 69. 60. Ben Reisman, “Why I Came to America,” in Cohen and Soyer, My Future Is in America, 67; Domnitz, “Why I Left My Old Home,” 142 – 143. 61. Abraham Kokofsky, Lower East Side Oral History Project, NS 33-64, Tamiment Institute. 62. Harry Golden, “East Side Memoir, 1910s,” in Ribalow, Autobiographies of American Jews, 309. 63. Domnitz, “Why I Left My Old Home,” 145. 64. Glenn, Daughters of the Shtetl, 133 – 135, 139; Rischin, Promised City, 85 – 86, 146 – 147; Jewish Daily Forward, February 4, 1906. 65. See the collection of oral interviews housed in the Lower East Side Oral History Project, Tamiment Institute. 66. H. S. Goldstein, Forty Years of Struggle for a Principle (New York: Bloch, 1928), 32 – 33. 67. Harry Golden, “East Side Memoir, 1910s,” 307. 68. Chotzinoff, “Life on Stanton Street,” 264. 69. Anne Goldman, Lower East Side Oral History Project, NS 33-58, Tamiment Institute. 70. “Layden, layden di kleyne stors,” Jewish Daily Forward, April 7, 1902; see also the editorial in that issue on the subject: “Unser ‘goody-goody’ shtot regirung.” 71. Rod Glogower, “The Impact of the American Experience on Responsa Literature,” American Jewish History 69:2 (December 1979): 263. 72. Livia Garfinkel, “Reflections on Other Times, New York, 1881 – 1931,” Brooklyn, 1981, Small Collections 5873, American Jewish Archives. 73. Annie Polland, “May a Free Thinker Help a Pious Man? The Shared World of the ‘Religious’ and the ‘Secular’ among Eastern European Jewish Immigrants to America,” American Jewish History 93:4 (December 2007): 375 – 407. 74. “Jews Want Closer Sabbath Keeping,” New York Times, May 31, 1909; “The Jewish Sabbath Association,” American Hebrew, January 8, 1909, 265, 272; American Hebrew, January 15, 1909, 286; “Police Commissioner Bingham and Jewish Sabbath Observers,” Shabes zhurnal, February 1909; Alexis McCrossen, Holy Day, Holiday: The American Sunday (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000), 107. 75. Rischin, Promised City, 134; “The Work of the New York Kehillah: Salient Points of the Executive Committee’s Report,” American Hebrew, May 1, 1914, 5. 76. “Non-commercial Employment Bureaus in the Jewish Community of New York,” in Kehillah (Jewish Community) of New York City, Jewish Communal Register of New

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York City, 1917 – 1918 (New York: Kehillah, 1918), 646; Bernard Drachman, “Jewish Sabbath Association,” in ibid., 330. 77. “The Ghetto Market, Hester Street,” New York Times, November 14, 1897, reprinted in Allon Schoener, ed., Portal to America: The Lower East Side, 1870 – 1925 (New York: Holt, Reinhart, Winston, 1967), 55. 78. Bertram Reinitz, “The East Side Looks into Its Future,” New York Times, March 13, 1932. 79. Edward Steiner, “The Russian and Polish Jew in New York,” Outlook, November 1, 1902. 80. Richard Wheatley, “The Jews of New York,” Century Magazine, January 1892, 327. 81. Joseph Benjamin, “The Comforts and Discomforts of East Side Tenements,” in Report of the Year’s Work (New York: University Settlement Society, 1897), 27. 82. Abraham Kokofsky, Lower East Side Oral History Project, NS 33-64, Tamiment Institute. 83. Anne Goldman, Lower East Side Oral History Project, NS 33-58, Tamiment Institute. 84. Helen Rosenfield, Lower East Side Oral History Project, NS 33-75, Tamiment Institute. 85. Helen Harris, Lower East Side Oral History Project, NS 33-60, Tamiment Institute. 86. Joselit, Wonders of America, 187 – 188, 193 – 195; Heinze, Adapting to Abundance, 175 – 177. 87. Paula E. Hyman, “Immigrant Women and Consumer Protest: The New York City Kosher Meat Boycott of 1902,” American Jewish History 70:1 (September 1980): 91 – 105 (quotes on 93). 88. Joselit, Wonders of America, 176; Heinze, Adapting to Abundance, 177. 89. Christopher Gray, “The Unmaking of a Landmark,” New York Times, May 26, 1991. 90. Day, Urban Castles, 32 – 33. 91. Abraham Cahan, Bleter fun mayn lebn, vol. 3 (New York: Forward Association, 1926), 428. 92. Day, Urban Castles, 42 – 46; Jeffrey Gurock, When Harlem Was Jewish, 1879 – 1930 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979), 45 – 49. 93. Moses Rischin, “Toward the Onomastics of the Great New York Ghetto: How the Lower East Side Got Its Name,” in Hasia Diner, Jeffrey Shandler, and Beth Wenger, eds., Remembering the Lower East Side: American Jewish Reflections (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), 13 – 24; Deborah Dash Moore, At Home in America: Second Generation New York Jews (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981), 8. 94. Moore, At Home in America, 19. 95. Cahan, Bleter fun mayn lebn, 3:430. 96. Gurock, When Harlem Was Jewish, 28, 33. 97. Wendell Pritchet, Brownsville, Brooklyn: Blacks, Jews, and the Changing Face of the Ghetto (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 11 – 18; Deborah Dash Moore, “On the Fringes of the City: Jewish Neighborhoods in Three Boroughs,” in David Ward and Olivier Zunz, eds., The Landscape of Modernity: New York City, 1900 – 1940 (New York:

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Russell Sage Foundation, 1992), 256 – 257; quote from “Brownsville an Example of Rise of Values in Brooklyn Realty,” New York Herald, undated clipping, A. J. Virginia Scrapbook, Jewish Division, New York Public Library. 98. Alter Landesman, Brownsville: The Birth, Development and Passing of a Jewish Community in New York (New York: Bloch, 1971), 58 – 60. 99. Ibid., 56, 78 – 79, 86, 88 – 89, 150; Moore, “On the Fringes of the City.” 100. Kehillah, Jewish Communal Register, map following p. 80; Domnitz, “Why I Left My Old Home,” 149. 101. Hasia Diner, “Buying and Selling ‘Jewish’: The Historical Impact of Commerce on Jewish Communal Life,” in Jack Wertheimer, ed., Imagining the American Jewish Community (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England  / Brandeis University Press, 2007), 28 – 41; Moore, At Home in America, 20; Gurock, When Harlem Was Jewish, 39. 102. Rischin, Promised City, 56. 103. Ibid., 57 – 58; Edmund James, Oscar Flynn, J. Paulding, Mrs. Simon Patton, Walter Scott Andrews, The Immigrant Jew in America (New York: B. Buck, 1906), 289; Samuel Chotzinoff, A Lost Paradise: Early Reminiscences (1955; repr., New York: Arno, 1975), 182 – 188; Joselit, Wonders of America, 202 – 203. 104. Joselit, Wonders of America, 208 – 215; James et al., The Immigrant Jew, 223; Rischin, Promised City, 141. 105. Pritchett, Brownsville, Brooklyn, 25; Domnitz, “Why I Left My Old Home,” 149 – 150. 106. Seward Park Branch records, Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations.

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1. Kehillah (Jewish Community) of New York City, The Jewish Communal Register of New York City, 1917 – 1918 (New York: Kehillah, 1918), v, 91 – 98. 2. Jonathan Frankel, The Damascus Affair: “Ritual Murder,” Politics, and the Jews in 1840 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 225. 3. Hasia Diner, The Jews of the United States, 1654 – 2000 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 176. See also Hyman Grinstein, The Rise of the Jewish Community of New York City, 1654 – 1860 (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1945), 420 – 422. 4. Naomi Cohen, “American Jews and the Swiss Treaty: A Case Study in the Indivisibility of Anti-Semitism,” in Nathaniel Stampfer, ed., The Solomon Goldman Lectures: Perspectives in Jewish Learning, vol. 3 (Chicago: Spertus College of Judaica Press, 1982). 5. David I. Kertzer, The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara (New York: Vintage Books, 1998), 124 – 128 (Wise quote on 126); Naomi Cohen, Encounter with Emancipation: The German Jews in the United States, 1830 – 1914 (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1984), 217; Grinstein, Rise of the Jewish Community, 430 – 432. 6. Alan Tarshish, “The Board of Delegates of American Israelites (1859 – 1878),” Publications of the American Jewish Historical Society 49 (1959): 17 – 32; Diner, Jews of the United States, 190 – 191; Grinstein, Rise of the Jewish Community, 432 – 436. 7. Leonard Dinnerstein, Anti-Semitism in America (New York: Oxford University

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Press, 1994), 35 – 40; John J. Appel, “Jews in American Caricature: 1820 – 1914,” in Jeffrey Gurock, ed., American Jewish History, vol. 6, part 1, Anti-Semitism in America (New York: Routledge, 1998), 54 – 62; Hasia Diner, A Time for Gathering: The Second Migration, 1820 – 1880 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 191; John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860 – 1925 (1955; repr., New York: Atheneum, 1981), 26 – 27. 8. Diner, Jews of the United States, 169 – 170; Higham, Strangers in the Land, 43 – 44, 48 – 49, 202 – 204, 340. 9. Quoted in Higham, Strangers in the Land, 67. 10. Cohen, Encounter with Emancipation, 233. 11. Jacob Rader Marcus, United States Jewry, 1776 – 1985, vol. 2, The Germanic Period (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1993), 478; Reena Sigman Friedman, “ ‘Send Me My Husband Who Is In New York City’: Husband Desertion in the American Jewish Immigrant Community, 1900 – 1926,” Jewish Social Studies 44:1 (Winter 1982): 1 – 18; Abraham Oseroff, “The United Hebrew Charities of the City of New York and Subsidiary Relief Agencies,” in Kehillah, Jewish Communal Register, 994 – 996, 1318 – 1327; Anna R. Igra, Wives without Husbands: Marriage, Desertion, and Welfare in New York, 1900 – 1935 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007); Peter Romanofsky, “ ‘. . . To Rid Ourselves of the Burden . . .’: New York Jewish Charities and the Origins of the Industrial Removal Office, 1890 – 1901,” American Jewish Historical Quarterly 64:4 (June 1975): 331. 12. Lillian Wald, House on Henry Street (New York: Holt, 1915), 5 – 7. 13. Marjorie Feld, Lillian Wald: A Biography (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008); Paula Hyman and Deborah Dash Moore, Jewish Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia (New York: Routledge, 1997), 2:1446 – 1449. 14. Adam Bellow, The Educational Alliance: A Centennial Celebration (New York: Educational Alliance, 1990), 41. 15. David Kaufman, A Shul with a Pool: The “Synagogue Center” in American Jewish History (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England / Brandeis University Press, 1999), 92; Minutes of a Meeting of the Committee on Religious and Moral Work of the Educational Alliance, May 4, 1916, Records of the Educational Alliance, RG 312, YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. 16. “In a Wide Labor Field,” New York Times, May 19, 1895. 17. Ibid. 18. Ibid. 19. Minutes of a Meeting of the Committee of Religious and Moral Work of the Educational Alliance, May 4, 1916. 20. “In a Wide Labor Field.” 21. Daniel Soyer, “Brownstones and Brownsville: Elite Philanthropists and Immigrant Constituents at the Hebrew Educational Society of Brooklyn, 1899 – 1929,” American Jewish History 88:2 (June 2000): 181 – 207. 22. Faith Rogow, Gone to Another Meeting: The National Council of Jewish Women, 1893 – 1993 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1993), especially 1 – 35, 225; Hasia Diner and Beryl Lieff Benderly, Her Works Praise Her: A History of Jewish Women in

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America from Colonial Times to the Present (New York: Basic Books, 2002), 252 – 253, 255; Martha Katz-Hyman, “American, Sadie,” in Hyman and Moore, Jewish Women in America, 1:38 – 39. 23. Rogow, Gone to Another Meeting, 231, 232, 233, 234, 236; Carla Goldman, “Kohut, Rebekah Bettelheim,” in Hyman and Moore, Jewish Women in America, 1: 749 – 750. 24. Rogow, Gone to Another Meeting, 130 – 142; Diner and Benderly, Her Works Praise Her, 256 – 257. 25. Rogow, Gone to Another Meeting, 118; Katz-Hyman, “American, Sadie,” in Hyman and Moore, Jewish Women in America, 1:38 – 39. 26. Rogow, Gone to Another Meeting, 130 – 142 (quote on 140); Diner and Benderly, Her Works Praise Her, 258. 27. Katz-Hyman, “American, Sadie,” in Hyman and Moore, Jewish Women in America, 1:39; Rogow, Gone to Another Meeting, 118 – 123. 28. Rogow, Gone to Another Meeting, 226; Peggy Pearlstein, “Brenner, Rose,” in Hyman and Moore, Jewish Women in America, 1:175; Kehillah, Jewish Communal Register, 1137, 1232. 29. Daniel Soyer, Jewish Immigrant Associations and American Identity in New York, 1880 – 1939 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), 61; Kehillah, Jewish Communal Register, 888 – 934. 30. Kehillah, Jewish Communal Register, 167 – 168, 816 – 817, 881; Isaac Rontch, Di idishe landsmanshaften fun Nyu York (New York: IL Peretz Yiddish Writers Union, 1938), 350 – 351. 31. Jacob Sholtz, autobiography #5, American Jewish Autobiographies, RG 102, YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. 32. Soyer, Jewish Immigrant Associations, 117 – 120 (quote on 118). 33. Tageblat and Barondess quoted in ibid., 144. 34. Tina Levitan, Islands of Compassion: A History of the Jewish Hospitals of New York (New York: Twayne, 1964), 89 – 92, 107 – 149; Kehillah, Jewish Communal Register, 119 – 124, 1014 – 1015; Soyer, Jewish Immigrant Associations, 142 – 160. 35. Soyer, Immigrant Associations, 138 – 141; Kehillah, Jewish Communal Register, 1241, 1243. 36. Steven J. Zipperstein, Elusive Prophet: Ahad Ha’am and the Origins of Zionism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 204 – 205. 37. Jonathan Frankel, Prophecy and Politics: Socialism, Nationalism, and the Russian Jews, 1862 – 1917 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 473 – 484 (Cahan quote on 483). 38. Deborah Dash Moore, B’nai B’rith and the Challenge of Ethnic Leadership (Albany: SUNY Press, 1981), 74; Monty Noam Penkower, “The Kishinev Pogrom: A Turning Point in Jewish History,” Modern Judaism 24:3 (October 2004): 191. 39. Frankel, Prophecy and Politics, 487 – 492 (quotes on 487, 488); Penkower, “Kishinev Pogrom,” 204. 40. Naomi Cohen, Not Free to Desist: A History of the American Jewish Committee, 1906 – 1966 (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1972), 8 – 28 (quotes on 8 – 9).

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41. Ibid., 27; Naomi Cohen, Jacob Schiff: A Study in American Jewish Leadership (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England / Brandeis University Press, 1999). 42. Cohen, Not Free to Desist, 28. 43. Kehillah, Jewish Communal Register, 1415 – 1422, 1426. 44. Cohen, Not Free to Desist, 19 – 28, 40 – 48, 57 – 58; Matthew Silver, “Louis Marshall and the Democratization of Jewish Identity,” American Jewish History 94:1 – 2 (March – June 2008): 41 – 69; Ann E. Healy, “Tsarist Anti-Semitism and Russian-American Relations,” Slavic Review 42:3 (Autumn 1983): 408 – 425; Esther Panitz, “In Defense of the Jewish Immigrant (1891 – 1924),” American Jewish Historical Quarterly 55 (1965): 63 – 64. 45. Diner, Jews of the United States, 181; Mark A. Raider, The Emergence of American Zionism (New York: NYU Press, 1998), 10 – 13; Evyatar Friesel, “Brandeis’ Role in American Zionism Historically Reconsidered,” in Jeffrey Gurock, ed., American Zionism: Mission and Politics (New York: Routledge, 1998), 92 – 96; Naomi Cohen, “The Reaction of Reform Judaism in America to Political Zionism (1897 – 1922),” in Gurock, American Zionism, 31 – 32; Kehillah, Jewish Communal Register, 1340 – 1342. 46. Raider, Emergence of American Zionism, 18 – 19. 47. Kehillah, Jewish Communal Register, 1360 – 1361, 1370 – 1371; Hyman and Moore, Jewish Women in America, 1:571. 48. Erica B. Simmons, Hadassah and the Zionist Project (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2006), 11; Raider, Emergence of American Zionism, 15 – 16; Hyman and Moore, Jewish Women in America, 2:1368 – 1370; Mary McCune, “The Whole Wide World without Limits”: International Relief, Gender Politics, and American Jewish Women, 1893 – 1930 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2005), 23 – 26. 49. Michael Brown, The Israeli-American Connection: Its Roots in the Yishuv, 1914 – 1945 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1996), 145; Hyman and Moore, Jewish Women in America, 1:572; Simmons, Hadassah and the Zionist Project, 18; Kehillah, Jewish Communal Register, 1360 – 1365. 50. Kehillah, Jewish Communal Register, 1340 – 1409. 51. Tony Michels, A Fire in Their Hearts: Yiddish Socialists in New York (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005), 125 – 178 (quotes on 136, 145); Melech Epstein, Profiles of Eleven: Profiles of Eleven Men Who Guided the Destiny of an Immigrant Society and Stimulated Social Consciousness among the American People (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1965), 297 – 317 (quote on 298). 52. Michels, A Fire in Their Hearts, 179 – 216 (quote on 179); Frankel, Prophecy and Politics, 453 – 509. 53. Quoted in Arthur Goren, New York Jews and the Quest for Community: The Kehillah Experiment, 1908 – 1922 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1970), 25. 54. Jenna Weissman Joselit, Our Gang: Jewish Crime and the New York Jewish Community (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983), 2, 5 – 8; Timothy Gilfoyle, City of Eros: New York City, Prostitution, and the Commercialization of Sex, 1790 – 1920 (New York: Norton, 1992), 264 – 265, 408n. 35. 55. Goren, New York Jews and the Quest for Community, 36. 56. Ibid., 36 – 38; Arthur Goren, introduction to Arthur Goren, ed., Dissenter in Zion:

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From the Writings of Judah L. Magnes (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982), 1 – 58; Deborah Dash Moore, “A New American Judaism,” in William M. Brinner and Moses Rischin, eds., Like All Nations? The Life and Legacy of Judah L. Magnes (Albany: SUNY Press, 1987), 41 – 42. 57. Goren, New York Jews and the Quest for Community, 52 – 55, 58 – 59, 82 – 84, 86 – 109, 159 – 213. 58. Samson Benderly, “The Present Status of Jewish Religious Education in New York City,” and Bernard Dushkin, “Cheder Instruction,” in Kehillah, Jewish Communal Register, 349 – 357, 397. 59. Goren, New York Jews and the Quest for Community, 240; Soyer, Jewish Immigrant Associations, 124 – 127. 60. “Di pflikht fun amerikaner iden,” Tageblat, August 20, 1914. 61. Henry Rosenfelt, This Thing of Giving: The Record of a Rare Enterprise of Mercy and Brotherhood (New York: Plymouth, 1924), 22. 62. McCune, “The Whole Wide World without Limits,” 50. 63. American Jewish Archives, “An Inventory to the Stephen S. Wise Collection,” http://www.americanjewisharchives.org/aja/FindingAids/SWise.htm#bio (accessed August 2, 2010); Kehillah, Jewish Communal Register, 1460 – 1461. 64. Frankel, Prophecy and Politics, 509 – 536 (quote on 536); Kehillah, Jewish Communal Register, 1429 – 1440; “Jews Pick Members for Congress Today,” New York Times, June 10, 1917. 65. Quoted in Cohen, Not Free to Desist, 119. 66. Daniel Walkowitz, Working with Class: Social Workers and the Politics of MiddleClass Identity (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 71 – 73; Jonathan Woocher, Sacred Survival: The Civil Religion of American Jews (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 25; Kehillah, Jewish Communal Register, 1281 – 1313; “Have Plan to Unite All Jewish Charity,” New York Times, June 24, 1916; Deborah Dash Moore, “From Kehillah to Federation: The Communal Functions of Federated Philanthropy in New York City, 1917 – 1933,” American Jewish History 68:2 (December 1978): 134.

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1. Hillel Rogoff, Meyer London: A biografye (New York: Meyer London Memorial Fund, 1930), 78 – 79; Melech Epstein, Jewish Labor in the USA, vol. 1, 1882 – 1914 (1950; repr., New York: Ktav, 1969), 358 – 360. 2. Abraham Cahan, Bleter fun mayn lebn (New York: Forward Association, 1926 – 1931), vol. 4 (1928), 606 – 607; vol. 5 (1931), 25 – 27, 240 – 241; Shirley Zavin, Forward Building, Landmarks Preservation Commission Designation, 1986. 3. Tammany Society, or Columbian Order, 150th Anniversary Celebration: 1786 – July 4 – 1936 (New York, Tammany Society, 1936), 65; Gustavus Myers, The History of Tammany Hall (New York: G. Myers, 1901), 257 – 258; Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 995, 1145. 4. Hasia Diner, The Jews of the United States, 1654 – 2000 (Berkeley: University of

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California Press, 2004), 48; Eli Faber, A Time for Planting: The First Migration, 1654 – 1820, The Jewish People in America 1 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 99, 100 – 101, 128; Ira Forman, “The Politics of Minority Consciousness: The Historical Voting Behavior of American Jews,” in L. Sandy Maisel, ed., Jews in American Politics (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2001), 144; Lawrence H. Fuchs, Political Behavior of American Jews (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1956), 25 – 27. 5. “Biographical Profiles,” in Maisel, Jews in American Politics, 328, 334, 351; Myers, History of Tammany Hall, 166 – 167; Fuchs, Political Behavior of American Jews, 29, 32 – 46; Arthur Silver, “Jews in the Political Life of New York City, 1865 – 1897” (DHL diss., Yeshiva University, 1954), 7 – 8, 80, 107 – 108, 113 – 120. 6. Andrew Kaufman, Cardozo (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), 6 – 19 (quote on 15); Alexander Callow, The Tweed Ring (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965), 133 – 134, 138 – 139, 149, 180; M. R. Werner, Tammany Hall (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Doran, 1928), 103, 112 – 113, 128 – 129 (quotes on 128); Oliver Allen, The Tiger: The Rise and Fall of Tammany Hall (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1993), 97 – 98; Myers, History of Tammany Hall, 262 – 263. 7. Steven Erie, Rainbow’s End: Irish-Americans and the Dilemmas of Urban Machine Politics, 1840 – 1985 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988). 8. Edmund James, Oscar Flynn, J. Paulding, Mrs. Simon Patton, and Walter Scott Andrews, The Immigrant Jew in America (New York: B. Buck, 1906), 258 – 259. 9. Moses Rischin, The Promised City: New York’s Jews, 1870 – 1914 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962), 222; Irving Howe, World of Our Fathers (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976), 366; Timothy Gilfoyle, City of Eros: New York City, Prostitution, and the Commercialization of Sex, 1790 – 1920 (New York: Norton, 1992), 261; Allen, The Tiger, 212 – 213; “Mr. Engel’s New Face,” New York Times, August 20, 1891; “Engel on the Stand,” New York Times, December 16, 1897; “Says Tammany Had Big Head,” New York Times, November 8, 1901; “Martin Engel, Old ‘De Ate’ Leader, Dies,” New York Times, July 16, 1915; Nancy Weiss, Charles Francis Murphy, 1858 – 1924: Respectability and Responsibility in Tammany Politics (Northampton, MA: Smith College, 1968), 28. 10. Warner, Tammany Hall, 381 – 382; Rischin, Promised City, 223; “Additional Nominations,” New York Times, October 31, 1888; “An Election Fraud Case,” New York Times, March 6, 1889; “Smith and Co. Are Arrested,” New York Times, March 27, 1889 (quote); “O’Brien’s Men Were There,” New York Times, August 6, 1889; “Silver Dollar Smith’s Trial,” New York Times, September 18, 1889; “ ‘Silver Dollar’ in a Row,” New York Times, December 5, 1894; “Charles J. Smith Dies,” New York Times, December 23, 1899. 11. “Biographical Profiles,” in Maisel, Jews in American Politics, 344; Louis Eisenstein and Elliot Rosenberg, A Stripe of Tammany’s Tiger (New York: Robert Speller and Sons, 1966), 29 – 30; “Russia’s Exclusion of Jews,” New York Times, March 29, 1902; “Goldfogle’s Resolution Adopted,” New York Times, May 1, 1902; “Russia’s Exclusion of Jews,” New York Times, February 19, 1904; “Exclusion of Jews to Go before House,” New York Times, February 23, 1911; “Literacy Hearing to Be Battle Royal,” New York Times, January 22, 1915; “Congressman Goldfogle,” New York Times, October 30, 1920; “H. M. Goldfogle Dies Suddenly,” New York Times, June 2, 1929; “Eulogies Paid H. M. Goldfogle,” New York

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Times, June 5, 1929; ”Birger fun 12ten kongres district,” Tageblat, October 29, 1912, “A vort vegen kongresman Goldfogl,” Tageblat, October 31, 1912. 12. Thomas Henderson, Tammany Hall and the New Immigrants: The Progressive Years (New York: Arno, 1976), 47 – 48, 157 (quote). 13. Richard Welch, King of the Bowery: Big Tim Sullivan, Tammany Hall, and New York City from the Gilded Age to the Progressive Era (Albany: SUNY Press, 2008), 43 – 44, 48 – 49, 66 – 67, 91, 132 (quote). 14. Eisenstein and Rosenberg, Stripe of Tammany’s Tiger, 15. 15. Ibid., 5 – 10, 22 – 23, 25, 33, 34, 49; Rischin, Promised City, 230; Howe, World of Our Fathers, 368, 370; Henderson, Tammany Hall and the New Immigrants, 167. 16. James et al., Immigrant Jew in America, 260. 17. Eisenstein and Rosenberg, Stripe of Tammany’s Tiger, 56 – 58; “Samuel S. Koenig, G.O.P. Leader, Dies,” New York Times, March 18, 1955. 18. Quoted in Tony Michels, A Fire in Their Hearts: Yiddish Socialists in New York (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005), 46. 19. Burrows and Wallace, Gotham, 1092. 20. Ibid., 1092 – 1110; Epstein, Jewish Labor in USA, 115 – 116, 144 – 149; E. Tcherikower, Geshikhte fun der yidisher arbeter bavegung in di fareynikte shtatn (New York: Yiddish Scientific Institute — Yivo, 1945), 290 – 294. 21. Ben Reisman, “Why I Came to America,” in Jocelyn Cohen and Daniel Soyer, eds., My Future Is in America: Autobiographies of Eastern European Jewish Immigrants (New York: NYU Press, 2006), 67 – 68. 22. J.  S. Hertz, 50 yor arbeter-ring in yidishn lebn (New York: National Executive Committee of the Workmen’s Circle, 1950), 15; A. S. Sachs, Di geshikhte fun arbayter ring, 1892 – 1925 (New York: National Executive Committee of the Workmen’s Circle, 1925), 3 – 6; Daniel Soyer, Jewish Immigrant Associations and American Identity in New York, 1880 – 1939 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), 66 – 70. 23. Howe, World of Our Fathers, 522 – 543; Melech Epstein, Profiles of Eleven: Profiles of Eleven Men Who Guided the Destiny of an Immigrant Society and Stimulated Social Consciousness among the American People (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1965), 49 – 110. 24. Hadassa Kosak, Cultures of Opposition: Jewish Immigrant Workers, New York City, 1881 – 1905 (Albany: SUNY Press, 2000). 25. Howe, World of Our Fathers, 298. 26. Ibid., 297 – 299; Annelise Orleck, Common Sense and a Little Fire: Women and Working-Class Politics in the United States, 1900 – 1965 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 39 – 41, 48 – 49, 60; Richard Greenwald, The Triangle Fire, the Protocol of Peace, and Industrial Democracy in Progressive Era New York (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2005), 32 – 46. 27. Greenwald, Triangle Fire, 50 – 75; Howe, World of Our Fathers, 301. 28. James et al., Immigrant Jew in America, 261. 29. Irving Howe and Kenneth Libo, eds., How We Lived: A Documentary History of Immigrant Jews in America, 1880 – 1930 (New York: Richard Marek, 1979), 190; Epstein,

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Profiles of Eleven, 189 – 232; Leksikon fun der nayer yiddisher literature, vol. 3 (New York: Congress for Jewish Culture, 1960), 138 – 139; Howe, World of Our Fathers, 315. 30. Howe, World of Our Fathers, 315; Epstein, Profiles of Eleven, 159 – 188 (quotes on 174); Rogoff, Meyer London. 31. James et al., Immigrant Jew in America, 261. 32. Silver, “Jews in the Political Life of New York City,” 35 – 41; David Hammack, Power and Society: Greater New York at the Turn of the Century (1982; repr., New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), 9. 33. Henderson, Tammany Hall and the New Immigrants, 103 – 111, 155 – 156, 167; James et al., Immigrant Jew in America, 257, 264 – 265; Howe, World of Our Fathers, 362; Rischin, Promised City, 228; Fuchs, Political Behavior of American Jews, 124; Silver, “Jews in the Political Life of New York City,” 121 – 122. 34. S. Sara Monoson, “The Lady and the Tiger: Women’s Electoral Activism in New York City before Suffrage,” Journal of Women’s History 2:2 (Fall 1990): 100 – 134 (Nathan quote on 110). 35. Joyce Antler, The Journey Home: Jewish Women and the American Century (New York: Free Press, 1997), 54 – 61 (quotes on 54 – 55). 36. Maud Nathan, The Story of an Epoch-Making Movement (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Page, 1926), 89. 37. Elizabeth Israels Perry, Belle Moskowitz: Feminine Politics and the Exercise of Power in the Age of Al Smith (1987; repr., Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1992), 118. 38. David Von Drehle, Triangle: The Fire That Changed America (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2003); Leon Stein, The Triangle Fire (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1962); Greenwald, Triangle Fire, 129 – 153. 39. Jewish Daily Forward, March 26, 1911. 40. Howe and Libo, How We Lived, 187. 41. Stein, Triangle Fire, 124, 138; Orleck, Common Sense and a Little Fire, 36 – 37, 44 – 45, 48, 103; Greenwald, Triangle Fire, 139 – 145. 42. Greenwald, Triangle Fire, 156 – 159; Von Drehle, Triangle, 209 – 214; Orleck, Common Sense and a Little Fire, 131 – 132. 43. Rischin, Promised City, 228 – 229; Gary Gerstle, American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 45 – 56, 72 – 74; Fuchs, Political Behavior of American Jews, 52 – 59. 44. Warner, Tammany Hall, 529 – 530; Henderson, Tammany Hall and the New Immigrants, 116; Naomi Cohen, Encounter with Emancipation: The German Jews in the United States, 1830 – 1914 (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1984), 144 – 147, 169 – 170; “Shtraus shturemt di ist sayd,” Tageblat, October 29, 1912. 45. Henderson, Tammany Hall and the New Immigrants, 118; Melvin Dubofsky, “Success and Failure of Socialism in New York City, 1900 – 1918: A Case Study,” Labor History 9:3 (Autumn 1968): 366. 46. “Levy Says Sulzer Coined ‘Confession,’ ” New York Times, August 19, 1913. 47. Henderson, Tammany Hall and the New Immigrants, 121, 129. 48. Warner, Tammany Hall, 532 – 554; Eisenstein and Rosenberg, Stripe of Tammany’s

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Tiger, 23 – 24; “Levy Says Sulzer Coined ‘Confession’ ”; “Loyal Few Hear Sulzer Farewell” and “Tammany Dismal, Fear for McCall,” New York Times, October 19, 1913; “Sulzer Frenzy Hits East Side,” New York Times, October 23, 1913; “Sulzer Elected to Assembly Two-to-One in Sixth” and “Sulzer Jubilant at Murphy’s Defeat,” New York Times, November 5, 1913; “Aaron J. Levy, 74, Ex-State Justice,” New York Times, November 22, 1955. 49. Henderson, Tammany Hall and the New Immigrants, 177; Howe, World of Our Fathers, 313, 315; Dubofsky, “Success and Failure of Socialism,” 367 – 368; Arthur Goren, The Politics and Public Culture of American Jews (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 84 – 89, 95 – 97 (quote on 97). 50. Alter Landesman, Brownsville: The Birth, Development and Passing of a Jewish Community in New York (New York: Bloch, 1971), 113 – 119, 299 – 302. 51. “Judge Hylan Opens Fight for Ballots,” New York Times, October 5, 1917. 52. Henderson, Tammany Hall and the New Immigrants, 193 – 219 (quotes on 202, 212); Dubofsky, “Success and Failure of Socialism,” 371; Howe, World of Our Fathers, 279 – 280, 319 – 321; Epstein, Profiles of Eleven, 213; “Hylan Victory Is a Tammany Record,” New York Times, November 8, 1917. 53. Henderson, Tammany Hall and the New Immigrants, 222 – 234; Landesman, Brownsville, 304. 54. Elinor Lerner, “Jewish Involvement in the New York City Woman Suffrage Movement,” American Jewish History 70:4 (June 1981): 442 – 461, reprinted in Jeffrey Gurock, ed., American Jewish History, vol. 3 (New York: Routledge, 1998), 963 – 982. 55. Orleck, Common Sense and a Little Fire, 87 – 113 (Lemlich quote on 91). 56. Perry, Belle Moskowitz, 117 – 139; Howe, World of Our Fathers, 386 – 391; Dubofsky, “Success and Failure of Socialism,” 371.

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1. Harmonie Club of the City of New York, One Hundred Years, 1852 – 1952: The Harmonie Club (New York: Harmonie Club, 1952); Rudolf Glanz, Studies in Judaica Americana (New York: Ktav, 1970), 176, 179, 181. 2. Reuben Iceland, “At Goodman and Levine’s,” in Irving Howe and Eliezer Greenberg, eds., Voices from the Yiddish: Essays, Memoirs, Diaries (1972; repr., New York: Schocken, 1975), 300 – 303. 3. Irving Howe and Kenneth Libo, eds., How We Lived: A Documentary History of Immigrant Jews in America, 1880 – 1930 (New York: Richard Marek, 1979), 288 – 290; Irving Howe, World of Our Fathers (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976), 235 – 238; Edmund James, Oscar Flynn, J. Paulding, Mrs. Simon Patton, and Walter Scott Andrews, The Immigrant Jew in America (New York: B. Buck, 1906), 222 – 226. 4. Hasia Diner, A Time for Gathering: The Second Migration, 1820 – 1880 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 8 – 35, 49 – 56, 219 – 226. 5. Sol Steinmetz, Yiddish and English: A Century of Yiddish in America (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1986), 30 – 40; Nancy Green, ed., Jewish Workers in the Modern Diaspora (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 193 (Sholem Aleichem quote). 6. Stephen Whitfield, In Search of American Jewish Culture (Hanover, NH: University

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Press of New England / Brandeis University Press, 1999), 36; Steinmetz, Yiddish and English, 41 – 65; H. L. Mencken, The American Language: An Inquiry into the Development of English in the United States, 4th ed. (1936; repr., New York: Knopf, 1962), 368 – 369, 578, 633 – 636, and supplements I (1945; 1962), 433 – 435, and II (1948; 1962), 188 – 193, 259 – 262, 754. 7. Jenna Joselit, “Fun and Games: The American Jewish Social Club,” in Marc Lee Raphael, ed., The Columbia History of Jews and Judaism in America (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 246 – 262; Glanz, Studies in Judaica Americana, 169 – 186; Harmonie Club, One Hundred Years. 8. Robert Greef, Public Lectures in New York, 1851 – 1878: A Cultural Index of the Times (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1945), 6 (quote); Sean Wilentz, Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1789 – 1850 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), 181 – 182, 271 – 272; Robert Ernst, Immigrant Life in New York City, 1825 – 1863 (1949; repr., Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1994), 142 – 144. 9. Tony Michels, A Fire in Their Hearts: Yiddish Socialists in New York (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005), 73 – 91, 189 – 204; Stephan F. Brumberg, Going to America, Going to School: The Jewish Immigrant Public School Encounter in Turn-of-the-Century New York City (New York: Praeger, 1986), 148 – 174; M. Shapiro (Em.S.), “Why I Came to America and What I Have Accomplished Here,” autobiography #34, American Jewish Autobiographies, RG 102, YIVO Institute for Social Research. 10. Diner, Time for Gathering, 133 – 134; Diane Ravitch, The Great School Wars: A History of the New York City Public Schools (1974; repr., New York: Basic Books, 1988), 33 – 76; Naomi Cohen, Encounter with Emancipation: The German Jews in the United States, 1830 – 1914 (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1984), 92 – 96. 11. Hyman Grinstein, Rise of the Jewish Community of New York City, 1654 – 1860 (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1945), 236, 244; Brumberg, Going to America, Going to School, 3, 67 – 69, 74 – 75, 130 – 131 138; James et al., Immigrant Jew in America, 185 – 186. 12. Brumberg, Going to America, Going to School, 67, 89, 114. 13. Martha Kransdorf, “Julia Richman’s Years in the New York City Public Schools, 1872 – 1912” (Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 1979), 58 – 127 (quote on 58); Paula Hyman and Deborah Dash Moore, eds., Jewish Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia (New York: Routledge, 1997), 2:1148 – 1149. 14. Kransdorf, “Julia Richman’s Years,” 66 – 72, 128 – 189 (quotes on 66 – 67, 72, 132 – 133); Howe, World of Our Fathers, 278; “Julia Richman,” and “Julia Richman Dies in Paris Hospital,” New York Times, June 26, 1912. 15. Ravitch, Great School Wars, 195 – 230; David Tyack, The One Best System: A History of American Urban Education (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1974), 250 – 251. 16. Howe, World of Our Fathers, 256 – 264, 273; James et al., Immigrant Jew in America, 188 – 191, 194 – 196. 17. Howe, World of Our Fathers, 280 – 286; James et al., Immigrant Jew in America, 191 – 192; Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 781; Morris Raphael Cohen, A Dreamer’s Journey: The Autobiography of Morris Raphael Cohen (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1949), 89. 18. Arthur Goren, “The Jewish Press,” in Sally Miller, ed., The Ethnic Press in the

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United States: A Historical Analysis and Handbook (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1987), 209; Barbara Straus Reed, “Pioneer Jewish Journalism,” in Frankie Hutton and Barbara Straus Reed, eds., Outsiders in Nineteenth Century Press History: Multicultural Perspectives (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1995), 41 – 45; Albert M. Friedenberg, “American Jewish Journalism to the Close of the Civil War,” Publications of the American Jewish Historical Society 26 (1918): 271; Kenneth Libo, “A History of Jewish Journalism in America,” in National Museum of American Jewish History, A People in Print: Jewish Journalism in America (Philadelphia: National Museum of American Jewish History, 1987), 34. 19. Jacob Rader Marcus, United States Jewry, 1776 – 1985, vol. 2 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1991), 271. Moshe D. Sherman, Orthodox Judaism in America: A Biographical Dictionary and Sourcebook (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1996), 35. 20. Libo, “History of Jewish Journalism,” 36 – 38; American Jewish Historical Society, “Guide to the Papers of Philip Cowen,” http://findingaids.cjh.org/?pID=109145 (accessed December 28, 2011). 21. Bette Roth Young, Emma Lazarus in Her World: Life and Letters (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1995), 24. 22. Joyce Antler, The Journey Home: Jewish Women and the American Century (New York: Free Press, 1997), 10 – 12; Francis Klagsbrun, foreword to Young, Emma Lazarus in Her World, xii – xiii; Esther Schor, Emma Lazarus (New York: Nextbook/Schocken, 2006), 17 – 20, 23 – 32, 46 – 49, 51 – 62, 76 – 79, 249 – 250; Young, Emma Lazarus in Her World, 3 – 5, 7 – 8, 36 – 57. 23. Glanz, Studies in Judaica Americana, 233 – 236; Stanley Nadel, “Jewish Race and German Soul in Nineteenth Century America,” American Jewish History 77:1 (September 1987): 14, 25. 24. Quoted in Glanz, Studies in Judaica Americana, 243. See also Christa Carvajal, “German-American Theatre,” in Maxine Schwartz Seller, ed., Ethnic Theater in the United States (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1983), 177; Nadel, “Jewish Race and German Soul,” 10. 25. Carvajal, “German-American Theatre,” 181 – 182; Glanz, Studies in Judaica Americana, 239 – 241; John Koegel, Music in German Immigrant Theater in New York City, 1840 – 1940 (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2009); Fritz Leuchs, The Early German Theatre in New York, 1840 – 1872 (1928; repr., New York: AMS Press, 1966), 82, 86. 26. Leuchs, Early German Theatre, 82, 96, 104, 110, 113, 118 – 119, 134, 145 – 146, 160 – 161, 206 – 207; Glanz, Studies in Judaica Americana, 240 – 241; Isidore Singer and Edgar Meis, “Bandmann, Daniel E.,” in Jewish Encyclopedia (1901 – 1906), available online at http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/view.jsp?artid=202&letter=B&search=bandmann (accessed October 26, 2010); “Daniel Bandmann Dead,” New York Times, November, 25, 1905; Nadel, “Jewish Race and German Soul,” 15. 27. Nadel, “Jewish Race and German Soul,” 15 – 16; Nahma Sandrow, Vagabond Stars: A World History of the Yiddish Theater (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), 72 – 78, 92, 104 – 109; Nina Warnke, “Immigrant Popular Culture as Contested Space: Yiddish Music Halls, the Yiddish Press, and the Processes of Americanization, 1900 – 1919,” Theater Journal 48:3 (October 1996): 326 – 331; Judith Thissen, “Jewish Immigrant Audiences in

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New York City, 1905 – 1914,” in Melvyn Stokes and Richard Maltby, eds., American Movie Audiences: From the Turn of the Century to the Early Sound Era (London: BFI, 1999), 18. 28. Sandrow, Vagabond Stars, 132. 29. Ibid., 132 – 163, 169 – 192, 259 – 271; Nina Warnke, “Theater as Educational Institution: Jewish Immigrant Intellectuals and Yiddish Theater Reform,” in Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett and Jonathan Karp, eds., The Art of Being Jewish in Modern Times (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 23 – 41. 30. Hyman and Moore, Jewish Women in America, 1:715 – 717. 31. Tony Michels, “ ‘Speaking to Moyshe’: The Early Socialist Yiddish Press and Its Readers,” Jewish History 14:1 (2000): 53; Goren, “Jewish Press,” 212. 32. Moses Rischin, The Promised City: New York’s Jews, 1870 – 1914 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962), 118; Moyshe Shtarkman, “Vikhtikste momentn in der geshikhte fun der yidisher prese in Amerike,” in J. Gladstone, S. Niger, and H. Rogoff, eds., Finf un zibetsik yor yidishe prese in Amerike, 1870 – 1945 (New York: Yiddish Writers Union, 1945), 17 – 19, 25 – 26; Leksikon fun der nayer yidisher literature, vol. 7 (New York: Congress for Jewish Culture, 1968), 88 – 89. 33. Michels, Fire in Their Hearts, 53 – 56, 95 – 104. 34. Andrew Heinze, Adapting to Abundance: Jewish Immigrants, Mass Consumption, and the Search for American Identity (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 150, 153; Goren, “Jewish Press,” 215, 217; Michels, “Speaking to Moyshe,” 69; Isaac Metzger, A Bintel Brief: Sixty Years of Letters from the Lower East Side to the Jewish Daily Forward (New York: Ballantine Books, 1971). 35. S. Margoshes, “The Jewish Press in New York City,” in Kehillah (Jewish Community) of New York City, Jewish Communal Register of New York City, 1917 – 1918 (New York: Kehillah, 1918), 600 – 608, 612 – 632. 36. Irving Howe, Ruth Wisse, and Khone Shmeruk, introduction to Irving Howe, Ruth Wisse, and Khone Shmeruk, eds., The Penguin Book of Modern Yiddish Verse (New York: Viking, 1987), 22 – 25; Leksikon fun der nayer yidisher literatur (New York: Congress for Jewish Culture, 1956 – 1981), vol. 1 (1956), 207 – 210; vol. 3 (1960), 432 – 443; vol. 6 (1965), 554 – 563; vol. 8 (1981), 350 – 356; Morris Rosenfeld, “The Teardrop Millionaire,” in Itche Goldberg and Max Rosenfeld, eds., Morris Rosenfeld: Selections from His Poetry and Prose (New York: Yidisher kultur farband, 1964), 29; Sarah Alisa Braun, “Jews, Writing, and the Dynamics of Literary Affiliation, 1880 – 1940” (Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 2007), 72 – 121. 37. Howe et al., introduction to Penguin Book, 28; Mani Leyb, “Ot azoy, azoy, azoy,” in Dovid Kazanski, ed., Zishe Landoy: Zamlbukh aroysgegebn fun khaveyrim (New York: Farlag Inzl, 1938), 11. 38. Howe et al., introduction to Penguin Book, 27 – 32, Mani Leyb, “I Am  .  .  .  /  Ikh bin . . . ,” in Howe et al., Penguin Book, 128 – 132; Ruth Wisse, A Little Love in Big Manhattan: Two Yiddish Poets (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), 21 – 44; Leksikon fun der nayer yidisher literatur, vol. 5 (1963), 450 – 456. 39. Aaron Domnitz, “Why I Left My Old Home and What I Have Accomplished in America,” in Jocelyn Cohen and Daniel Soyer, eds., My Future Is in America:

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Autobiographies of Eastern European Jewish Immigrants (New York: NYU Press, 2006), 151 – 152. 40. Howe, World of Our Fathers, 445 – 451; Leksikon fun der nayer yidisher literatur, 8:678 – 720; 1:83 – 92; Arthur Goren, The Politics and Public Culture of American Jews (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 67 – 71. 41. Margoshes, “Jewish Press,” 599; Z’vi Scharfstein, “Hebrew Speaking Clubs in America,” in Kehillah, Jewish Communal Register, 566 – 567; Domnitz, “Why I Left My Old Home,” 148; Alan Mintz, “Hebrew Literature in America,” in Michael Kramer and Hanna Wirth-Nesher, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Jewish American Literature (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 92 – 109; Alan Mintz, “A Sanctuary in the Wilderness: The Beginnings of the Hebrew Movement in America in Hatoren,” in Alan Mintz, ed., Hebrew in America: Perspectives and Prospects (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1993), 29 – 67. 42. Aviva Ben-Ur, “The Ladino (Judeo-Spanish) Press in the United States, 1910 – 1948,” in Werner Sollors, ed., Multilingual America: Transnationalism, Ethnicity, and the Languages of American Literature (New York: NYU Press, 1998), 64 – 79. 43. Rischin, Promised City, 128 – 130; Michels, “Speaking to Moyshe,” 67; Nadel, “Jewish Race and German Soul,” 16; Nadel, Little Germany: Ethnicity, Religion, and Class in New York City, 1845 – 80 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990), 83. 44. Christine Stansell, American Moderns: Bohemian New York and the Creation of a New Century (2000, repr., Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010); Tony Michels, “Cultural Crossings: Immigrant Jews, Yiddish, and the New York Intellectual Scene” (unpublished paper in authors’ possession). 45. Braun, “Jews, Writing, and the Dynamics of Literary Affiliation,” 20 – 67 (quotes on 40 – 41); Abraham Cahan, Bleter fun mayn lebn, vol. 4 (New York: Forward Association, 1928), 21 – 31; Sanford Marovitz, Abraham Cahan (New York: Twayne, 1996), 153 – 156. 46. Stansell, American Moderns, 132, 134. 47. Antler, Journey Home, 74; Stansell, American Moderns, 121, 134. 48. Antler, Journey Home, 73 – 78, 82 – 85 (quotes on 85); Stansell, American Moderns, 120 – 144; Hyman and Moore, Jewish Women in America, 1:529. 49. Carol Schoen, Anzia Yezierska (Boston: Twayne, 1982), 11; Antler, Journey Home, 29. 50. Schoen, Anzia Yezierska, 1 – 38; Antler, Journey Home, 27 – 30; Hyman and Moore, Jewish Women in America, 2:1521; Alice Kessler Harris, introduction to Bread Givers, by Anzia Yezierska (New York: Persea Books, 1975), v – xviii. 51. Burrows and Wallace, Gotham, 1151 – 1154, 1189, 1213; Daniel Pfaff, “Pulitzer, Joseph,” American National Biography Online, http://www.anb.org. 52. Jacob Rader Marcus, United States Jewry, 1776 – 1985, vol. 3 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1993), 313 – 314; Susan Barnes, “Ochs, Adolph Simon,” American National Biography Online, http://www.anb.org; Naomi Cohen, Not Free to Desist: The American Jewish Committee, 1906 – 1966 (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1972), 74; “Adolph S. Ochs Dead at 77,” New York Times, April 9, 1935; Harrison Salisbury, “New

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York Times,” in Kenneth Jackson, ed., Encyclopedia of New York City (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 846 – 847; Susan E. Tifft and Alex S. Jones, The Trust: The Private and Powerful Family Behind the New York Times (Boston: Little, Brown, 1999), 92 – 96; “The Frank Case,” New York Times, May 8, 1914; Deborah Dash Moore, B’nai B’rith and the Challenge of Ethnic Leadership (Albany: SUNY Press, 1981), 107 – 108; Leonard Dinnerstein, Anti-Semitism in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 181 – 184. 53. Stansell, American Moderns, 18 – 25 (quote on 19). 54. Moses Rischin, introduction to Moses Rischin, ed., Grandma Never Lived in America: The New Journalism of Abraham Cahan (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), xvii – xliv. 55. Norman L. Kleeblatt and Susan Chevlowe, Painting a Place in America: Jewish Artists in New York, 1900 – 1945, exhibition catalogue (New York: Jewish Museum, 1991), 100. 56. Hutchins Hapgood, The Spirit of the Ghetto (1902; repr., Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967), 254 – 261; Matthew Baigell, “From Hester Street to Fifty-Seventh Street: Jewish-American Artists in New York,” in Kleeblatt and Chevlowe, Painting a Place in America, 30 – 31. 57. Baigell, “From Hester Street to Fifty-Seventh Street,” 32; Kleeblatt and Chevlowe, Painting a Place in America, 92 – 93, 198 – 200; Milton Wolf Brown, American Painting, from the Armory Show to the Depression (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1955), 39 – 44, 137 – 138 (quote on 42). 58. Kleeblatt and Chevlowe, Painting a Place in America, 94 – 95, 98. 59. Ibid., 106 – 109; Paul Avrich, The Modern School Movement: Anarchism and Education in the United States (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), 145 – 153. 60. Kleeblatt and Chevlowe, Painting a Place in America, 105 – 114. 61. Baigell, “From Hester Street to Fifty-Seventh Street,” 32; Kleeblatt and Chevlowe, Painting a Place in America, 99 – 100; Adam Bellow, The Educational Alliance: A Centennial Celebration (New York: Educational Alliance, 1990), 123. 62. Burrows and Wallace, Gotham, 1140 – 1146; Robert Snyder, The Voice of the City: Vaudeville and Popular Culture in New York (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 4 – 37, 82 – 83, 96 – 97. 63. Snyder, Voice of the City, 42 – 52. 64. Ibid., 55 – 56; Hyman and Moore, Jewish Women in America, 2:1416 – 1418. 65. Jonathan Karp, “Of Maestros and Minstrels: American Jewish Composers between Black Vernacular and European Art Music,” in Kirshenblatt-Gimblett and Karp, Art of Being Jewish, 57 – 77; Michael Alexander, Jazz Age Jews (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 133 – 153; Michael Rogin, Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants and the Hollywood Melting Pot (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996); Whitfield, In Search of American Jewish Culture, 149 – 154. 66. Larry Stempel, Showtime: A History of the Broadway Musical Theater (New York: Norton, 2010), 79 – 84, 124 – 125, 136; Foster Hirsch, The Boys from Syracuse: The Shuberts’ Theatrical Empire (1998; repr., New York: Cooper Square Press, 2000). 67. Burrows and Wallace, Gotham, 1146 – 1147; David A. Jasen, Tin Pan Alley: The

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Golden Age of American Song (New York: Routledge, 2003): ix; Alexander, Jazz Age Jews, 156; Heinze, Adapting to America, 141; Mark Slobin, Tenement Songs: The Popular Music of the Jewish Immigrants (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982), 123; Whitfield, In Search of American Jewish Culture, 95. 68. Alexander, Jazz Age Jews, 158 – 163 (“Norman Rockwell” quote on 158); Whitfield, In Search of American Jewish Culture, 95 – 99 (Kern quote on 96); Ann Douglas, Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995), 355 – 359. 69. David Nasaw, Going Out: The Rise and Fall of Public Amusements (New York: Basic Books, 1993), 104 – 114 (Israels quote on 104). 70. Minnie Goldstein, autobiography #155/155A/267, American Jewish Biographies Collection, RG 102, YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. 71. Kathy Peiss, Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-theCentury New York (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986), 89 – 99; Heinze, Adapting to Abundance, 120; Daniel Soyer, Jewish Immigrant Associations and American Identity in New York, 1880 – 1939 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), 104 – 106. 72. “Heinrich Conried Dies in Austria,” New York Times, April 27, 1909; Carvajal, “German-American Theatre,” 182; Nadel, “Jewish Race and German Soul,” 15; Joseph Horowitz, Classical Music in America: A History of Its Rise and Fall (New York: Norton, 2005), 185 – 192. 73. Horowitz, Classical Music in America, 198 – 204, 247 – 255, 364 – 365; John Frederick Cone, Oscar Hammerstein’s Manhattan Opera Company (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1966); Jonathan Gill, Harlem: The Four Hundred Year History from Dutch Village to Capital of Black America (New York: Grove, 2011), 113 – 114, 122 – 125. 74. Ben Singer, “Manhattan Nickelodeons: New Data on Audiences and Exhibitors,” Cinema Journal 34:3 (Spring 1995): 5; Judith Thissen, “Film and Vaudeville on New York’s Lower East Side,” in Kirshenblatt-Gimblett and Karp, Art of Being Jewish, 45; Heinze, Adapting to Abundance, 119, 204; Thissen, “Jewish Immigrant Audiences in New York City,” 18 – 19; Peiss, Cheap Amusements, 149. 75. Lary May, Screening Out the Past: The Birth of Mass Culture and the Motion Picture Industry (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 148 (Zukor quote), 174 – 175. 76. Heinze, Adapting to Abundance, 208 – 218; Matthew Bernstein, “Zukor, Adolph,” American National Biography Online, http://www.anb.org; Neal Gabler, An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood (New York: Crown, 1988), 65 – 66. 77. Charles Musser and David James, “Filmmaking,” in Jackson, Encyclopedia of New York City, 404 – 405; Douglas, Terrible Honesty, 61. 78. Howe, World of Our Fathers, 485 – 492; Milton Doroshkin, Yiddish in America: Social and Cultural Foundations (Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1969), 218; Whitfield, In Search of American Jewish Culture, 30. 79. Horowitz, Classical Music in America, 423; Whitfield, In Search of American Jewish Culture, 61. 80. Stempel, Showtime, 192 – 194, 250 – 255; Douglas, Terrible Honesty, 102 – 103; Whitfield, In Search of American Jewish Culture, 69 – 71, 74 – 77, 155 – 157.

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NOTES TO THE CONCLUSION

1. Deborah Dash Moore, At Home in America: Second Generation New York Jews (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981), 21. 2. “Likens Alien Bill to Pharaoh’s Plan,” New York Times, April 20, 1924. 3. John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860 – 1925 (New York: Atheneum, 1981), 194 – 299. 4. Ibid., 270 – 286; Madison Grant, The Passing of the Great Race (New York: Scribner, 1916), 81; Naomi Cohen, Not Free to Desist: The American Jewish Committee, 1906 – 1966 (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1972), 127. 5. Cohen, Not Free to Desist, 124 – 139; Victoria Saker Woeste, “Insecure Equality: Louis Marshall, Henry Ford, and the Problem of Defamatory Antisemitism, 1920 – 1929,” Journal of American History 91:3 (December 2004): 877 – 905. 6. Roger Daniels, Guarding the Golden Door: American Immigration Policy and Immigrants since 1882 (New York: Hill and Wang, 2004), 7 – 49 (quote on 47 – 48). 7. “Says ‘Foreign Bloc’ Fights Johnson Bill,” New York Times, March 2, 1924; Chin Jou, “Contesting Nativism: The New York Congressional Delegation’s Case against the Immigration Act of 1924,” Federal History Online 3 (January 2011): 66 – 79, http://shfg.org/shfg/ wp-content/uploads/2010/07/5%E2%80%93jou_Layout-11-final-2.pdf (accessed May 23, 2011); Biographical Dictionary of the United States Congress, http://bioguide.congress.gov (accessed May 23, 2011); House Vote #90 (May 15, 1924), To Agree to the Report of Conference Committee on H.R. 7995, to Limit the Immigration of Aliens into the United States (P. 8651-1), GovTrack.com, http://www.govtrack.us/congress/vote.xpd?vote=h68_1-90 (accessed May 23, 2011). 8. John Higham, Send These to Me: Jews and other Immigrants in Urban America (New York: Atheneum, 1975), 203 – 208. 9. Libby Garland, “Not-Quite-Closed Gates: Jewish Alien Smuggling in the PostQuota Years,” American Jewish History 94:3 (September 2008): 199. 10. Ibid.; Minnie Kusnetz, “I Haven’t Lost Anything by Coming to America,” in Jocelyn Cohen and Daniel Soyer, eds., My Future Is in America: Autobiographies of Eastern European Jewish Immigrants (New York: NYU Press, 2006), 302, 307 – 309. 11. Kusnetz, “I Haven’t Lost Anything,” 302. 12. Ruth Gay, Unfinished People: Eastern European Jews Encounter America (New York: Norton, 1996), 124. 13. Moore, At Home in America, 19 – 24, 65 – 68; Beth Wenger, New York Jews and the Great Depression: Uncertain Promise (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), 81, 83 – 84, 94. 14. Moore, At Home in America, 23, 66, 71 – 73, 78 – 82; Moses Rischin, The Promised City: New York’s Jews, 1870 – 1914 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962), 93; Wenger, New York Jews and the Great Depression, 85 – 89. 15. Moore, At Home in America, 23, 66, 73 – 74, 76 (quote on 73); Wenger, New York Jews and the Great Depression, 90 – 93 (Howe quote on 93).

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16. Mary Wasserzug Natelson, “The Rabbi’s House (Story of a Family),” trans. Rachel Natelson, manuscript in authors’ possession. 17. Moore, At Home in America, 21, 23, 86 (Kazin quote); Beth Wenger, New York Jews and the Great Depression, 81. 18. Alfred Kazin, A Walker in the City (1946; repr., San Diego: Harcourt Brace, 1979), 88, 107; Gay, Unfinished People, 298.

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N O T E S T O V I S U A L E S S AY

I thank Deborah Dash Moore for graciously inviting me to be part of this project, for her support of my work, and for her deep appreciation of objects and images. Jennifer Hammer of New York University Press has worked magic with my writing. It has been a delight to work with all four coauthors: Jeffrey S. Gurock, Annie Polland, Howard Rock, and Daniel Soyer. Danny earns a special thank-you for driving me around New York City to see murals and architecture. I also thank the anonymous readers for their helpful suggestions and advice. Numerous archivists, curators, librarians, collectors, and subscribers to the American Art listserv and the American Jewish History listserv offered valuable information. I appreciate all the living artists who granted me permission to reproduce their work. Laura Holzman, Nina Liss-Schultz, and Shoshana Olidort were terrific research assistants, and Alexandra Maron was of great help with the illustrations and permissions. Sonja Assouline, Kate Breiger, and Amanda Koire were loving, responsible, and very fun babysitters to Alex and Emily, allowing me to work. Friends, family, and colleagues have all generously given support, citations, personal stories and photographs, criticism, and beds on which to crash while in New York City. I thank Susanne Hunt for morning walks and for two years of hearing me go on about this book. She makes Claremont, California, home. David Brody finesses the perfect balance between his “amazings” to his “oy gevalts,” and I love him for that. Tom Burke, Sarah Cash, Kate Fermoile, George Gorse and Susan Thalmann (both of Pomona College), Martha Grier, Carol Hamoy, Camara Dia Holloway, Russet Lederman, Dr. Erica Rosenfeld, Kerri Steinberg, Craig S. Wilder, and Karen Zukowski — I thank you all. And Carolyn Halpin-Healy is just golden in all regards. My mom and dad, Joan and David Linden, put a subway map and a subway token in my hands at an early age with the mandate to go learn and love New York City. They are also the world’s greatest grandparents. My husband, Peter Ross, offers an unlimited supply of love, humor, understanding, and appreciation; he also holds everything together when I am off to New York on research trips. As my twins, Alex and Emily Linden-Ross, are New York Jews by heritage rather than birth, I am proud that they recognize the Flatiron Building at a distance, love Junior’s cheesecake, and hold on tight when the subway sways. I hope that they too will discover the magic of the City of Promises. 1. Ellen Smith, “Greetings from Faith: Early-Twentieth-Century American Jewish New Year Postcards,” in David Morgan and Sally M. Promey, eds., The Visual Culture of American Religions (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 243 – 247. 2. Hasia Diner, “A Century of Migration, 1820 – 1924,” in Michael W. Grunberger, ed.,

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From Haven to Home: 350 Years of Jewish Life in America (Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 2004), 71. 3. Castle Gardens, the distinctive rounded building in the horizon, was an immigrant processing center from August 1, 1855, until April 18, 1890. 4. Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (New York: Routledge, 1995). 5. Alfred Stieglitz, “How The Steerage Happened,” in Dorothy Norman, ed., Twice a Year: A Book of Literature, the Arts and Civil Liberties 8 – 9 (1942): 127 – 131. 6. Ibid., 128. 7. John Higham, Send These to Me: Immigrants in Urban America, rev. ed. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), 71 – 80; Marvin Trachtenberg, The Statue of Liberty (New York: Viking Penguin, 1986). 8. Howard Markel, “ ‘The Eyes Have It’: Trachoma, the Perception of Disease, the United States Public Health Service, and the American Jewish Immigration Experience, 1897 – 1924,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 74:3 (Fall 2000): 527 – 529. 9. Alexandra M. Lord, “Advice: An Object Lesson,” Chronicle of Higher Education, October 1, 2007, http://wiredcampus.chronicle.com/article/An-Object-Lesson/46505 (accessed July 29, 2010). 10. Matthew Baigell, “Sweatshop Images: Jewish History and Memory,” Images 2 (2009): 81. 11. Kathy Peiss, “The Coney Island Excursion,” chap. 5 in Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986), 115 – 138. 12. Stephen Birmingham, “Our Crowd”: The Great Jewish Families of New York (New York: Harper and Row, 1967), 132, 148 – 149. 13. Herbert D. Croly, “The Harmonie Club House,” Architectural Record 19:4 (1906): 237 – 243. 14. David Nasaw, Children of the City: At Work and at Play (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985). 15. Rebecca Zurier, Picturing the City: Urban Vision and the Ash Can School (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 221; Marianne Doezema, George Bellows and Urban America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 147. 16. Joseph Edgar Chamberlin, “An Excellent Academy Show,” New York Evening Mail, March 14, 1908, quoted by Adam Greenhalgh in Sarah Cash, ed., Corcoran Gallery of Art: American Paintings to 1945 (Washington, DC: Corcoran Gallery of Art, 2011), 194 – 195. 17. Jonathan D. Sarna, “American Judaism,” in Grunberger, From Haven to Home, 142; “Dancing for Charity: The Ball of the Purim Association Was a Grand Success,” New York Times, March 5, 1890. 18. I. S. Isaacs, “Meyer S. Isaacs,” Publications of the American Jewish Historical Society 13 (1905): 146. 19. Joshua Brown, Beyond the Lines: Pictorial Reporting, Everyday Life, and the Crisis of Gilded Age America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006); Tyler Anbinder, Five Points: The 19th-Century New York City Neighborhood That Invented Tap Dance, Stole Elections, and Became the World’s Most Notorious Slum (New York: Plume, 2002).

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20. My interpretation of Riis’s photograph draws from the scholarship and input of Riis expert Bonnie Yochelson. I appreciate her enormous generosity in sharing her knowledge of Riis and her research materials. 21. Bonnie Yochelson, Jacob Riis (New York: Phaidon, 2001), 118 – 119. 22. I want to thank decorative arts scholar Karen Zukowski for providing insights into the furniture displayed in the photographer’s studio. John Tagg, The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 37. 23. It is not clear which lodge in New York Levi belonged to, according to Thomas M. Savini, director of the Masonic Library, Grand Lodge, New York (email correspondence with author, September 21, 2010). 24. Alice M. Greenwald, “The Masonic Mizrahi and Lamp: Jewish Ritual Art as a Reflection of Cultural Assimilation,” Journal of Jewish Art 10 (1984): 101. 25. Donna T. Haverty-Stacke, America’s Forgotten Holiday: May Day and Nationalism, 1867 – 1960 (New York: NYU Press, 2009), 85 – 88. 26. Maria Balinska, The Bagel: The Surprising History of a Modest Bread (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 115 – 119. The Jewish bakers’ union became famous for adding to their demands something for “which the Jewish labour movement was to become famous: that the bosses allow their workers to give one night’s work to unemployed bakers” (ibid., 115). 27. “Big Change in a Big Store Which All Brooklyn Knows,” New York Times, April 2, 1893; see also Andrew R. Heinze, Adapting to Abundance: Jewish Immigrants, Mass Consumption, and the Search for American Identity (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990). 28. See Jenna Weissman Joselit, A Perfect Fit: Clothes, Character, and the Promise of America (New York: Holt, 2001). 29. Robert Hendrickson, The Grand Emporiums: The Illustrated History of America’s Great Department Stores (New York: Stein and Day, 1979), 33. 30. Jennifer A. Greenhill, “Charles Dana Gibson, George du Maurier and the Site of Whiteness in Illustration c. 1900,” Art History 34 (September 2011): 26; Carolyn Kitch, The Girl on the Magazine Cover: The Origins of Visual Stereotypes in Mass Media (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 39 – 40. 31. A fascinating book on the history of wife desertion is Anna R. Igra, Wives without Husbands: Marriage, Desertion, and Welfare in New York City, 1900 – 1935 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 3 – 4. 32. Isaac Metzker, introduction to Isaac Metzker, ed., A Bintel Brief: Sixty Years of Letters from the Lower East Side to the Jewish Daily Forward (New York: Schocken Books, 1971), 10 – 15. 33. Ellen Wiley Todd, “Remembering the Unknowns: The Longman Memorial and the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Fire,” American Art 23:3 (Fall 2009): 65. 34. Aviva Ben-Ur, Sephardic Jews in America: A Diasporic History (New York: NYU Press, 2009), 111. 35. Marc D. Angel, La America: The Sephardic Experience in the United States (Phila-

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delphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1982). La America began publication in 1910 as a national weekly. It continued to be published intermittently until 1925. 36. Helene Schwartz Kenvin, This Land of Liberty: A History of America’s Jews (New York: Behrman House, 1986), 118 – 121. 37. Kate Sampsell-Williams, Lewis Hine: A Social Critic (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2009), situates Hine within Pragmatism and intellectual history. 38. Quoted in Beth Venn and Adam M. Weinberg, Frame of Reference: Looking in American Art, 1900 – 1950 (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1999), 64. 39. Ericka Lee, “The Chinese Exclusion Example,” Journal of American Ethnic History 21 (Spring 2002): 36 – 62. 40. Judith Rosenbaum, “ ‘The Call to Action’: Margaret Sanger, the Brownsville Jewish Women, and Political Activism,” in Marion A. Kaplan and Deborah Dash Moore, eds., Gender and Jewish History, 251 – 266 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010); Cathy Moran Hajo, Birth Control on Main Street: Organizing Clinics in the United States (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010). 41. “Leonard, Benny,” Jews in Sports Online, http://www.jewsinsports.org/profile.asp ?sport=boxing&ID=8 (accessed September 27, 2010); see also Stephen H. Norwood, “ ‘American Jewish Muscle’: Forging a New Masculinity in the Streets and in the Ring, 1890 – 1940,” Modern Judaism 29:2 (May 2009): 167 – 193. 42. “Leonard, Benny.”

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PERIODICALS

American Hebrew American Israelite Asmonean Atlantic Monthly Century Magazine Evening World Forverts (Jewish Daily Forward) Jewish Messenger Morgen zhurnal New York Daily Tribune New York Herald New York Times Occident Outlook Shabes zhurnal Yidishe gazeten Yidishe tageblat

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ARCHIVAL COLLECTIONS

American Jewish Archives Livia Garfinkel, “Reflections on Other Times, New York, 1881 – 1931,” Brooklyn, 1981, Small Collections 5873 American Jewish Historical Society Association for Free Distribution of Matsot to the Poor, I-106 Central Synagogue Archives Women’s Organizations, RG 4 Lower East Side Tenement Museum Archives Museum at Eldridge Street Collection New York Public Library American Jewish Committee Oral Histories Tamiment Library, New York University Lower East Side Oral History Project, NS 33-64 United States Census, 1860 YIVO Institute for Jewish Research American Jewish Autobiographies, RG 102 Records of the Educational Alliance, RG 312

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INDEX

Page numbers in italics refer to a figure or a caption on the page. 137th Street (Manhattan), 49 149th Street (Bronx), 235 1840s, 23, 43 1850s, 13, 23 1860s, 275 1870 – 1915, 66 1880 – 1924, 111 – 112 1880s, 91 1886 elections, 185 1912 elections, 197 – 200 1914 elections, 173 1917 mayoral elections, 201 – 202 1920 elections, 202 1920s and 1930s, 177 1930s and 1940s, 204 A. T. Stewart & Co., 42 Aaronson, Harris, 49, 50, 54 – 55, 130 – 131 Abendblat (newspaper), 221 Abraham, Abraham, 147, 153 Abraham, Fanny, 30 Abraham, Jacob, 30 – 31 Abraham & Straus, 153, 274 – 275 Academy of Music, 57 Adler, Celia, 220 Adler, Cyrus, 215 Adler, Felix, 85, 95 Adler, Jacob, 219, 220 Adler, Luther, 220 Adler, Samuel, 85 Adler, Stella, 220 Agudath Ha-Rabbannim (Union of Orthodox Rabbis of the United States and Canada), 98 Ahawath Chesed congregation (later Central Synagogue): Americanization, 95; Avenue C location, 65, 76; Bohemian Jews, 31; construction, 73 – 76; cornerstone laying, 73 – 74; dedication, 75 – 76; facade, 75; Fernbach, Henry, 207; Friday night services, 97; German language, 95; German-speaking immigrants, 89; Huebsch, Adolph, 85;

Kohut, Alexander, 64, 86, 88; Kohut, Rebekah Bettelheim, 64; Leerburger, Hannah, 68; Moorish architecture, 72, 74, 76, 79; Protestant church, remodeling of, 76; Reform Judaism, 85 – 86; seat contracts, 90; sisterhood, 68 – 69; Wise, Isaac Mayer, 75, 85; women’s charitable work, 67 Ahearn, Eddy, 182 Ahearn, John, 182 – 183, 199 Ahearn Association, 182, 183 Akiva, Rabbi, 53 – 54 Allen Street (Manhattan), 31, 89, 112 Alliance Israelite Universelle, 154 Allied Conference for Cheap Kosher Meat, 128 Amboy Street (Brooklyn), 286 American, Sadie, 147 – 148 American Hebrew (magazine): Americanization, 215; Cohn, Max, 86; Cowen, Philip, 215; cultural modernization, 215; Jewish Theological Seminary (JTS), 88; Lazarus, Emma, 217; mayoral nomination of Nathan Straus, 178; writers published by, 215 American Israelite (newspaper), 92 – 93 American Jewish Committee (AJC): assimilation, 160 – 161; B’nai B’rith, 158; Elkus, Abram, 197; Ford, Henry, 247; founding, 156 – 158; Jewish immigrants, 157 – 158; Jewish rights and privileges, 157; Kehillah, the (The Jewish Community), 164, 165; “leading Jews,” 158; Magnes, Judah, 163; Marshall, Louis, 156, 247; National Liberal Immigration League, 158; Roosevelt, Theodore, 157; United Hebrew Charities (UHC), 63; Versailles peace talks, 169 American Jewish Congress, 167 – 169 American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC), 167 American Jewish Relief Committee (AJRC), 167 American Jewish Year Book (Jewish Publication Society), 157 American Labor Party, 204

341

342

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Index

Americanization/Americanism: Ahawath Chesed congregation, 95; American Hebrew (magazine), 215; eastern European Jews, 93, 95; Educational Alliance, 145; Eldridge Street Synagogue (Manhattan), 95; Jewish immigrants, 36; Jewish religious life, 95 – 97; landsmanshaftn, 150; lessons in, 257 – 258; Lower East Side (Manhattan), 104; new clothes, 116 – 117; Orthodox Judaism, 95 – 96, 98, 99; picture to send back home, 116; public schools, 213; Zionism/Zionists, 151 Amerika, La (weekly), 226, 280, 281 Anderson, Robert, 54 Anshe Chesed congregation: Bernstein, Zion, 50; B’nai Jeshurun congregation, 25; Jones, Henry, 34; Moorish structure, 72; New York Dispensary location, 12; Norfolk Street location, 31, 78, 83; Schwab, Michael, 50; Shaarey Hashamayim congregation, 25; Shaarey Zedek congregation, 25 Anthony Street (Manhattan) (now Baxter Street), 18 Anti-Bolshevik (magazine), 247 anti-Semitism: Ford, Henry, 247; Grand Union Hotel (Saratoga), 141; Jewish fraternal organizations, 33; Jewish visibility, xvi; nativism, 246 – 247; overseas, interest in, xvi; Roosevelt’s criticism of, Theodore, 198; Russia, 154 – 156; Seligman, Joseph, 141; twentieth century, xi “appetizing stores,” 133, 250 Arion Glee Club, 217 Arm of the Statue of Liberty (photograph), 262 “Armory Show” (1913), 233 – 234 Aruch Completum (Kohut), 86 Asch, Sholem, 225 Ash, Abraham, 84 Ashkenazic Jews, 14 – 16; 1820s congregations, 26; Association for the Free Distribution of Matsot to the Poor, 52; B’nai Jeshurun, 15 – 16; as majority Jewish group, 14, 226; Sephardic Jews, communication with, 278 – 281; Shearith Israel congregation, 15 Asmonean (newspaper): advertisements, 29, 43; Association for the Free Distribution of Matsot to the Poor, 52; charity, 53 – 54; Democratic Party, 215; encounters between rich and poor, 53; Judaism, defense of, 215; Lyon, Robert, 215; from peddler to dry-goods merchant, 23; seven-day-a-week stores, 38 – 39 assimilation: American clothes, buying,

6 – 7; American Jewish Committee (AJC), 160 – 161; eastern European Jews, 70; family seating in synagogues, 83; German immigrants, 32 – 33; Jewish distinctiveness, balance with, xv; Jewish fraternal organizations, 32 – 33; Moorish architecture, 74; Reform Judaism, 70; Saturday, work on, 37 – 38; Socialism/Socialists, 161 Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor, 47, 51, 60 Association for the Free Distribution of Matsot to the Poor, 50, 51 – 55, 58 Association of Orthodox Hebrew Congregations (Agudes ha-Kehillos), 94 Atlantic Monthly (magazine), 78 – 79 Attorney Street (Manhattan), 31 Austro-Hungarian Jewish immigrants, 135, 149, 183 Autoemancipation (Pinsker), 158 Avenue A (Manhattan), 116 Avenue C (Manhattan), 66, 85 Bachelors’ Loan Society, 48 bakeries, Jewish, 250 bakers, 273 – 274 Bakers and the Big Loaf (photograph), 273 Balfour Declaration, 202 Bandmann, Daniel, 218 – 219 Bankers’ Committee, 154 banks, 103 – 111; Bronx, 110; Harlem (Manhattan), 110; immigrant businesses, growth of, 110; installment plans, 109; Jarmulowsky bank buildings, 102, 105 – 108; Lower East Side (Manhattan), 105, 109, 110 – 111; real estate development, 110, 129; runs on, 103 – 105, 107 – 108, 109, 129; as ship ticket agents, 107, 109 Barnard College, 148 Barnum, P. T., 11, 77 Baron de Hirsch Fund, 147 Barondess, Joseph, 152 Bartholdi, Auguste, 262 baseball, 282 Baskin, Leonard, 235 Battery Park (Manhattan), 2, 141 Bauman, Jacob, 125 Baxter Street (Manhattan), 19, 51 Bay and Harbor of New York, The (Waugh), 258 – 260 Bayard Street (Manhattan), 41 Beekman Place (Manhattan), 45, 64 – 65 Beilis, Mendel, 157

Index Belasco, David, 237, 241 Bellows, George, 234, 268, 269 Belmont, Alva, 189 Belmont Avenue (Brooklyn), 132 Ben-Gurion, David, 167 Ben-Tsvi, Yitshak, 167 Benderly, Samson, 165 Benjamin, Judah, 178 Bercovici, Konrad, 226, 227 Bercovici, Naomi, 226 Berger, Victor, 188 Berkman, Alexander, 228 Berlin, Irving, 236, 238 Berliner, Henry, 55 Berliner, Samuel, 55 Berliner, Sara, 55 Berman, Samuel, 150 Bernheimer, Charles, 118, 122 Bernstein, Herman, 247 Bernstein, Zion, 49, 50, 51 Beth El congregation: Cowen, Raphael, 25; Einhorn, David, 84; German Jewish immigrants, 31; Kohler, Kaufman, 85, 86; Polish Jewish immigrants, 31 Beth Elohim (Charleston, South Carolina), 82, 149 Beth Elohim congregation (Manhattan), 31 Beth Hamedrash Hagadol congregation: Ash, Abraham, 84; Association of Orthodox Hebrew Congregations (Agudes ha-Kehillos), 94; Eisenstein, Judah David, 97 – 98; Five Points (Manhattan), 90; Marks, Isaac, 29; name change, 89 (see also Kahal Adath Jeshurun); Russian Jewish immigrants, 25, 31 Beth Israel Association of New York, 152 Beth Israel congregation, 12 Beth Israel Hospital, 99, 152 – 153 Betsy Head Park (Brooklyn), 134 Bettelheim, Aaron, 88 Bikur Cholim congregation, 24, 31 Bingham, Theodore A., 126, 162 – 163 blackface, 236 – 237, 243 Blaustein, David, 128 Bloom, I. Mortimer, 245 – 246 Bloom, Sol, 248 Bloomingdale, Joseph, 46 Bloomingdale, Lyman, 46 Blume, Peter, 235 Blunt, Edmund, 15 B’nai Am Chai, 160 B’nai B’rith: 1832 treaty with Russia, abrogation of, 157; American Jewish Committee

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343

(AJC), 158; Covenant Hall, 35; founding, 33 – 34; Frank, Leo, 231; German Jewish immigrants, 33; Heinemann, Hirsh, 35; Jewish immigrants, 35; Jones, Henry, 34 – 35; Kishinev pogrom (1903), 154; Kleindeutschland, 33; Maimonides Library Association, 38; meeting places, 12 – 13; membership, 35; as a mutual aid association, 34, 36; philanthropy, 36; rituals, 36; Schwab, Michael, 50; Sinsheimer’s saloon, 33; Unabhaengiger Orden Treuer Schwester (Independent Order of True Sisters), 36 B’nai Jeshurun congregation: Aaronson, Harris, 50, 54; Anshe Chesed congregation, 25; Ashkenazic Jews, 15 – 16; family seating, 83; Five Points (Manhattan), 15, 25; Greene Street location, 31; Hebrah Gmilut Hassed (Hebrew Mutual Benefit Society), 26 – 27; Raphall, Morris, 29, 49; Shaarey Tefilah congregation, 26; Shaarey Zedek congregation, 25; Shearith Israel congregation, 15 – 16 B’nai Yeshurun (Cincinnati), 73, 77 Board of Delegates of American Israelites, 140 Board of Orthodox Rabbis, 164 Boas, Franz, 249 Bohemian Jews, 26, 31, 213 Borough Park (Brooklyn), 251, 252 Bovshover, Yoysef, 223 Bowery (Manhattan), 18, 23, 112, 219, 220 boxing, 287 – 288 Boz del Pueblo, La (newspaper), 226 Brandeis, Emanuel, 38 – 39 Brandeis, Louis D., 160, 167 – 168, 189 Brennan, Matt, 25 Brenner, Rose, 149 Brentano, Simon, 197 Brisbane, Arthur, 288 Broadway (Manhattan), 15, 43 Broadway theater, 242 – 243 Bronx: banks, 110; butchers, boycott against (1902), 128; development of, 110, 129; Domnitz, Aaron, 132, 224 – 225; interwar years, 250; Jewish fraternal organizations, 250 – 251; Jewish migration to, 7, 94 – 95, 104, 130, 135, 244; Jewish neighborhoods, 132; Jewish residence, center of, 251; public library, patronage of, 134; rapid transit, xiv; shopping streets, major, xvii; subway construction, 130; Trotsky, Leon, 247; typical path of social ascent, 251; Yiddish theaters, 219. See also specific streets and neighborhoods Bronzviler Post (newspaper), 132

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Index

Brooklyn: Anti-Bolshevik (magazine), 247; boats to, 141; bridges to, xiv; butchers, boycott against (1902), 128; development of, 129; Federation of Jewish Charities, 170; German-speaking migration to, 66; interwar years, 250; Jewish fraternal organizations, 250 – 251; Jewish migration to, 7, 104, 130, 135, 244; Jewish residence, center of, 251; National Council of Jewish Women (NCJW), 149; shopping streets, major, xvii; subway construction, 130; typical path of social ascent, 251; Yiddish theaters, 219; Zionism/Zionists, 160. See also specific streets and neighborhoods Brooklyn Eagle (newspaper), 131 – 132, 147 Brooks, Van Wyck, 233 Brown, Charles, 131 Brown, Chris, 236 Brownsville (Brooklyn): Amboy Street, 286; Betsy Head Park, 134; Domnitz, Aaron, 6; garment industry, 131; Hebrew Educational Society (HES), 149; Jewish population, 131; Jewish settlement in, 7, 130, 131; Labor Lyceum, 201; Pitkin Avenue, xvii, 160; public library, patronage of, 134; pushcart markets, 133, 250; religious institutions, 132; Sackman Street, 201; Sanger, Margaret, 286; Shiplacoff, Abraham, 200 – 201; subway construction, 130; tenements, 113; William Morris Educational Club, 201; Wolff, Barnett, 201; working-class immigrants, 251; Zionism/Zionists, 160 Buchanan, James, 139 – 140 Bureau of Jewish Education, 165 Burns, George, 236 Burr, Aaron, 48 Busatt, Isidore, 282, 283 “buttonhook men,” 263 Café Royale, 208 cafes, 208 – 209, 223, 228 cafeterias, 250 Cahan, Abraham: Commercial Advertiser (newspaper), 187, 227, 232; detractors, 187; education, 187; English language writers, 219; German newspapers, 184; Hapgood, Hutchins, 227; Harlem apartments, 131; Howells, William Dean, 227; immigrant and native intelligentsias, mediating between, 227; Jewish Daily Forward (newspaper), 129, 184, 187; Kishinev pogrom (1903), 154; Mencken, H. L., 211; “A Providential

March,” 227; The Rise of David Lewinsky, 227; Short Stories (magazine), 227; Socialism/Socialists, 221 – 222; Steffens, Lincoln, 187; Yekl, 227; Zhitlovsky, Chaim, debate with, 161 calling cards, 284 – 285 Canal Street (Manhattan): Cowen, Newman, 13; Five Points boundary, 18; Jarmulowsky bank, 107; Jewish Workers’ Association, 185; Kobre’s bank, 111; Schreiber’s cafe, 208 candy stores, 250 Cantor, Eddie, 235 – 236 Cardozo, Albert, 179 Cardozo, Benjamin, 179 Castle Garden, 2 – 4, 3, 6 Catholics: churches, 76; Democratic Party, 140; Irish Catholic culture, 179 – 180; JohnsonReed Act (1924), opposition to, 248; as majority ethnic group, 253; Mortara case (Italy, 1858), 139 – 140; nativism, 141 Celler, Emanuel, 248 Central Committee for the Relief of Jews Suffering through the War (CRC), 166 – 167 central European Jews: 1880s, 91; Five Points (Manhattan), 107; German language, 209; Jewish identity, 211 – 212; Kleindeutschland (Manhattan), 107; migration to uptown, 107; national origins, 209; nineteenth century, early, 2; Protestant elites, 140 – 141; Reform Judaism, 81; Sabbath observance, 124; working-class, 46. See also German Jews Central Synagogue. See Ahawath Chesed congregation Centre Street (Manhattan), 18 Century Magazine, 95, 126 – 127 Charities and Commons (Hine), 282 charity, 43 – 71; Asmonean (newspaper), 53 – 54; Board of Relief, 57 – 58; citywide endeavors, 55; Committee of Fifteen, 61; district organization of, 60; donations, appeals for, 56; Eldridge Street Synagogue (Manhattan), 99; federation movement, 169 – 170; formal institutions, emergence of, 70 – 71; Jewish beggars, professional, 59; Jewish community, reshaping of, 47; Jewish immigrants, 66; Jewish religious life, 53 – 54; Jewish understanding of, traditional, 53; Jewish women, 47, 60; Kohut, Rebekah Bettelheim, 45, 64; Levantine Jewish immigrants, 281; London System, 60; missionary activity, 47; mutual aid associations, 55, 150; neighborhood synagogues, 55; networks

Index and institutions, 46; Panic of 1857, 47, 49 – 56; Passover provisions, 50, 51 – 55; Passover season, 57 – 58; philanthropy, 43, 46 – 47, 56 – 57, 71, 104, 145, 152; professionalization of, 59 – 62; Protestant organizations, 51, 60; Purim balls, 56 – 57; sisterhoods, 66 – 70; social responsibility, sense of, 46; synagogues’ role, 47 Charity Organization Society, 47 Charlton Street (Manhattan), 14 Chatham Square (Manhattan), 250 Chatham Street (Manhattan): 1840s, 43; commercial hustle and bustle, 11 – 12; economic rise of, 211; Five Points boundary, 18; Jewish immigrants, 12, 13; Lyons and Guion (store), 28 – 29; as a neighborhood, 11 – 13; old clothes, trading in, xvii; peddling, 23; secondhand-clothing merchants, 24, 43; seven-day-a-week stores, 38 – 39; Wise, Isaac Mayer, 11 – 12 Cherry Street (Manhattan), 115, 257 Chevrah Beth David Anshei Rokov (Congregation Beth David People of Rakov), 150 Chicago Women’s Club, 148 Chinese Restaurant (Weber), 282 – 284 Chinese restaurants, 133 – 134 Chotzinoff, Samuel, 122 – 123, 125 Christian Germans, 19, 30, 37 Chrystie Street (Manhattan), 25, 76, 82, 89 City College, 160, 168, 215 Civil War: hospital beds, demand for, 48; Jewish chaplains, 140; synagogue construction, 76; uniforms for, xvii, 39 – 40; Union cause, xvi Clara Aguilar Free Library, 145, 146 Claremont Park (Bronx), 132 Cleveland, Grover, 154 Clinton Street (Manhattan), 82, 123 Cochran, Samuel, 75 Cohen, Barrow E., 14 – 15 Cohen, Charles, 20 Cohen, David, 94 Cohen, Joseph, 153 Cohen, Marx, 20 Cohn, Max, 86 Cohnheim, Max, 217, 218 Coit, Stanton, 143 – 144 College Settlement, 144 Colossus of Coney, 265, 266 Columbia College/University, 48, 160, 168, 215, 229 “Columbus tailors,” 119

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345

Commercial Advertiser (newspaper), 187, 227, 230, 232 Communist Party (CP), 202 Coney, Colossus of, 265, 266 Coney Island (Brooklyn), 141, 220, 235, 265, 266 Conried, Heinrich, 239 – 240 Conservative Judaism, 88 consumerism, 28, 274, 276 Corn Exchange Bank, 110 Cortissoz, Royal, 232 Council Home for Jewish Girls (Queens), 149 Cowen, Julia (née Manasseh), 17, 21, 22 Cowen, Nathan, 17 Cowen, Newman, 13, 21 Cowen, Philip, 17, 21, 130, 215 Cowen, Raphael, 16 – 18, 21, 22, 24 – 25 crime, 162 – 163 Croly, Herbert D., 267 Crosby Street (Manhattan), 16 Cross Street (Manhattan) (now Worth Street), 18 Crotona Park (Bronx), 132, 134, 252 Crystal Palace, 77 cultural pluralism, 248 – 249 Cultus Society, 81 – 82 Customers at the Main Entrance Waiting for Opening (photograph), 274 Czolgosz, Leon, 228 Damascus blood libel (1840), 138 – 139, 170 Damrosch, Leopold, 217 dance, 238 – 239 Daughters of Zion, Hadassah Chapter, 159 Davidson, Jo, 235 Davis, Moses, 19 de Sola Pool, David, 68, 245 Dearborn Independent (newspaper), 247 Debs, Eugene Debs, 188, 197 Delancey Street (Manhattan), 192 delicatessens, 133, 250 Democratic National Convention (1868), 175 Democratic Party: 1912 elections, 197; 1914 elections, 175; anti-Tammany Democrats, 176; Asmonean (newspaper), 215; Catholics, 140; fusion politics, 202; Goldfogle, Henry M., 173, 181 – 182, 199; “hunker” faction, 177; Jeffersonians, 177, 178; Jewish politics, 177; social reform, 204; Tammany Society, 178 department stores: 1860s, 275; A. T. Stewart & Co., 42; Abraham & Straus, 153, 274 – 275; expansion of markets, 39; Jewish women, 274 – 275; Macy’s, 42 – 43, 198, 254

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Index

Deutsch Brothers, 116 Deutsche Liederkranz, 217 Dewey, John, 23 Dewey Theater, 241 Dey Street (Manhattan), 58 di yunge, 224 – 225, 233, 242 Dickstein, Samuel, 248 “Difficult Path, A” (Busatt), 283 Dinkelspeil, Rebecca, 218 Dittenhoefer, Abram, 178 Division Street (Manhattan), 209 Dodge, Mabel, 228 “Doing the Slums: A Scene in the Five Points” (newspaper illustration), 270, 271 Domnitz, Aaron: boarding situation, 123; Bronx, 132, 224 – 225; cloakmaker’s apartment, 115 – 116; on Ellis Island, 5; Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS), 6; on landslayt (natives of a town), 117, 118 Dowling, Barney, 183 Drachman, Bernard, 37, 93, 94, 97, 126 Draft Riots (1863), 48 Dreyfus, Alfred, 231 “dumbbell tenements,” 114 Durant, Ariel, 226 Dushkin, Alexander, 165 East Broadway (Manhattan): Beth Israel Hospital, 152; Educational Alliance, 145; Forward Building, 175; Goodman and Levine’s cafe, 208 – 209; Hebrew Immigrant Sheltering and Aid Society (HIAS), 153; Natelson family, 252; public library, patronage of, 134; Tammany Hall, 182 East Bronx (Bronx), 7, 250, 251 – 252 East Flatbush (Brooklyn), 251 East Fourteenth Street (Manhattan), 175 East Seventy-Seventh Street (Manhattan), 49 East Side (Manhattan), 45 “East Side Street Scene” (Soyer), 244 East Sixteenth Street (Manhattan), 153 East Sixtieth Street (Manhattan), 267 East Third Street (Manhattan), 150 East Thirtieth Street (Manhattan), 22 eastern European Jews: adult education programs, 212; American Jewish Congress, 167; Americanization, 93, 95; arrivals (1870s), 107; arrivals (1880 – 1924), 111 – 112; assimilation, 70; Ellis Island, 263; Five Points (Manhattan), 107; garment industry, 13, 40 – 41, 89; German-speaking migration uptown and to Brooklyn, 66;

Jarmulowsky’s bank, 107; Kleindeutschland, 107; kosher meat, market for, 127 – 128; Lower East Side (Manhattan), 111; Mount Sinai Hospital, 152; National Council of Jewish Women (NCJW), 148; nineteenth century, late, 2; philanthropy, 152; Reform Judaism, 91; religious life, 69; Sabbath observance, 124; small congregations, 90 – 91; Socialism/Socialists, 184; Tammany Hall, 176; taste in furnishings, 115 – 116; United Hebrew Charities (UHC), 63; workingclass, 46; Zionism/Zionists, 158, 160 Eastern Parkway (Brooklyn), 7, 251 Edelshtat, Dovid, 223 Educational Alliance, 145 – 147; Americanization, 145; art exhibits, 234; art school, 236; Blaustein, David, 128; building, 145 – 146; founding, 145; Jewish religious education, 145, 146; location, 145; Mefitsei Sefat Ever ye’Sifrutah, 225; Moskowitz, Belle, 194; Orthodox Judaism, 146; Ostrowsky, Abbo, 235; Reform Judaism, 146; Richman, Julia, 213; Socialism/Socialists, 146; University Settlement, 145 Eidlitz, Leopold, 82 Eighth Assembly District, 180 – 181 Einhorn, David, 84 Einstein, Edwin, 178 Einstein, Hanna B., 68 Eisenstein, Judah David, 97 – 98 Eisenstein, Louis, 183 Eldridge Street (Manhattan), 79 Eldridge Street Synagogue (Manhattan), 91 – 95; Americanization, 95; Association of Orthodox Hebrew Congregations (Agudes ha-Kehillos), 94; bar mitzvah, 97; cantor’s role, 93; charity, 99; Cohen, David, 94; decorum, lack of, 93; dedication ceremony, 91; Drachman, Bernard, 93; drawing, 80; Gellis, Isaac, 94; Goldfein, Barnet, 94; Hutkoff, Nathan, 94; income, 97; Jarmulowsky, Sender, 94, 103, 104; Joseph, Jacob, 94; kosher meat, tax on, 94; lay leaders, 94 – 95; Lazerowitz, Simon, 94; Moorish architecture, 80; opening day, 95; Orthodox liturgy, 93; Orthodox Union, 97; shames’s (sexton’s) role, 93; Simons, Morris, 96 Elizabeth Street (Manhattan), 29 Elkus, Abram, 197, 199, 204 Ellis Island: “buttonhook men,” 263; Domnitz on, Aaron, 5; eastern European Jews, 263; ethnic aid organizations at, 5; Hebrew

Index Immigrant Sheltering and Aid Society (HIAS), 153 – 154; inspection process, 4, 5; main building, 4 – 5; medical inspections, 263; National Council of Jewish Women (NCJW), 5, 148; Passover Seder (1906), 1, 6; Pfeffer on, Yakov, 7; repatriation, 260, 263; as Trernindzl (“Isle of Tears”), 263 “Ellis Island art,” 232 Ellis Island Immigration Museum, 264 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 216 employment: child labor, xvii, 122; competitive contracting, xviii; ethnic ties, 21, 118; garment industry, 118 – 119; Jewish immigrants, 112, 118 – 119; multiple wage earners, 122; occupational niches, xvii; peddling, 23; personal fulfillment, xvi – xvii; professions, 120; Saturday, work on, 37 – 38; working papers, 122 – 123 Engel, Martin, 180 – 181 English language, Jewish cultural expression in, 226 – 230 English language, use of, 69, 209 – 211 English language press, Jewish influence on, 230 – 232 English language theater, Yiddish actors in, 220 – 221 Enlightenment, 77, 80 Entin, Joel, 168 – 169 Epstein, Jacob, 233 Erie Canal, 2 Erlanger, Abraham Lincoln, 237 Essex Street (Manhattan), 123, 186 Essex Street Market, 29 Ethical Culture School, 282 Ethical Culture Society, 85, 95 Ethics of the Fathers (Kohut), 86 – 88 Etz Ha-hayim (Tree of Life), 281 Evergood, Philip, 235 Factory Investigating Commission (FIC), 196 – 197 family planning, 285 – 287 Famous Players Film Company, 241 Famous Players-Lasky Corporation, 241 Farley, John, 154 “Fat of the Land” (Yezierska), 229 – 230 Federal Club, 183 Federation for the Support of Jewish Philanthropic Societies, 169 – 170 federation movement, 169 – 170 Federation of American Zionists (FAZ), 158, 159 – 160, 167

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347

Federation of Jewish Charities, 170 Federation of Sisterhoods of Personal Service, 68 Ferber, Edna, 243 Fernbach, Henry, 74, 75, 207 Ferrer Center (Modern School), 234 Fields, Lew, 237 Fifth Avenue (Manhattan), xvii Fischel, Harry, 124 Fiske, Harrison Grey, 221 Five Points (Manhattan), 17 – 30; Beth Hamedrash Hagadol congregation, 90; B’nai Jeshurun congregation, 15, 25; boundaries, 18; Chatham Street (see Chatham Street); children, 20; Christian Germans, 19; collective memory of, 18; “Doing the Slums: A Scene in the Five Points” (newspaper illustration), 270, 271; eastern European Jews, 107; German Jewish immigrants, 17 – 18; Irish immigrants, 18, 19; Jewish congregations, 24 – 25; Jewish immigrants, 19; Jewish migration away from, 7, 28; neighborhood network, 20, 21 – 22, 29; new congregations, 31; peddling, 19, 21; Polish Jewish immigrants, 18; Polish Jews, 18; tenements, 18; unmarried women, 20 Five Points New York Ladies Home Missionary Society, 60 Flatbush (Brooklyn), 251 Fleisher, Selig, 150 Ford, Henry, 247 Fordham Road (Bronx), xvii Forty-Fourth Street (Manhattan), 74, 76, 79 Forty-Third Street (Manhattan), 73, 76 Forty-Two Kids (Bellows), 268 Forum (magazine), 229 Forum Exhibition of Modern American Painting (1916), 233 – 234 Forverts (newspaper). See Jewish Daily Forward Forward Building, 173 – 175, 234 – 235, 253 Fourteenth Street (Manhattan), xvii, 112, 220, 240, 241 Fourth Assembly District, 182 Fox, William, 241 Fox Street (Bronx), 252 Frank, Leo, 231 – 232 Frank, P. W., 61 – 62 Frank, Waldo, 226, 233 Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, 270, 271 Frankel, Lee K., 68 fraternal organizations. See Jewish fraternal organizations

348

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Fraye arbeter shtime (publication), 222 Frederic, Harold, 142 Free Synagogue (Manhattan, later Queens), 168, 195 “Free Vacation House” (Yezierska), 229 – 230 Freemasonry, 273 Freiheit, Die (newspaper), 184 Frick, Henry Clay, 228 Friedman, Phillip, 29 Frohman, Charles, 241 Frohman, Daniel, 241 Fulton Street (Brooklyn), 235 Fulton Street (Manhattan), 23 Gadol, Moise, 281 Galician Jewish immigrants, 112, 113, 150, 151 “Gallery of Missing Husbands” (feature story), 276, 277 Garfinkel, Livia, 125 garment industry, 39 – 41; Brownsville (Brooklyn), 131; Civil War uniforms, xvii, 39 – 40; cloakmakers’ strike (1886), 184 – 185; cloakmakers’ strike (1910), 189, 190; “Columbus tailors,” 119; contracting system, 119 – 120; democratization of clothing, 117 – 118; eastern European Jews, 13, 40 – 41, 89; electric sewing machines, 120; employment, 118 – 119; German Jewish immigrants, 40, 278; “Great Revolt,” 188; growth of, 39 – 42; investors, 130; Jewish women, 20, 118 – 119, 120, 189; manufacturing, xiii, 13, 39 – 40, 119; marketing, 13; mass production, 117; New York’s assets, 39; piecework, 281 – 282; “Protocol of Peace,” 189, 190; ready-made styles, xiv; Russian Jewish women, 118 – 119; shirtwaists, 275, 276; Socialist-led unions, 188; standardization of sizes, 40; tenement sweatshops, 119 – 120; Triangle Fire (1911), 194 – 197, 276 – 278, 279; “Uprising of the 20,000” (1909), 188; uptown buildings, 120; waist makers’ strike (1909), 188 – 189; Welcome to America (Hamoy), 264 – 265 Gary System, 201, 214 Gay, Ruth, 250, 253 Gaynor, William, 195 Gellis, Isaac, 94, 99 Gellis, Sarah, 99 Gellis company, 127 Geltman, Mary, 103 – 104, 106 George, Henry, 185, 192 German Americans, 246 German culture, 217 – 219

German Hebrew Benevolent Society, 48 German immigrants: 1886 elections, 185; assimilation, 32 – 33; Christian Germans, 19, 30, 37; class distinctions among, 31; “Continental Sabbath,” 37 – 38; free thinkers among, 32; German-language newspapers, 30; Jewish fraternal organizations, 32 – 33; Kleindeutschland (Manhattan), 31; newspapers, 184; occupational niches, 18 – 19; voluntary associations (Vereine), 32 German Jewish immigrants: Bay and Harbor of New York, The (Waugh), 258 – 260; Beth El congregation, 31; B’nai B’rith, 33; education, lack of formal, 17; Five Points (Manhattan), 17 – 18; garment industry, 40, 278; Germany, 166; Harmonie Club, 211; Lower East Side (Manhattan), 112, 267; Mirror of Italy, The (Waugh), 258; non-Jews, relations with, 217; peddling, 18 – 19; poverty, 17; subdivision of one-family homes, 113; synagogue governance, 26; Tefilah mi-kol ha-shanah: Minhah Ketanah (prayer book), 258, 259; wealthy, 265 German language: Ahawath Chesed congregation (later Central Synagogue), 95; central European Jews, 209; jettisoning of, 249; linguistic affinity between Yiddish and, 184; stage, 218; Yiddish-inflected, 209 – 210 German Order of the Harugari, 33 German Socialists, 221 Germany, 17, 80, 83, 84, 166 Gershwin, George, 242 – 243 Gershwin, Ira, 243 Gibson, Charles Dana, 275 – 276 Glockner, Lucas, 58 Goldberg, Henry L., 12 Golden, Harry, 123, 124 Goldfaden, Abraham, 219 Goldfein, Barnet, 94 Goldfogle, Henry M., 173, 181 – 182, 199 Goldman, Abraham, 108 Goldman, Anne, 125, 127 Goldman, Emma, 219, 227 – 229 Goldstein, Minnie, 6, 121, 239 Goldwyn, Samuel, 230, 241 Gollup, Avraham, 121 Gollup, Rahel, 121 Gompers, Samuel, 197 Goodman and Levine’s cafe, 208 – 209, 223 Gordin, Jacob, 220 Gornick, Vivian, 253 Gothic style, 78

Index Gottheil, Gustav, 64, 68, 84, 87 Gottheil, Richard, 158 Gottlief, Leo, 235 Grand Concourse (Bronx), 7, 252 Grand Street (Manhattan): Kleindeutschland, 29; piano store, 116; relocation to, dream of, 23; Russian Jewish immigrants, 112; Schwab, Michael, 50; Temple Emanu-El (Manhattan), 82; Yiddish theaters, 219 Grand Union Hotel (Saratoga), 141 Grant, Madison, 246 – 247 “Great Revolt,” 188 Greene Street (Manhattan), 14, 31 Greenwald, Alice M., 273 Greenwich Street (Manhattan), 14 Greenwich Village (Manhattan), 219, 226, 232 Gross, Chaim, 235 Groyser Kundes, Der (magazine), 283 Guggenheim, Solomon, 46 Gumpertz, Isaac, 59 Gumpertz, Julius, 58 – 59 Gumpertz, Nanne, 59 Gumpertz, Natalie Reinsburg, 58 – 59 Gumpertz, Olga, 59 Gumpertz, Rosa, 59 Gumpertz family, 58 Ha-toren (literary weekly), 225 Ha-tsofe ba-arets ha-hadasha (literary weekly), 225 Haas, Julius, 233 Hadassah, 159, 160 Hadassah Study Circle, 159 Hammer, Khanetshe, 123 Hammer, Yitskhok, 123 Hammerstein, Oscar, 228, 237, 239, 240 Hammerstein, Oscar, II, 243 Hamoy, Carol, 264 – 265 Hapgood, Hutchins, 227, 233 “Happy New Year” postcard, 256 Har Sinai (Baltimore), 82 Harkavy, Alexander, 1, 6, 7 Harland, Henry (aka Sidney Luska), 64 – 65 Harlem (Manhattan): apartment in, 131; banks, 110; butchers, boycott against (1902), 128; development of, 110, 129; Jewish migration to, 94 – 95, 104, 130, 131, 135, 251; nickelodeons, 240; pushcart markets, 133; rapid transit to, xiv; subway construction, 130; tenements, 113 Harmonie Club: architecture, 265 – 267; East Sixtieth Street location, 207; Federation for

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the Support of Jewish Philanthropic Societies, 170; Fernbach, Henry, 207; founding, 211; German descent, 207; German Jewish immigrants, 211; linguistic evolution, 207, 210, 211 – 212; location, 267; McKim, Mead & White, 267; membership limit, 207; Purim Association, 269; Seligman, Joseph, 265; West Forty-Second Street location, 207; White, Stanford, 208 Harris, Ida, 285 Hart, Emanuel, 177 Hartley, Robert, 60 Hearst, William Randolph, 192, 271, 278 Hebrah Gmilut Hassed (Hebrew Mutual Benefit Society), 26 – 27 Hebraists, 225 Hebrew Assistance Society, 48 Hebrew Benevolent and Orphan Asylum Society, 59, 61, 62 Hebrew Benevolent Fuel Association, 62 Hebrew Benevolent Society (HBS), 48 – 49, 50, 56, 61 Hebrew Educational Society (HES), 147, 149 Hebrew Free School Association, 145 Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS), 5, 6, 153 Hebrew Immigrant Sheltering and Aid Society (HIAS), xxx, 153 – 154, 281 Hebrew Institute, 145 Hebrew language, 69, 225 Hebrew National, 127 Hebrew Orphan Asylum (HOA), 48 – 49 Hebrew Publishing Company, 116 Hebrew Relief Society, 62 Hebrew schools, 100 Hebrew Sheltering and Immigrant Aid Association, 99 Hebrew Sheltering House Association (Hakhnoses Orkhim), 153 Hebrew Tabernacle of West 116th Street (Manhattan), 245 Hebrew Technical Institute, 142 Hebrew Union College, 163 Heine, Heinrich, 216 Heinemann, Hirsh, 35 Henri, Robert, 233, 234 Henry Street (Manhattan), 98, 134, 144 Henry Street Settlement, 144 – 145 herem (excommunication), 14 Herrick’s (later Sholem’s) cafe, 209 Herter Brothers’, 90 Herzl, Theodore, 158

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Hester Park (Manhattan), 134 Hester Street (Manhattan), 121 Hewitt, Abram, 185 Hibbat Zion circle (Baltimore), 159 Hillquit, Morris, 189 – 190, 201 – 202, 203 Hine, Lewis, 281 – 282 Hirsch, Gabriel, 181 Histadrut Haivrit, 225 Hobbs, Charles W., 79 Hogan’s Alley (cartoon), 269 Home of the Daughters of Jacob, 99 Hopkinson Avenue (Brooklyn), 147 Horowitz-Margareten, 127 housing, xviii – xix Houston Street (Manhattan), 31, 51, 112 Howard, Willie, 236 Howe, Irving, 190, 252 Howells, William Dean, 227 Huebsch, Adolph, 85 – 86 Hungarian Jewish immigrants, 112 Hungry Hearts (Yezierska), 230 Hunter College (previously Female Normal College), 160, 213, 215 Hurwitz, Moyshe, 219 Hutkoff, Nathan, 94 Hylan, John “Red Mike,” 201 “I Am . . .” (Leyb), 224 Ignatoff, David, 235 Illinois Consumers’ League, 148 Illustrated New York City and Surroundings (Hobbs), 79 Immigration Act (1921), 248 Improved Order, Knights of Pythias, 33 “In the Jewish Synagogue at Newport” (Lazarus), 216 Independent Benevolent Association, 180 – 181 Independent Citizens’ Committee, 204 Independent Order Brith Abraham (IOBA), 35, 149 – 150 Independent Order Brith Sholom, 35 Independent Order Free Sons of Israel, 35 Independent Order of Red Men, 33 Industrial Removal Office, 21 Inter-collegiate Zionist Association, 160 International Exhibition of Modern Art (1913), 233 – 234 International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU), 188 – 189, 190, 203 Irish immigrants: 1886 elections, 185; in The Bay and Harbor of New York by Waugh, 258 – 260; Five Points (Manhattan), 18,

19; nativism, 141; occupational niches, 18; subdivision of one-family homes, 113; Tammany Hall, 175, 179 – 180, 182 Irving Hall, 56 Irving Place Theatre, 220 Isaacs, Augusta, 20 Isaacs, Isador Isaac, 20 Isaacs, Julius, 20 Isaacs, Levi, 272 Isaacs, Mark, 54 Isaacs, Meyer S., 269 Isaacs, Myer Samuel, 58, 59 – 62 Isaacs, Samuel Myers: Association for the Free Distribution of Matsot to the Poor, 52; Board of Relief, 57 – 58; Jewish Messenger (newspaper), 28, 36, 48, 215; Marks, Isaac, 29; Passover charity, 55, 57 – 58; Protestant charitable organizations, 51; Sabbath observance, 36, 84 – 85; Shaarey Tefilah congregation, 28, 48, 50, 74, 84, 140; son Myer (see Isaacs, Myer Samuel); tradition, defense of, 74 Israels, Belle. See Moskowitz, Belle Lindner Israels J. & W. Seligman & Co., 106 J. Strauss & Co., 23 Jacobs, Isaac, 19 James, Henry, 210 Jarmulowsky, Louis, 106 Jarmulowsky, Meyer, 105 Jarmulowsky, Sender, 105 – 108; bank, auction of, 102, 129; bank building, 102, 105 – 108; bankruptcy auction, 129; death, 108; Eldridge Street Synagogue (Manhattan), 94, 103, 104; reputation, 108; run on his bank (1901), 103 – 105 Jarmulowsky family, 102 Jastrow, Marcus, 88 Jefferson Bank, 110 Jeffersonians, 177, 178 Jessel, George, 236 Jew (newspaper), 215 Jewish civil society. See Jewish fraternal organizations Jewish clubs, 211 – 212 Jewish Communal Register (Kehillah), 137, 142 – 143, 150, 222, 226 Jewish culture, 207 – 243; “appetizing stores,” 133, 250; bakeries, 250; baseball, 282; blackface, 236 – 237, 243; boxing, 287 – 288; Broadway theater, 242 – 243; cafes, 208 – 209,

Index 223, 228; cafeterias, 250; calling cards, 284 – 285; candy stores, 250; delicatessens, 133, 250; department stores (see department stores); di yunge, 224 – 225, 233, 242; English language, cultural expression in, 226 – 230; English language, use of, 69, 209 – 211; English language press, influence on, 230 – 232; family planning, 285 – 287; fraternal organizations (see Jewish fraternal organizations); German culture, 217 – 219; German language, 209 – 210, 218; Hebrew language, 69, 225; immigrant roots, movement away from, 242; Ladino press, 226, 278 – 281; lectures, 212; libraries, patronage of, 134, 214; literary societies, xvi; modernism, 284; movies, 240 – 242; newspapers and other publications, 221 – 222; nickelodeons, 240; performing arts, 235 – 240; photography, 260 – 262, 271 – 272, 282; portraits, commissioned, 272; postcards, 255 – 258, 267, 274 – 275; pushcart markets, 133, 250; Russian press, 226; theater, 218, 219; transition to native-born and English-speaking culture, 249; vaudeville, 235, 237, 240; visual arts, 232 – 235; writers, 215 – 216; Yiddish (see Yiddish culture; Yiddish language; Yiddish press); Yinglish slang, 242 Jewish Daily Forward (newspaper): 1914 elections, 173 – 175; advertisements, 106 – 107; Cahan, Abraham, 129, 184, 187; Forward Building, 173 – 175, 234 – 235, 253; “Gallery of Missing Husbands” feature, 143, 276, 277; Jewish religious life, 125 – 126; Miller, Louis, 222; nickelodeons, 240; pushing children too hard, 214; Richman, Julia, 214; Socialism/Socialists, 173, 174, 186 – 187, 221 – 222; Socialist Party (SP), 174; Triangle Fire (1911), 195, 278 Jewish Defense Association (JDA), 155 Jewish Family Working on Garters in Kitchen for Tenement Home (Hine), 281 Jewish fraternal organizations, 33 – 36; anti-Semitism, 33; assimilation, 32 – 33; Austro-Hungarian Jewish immigrants, 149; Bronx, 250 – 251; Brooklyn, 250 – 251; Jewish women’s, 35 – 36; members nationwide, 149; philanthropy, 71; Russian Jewish immigrants, 149; saloons, 33; synagogues compared to, 34 – 35; Workmen’s Circle as, xviii. See also individual organizations Jewish Hospital of Brooklyn, 153 Jewish hospitals: Beth Israel Hospital, 99,

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152 – 153; Jewish Hospital of Brooklyn, 153; Jews’ Hospital, 47 – 48, 50, 56; kosher food, lack of, 152; landsmanshaftn, 153; Lebanon Hospital, 99, 153; Lower East Side (Manhattan), 152 – 153; Montefiore Hospital, 153; Mount Sinai Hospital, 99, 152, 153; Yiddish language, lack of, 152; Yidishe tageblat (newspaper), 152 Jewish identity: central European Jews, 211 – 212; Jewish merchants, 89; Jewish New Yorkers, 22; Jewish women, 28, 67; Socialism/Socialists, 160 – 161; Yiddish language, 161; Zhitlovsky, Chaim, 161 Jewish immigrants: American Jewish Committee (AJC), 157 – 158; Americanization, 36; arrivals (1870s), 107; arrivals (1880 – 1924), 111 – 112; arrivals (1922), 249; B’nai B’rith, 35; Castle Garden, 2 – 4; cessation of immigration, 245 – 250; chain migrations, 112; charity, 66; Chatham Street (Manhattan), 12, 13; “Continental Sabbath,” 37 – 38; dependents, 122; educational attainment, 122; employment, pressure to find, 112; Five Points (Manhattan), 19; illegal immigration, 249 – 250; landslayt (natives of a town), 112, 117, 118; matzo distribution lists, 51; midwestern labor leaders, 188; multiple wage earners, 122; nativism, 141; nineteenth century, 1 – 2; organization of, 149 – 154, 170 – 171; peddling, 13, 22 – 23, 43, 120 – 121; poverty, 45, 53, 60; public education, free, 213 – 215; reform movements, 191; returnees, 112; Richman, Julia, 214; secular associations and clubs, 32; small businesses, 120; Socialism/Socialists, 185 – 186; United Hebrew Charities (UHC), 66; vocational education, 214; Welcome to America (Hamoy), 264 – 265; women among, 112. See also Ellis Island Jewish Labor Bund, 161 Jewish merchants: advertisements, 24, 28 – 29; “appetizing stores,” 133, 250; butchers, 28; caricature of, 10; delicatessens, 133, 250; direct selling, 24; dry goods, 43; dry-goods merchants, 23; grocers, 28; installment plan, introduction of, 24; Jewish identity, 89; local shopping streets, major, xvii; Lower East Side (Manhattan), 120; networks of, 23 – 24, 28; old clothes, trading in, xvii; peddling, 13, 18 – 19, 21, 22 – 23, 43, 120 – 121; profit margins, 24; prosperity, xvii; pushcart markets, 133, 250; restaurants, 133; retailing, 42 – 43; saloon keepers, 58;

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Jewish merchants (continued ) secondhand-clothing merchants, 24, 43; soda-water companies, 133; storekeepers, 121, 125; Sunday openings, 96, 125, 126 Jewish Messenger (newspaper): advertisements, 28 – 29; Association for the Free Distribution of Matsot to the Poor, 52; Board of Relief, donations for, 57 – 58; charitable efforts, 59, 60 – 61; Isaacs, Samuel Myers, 28, 36, 48, 215; religious reform, arguments against, 215; Sabbath observance, 36 – 37; Shushan Purim ball (1862), 56; union, feats of, 55 – 56 Jewish National Workers’ Alliance, 159, 160 Jewish New Yorkers: 1920s and 1930s, 242; boarders, keeping, 123; Chinese restaurants, 133 – 134; class differences, 68, 195 – 196; class division, 15; congregations and traditions, loyalty to, 26; defensive efforts, 138 – 140; divisions among, 14 – 15, 26; educational attainment, 214; English language, 69, 209 – 211, 219; family stability, 147; freedom to remain outside the formal community, 138; geographic spread, 15, 52 – 53, 135, 250 – 251; husbands, desertion by, 62, 142 – 143, 276; immigrant roots, movement away from, 242; internal divisions/ conflicts, xvi, 8, 68, 85, 131 – 132, 141 – 142, 150, 170; Jewish identity, 22; as leaders of American Jewry, 84; middle-class, 45 – 46, 56, 65, 170, 191, 203, 245, 252; mobility, economic, xvii, 7 – 8, 116, 134, 151; mobility, residential, 7; mobility, social, xvii, 7 – 8, 45 – 46, 117, 244, 251, 252 – 253; modernization, xiv, 98; mutual aid associations, 26 – 27; neighborhood networks, 16, 20, 21 – 24, 28, 51, 53, 70; neighborhoods, diversity of, xix; neighborhoods of secondary settlements, 135; networks of organizations, 137 – 138; New York City parks, 134; non-Jewish New Yorkers, interaction with, 16; organization across congregational lines, 138 – 139, 170 – 171; organization on a national scale, 139 – 140; philanthropy (see charity); pianos, 116; pluralism, 138; political participation (see Jewish politics); population, xii, 7, 13, 16, 28, 54, 245, 254; public education, free, xiv; second generation, 254; self-representation, 256 – 258; servants, percent having, 46; stores as social centers, 27 – 28; transition to native-born and English-speaking culture, 249; union, feats of, 8, 54, 55 – 56,

165, 166 – 167, 170; upper-class, 56, 170, 191, 271; upwardly mobile, 81; voluntarism, 138; wealthy, 46, 50 – 51, 53, 152, 156, 170, 180, 203, 226, 251; working-class, 46, 208, 245, 251 – 252, 265, 276 Jewish People’s Relief Committee of America (PRC), 167 Jewish politics, 173 – 205; 1886 elections, 185; 1912 elections, 197 – 200; 1914 elections, 173 – 177, 200; 1917 mayoral elections, 201 – 202; 1920 elections, 202; 1920s and 1930s, 177; 1930s and 1940s, 204; antiwar sentiments, 165, 201 – 202; central European Jews, 177 – 178; class differences, 195 – 196; Democratic Party, 177; domestic issues, xvi; fusion politics, 200, 202; Gary System, 201; goodgovernment reformers, 191, 193; “Great Revolt,” 188; immigration restriction, 190, 198; Jeffersonians, 177; La Guardia, Fiorello, 204 – 205; middle-class activists, 191, 203; midwestern labor leaders, 188; non-Jewish liberals, 204 – 205; petition and protest, xvi; political machines, 191 – 192; political style, 8; populism, 192; reform movements, 191 – 194; Republican Party, 176, 177 – 178, 183 – 184, 204; Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 204 – 205; Russian Jewish immigrants, 180; Smith, Al, 177, 204; social reform, 193, 204; Socialism/Socialists (see Socialism/Socialists; Socialist Labor Party; Socialist Party); southern sympathies, pre-Civil War, 177 – 178; strikes, 188 – 189, 273; Sunday closing laws, 182, 192; Tammany Hall, 177, 178 – 183; ticket splitters, 192, 199; Triangle Fire (1911), 194 – 197; unions, 188; upper-class activists, 191; “Uprising of the 20,000” (1909), 188; use of government to counter capitalist markets, 177; woman suffrage, 203 – 204 Jewish Publication Society, 140, 157, 159 Jewish real estate speculators, 129 Jewish Relief Campaign poster, 136 Jewish religious education, 99 – 101; Bureau of Jewish Education, 165; Educational Alliance, 145, 146; Hebrew schools, 100; heder teachers, 165; Labor Zionist schools, 100; pedagogical standards for, 165; of public school attendees, 165; Reform Judaism, 99 – 100; secular Yiddish schools, 100; Talmud torahs, 100; yeshivas, 100; Yiddish schools, 100 Jewish religious life, 49 – 56; alternative places for socialization, 16; American culture,

Index 100 – 101; American workweek, 69, 84, 96; Americanization, 95 – 97; bar mitzvah, 97; burial, 27; cantor’s role, 93; charity, 53 – 54; churches, synagogues in remodeled, 76; competitiveness among congregations, 79; congregational independence, 81; “Continental Sabbath,” 37 – 38; dietary laws, 82, 127 – 129; diversity in, xvi; eastern European Jews, 69; family seating, 83 – 84; Friday night services, 97; herem (excommunication), 14; High Holidays, 97; home life, 101; Jewish Daily Forward (newspaper), 125 – 126; Jewish women, 70; kosher meat, distribution and sale of, 27; matzo, baking and sale of, 27; “minyan men,” need for, 32; new congregations, 24 – 26, 31; Passover, 99; Passover (1858), 49 – 56; Passover (1873), 61; Passover (1906, at Ellis Island), 1, 6; Passover (1924), 245; Passover obligations, 54; pikuakh nefesh concept, 125; prayer shawls for men, 82; rented spaces, synagogues in, 25, 76; ritual observances, 14, 28, 32; Sabbath, preparations for, 126 – 127; Sabbath observance, 36 – 39, 70, 84 – 85, 97, 124 – 127; Saturday, work on, 37 – 38; seat contracts, 90; secularization, xv, 16, 32; separation of men and women during prayer, 82; Sundays, 37, 85, 96, 125, 126; synagogue affiliation, 81, 97; synagogue attendance, 32, 81, 84 – 85; synagogue construction, 76; synagogue governance, 26; synagogue in, declining significance of, 27; synagogue membership, xvi, 27, 28; synagogue seating, 28; Talmud, 88; Talmudic scholars, plight of, 69, 70; Workmen’s Circle, 125 – 126 Jewish rights and privileges: 1832 treaty with Russia, abrogation of, 157, 199; American Jewish Committee (AJC), 157; American Jewish Congress, 168; Board of Delegates of American Israelites, 140; civil rights, 168; defense at home, 138; “group rights,” 168; intercession with the government, 155 – 156; Jewish Defense Association (JDA), 155; Jews abroad, actions on behalf of, 139, 154; Kishinev pogrom (1903), 154 – 155; Marshall, Louis, 156 – 157; organization across congregational lines, 138 – 139; organization on a national scale, 139 – 140; “rights of peoples,” 168; Schiff, Jacob, 156; “The Wanderers,” 155 Jewish Socialist Federation (JSF), 161 – 162, 175 Jewish Theological Seminary (JTS), 88 – 89, 160 Jewish women: American beauty standards,

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275; cafes, 208; charitable endeavors, 47; charity, 60; consumerism, 28, 274, 276; dancing, 239; family planning, 285 – 287; garment industry, 20, 118 – 119, 120, 189; Hadassah Study Circle, 159; home life, 101; household funds, management of, 123; husbands, desertion by, 62, 142 – 143, 276; incarcerated, assistance to, 149; Jewish fraternal organization, 35 – 36; Jewish identity, 28, 67; Jewish religious life, 70; middle-class, 65, 203; mutual assistance, 285; postcards, 255; prostitution, 148, 163; reform movements, 192 – 194; Russian, 118 – 119; shirtwaists, 275, 276; sisterhoods, 66 – 70; skirt lengths, 258; social work, professionalization of, 66 – 67; United Hebrew Charities (UHC), 47; unmarried women, 20; uptown women, 70; Welcome to America (Hamoy), 264 – 265; women’s suffrage, 168, 203 – 204, 228 Jewish Women’s Congress, 147 Jewish Workers’ Association, 184, 185 Jewish writers, 215 – 216 Jews’ Hospital, 47 – 48, 50, 56 Johnson, Albert, 248 Johnson-Reed Act (1924), 248, 249 Jolson, Al, 236 – 237, 242 – 243 Jones, Daniel, 116 Jones, Henry, 34 – 35 Joseph, Jacob, 94, 98 – 99 Joseph, Samuel, 122 Joshua, Israel, 242 Journal, The (newspaper), 271 Kahal Adath Jeshurun congregation, 79, 89 – 90 Kahn, Gus, 238 Kahn, Otto, 240 Kalich, Bertha, 206, 220 – 221, 235 Kallen, Horace, 248 – 249 Kaplan, Elias, 131 Kazin, Alfred, 253 – 254 Kehillah, the (The Jewish Community), 162 – 165; American Jewish Committee (AJC), 164, 165; Benderly, Samson, 165; Education Bureau, 164; efforts to form, 152; Jewish Communal Register, 137 – 138; Magnes, Judah, 163; professional bureaus, 164 – 165; Saturday opening of stores, 126; Social Morals Bureau, 164; United Hebrew Charities (UHC), 63 Kelly, John, 179 Kern, Jerome, 238, 243

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Kesher shel Barzel, 35 Kessler, David, 219 King’s Daughters, 69 Kirbatch Amerikano, El (newspaper), 226 Kishinev (Bessarabia), 154 – 155, 278 Klaw, Marc, 237 Kleindeutschland (Manhattan), 30 – 35; 1850s, 13; Ahawath Chesed congregation, 31; beer saloons, 33; Beth Elohim congregation, 31; Bikur Cholim congregation, 31; B’nai B’rith, 33; central European Jews, 107; Christian Germans, 30; church affiliation, 32; Cultus Society, 81; eastern European Jews, 107; Essex Street Market, 29; as foreign-language urban enclave, 30; German immigrants, 30, 31; German-language newspapers, 30; as a German-speaking city, 30; Jewish migration away from, 7, 31; location, 13; Loew, Marcus, 241; major artery (1860), 29; new congregations, 31; Richman, Julia, 213; Rodeph Shalom congregation, 31; Shaarey Hashamayim congregation, 31, 54 – 55; Temple Emanu-El (Manhattan), 31. See also Lower East Side; individual streets Kobre, Max, 105, 111 Koenig, Samuel, 183 – 184 Kohler, Kaufman, 85, 86 – 88, 87, 215 Kohut, Alexander: Ahawath Chesed congregation, 64, 86, 88; American Hebrew (magazine), 215; Aruch Completum, 86; Breslau Theological Seminary, 86; Ethics of the Fathers, 86 – 88; Gottheil, Gustav, 87; Jewish Theological Seminary (JTS), 88; Kohut, Rebekah Bettelheim, 63 – 64, 65, 87; Kohut-Kohler affair, 86 – 88 Kohut, Rebekah Bettelheim, 63 – 68; Ahawath Chesed congregation, 64; charity, 45, 64; Gottheil, Gustav, 64; Harland, Henry (aka Sidney Luska), 64; Jewish Theological Seminary (JTS), 88 – 89; Kohut, Alexander, 63 – 64, 65, 87; National Council of Jewish Women (NCJW), 64, 147 – 148; photograph, 64; sisterhoods, 66 – 69; social work, 65; Talmudic scholars, plight of, 69; Temple Emanu-El (Manhattan), 64, 87; Women’s Health Protective Association, 65 Kohut-Kohler affair, 86 – 88 Kokofsky, Abraham, 123 Koldunye (Goldfaden), 219 Ku Klux Klan, 246 Kuhn, Loeb & Company, 156, 169, 241 Kusnetz, Minnie, 249 – 250

La Guardia, Fiorello, 177, 204 – 205 Labor Lyceum, 132, 201, 212 Labor Zionists, 100, 161, 169, 202 Ladies’ Anti-Beef Trust Association, 128 Ladies Benevolent Society, 60 – 61, 62 Ladino (Judeo-Spanish), 226, 278 – 281 Ladino press, 226, 278 – 281 Laemmle, Carl, 241 Lafferty, James V., 266 Laight Street (Manhattan), 14 Lamartine Place (Manhattan), 49 landslayt (natives of a town), 112, 117, 118, 239 landsmanshaftn, 150 – 152, 153, 166, 175 Lasky, Jesse, 241 Lateiner, Joseph, 219 Lauterbach, Edward, 178 Lazarus, Emma, 158, 215 – 217, 262 – 263 Lazarus, Jacob Hart, 232 Lazerowitz, Simon, 94 Lebanon Hospital, 99, 153 lecture culture, 212 Leerburger, Hanna, 68 Leeser, Isaac, 81 Lehman, Herbert, 199, 204 Leipziger, Henry M., 212 Lemlich, Clara, 188 – 189, 197, 203 Leonard, Benny, 287 – 288 Lesser, Samuel, 19 Levantine Jewish immigrants, 112, 135, 278 – 281 Levi Isaacs in Freemason Regalia (photograph), 272 Levy, Aaron Jefferson, 183, 199 – 200 Levy, Ferdinand, 178 Levy, Myer, 19 Levy, Phillip, 49 Levy, Sarah, 19 Lexow Commission, 148, 162 – 163 Liberal Party, 204 libraries, patronage of, 134, 214 Lilienthal, Max, 27, 82 Lippmann, Walter, 226 Lipsky, Louis, 108 literary societies, xvi Loew, Marcus, 241 London, Meyer: 1912 elections, 199; 1914 elections, 173, 175; 1918 elections, 202; 1920 elections, 202; antiwar sentiments, 202; career, 190 – 191; cloakmakers strike (1910), 189, 190; Congress, election to, xviii, 191, 200, 202; Immigration Act (1921), 248; International Ladies’ Garment Workers’

Index Union (ILGWU), 190; Labor Zionists, 202; Lower East Side (Manhattan), xviii, 190; New York University Law School, 190; People’s Relief Committee, 190 – 191; photograph, 172; “Protocol of Peace,” 189; Socialism/Socialists, 172, 173; Socialist Labor Party (SLP), 190; Workmen’s Circle, 190 London System, 60 Louis, Minnie, 148 Low, Seth, 125, 154, 192 Lower East Side (Manhattan): 1892, 251; Americanization, 104; Austro-Hungarian Jewish immigrants, 135; banks, 105, 109, 110 – 111; boundary, 112; butchers, boycott against (1902), 128; communal affection for, 130 – 131; communal networks, 135; development of, 110; eastern European Jews, 111; Eighth Assembly District, 180 – 181; food sellers, 133; German Jewish immigrants, 112, 267; Goldman, Emma, 228 – 229; Hester Park, 134; Jarmulowsky bank building, 105 – 106; Jewish cafes, 208 – 209; Jewish criminal activity, 162 – 163; Jewish hospitals, 152 – 153; Jewish merchants, 120; Jewish migration away from, xviii, 94 – 95, 134; Jewish population, 113, 130; Jewish settlement in, 7; jobs held by immigrants, 118; Kazin, Alfred, 253; Leonard, Benny, 287; Levantine Jewish immigrants, 135; literary scene, 232; London, Meyer, xviii, 190; nickelodeons, 240; piano store, 116; property owners, 129 – 130; Russian Jewish immigrants, 135; Saturday openings, 126; school enrollment, declines in, 122; settlement patterns, 112; Seward Park Library (Manhattan), 134, 214; sisterhoods, 66 – 67; Smith, Al, 196; stores, 105; tenements, 113; vaudeville, 235; Yiddish language, 251; Zionism/Zionists, 160 Lower Manhattan, 14, 27, 175 Lozowick, Louis, 235 Ludlow Street (Manhattan), 31, 119 Luria, J. H., 126 Lyon, Robert, 215 Lyons, Jacques Judah, 28, 50, 52 Lyons and Guion (store), 28 – 29 M. & L. Jarmulowsky, 110 MacDougal Street (Manhattan), 49 Macy, R. H., 42 Macy’s, 42 – 43, 198, 254 Madison Avenue (Manhattan), 285 Madison Street (Manhattan), 113, 115, 134

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Magnes, Judah: American Jewish Committee (AJC), 163; American Jewish Congress, 167; antiwar position, 165; Federation of American Zionists (FAZ), 158; Hebrew Union College, 163; Kehillah, the (The Jewish Community), 163; Marshall, Louis, 155; pogroms, demonstration against, 164; Schiff, Jacob, 163; Temple Emanu-El, 163; Zionism/Zionists, 155, 164 Mahler, Gustav, 239 Maimonides College (Philadelphia), 140 Maimonides Library Association, 38 Malkiel, Teresa, 195, 203 Manasseh, Julia. See Cowen, Julia Mandel, Adolf, 108 – 109 Mandell, Fania, 286 Manhattan, 250, 251. See also specific streets and neighborhoods Manhattan Opera Company, 240 Mani Leyb, 224 Mannheimer, Joseph, 55 Mannheimer, Marx, 55 Mannheimer, Mina, 55 Mannheimer, Sophia, 55 Manufacturer and Builder (journal), 76 “Margaret Sanger’s Brownsville Clinic” (photograph), 286 Market Street (Manhattan), 112 Marks, Isaac, 29 Marshall, Louis: American Jewish Committee (AJC), 156, 247; Bernstein, Herman, 247; Bingham, Theodore A., 162; cloakmakers strike (1910), 189; intercession with the government, 155 – 156; Jewish rights and privileges, 156 – 157; Jewish Theological Seminary (JTS), 88; Magnes, Judah, 155, 163; Masliansky, Tsvi Hirsh, 157; public persona, 156 – 157; Richman, Julia, 214; Russian Jewish immigrants, sympathy for, 142; Sulzer, William, 199 – 200; Versailles peace talks, 169; Yiddish language, 157 Marxism, 184 Masliansky, Tsvi Hirsh, 146, 157 Masonic order, 33 Mathews, Cornelius, 12 Maxwell Street Settlement, 147, 148 May Day, 273 – 274 Mazet Committee, 162 – 163 McBride, Henry, 233, 234, 235 McFay, Mary, 19 McGowan and Hart (store), 29 McKim, Mead & White, 267

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Mefitsei Sefat Ever ve’Sifrutah, 225 Melicov, Dina, 235 Mencken, H. L., 211 Mendes, Henry Pereira: downtown Orthodox Jews, 94; Orthodox Union, 97; Sabbath Association, 126; Shearith Israel congregation, 88, 93 Menken, Alice Davis, 148 Merzbacher, Leo, 81 – 82 Metropolitan Club, 265 Metropolitan Opera, 240 Metropolitan Opera House, 195 Meyer, Annie Nathan, 148 Meyer, Barbara, 31 Meyer, Herman, 31 Meyer, Sarah, 54 – 55 Meyer, William, 54 – 55 Mikveh Israel (Philadelphia), 81 Mill Street (Manhattan), 14 Miller, Louis, 222 Miner’s Bowery theater, 236 Minsky, Louis, 121 Mirror of Italy, The (Waugh), 258 Mischaloff, Bessie, 115 Mishkan Israel Suvalk congregation, 89 Mitchel, John Purroy, 200, 201, 202, 214 Mizrachi movement, 158 – 159, 160 Modern School (Ferrer Center), 234 modernism, 284 modernization, xiv, 98 Monopole cafe, 208 Montefiore Home, 99 Montefiore Hospital, 153 Moorish architecture, 73 – 79, 89 – 99; Ahawath Chesed congregation, 72, 74, 76, 79; assimilation, 74; B’nai Yeshurun (Cincinnati), 73, 77; central European synagogues, 77 – 78; Christian objections to use of Gothic, Romanesque, 77 – 78; cosmopolitanism, 78 – 79; downtown synagogues, 91; Eldridge Street Synagogue (Manhattan), 80; Enlightenment, 77; Fernbach, Henry, 74; Jarmulowsky bank building, 105 – 106; Kahal Adath Jeshurun congregation, 79; otherness, sense of, 78; romanticism of Oriental roots, 77; Shaarey Tefilah congregation, 76, 79; social position, concern with, 78; synagogue details, 77; Temple Emanu-El (Manhattan), 73, 76; Temple Emanu-El (San Francisco), 77 “Moorish Manhattan,” 74 – 79 Morais, Sabato, 88

Morgan, Anne, 189 Morgen zhurnal (newspaper), 124, 222 Morgenthau, Henry, 199 Mortara case (Italy, 1858), 48, 139 – 140 Moses, Robert, 204 Moskowitz, Belle Lindner Israels, 148, 193 – 194, 198, 204, 238 Moskowitz, Henry, 199 Most, Johan, 184, 228 Mother Earth (magazine), 228 Mott Haven (Bronx), 133 Mott Street (Manhattan), 12, 17, 19, 107 Mount Sinai Hospital, 99, 152, 153 movies, 240 – 242 Mulberry Street (Manhattan), 19 – 20, 51 Murder Incorporated, 132 Murphy, Charles, 181, 199 mutual aid associations: B’nai B’rith, 34, 36; growth in, 150; Jewish New Yorkers, 26 – 27; localism, 55 Mutual Alliance trust company, 110 Natelson, Gittel, 12 Natelson, Nathan, 252 Natelson, Rachel, 252 Natelson, Sam, 252 – 253 Nathan, Maud, 148, 193, 203 – 204 National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, 145 National Child Labor Committee (NCLC), 282 National Consumers’ League, 148, 193, 195 National Council of Jewish Women (NCJW), 147 – 149; American, Sadie, 147 – 148; Brenner, Rose, 149; Brooklyn section, 149; Council Home for Jewish Girls (Queens), 149; Department of Immigrant Aid, 148; eastern European Jews, 148; Ellis Island, representatives at, 5, 148; family stability, 147; financial mismanagement, 149; founding, 36; Hebrew Educational Society (HES), 149; Jewish Women’s Congress, 147; Kohut, Rebekah Bettelheim, 64, 147 – 148; members, 147 – 148; Moskowitz, Belle, 194; Reform Judaism, 148 National Desertion Bureau (NDB), 142 – 143, 276 National Liberal Immigration League, 158 nativism: anti-Semitism, 246 – 247; Catholics, 141; Irish immigrants, 141; Jewish immigrants, 141; Johnson-Reed Act (1924), 248; World War I, 246 needle trades. See garment industry

Index Neighborhood Guild (later University Settlement), 143 – 144, 145 “New Colossus, The” (Lazarus), 217, 219, 262 – 263 New School for Social Research, 248 New York American (newspaper), 278, 279 New York City: 1870 – 1915, 66; as American cultural capital, 8; bridges, East River, xiv, xviii, 130; as capital of Jewish world, 138; consolidation (1898), 7; cosmopolitanism, 78 – 79, 254; as cultural capital of United States, xx, 7, 209, 243; culture, general, Jewish contributions to, 209; as a destination for European Jews, xiii, 249, 288; as entry point for immigrants, 2; as a foreign city, 253; Jewish population, xii, 7, 13, 16, 28, 54, 245, 254; natural advantages, 2; neighborhoods, diversity of, xix; philanthropic enterprises, 46 – 47; population, 66; public education, free, xiv, 213 – 215; rapid transit, xiv, 52, 130; rise of, 2; stability, security and equality, 170; subways, building of/along, xviii, 130; Wise, Isaac Mayer, 11 – 12 New York City Board of Education, 212 New York City parks: Battery Park (Manhattan), 2, 141; Betsy Head Park (Brooklyn), 134; Claremont Park (Bronx), 132; Crotona Park (Bronx), 132, 134, 252; Hester Park (Manhattan), 134; Jewish New Yorkers, 134; Seward Park (Manhattan), 146, 173 New York Daily Tribune (newspaper), 90 New York Dispensary, 12, 25 New York Herald (newspaper), 24, 92, 95, 128 New York Herald-Tribune (newspaper), 232 New York Philharmonic, 242 New York Times (newspaper): Educational Alliance’s building, 145 – 146; Gibson, Charles Dana, 275 – 276; Jarmulowsky bank building, 106; Jewish influence on, 230 – 231; Jewish issues, coverage of, 231 – 232; Joseph’s funeral, Jacob, 98; Kohut-Kohler affair, 86 – 87; Moorish synagogues, 76; Ochs, Adolph, 231; run on the Jarmulowsky bank, 103 – 104; Russian Jewish immigrants, sympathy for, 142; Sabbath, preparations for, 126; Sunday opening for Jewish businesses, 96 New York Tribune (newspaper), 108 – 109, 110 – 111, 117, 141 New York University, 160, 215 New York University Law School, 190

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New York World (newspaper), 75 – 76, 230 New York World Telegram (newspaper), 286 New Yorker Männerchor, 217 New Yorker Sängerrunde, 217 Newman, Elias, 235 Newman, Pauline, 197 nickelodeons, 240 Noah, Mordecai Manuel, 138 – 139 Norfolk Street (Manhattan), 31, 78, 83, 90 North American Review (journal), 162 Novy Mir (newspaper), 226 Nurses’ Settlement, 144 Nyu-Yorker yidishe folkstsaytung (newspaper), 221 Ochs, Adolph, 231 – 232 Odd Fellows, 33 Ohabey Zedek congregation, 26 Opatashu, Yoysef (Joseph Opatovski), 225 opera, 239 – 240 Oppenheim, James, 226, 233 Orange Street (Manhattan) (now Park Row), 18 Orchard Street (Manhattan): Covenant Hall, 35; Gumpertz family, 58; Jarmulowsky bank, 103; Maimonides Library Association, 38; Minsky, Louis, 121; name, 257; Natelson family, 252; piano store, 116; tenement windows, 114 Orden der Hermanns Soehne (Order of the Sons of Hermann), 33 Order Ahavas Israel, 35 Order Brith Abraham, 35 Order Sons of Zion, 160 Orpheus (singing society), 217 Orthodox Judaism: American ways of doing business, 96 – 97; American workweek, 69, 84, 96; Americanization, 95 – 96, 98, 99; Board of Orthodox Rabbis, 164; Educational Alliance, 146; kosher meat, regulation of, 94; Mount Sinai Hospital, 152; newspapers of, 124, 221, 222; Reform Judaism, xvi; Sabbath observance, 84 – 85; Shearith Israel congregation, 83; synagogue attendance, 84 – 85; World War I, 166 Orthodox Union, 97 – 98 Ostrowsky, Abbo, 235 Outlook (newspaper), 126 Palestine: Balfour Declaration, 202; Lazarus, Emma, 216 – 217; Szold, Henrietta, 159 – 160 Paley, Johan, 221

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Panic of 1857: charity, 47, 49 – 56; neighborhood networks, diminished power of, 51; poverty, 49 – 56, 58; response to, 56; unemployment, xvi – xvii Panic of 1873, xvi – xvii, 47, 58, 62 Panken, Jacob, 202 Paramount Pictures Corporation, 241 Parnassus (Emerson), 216 Pastor, Tony, 175 “peace and milk” campaign, 201 – 202 Pearl Street (Manhattan), 18 People’s Art Guild, 234 – 235 People’s Relief Committee, 190 – 191 performing arts, 235 – 240 Perkins, Frances, 195 Perlman, Nathan, 248 Pfeffer, Yakov, 1, 6, 7 Phagan, Mary, 231 Photo-Secession Gallery, 233 photography, 260 – 262, 271 – 272, 282 pianos, 116 Picture of New York (Blunt), 15 Pinsker, Leo, 158 Pitkin Avenue (Brownsville), xvii, 160 Pitt Street (Manhattan), 51 Pittsburgh Platform, 88 Plumbing and Sanitary Engineer ( journal), 114 Poale Zion (Workers of Zion), 159, 160 Polish Jewish immigrants, 18, 26, 31, 151, 209 politics. See Jewish politics Pope, Jesse, 41 Porgy and Bess (musical), 243 postcards, 255 – 257, 267, 274 – 275 poverty, 49 – 56; Association for the Free Distribution of Matsot to the Poor, 51 – 55; Jewish immigrants, 45, 53, 60; Panic of 1857, 49 – 56; Passover season, 57; professional Jewish beggars, 59 Price, George, 197 Prisoner of Zenda (film), 241 Progressive Party, 197 – 198 Promised City, The (Rischin), xiii – xiv Proskauer, Joseph, 204 prostitution: Colossus of Coney, 265, 266; Engel, Martin, 180; Jewish women, 148, 163; Moskowitz’s campaign against, Belle Lindner Israels, 194; Tammany Hall, 180, 193 Protestant elites, 141 “Protocol of Peace,” 189, 190 Protocols of the Elders of Zion, The (forgery), 247 “Providential March, A” (Cahan), 227

Provisional Executive Committee for Zionist Affairs (PEC), 167 – 168 public libraries, 134, 214 public schools, xiv, 165, 213 – 215 Puck (humor magazine), 218 Pulitzer, Joseph, 230 Purcell, John, 19 Purim Association, 2369 Purim Association Fancy Dress Ball (print), 268 Purim Association of the City of New York, 56 – 57 Purim balls, 56=57, 269 – 271 pushcart markets, 133, 250 Queens, 235, 250, 253 R. H. Hoe factory, 98 Rabbi Chaim Berlin Yeshiva, 132 Rabbi Isaac Elchannan Theological Seminary (RIETS), 98, 100 Rabbi Jacob Joseph School, 100 Rabbinical College of America, 160 Radin, Rose, 121 Rakov, Belarus, 150 Rakover Froyen Klub (Rakover Women’s Club), 150 Rakower Young Men’s Benevolent Association, 150 Raphall, Morris, 29, 49 real estate speculators, 129 Reed, David A., 248 Reform Judaism, 79 – 89; Ahawath Chesed congregation, 85 – 86; American workweek, 84; assimilation, 70; attacks on, 86 – 88; Beth Elohim (Charleston, South Carolina), 82; central European Jews, 81; Cultus Society, 81 – 82; eastern European Jews, 91; Educational Alliance, 146; English language, use of, 69; Enlightenment, 80; first American synagogue, 82; Germany, 80, 83; Har Sinai (Baltimore), 82; innovations by, 80 – 81, 82 – 86; Jewish religious education, 99 – 100; Jewish Theological Seminary (JTS), 88; Kohut-Kohler affair, 86 – 88; law, spirit of trumping letter of, 69; Lilienthal, Max, 82; majority of American congregations, 84; Merzbacher, Leo, 82; modernity, 74, 83; National Council of Jewish Women (NCJW), 148; Orthodox Judaism, xvi; Pittsburgh Platform, 88; privileging English over Hebrew, 69; rabbis from Germany, 84; Sabbath observance, 84 – 85; Schiff, Jacob,

Index 156; Sunday sermons, 85; synagogue attendance, 84 – 85; Talmud, rejection of, 88; Temple Emanu-El (Manhattan), 31, 81, 82, 85; Union of American Hebrew Congregations, 157; universal ethics, commitment to, 148; upwardly mobile Jews, 81 Reisman, Ben, 6, 123 Republican Party: 1912 elections, 197; central European Jews, 177 – 178; Dittenhoefer, Abram, 178; fusion politics, 202; Jewish politics, 176, 177, 183 – 184, 204; Koenig, Samuel, 183; liberal wing, 204 Richman, Julia, 66, 148, 213 – 214 Ridge Street (Manhattan), 31, 51, 55, 113 Riis, Jacob, 271 Rischin, Moses, xiii – xiv Rise of David Lewinsky, The (Cahan), 227 Rivington Street (Manhattan), 108, 252 Rodeph Shalom congregation, 31 Rodfei Tsedek (Seekers of the Truth), 281 Rokeach company, 127 Roman Catholics. See Catholics Romanesque style, 78 Romanian Jewish immigrants, 112, 135 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 177, 204 – 205 Roosevelt, Theodore, 154, 157, 185, 197 – 198, 199 Root, Elihu, 157 Rosenfeld, Morris, 223, 224 Rosenfeld, Paul, 233 Rosenfield, Helen, 127 Rumshinsky, Joseph, 116 Russia: 1832 treaty with, 157, 199; anti-Semitism, 154 – 156; discrimination against Jewish travelers, 157; Kishinev pogrom (1903), 154 – 155, 278; pogroms, demonstration against, 164 Russian Jewish immigrants: Beth Hamedrash Hagadol congregation, 25, 31; as builders, 130; communal networks, 135; Jewish fraternal organizations, 149; landsmanshaftn of, 151; Lower East Side (Manhattan), 135; nativism, 141; Russian press, 226; settlement patterns, 112; Socialism/Socialists, 184; sympathy for, 142; Tammany Hall, 180; women in garment industry, 118 – 119 Russian Revolution (1905), 155, 161 Rutgers Place (Manhattan), 115 Rutgers Square (Manhattan), 173 Sabbath Association, 126 Sach’s cafe, 228

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Sackman Street (Brownsville), 201 Sanger, Margaret, 285 – 286 Sapiro, Aaron, 247 Sarasohn, Kasriel, 153, 158, 221 Schechter, Solomon, 88 Schewitsch, Sergei, 184 Schiff, Jacob: Alliance Israelite Universelle, 154; Bankers’ Committee, 154; cloakmakers strike (1910), 189; intercession with the government, 155 – 156; Jewish rights and privileges, 156; Jewish Theological Seminary (JTS), 88; Kishinev pogrom (1903), 154; Kuhn, Loeb & Company, 156; Lebanon Hospital, 153; Magnes, Judah, 163; Montefiore Hospital, 153; Nurses’ Settlement, 144; Reform Judaism, 156; Roosevelt, Theodore, 198; Russian Jewish immigrants, sympathy for, 142; Russo-Japanese War, 156; Shocharei S’fath Eber, 225; Sulzer, William, 199; wealth, 46 Schimmel, Harry, 183 Schneeberger, Henry, 88 Schneider, John, 58 Schneiderman, Rose, 195 – 196, 197, 203 School for Jewish Communal Work, 164 Schreiber’s cafe, 208 Schul, Abram, 20 Schwab, Michael, 49, 50, 55 Schwab’s cafe, 228 Schwartz, I. J., 224 Schwartz, Maurice, 220 Second Avenue (Manhattan), 208, 219 Second Street (Manhattan), 30 secularization, xv, 16, 32 Seder Tefilah prayer book (Merzbacher), 82 Seligman, James, 23 Seligman, Jesse, 142 Seligman, Joseph, 23, 46, 141, 265 Seligman, William, 23 Sephardic Jews: Ashkenazic Jews, communication with, 278 – 281; Association for the Free Distribution of Matsot to the Poor, 52; Ladino language, 226; Ladino press, 278 – 281; Lazarus family, 262; population, 226; Shearith Israel congregation, 14 – 15; tenements, 112 – 113 settlement houses: College Settlement, 144; gap between parents and children, bridging, 146; Henry Street Settlement, 144 – 145; immigrant Jewish artists, 234; Neighborhood Guild (later University Settlement), 143 – 144, 145; Nurses’ Settlement, 144;

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settlement houses (continued ) United Hebrew Charities (UHC), 143; Wald, Lillian, 144 – 145 Seven Arts (magazine), 226, 233 Seward Park (Manhattan), 146, 173 Seward Park Library (Manhattan), 134, 214 Shaarey Hashamayim congregation, 25, 31, 54 – 55 Shaarey Rachamin congregation, 31 Shaarey Tefilah congregation: B’nai Jeshurun congregation, 26; Fernbach, Henry, 74; Forty-Fourth Street location, 74, 76, 79; Isaacs, Myer Samuel, 60; Isaacs, Samuel Myers, 28, 48, 50, 74, 84, 140; Ladies Benevolent Society, 60 – 61; Moorish architecture, 76, 79; Wooster Street location, 78 Shaarey Zedek congregation, 12, 25, 26 Shahn, Ben, 235 Shapiro, Moyshe, 212 Shearith Israel congregation, 14 – 16; Ashkenazic Jews, 15; B’nai Jeshurun congregation, 15 – 16; breakup of, 15 – 16; Central Park West location, 245; Cohen, Barrow E., 14 – 15; Crosby Street location, 16; de Sola Pool, David, 68, 245; Isaacs, Levi, 272; Lyons, Jacques Judah, 28, 50; Mendes, Henry Pereira, 88, 93; Mill Street location, 14; New York Dispensary location, 12; Orthodox Judaism, 83; separate seating for men and women, 83; Sephardic rites, 14 – 15; as a synagogue community, 14 Shiplacoff, Abraham, 200 – 201 shirtwaists, 275, 276. See also Triangle Fire (1911) Shocharei S’fath Eber, 225 Sholem (Jewish agricultural community), 50 Sholem Aleichem, 210, 225 Short Stories (magazine), 227 Showboat (musical), 243 Shubert, J. J. (Jacob), 237 Shubert, Lee, 237 Shubert, Sam, 237 Shund, 220 Simkhovitch, Mary, 180 Simons, A. M., 196 Simons, Morris, 96 Simson, Sampson, 48 Singer, Isaac Bashevis, 242 Sinsheimer’s saloon, 33 Sixth Assembly District, 183 Smith, Al, 177, 196 – 197, 204 Smith, Charles “Silver Dollar,” 181

Smith, Ellen, 255 social work, 65, 66 – 67 Socialism/Socialists, 184 – 191, 200 – 203; 1912 elections, 199; 1914 elections, 173, 200; 1920 elections, 202; American Jewish Congress delegate elections, 169; appeal to Jewish workers, xviii; assimilation, 161; Brownsville (Brooklyn), 200; Cahan, Abraham, 221 – 222; cloakmakers’ strikes, 184 – 185, 189; dissension within the ranks, 202; eastern European Jews, 184; Educational Alliance, 146; educational efforts, 212; eight-hour day, 184; electoral decline, 202 – 203; as ethnic and political challenge, 176; Forward Building, 174 – 175; fusion politics, 202; George, Henry, 185; German, 185; German Socialists, 221; gerrymandering, 202; Hillquit, Morris, 201; Jewish Daily Forward (newspaper), 173, 174, 186 – 187, 221 – 222; Jewish identity, 160 – 161; Jewish immigrants, 185 – 186; Jewish Labor Bund, 161; Jewish People’s Relief Committee of America (PRC), 167; Jewish Workers’ Association, 185; La Boz del Pueblo (newspaper), 226; leaders of, 189 – 190; Lemlich, Clara, 188 – 189; linguistic affinity between German and Yiddish, 184; local elections contested, 200; London, Meyer, 172, 173; mainstream, 204; midwestern labor leaders, 188; organizational infrastructure, 186; paths to Socialism, xviii; “peace and milk” campaign, 201 – 202; Poale Zion (Workers of Zion), 159; political power, 184; Russian Jewish immigrants, 184; Tammany Hall, 184; unions, 188; United Labor Party, 185; Workmen’s Circle, 150, 162 Socialist Labor Party (SLP), 184, 188, 190, 221 Socialist Party (SP): 1914 elections, 200; 1917 mayoral elections, 202; 1920 elections, 202; Jewish Daily Forward (newspaper), 174; Jewish politics, 177; Jewish Socialist Federation (JSF), 161 – 162; Milwaukee, 196; Socialist Labor Party (SLP), 188; Triangle Fire (1911), 194; woman suffrage, 203; Workmen’s Circle cemetery, 195 Socialist-Territorialists, 161 Society of Saint Tammany or the Columbian Order, 175, 177, 178 Solomon, Charles, 181 Songs from the Ghetto (Rosenfeld), 223 Songs of a Semite (Lazarus), 216 Sons of Benjamin, 35

Index Sons of Zion, 158 Soyer, Isaac, 234, 235 Soyer, Moses, 234, 235 Soyer, Raphael, 234, 244 Spector, Joseph, 116 Staats-zeitung (newspaper), 32, 33 Stadttheater, 218 Stand, Leon, 183 Stanton Street (Manhattan), 51, 185 Staten Island, 141, 235, 253 Statue of Liberty, 262 – 263 Steerage (Stieglitz), 260, 261 Steffens, Lincoln, 187, 232 Steinway piano company, 116 Stern, Mayer, 30 Stern, Myer, 61 Sterne, Simon, 191 Stewart, A. T., 42 Stieglitz, Alfred, 233, 260, 284 Stokes, I. N., 114 Stone Avenue Talmud Torah, 132 Straus, Isidor, 42 – 43, 46, 198 Straus, Lazarus, 42 Straus, Nathan: Hadassah, 160; Macy’s, 42 – 43, 198; mayoral nomination, 178; Tammany Hall, 178; wealth, 46 Straus, Oscar: 1912 elections, 198 – 199; appointive posts, 198; intercession with the government, 155 – 156; law career, 43; Roosevelt, Theodore, 198; Russian Jewish immigrants, sympathy for, 142; Taft, William Howard, 198 Strauss, Jonas, xiii, 23 Strauss, Levi, xiii, 23 Strauss, Louis, xiii, 23 Strong, William, 96, 192 Sullivan, Big Tim, 182 Sullivan, Florrie, 181 Sulzer, William, 198 – 200 Sutter Avenue (Brooklyn), 147 “Swanee” (Gershwin), 242 – 243 “sweatshop poets,” 222 – 223 Szold, Benjamin, 159, 160 Szold, Henrietta, 159 – 160, 215, 252 Taft, William Howard, 197, 198 Tageblat. See Yidishe tageblat Talmud Torahs, 100 Talmudic Academy, 100 Tammany Hall, 175 – 177, 178 – 183; 1912 elections, 197; 1914 elections, 175; antiTammany Democrats, 176; business of

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361

politics model, 179; corruption, violence, intimidation, fraud, 178 – 179; cost of doing business in Tammany districts, 192; eastern European Jews, 176; Engel, Martin, 180 – 181; Factory Investigating Commission (FIC), 197; fusion politics, 202 – 203; Goldfogle, Henry M., 181 – 182; headquarters, 182; Irish Catholic culture, 175, 179 – 180; Irish immigrants, 182; Jewish politics, 177, 178 – 183; Levy, Ferdinand, 178; location, 175; Moskowitz, Belle, 194; personal, faceto-face politics, 179 – 180; philosemitism, 182 – 183; photograph, 176; prostitution, 180, 193; reform of itself, 179; Russian Jewish immigrants, 180; Smith, Al, 196; Socialism/ Socialists, 184; Straus, Nathan, 178; Sulzer, William, 198; Sunday closing laws, 182; Triangle Fire (1911), 194 “Teardrop Millionaire” (Rosenfeld), 224 Tefilah mi-kol ha-shanah: Minhah Ketanah (prayer book), 259 Temple Emanu-El (Manhattan), 81 – 83; Chrystie Street location, 76, 82, 89; Daughters of Zion, Hadassah Chapter, 159; dietary laws, 82; Eidlitz, Leopold, 82; Einstein, Hanna B., 68; family seating, 82 – 83; Fernbach, Henry, 207; Forty-Third Street location, 73, 76; Friday night services, 97; Gottheil, Gustav, 68, 84; hymnal, 82; Kleindeutschland, 31; Kohut, Rebekah Bettelheim, 64, 87; Magnes, Judah, 163; Merzbacher, Leo, 81; Moorish architecture, 73, 76; prayer shawls for men, 82; Protestant church, remodeling of, 76; Reform Judaism, 31, 81, 82, 85; religious school of, 69; Russian pogroms, response to, 155; Seder Tefilah prayer book, 82; separation of men and women during prayer, 82; sisterhood, 68; torah reading, 82; Twelfth Street location, 76; Unabhaengiger Orden Treuer Schwester (Independent Order of True Sisters), 35; vocal music, 82; Wise, Stephen, 168 Temple Emanu-El (San Francisco), 77 Tenement Housing Department, 115 Tenement Housing Law (1901), 114 – 115 tenement sweatshops, 119 – 120 tenements, 113 – 116; air shafts, 114; apartment size, average, 114; construction along subway routes, 130; crowdedness, 113 – 114; “dumbbell tenements,” 114; interior decoration, 115 – 116; kitchens, 114; landlords, 113 – 114; light and air, 113; Lower East Side

362

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Index

tenements (continued ) (Manhattan), 113; secondary settlement areas, 113; toilets, 114 – 115; water, 114, 115 Theatrical Syndicate, 237 Third Assembly District, 182 Third Avenue (Manhattan), 22 Third Street (Manhattan), 55 Thirty-Third Street (Manhattan), 31 Thomashefsky, Boris, 219 Tichner, Poline, 20 “Tin Pan Alley,” 237 – 238 Tiphereth Zion Club, 160 Todd, Ellen Wiley, 278 Tog (newspaper), 222 Toynbee Hall (East London), 143 Triangle Fire (1911), 194 – 197, 276 – 278, 279 Triangle Shirtwaist Company, 194 Trotsky, Leon, 247 Tucker, Sophie, 236 Turn Hall, 219 Tweed, William M., 179 Tweed Ring, 179, 191 Twelfth Congressional District (Manhattan), 173 Twelfth Street (Manhattan), 76 Twenty-Eighth Street (Manhattan), 238 Twenty-First Street (Manhattan), 63 Unabhaengiger Orden Treuer Schwester (Independent Order of True Sisters), 35 – 36 Union of American Hebrew Congregations, 140, 157 Union of Orthodox Rabbis of the United States and Canada (Agudath Ha-Rabbannim), 98 unions: “Great Revolt,” 188; International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU), 188 – 189, 190, 203; strikes, 188 – 189, 273; United Hebrew Trades, 188; “Uprising of the 20,000” (1909), 188 United Hebrew Charities (UHC), 57 – 63; American Jewish Committee (AJC), 63; anticipation of, 21; Board of Relief, 57; campaign to establish, 47 – 48; dissatisfaction with, 153; drawing depicting, 44; dressmakers or milliners, sewing machines for, 62 – 63; eastern European Jews, 63; finances, 63; Frankel, Lee K., 68; Hebrew Benevolent and Orphan Asylum Society, 62; Hebrew Benevolent Fuel Association, 62; Hebrew Relief Society, 62; Hebrew Technical Institute, 142; husbands, desertion by, 142; Jewish women, 47; Kehillah, the (The

Jewish Community), 63; Ladies Benevolent Society, 62; Moskowitz, Belle, 194; newly arrived immigrants, 66; Panic of 1873, 58, 62; Second Avenue location, 63; settlement houses, 143; sisterhoods, 68 United Hebrew Trades, 175, 188, 195, 203 United Labor Party, 185 U.S. Immigration Commission, 122 U.S. State Department, 157 University Settlement Society, 127, 235 Upper West Side (Manhattan), 7, 251 “Uprising of the 20,000” (1909), 188 Van Norden trust company, 110 Varhayt (newspaper), 222 vaudeville, 235, 237, 240 Vegvayzer in der amerikaner biznes velt (publication), 222 Veiller, Lawrence, 114 Vereine (voluntary associations), 32 Versailles peace talks, 169 Visiting Nurse Service, 145 visual arts, 232 – 235 vocational education, 214 Volkszeitung (newspaper), 184 Von Tilzer, Howard, 236 Wade, Benjamin, 178 Wagner, Robert F., 196 – 197 Wald, Lillian, 144 – 145, 193 Walkowitz, Abraham, 233 – 234 “Wanderers, The,” 155 Warburg, Felix, 169, 170 Washington Heights (Manhattan), 251 Wasserzug, Mary, 20, 40 – 41, 252 Wasserzug, Rivkah, 40 Waugh, Samuel B., 258 – 260 Weber, Joe, 237 Weber, Max (artist), 233, 282 – 284 Weil, Jonas, 104 – 105 Weinstock, Rachel, 22 Welcome to America (Hamoy), 264 – 265 West Forty-Second Street (Manhattan), 207 West Fourteenth Street (Manhattan), 54 Wheatley, Richard, 95 “Where Santa Will Not Go” (Riis), 270, 271 – 272 White, Stanford, 208, 267 Whiteman, Charles, 175 Wiener, Leo, 223 Willett Street (Manhattan), 30, 51, 285 William Morris Educational Club, 201

Index William Street (Manhattan), 23, 106 Williamsburg (Brooklyn): Jewish settlement in, 7, 130; Natelson family, 252; pushcart markets, 250; subway construction, 130; vaudeville, 235; working-class immigrants, 251 Williamsburg Ladies Aid Society, 252 Willmot, C., 29 Wilson, Woodrow, 169, 197 Winchevsky, Morris, 223 Wise, Effie Miriam, 231 Wise, Isaac Mayer: Ahawath Chesed congregation, 73 – 74, 75, 85; ambitions, 22; on Chatham Street, 11 – 12; Cincinnati, 84; Kohut-Kohler affair, 87 – 88; Mortara case (Italy, 1858), 139 Wise, Stephen: American Jewish Congress, 167; City College, 168; Columbia University, 168; Federation of American Zionists (FAZ), 158; Free Synagogue, 168, 195; Goldfogle, Henry M., 181 – 182; Provisional Executive Committee for Zionist Affairs (PEC), 167; Temple Emanu-El, 168; Zionism/Zionists, 168 Witmark and Sons, 238 Wolf, Simon, 142 Wolff, Barnett, 201 Women’s Health Protective Association, 65 Women’s Municipal League, 193 women’s suffrage, 168, 203 – 204, 228 Women’s Suffrage Party, 203 Women’s Trade Union League, 189, 195, 196 Wooster Street (Manhattan), 14, 78 Workmen’s Circle: branches in New York City, 186; cemetery, 195; East Bronx, presence in, 252; education and solidarity, emphasis on, 186; establishment of, 186; Forward Building, 175; as a Jewish fraternal organization, xviii; Jewish religious life, 125 – 126; Labor Lyceum, 132, 201; lectures, 212; London, Meyer, 190; as a mutual-aid society, xviii; Socialism/Socialists, 150, 162; working class, 186; World War I, 166 World Parliament of Religions (1893), 147 World War I, 165 – 169, 245, 246, 248 World Zionist Congress (1897), 158 World’s Columbia Exposition (1893), 147 Yekl (Cahan), 227 Yeshiva College, 100 Yeshiva Etz Chaim, 98, 99, 100 yeshivas, 100

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Yezierska, Anzia, 229 – 230 Yiddish Art Theater, 220 Yiddish culture, 219 – 226; di yunge, 224 – 225, 233, 242; English language, 219; English language theater, Yiddish actors in, 220 – 221; literary scene, 219; literary weeklies, 225; music halls, 220; periodicals, 221 – 222; poetry, 223 – 224, 242; prose, 242; Shund, 220; “sweatshop poets,” 222 – 223; Yiddish theaters, 219 Yiddish language, 209 – 211; English language influence, 210 – 211, 219; German influences, 210; Independent Order Brith Abraham (IOBA), 149; Jewish hospitals, 152; Jewish identity, 161; linguistic affinity between German and, 184; Lower East Side (Manhattan), 251; Marshall, Louis, 157; secular Yiddish schools, 100; Tin Pan Alley hits, 238; Yiddish-inflected German, 209 – 210; Yiddishisms, 211 Yiddish press, 157, 221 – 223 Yidishe gazeten (newspaper), 90, 221 Yidishe tageblat (newspaper): 1914 elections, 173; Jarmulowsky, Sender, 108; Jewish hospitals, 152; Joseph’s funeral, Jacob, 98; Morgn zhurnal (newspaper), 222; Sabbath observance, 124; Sarasohn, Kasriel, 158, 221; World War I, misery caused by, 166 Yidisher kemfer (Jewish Militant) (journal), 159 Yinglish slang, 242 Yoke of the Thorah (Luska), 65 Yorkville (Manhattan), 251 Yorkville Ladies Benevolent Society, 62 Young Judea, 158, 160 Young Men’s Fuel Association, 48 Young Men’s Hebrew Association, 145 Yugnt, Di (journal), 223 – 224 YWHA, 213 Zametkin, Michael, 173 Zangwill, Israel, 215 Zhitlovsky, Chaim, 161 Zionism/Zionists, 158 – 161; American Jewish Congress, 167; Americanization, 151; Balfour Declaration, 202; Barondess, Joseph, 152; Borough Park (Brooklyn), 251; Brandeis, Louis D., 167; Brooklyn, 160; eastern European Jews, 158, 160; emergence in America, 158; Federation of American Zionists (FAZ), 158; Hadassah Study Circle, 159; Herzl, Theodore, 158; Hibbat Zion

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Zionism/Zionists (continued ) circle (Baltimore), 159; Inter-collegiate Zionist Association, 160; Kallen, Horace, 248 – 249; Labor Zionists, 100, 161, 169, 202; Lower East Side (Manhattan), 160; Magnes, Judah, 155, 164; Masliansky, Tsvi Hirsh, 146; membership in the movement, 160; Mizrachi movement, 158 – 159, 160;

Natelson, Rachel, 252; Poale Zion (Workers of Zion), 159, 160; Provisional Executive Committee for Zionist Affairs (PEC), 167 – 168; Sons of Zion, 158; Szold, Benjamin, 160; Wise, Stephen, 168; World War I, 167; World Zionist Congress (1897), 158; Young Judea, 158, 160 Zukor, Adolph, 240

ABOUT

THE

AUTHORS

Annie Polland is Vice President for Programs and Education at the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, where she oversees the development of exhibits and programs. She is the author of Landmark of the Spirit: The Eldridge Street Synagogue (Yale University Press, 2009) and teaches at the Eugene Lang College at the New School. Daniel Soyer is Professor and Chair of the History Department at Fordham University. He is the author or editor of numerous books including Jewish Immigrant Associations and American Identity in New York, 1880 – 1939, A Coat of Many Colors: Immigration, Globalization, and Reform in the New York City Garment Industry, and My Future Is in America: Autobiographies of Eastern European Jewish Immigrants (available from NYU Press).

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Haven of Liberty New York Jews in the New World, 1654 – 1865

C ITY O F PROMISES was made possible in part through the generosity of

a number of individuals and foundations. Their thoughtful support will help ensure that this work is affordable to schools, libraries, and other not-for-profit institutions. The Lucius N. Littauer Foundation made a leadership gift before a word of CITY O F PROMISES had been written, a gift that set this project on its way. Hugo Barreca, The Marian B. and Jacob K. Javits Foundation, Mr. and Mrs. Peter Malkin, David P. Solomon, and a donor who wishes to remain anonymous helped ensure that it never lost momentum. We are deeply grateful.

C I TY O F PR O M I S ES A

H ISTORY

G E NE R A L

OF

THE

E D I T O R :

JEW S

D E BORAH

O F

NEW

DASH

Y O R K

M OORE

Volume 1

Haven of Liberty New York Jews in the New World, 1654 – 1865 H o wa r d b . R o c k Volume 2

Emerging Metropolis New York Jews in the Age of Immigration, 1840 – 1920 Annie Polland and Daniel Soyer Volume 3

Jews in Gotham New York Jews in a Changing City, 1920 – 2010 Jeffrey S. Gurock Advisory Board: Hasia Diner (New York University) Leo Hershkowitz (Queens College) Ira Katznelson (Columbia University) Thomas Kessner (CUNY Graduate Center) Tony Michels (University of Wisconsin, Madison) Judith C. Siegel (Center for Jewish History) Jenna Weissman-Joselit (Princeton University) Beth Wenger (University of Pennsylvania)

CI T Y O F P R O M I S E S A HISTORY OF THE JEWS OF NEW YORK

H AV E N O F

L IBERTY NEW

YORK

JEWS

IN

THE

NEW

WORLD,

1654–1865

HOWARD B. ROCK WITH A FOREWORD BY

DEBORAH DASH MOORE AND W I T H A V I S U A L E S S AY B Y

DIANA L. LINDEN

a NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS ■

N E W

YO R K

A N D

L O N D O N

NEW YORK UNIVERSIT Y PRESS New York and London www.nyupress.org © 2012 by New York University All rights reserved References to Internet websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor New York University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data City of promises : a history of the Jews of New York / general editor, Deborah Dash Moore. v. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. Contents: v. 1. Haven of liberty: New York Jews in the New World, 1654 – 1865 / Howard B. Rock — v. 2. Emerging metropolis: New York Jews in the age of immigration, 1840 – 1920 / Annie Polland and Daniel Soyer — v. 3. Jews in Gotham: New York Jews in a changing city, 1920 – 2010. ISBN 978-0-8147-7632-2 (cl : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8147-4521-2 (ebook) — ISBN 978-0-8147-7692-6 (ebook) — ISBN 978-0-8147-1731-8 (boxed set : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8147-2932-8 (e-set) 1. Jews — New York (State) — New York. 2. New York (N.Y.) — Ethnic relations. I. Moore, Deborah Dash, 1946 – II. Rock, Howard B., 1944 – F128.9.J5C64 2012 305.892'40747 — dc23

2012003246

New York University Press books are printed on acid-free paper, and their binding materials are chosen for strength and durability. We strive to use environmentally responsible suppliers and materials to the greatest extent possible in publishing our books. Manufactured in the United States of America 10

9

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■ For my sisters, Elaine Gluck and Marcia Rock,

Who through the years have given me so much love and support And for my grandson, Caleb Joseph Rock, May he find a life of peace and fulfillment

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CON TENTS

Foreword by Deborah Dash Moore, General Editor General Editor’s Acknowledgments Author’s Acknowledgments ■

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11

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xi xxv xxvii

Introduction A Dutch Beginning A Merchant Community A Synagogue Community The Jewish Community and the American Revolution The Jewish Community of Republican New York A Republican Faith New York’s Republican Rabbi and His Congregation Beyond the Synagogue in Antebellum New York Division, Display, Devotion, and Defense: The Synagogue in Antebellum New York The Challenge of Reform Politics, Race, and the Civil War Conclusion

1 5 25 43 71 93 113 137 151 181 205 227 255

Visual Essay: An Introduction to the Visual and Material Culture of New York City Jews, 1654 – 1865

261

Diana L. Linden

Notes Select Bibliography Index About the Author

299 345 351 370

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FOR EWORD

“[O]f all the big cities,” Sergeant Milton Lehman of the Stars and Stripes affirmed in 1945, “New York is still the promised land.”1 As a returning Jewish GI, Lehman compared New York with European cities. Other Jews also knew what New York offered that made it so desirable, even if they had not served overseas. First and foremost, security: Jews could live without fear in New York. Yes, they faced discrimination, but in this city of almost eight million residents, many members of its ethnic and religious groups encountered prejudice. Jews contended with anti-Semitism in the twentieth century more than German Protestants or Irish Catholics dealt with bias, perhaps; but the Irish had endured a lot in the nineteenth century, and Jews suffered less than African Americans, Latinos, and Asian New Yorkers. And New York provided more than security: Jews could live freely as Jews. The presence of a diverse population of close to two million New York Jews contributed to their sense that “everyone was Jewish.”2 New York Jews understood that there were many ways to be Jewish. The city welcomed Jews in all their variety. New York Jews saw the city as a place where they, too, could flourish and express themselves. As a result, they came to identify with the city, absorbing its ethos even as they helped to shape its urban characteristics. When World War II ended in Europe with victory over Nazi Germany, New York’s promises glowed more brightly still. New York’s multiethnic diversity, shaped in vital dimensions by its large Jewish population, shimmered as a showplace of American democratic distinctiveness, especially vis-à-vis Europe. In contrast to a continent that had become a vast slaughterhouse, where millions of European Jews had been ruthlessly murdered with industrial efficiency, New York glistened as a city Jews could and did call their home in America. The famous skyline had defined urban cosmopolitanism in the years after World War I. Now the city’s thriving ethnic neighborhoods — Jewish and Catholic, African American and Puerto Rican, Italian and Irish — came to represent modern urban culture. New York’s economy responded robustly to demands of war production. By the end of hostilities, its per capita income exceeded the national average by 14 percent.

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But as a poster city for immigration, with a majority population composed of immigrants and their children, the city had to contend with negative perceptions. Considered undesirable by many Americans, Jews and other foreigners in the city contributed to impressions that New York seemed less American than other cities with large percentages of native-born residents.3 As the city flourished during and after the war, it maintained its political commitments to generous social welfare benefits to help its poorest residents. Jews advocated for these policies, supporting efforts to establish a liberal urban legacy. In modeling a progressive and prosperous multiethnic twentiethcentury American city, New York demonstrated what its Jews valued. Versions of Jewish urbanism played not just on the political stage but also on the streets of the city’s neighborhoods. Its expressions could be found as well in New York’s centers of cultural production. By the middle of the twentieth century, no city offered Jews more than New York. It nourished both celebration and critique. New York gave Jews visibility as individuals and as a group. It provided employment and education, inspiration and freedom, fellowship and community. Jews reciprocated by falling in love with the city, its buildings’ hard angles and perspectives, its grimy streets and harried pace. But by the 1960s and ’70s, Jews’ love affair with the city soured. For many of the second generation who grew up on New York’s sidewalks, immersed in its babel of languages and cultural syncretism, prosperity dimmed their affection for the working-class urban world of their youth. Many of them aspired to suburban pleasures of home ownership, grass and trees that did not have to be shared with others in public parks. Yet New York City remained the wellspring of Jewish American culture for much of the century, a resource of Jewishness even for those living thousands of miles west of the Hudson River. Jews had not always felt free to imagine the city as their special place. Indeed, not until mass immigration from Europe piled up their numbers, from the tens of thousands to the hundreds of thousands, had Jews laid claim to New York and influenced its politics and culture. Its Jewish population soared from five hundred thousand at the turn of the twentieth century to 1.1 million before the start of World War I. On the eve of World War II, Jews, over a quarter of New York’s residents, ranked as the largest ethnic group.4 Demography both encouraged many outsiders to perceive New York as a Jewish city and underwrote local cultural productions, such as a thriving theater scene, a

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flourishing popular music business, and extensive publishing in several languages. Jews were used to living as a minority in Europe and the Middle East. New York offered life without a majority population — without one single ethnic group dominating urban society. Now Jews could go about their business, much of it taking place within ethnic niches, as if they were the city’s predominant group. When and in what sense did New York become a city of promises for Jews? Certainly not in the colonial era. During that period, seeds for future promises were planted, most importantly political, economic, and religious rights. While New York’s few hundred Jews lived in the shadow of far more prosperous Jewish communities in London and Amsterdam, New York Jewish men enjoyed citizenship rights and responsibilities that their peers in London could only envy. These rights gradually led New York Jews to emerge from a closed synagogue society and to participate with enthusiasm in revolutionary currents sweeping the colonies. Jews in New York absorbed formative ideas regarding human rights; they tasted freedom and put their lives on the line for it during the Revolution. In the decades that followed, they incorporated ideals of the American Enlightenment into their Jewish lives. Sometime during the nineteenth century, these changes attracted increasing attention from European Jews. New York began to acquire a reputation as a destination in itself. Arriving from Europe at Castle Garden, increasing numbers of Jewish immigrants decided to stay. New York’s bustling streets enticed them, so they put off riding west or south to peddle or settle. Sometimes, older brothers made that choice, as did Jonas and Louis Strauss, who sent their younger brother Levi to the West Coast via steamship in 1853 to open a branch of their New York City dry-goods firm. Levi Strauss did better, perhaps, than they expected when he went into manufacturing copper-riveted denim work pants after the Civil War.5 But such a move into garment manufacturing from selling dry goods and, especially, used clothing had already taken root in New York prior to the war. It formed the basis of an industry that became the city’s largest, and more than any other, it made New York the city of promises. In 1962, the historian Moses Rischin published his pioneering book, The Promised City: New York’s Jews, 1870 – 1914. Rischin aimed to “identify those currents of human and institutional vitality central to the American urban experience that converged on the Lower East Side in the era of the great Jewish migration just as New York emerged as the nation’s and the world’s most

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dynamic metropolis.”6 The interlocking themes of Jewish immigration from eastern Europe and the rise of New York as a “city of ambition” led Rischin to cast his account as a “revolutionary transformation” not only in American urban history but also in Jewish history.7 Rischin saw a universal paradigm of modernization unfolding in the very particularistic experiences of New York Jews. His vision of democratic urban community remains relevant to contemporary scholars. What did the city promise? First, a job. Close to half of all immigrants sewed clothing in hundreds of small-scale sweatshops that disguised an everburgeoning industry that soon became one of the nation’s most important. Second, a place to live. True, the overcrowded Lower East Side bulged with residents, even its modern tenements straining to accommodate a density of Jewish population that rivaled Bombay. Yet by the early twentieth century, bridges to Brooklyn and rapid transit to Harlem and the Bronx promised improvements: fresh air, hot and cold running water, even a private toilet and bathroom. Third, food. Jewish immigrants had not starved in Europe, but New York’s abundance changed their diets and attitudes toward food and its simple pleasures. In New York, a center of the nation’s baking industry, Jews could enjoy a fresh roll and coffee each morning for pennies. Fourth, clothing. It did not take long, especially laboring in the garment industry, for Jews to trade their old-world clothes for the latest ready-made styles. Thus properly attired, they looked and felt like modern men and women, able and willing to make their way.8 Such promises might be quotidian, but they opened Jews’ eyes to other more important ones. Young Jewish immigrants embraced the city’s promise of free public education, from elementary school to secondary school, all the way through college. Only a handful of Jewish immigrants in the nineteenth century and years before World War I ever managed to take advantage of such a magnificent offer. Although a family economy that privileged sons over daughters when decisions about post-elementary education had to be made and costs of forgoing income from teenaged children often required Jews to go to work and not attend school, increasingly Jews flocked to the city’s free schools. Some immigrants, especially women, thought the city promised freedom to choose a spouse, though matchmakers also migrated across the ocean. Still others rejoiced in what they imagined was a promise of uncensored language: written and spoken, published and on stage, in Yiddish, Hebrew,

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German, Ladino, and English. Some conceived of the city’s rough democracy as holding a promise of solidarity among working men and women, while a significant number demanded extension of civil and voting rights to women. Then there were more ambiguous promises. Did New York offer Jews a chance to live without a formal, legally constituted Jewish community? Did it suggest that Jews no longer needed to practice Jewish rituals or observe the Sabbath? Some Jewish immigrants thought they could leave behind old-world ways of thinking and acting; they secularized their Jewish lives, often starting the process in Europe even before they emigrated. Others fashioned ways of being Jewish, both secular and religious, in tune with New York’s evolving cultures. Both groups identified their own visions of what it meant to be Jewish in America with New York itself. That New York City bloomed with such promises would have been hard to anticipate in 1654. Then the ragged seaport only reluctantly welcomed its first contingent of miserable Jewish migrants. In fact, not receiving permission to settle, Jews had to petition to stay, to live and work in the outpost. They agreed to practice their religion in private even as they participated in civic culture. When the British turned New Amsterdam into New York, they accepted these arrangements, giving Jews unprecedented legal rights. Here lay hints of future promises. Gradually the British increased opportunities for public religious expression and extended to Jewish men civil rights, including citizenship, the right to vote, and the right to hold office. When Jews founded their first congregation, they called it Shearith Israel (Remnant of Israel), an apt name for the handful living in a colonial town far from European centers of Jewish life. Yet during the eighteenth century, Jews integrated into the fabric of New York life. They faced challenges of identifying as Jews within a free society. As the first to enjoy such political freedoms, they struggled to balance assimilation with Jewish distinctiveness. By the time of the Revolution, many New York Jews felt deeply connected to their city and fellow American patriots, enough to flee the British occupation for Philadelphia. The end of the war marked a new democratic consciousness among New York Jews who returned to rebuild their city and community. A democratic ethos pervaded Jewish urban life in the new republic, opening possibilities for individual and collective ambition as well as cooperation. This republicanism changed how Jews organized themselves religiously and how they imagined their opportunities. Shearith Israel incorporated and

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drafted its own constitution, modeled on the federal example. Republicanism animated women, inspiring them to establish charities to help succor the poor. Once Jewish immigration brought sufficient ethnic and economic diversity to New York in the 1830s and 1840s, Jews started to build a different type of community. They forged bonds based on intimacy, gender, shared backgrounds, common aspirations, and urgent necessities. Jewish religious life became increasingly diverse, competitive, and strident. Democracy without an established religion fostered creativity and experimentation. Congregations multiplied in the city, but most Jews chose not to join one, despite variety ranging from Orthodox to Reform. The city saw a fierce battle between proponents of orthodoxy and advocates of reform. These debates engaged Jews deeply but did not lead the majority to affiliate. Still, increasingly synagogue buildings formed part of the cityscape, an indication of Jewish presence. Democratic freedoms permitted a new type of urban Jewish life to emerge. Lacking formal communal structures, Jews innovated and turned to other forms of organization as alternatives. They established fraternal orders and literary societies, seeking a means to craft connections in a rapidly growing and bewildering city. Yet soon they multiplied these activities as well. Pleas for charity and education, hospitals and libraries, mobilized Jewish New Yorkers. With the extension of the franchise, more Jewish men acquired the right to vote, irrespective of their economic situation, encouraging them to enter political debates with enthusiasm. They paid attention to events overseas affecting fellow Jews, especially examples of anti-Semitism, and tried to convince the president to help. New York Jews mastered the arts of petition and protest. They took sides as individuals in election cycles, first between Federalists and Jeffersonians, later between Democrats and Whigs, and finally between Democrats and Republicans. Domestic issues divided Jews; even the question of slavery found supporters and opponents. Rabbis debated the subject in pulpit and press until the Civil War ended their polemics and both sides rallied to the Union cause. Politics necessarily pushed Jews into public consciousness; non-Jews noticed them. Prejudice began to appear in social life, and stereotypes started to circulate in the press. Yet Jewish New Yorkers were hardly the retiring sort, and many gave as good as they got. Jewish immigrants readily found employment, entering the city’s expanding economic marketplace as they carefully tested its promises of personal fulfillment. Although the Panics of 1857 and 1873 threw thousands out of work,

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during normal times, Jews coped with capitalist volatilities. Many gravitated to small-scale commerce and craft production. Men and women both worked and drew on family resources, especially the labor of their children, to help make ends meet. Jews saved regularly to withstand seasonal swings in employment. Within the city’s diversifying economy, they located ethnic niches that became occupational ladders of advancement for many. Some of the merchants trading in old clothes around Chatham Street initiated manufacturing of cheap goods. A garment industry took shape; it received a big boost with demand for uniforms in the Civil War. As the industry grew, its need for workers increased steadily, employing an ever-greater proportion of Jewish immigrants to the city. Small shops and a competitive contracting system continued to dominate the industry. Despite miserable conditions, the system tempted many workers with a promise of self-employment. Taking a risk, some immigrants borrowed money, often from relatives and fellow immigrants from the same European town, to supplement meager savings. Then they plunged into contracting, trying with a new design idea to secure prosperity. As often as not, they failed, falling back into the laboring class. But success stories trumped failures; they stood as reminders that the city had fulfilled its promise. Merchants and peddlers, who occupied another popular Jewish economic niche, viewed the rise of department stores as an urban achievement. These commercial emporiums proffered a magical array of goods under one roof and represented the pinnacle of success for local hardware-store owners or dry-goods shopkeepers. Retail establishments proliferated around the city as it grew; Jewish entrepreneurship flourished on local shopping streets in the Bronx and Brooklyn. Pitkin Avenue in Brownsville and Fordham Road in the Bronx could not rival Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue or even Fourteenth Street. But they provided a measure of prosperity and independence to Jewish merchants, enough so that they could enjoy some of the perquisites of middle-class living, such as sending one’s sons and even one’s daughters to high school and college. Mobility came in many forms, and often immigrant Jews achieved economic and social mobility first through business and then through education. New York’s explosive growth at the turn of the twentieth century produced radical social movements based on class struggle and politics. For many Jewish immigrants, becoming a small manufacturer paled beside a larger vision of a just society, one without workers living in overcrowded, filthy tenements, exposed to disease, and wracked by despair. Hedging their bets, they dreamed of

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becoming capitalists even as they sought in socialism better living conditions, fair wages, and reasonable working hours. Socialism as a utopian ideal promised equality, an economic system that took from each according to his or her ability and returned to everybody whatever he or she needed. Even some Jewish capitalists subscribed to such an ideal. But on a pragmatic level, socialism appealed to Jewish workers for its alternatives to unrestrained capitalist exploitation. Paths to socialism led through union organizing, the polling booth, fraternalism, and even cooperative housing. Jewish immigrants embraced them all. They forged vibrant garment-workers unions, as well as unions of bakers and plumbers, teachers and pharmacists. They voted for Socialist candidates, sending Meyer London in 1914 to represent the Lower East Side in Congress. They organized the Workmen’s Circle, initially in 1892 as a mutualaid society and then in 1900 as a multibranch fraternal order in which they could socialize with fellow workers and receive health and social welfare benefits not provided by a wealthy but stingy city government. And after World War I ended, New York Jews pushed for legislation that would allow them to build cooperative housing projects, so that they could enjoy living in decent apartments together with other Jewish workers. These examples of democratic community radically reshaped the city and contributed to its progressive commitments even as Jewish struggles for social justice empowered them both individually and as a group. For several centuries, until the beginning of the twentieth, most New York Jews lived in Lower Manhattan, with smaller numbers residing in Williamsburg and Bedford, in the city of Brooklyn. The consolidation of New York with Brooklyn and the creation of a city of five boroughs, including the Bronx, Queens, and Staten Island, stimulated construction of subways and bridges which expanded opportunities for Jewish immigrants to leave the constricted quarters of the Lower East Side. Once they started to move, only the Great Depression, discrimination, and wartime constraints made Jews pause. New neighborhoods held out hopes of fresh beginnings. Adjusting to the strangeness of a neighborhood invited ways to reimagine one’s relationship to New York City. Jews adopted different perspectives on themselves and their city as they exchanged views out kitchen windows. Modern tenements, with steam heat, hot and cold running water in the kitchen sink, and an icebox, proclaimed a sense of accomplishment worth the pain of dislocation produced by immigration. Modern apartment buildings with parquet floors, windows in

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every room, and the latest conveniences announced a form of success. It did not matter that these apartments were rented; home ownership did not rank high on Jewish New Yorkers’ requirements for either the good life or economic security — better to be able to catch the express train and in ten minutes travel two stops on the subway to reach the Midtown garment district than to own a house in the suburbs with a commute of an hour to work each day. And renting let Jews move as their finances fluctuated, freeing funds for other purposes. New York Jews committed themselves to a wide array of neighborhoods, reflecting different desires. Did one wish for a neighborhood filled with modern synagogues and kosher butcher shops, bakeries, and delicatessens? There was a range of choices based on how much rent one was willing to pay. Did one seek a lively center of radicalism where socialism was considered “right wing” in comparison to “left wing” communism, an area filled with union activities, cultural events, and places to debate politics? A slightly narrower number of neighborhoods fit the bill. Did one yearn to speak Yiddish or German or Ladino or Russian, to find traces of the old home in familiar styles of shopping and praying? Neighborhoods, not just a block or two but a cluster of them, catered to those who yearned for what they had left behind in Europe or the Middle East. Did one seek a yeshiva for sons and eventually for daughters, as well as intimate congregations for daily study and prayer? New York made room for these as well. In all of them, Jews had neighbors who were not Jewish, but that mattered less than the neighbors who were Jewish. Jews lived next door to other white ethnics, as well as to African Americans, and, after World War II, Puerto Ricans. While most Jews tolerated their non-Jewish neighbors, economic competition, national and international politics, and religious prejudice ignited conflict. An uneasy coexistence among neighbors characterized many New York neighborhoods. Despite this diversity of residential neighborhoods, Jews stayed in an area usually only for a generation. New neighborhoods beckoned constantly; children moved away from parents; parents lost money or made money. Primarily renters, unlike other groups, Jews did not remain committed for long to a neighborhood. They were ready to move elsewhere in the city, to try something different. Such was New York’s promise of community for Jews. New York Jews began to leave their city in the 1960s, a process that continued for the rest of the century. The largest decline in Jewish population occurred in the 1970s when the city’s fiscal crisis arrived, just in time to welcome

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Abe Beame, New York’s first Jewish mayor. As Jews departed, African Americans and Puerto Ricans moved into the city in ever-greater numbers. By the mid-1950s, a million African Americans lived in New York. After liberalization of immigration laws in 1965, an increasingly diverse array of immigrants from Asia, especially China, and also from the Caribbean, Latin America, and Africa arrived in New York. Jewish immigrants figured among them, most prominently from the Soviet Union; these new immigrants brought some of the same drive and energy that had made New York a city of promises a hundred years earlier. At the start of the twenty-first century, New York still lacked a majority population. In contemporary ethnic calculus, Jews made up a significant percentage of white New Yorkers. But whites constituted a minority in the city, hence Jews’ overall percentage of the population declined. Most Jews were college educated; many had advanced degrees. Having overcome occupational discrimination that endured into the 1960s, Jews held jobs in real estate, finance, publishing, education, law, and medicine in this postindustrial city. They still congregated in neighborhoods, but Queens attracted more Jews than the Bronx did. They still worked in commerce, usually as managers of large stores rather than as owners of small ones. New York Jews still debated how to observe Jewish rituals and holidays. Most declined to join a congregation, yet many retained a consciousness of being Jewish. Often awareness of Jewish differences grew out of family bonds; for some, their sense of Jewishness flowed from work or neighborhood or culture or politics. A visible minority rigorously observed the strictures of Judaism, and their presence gave other Jews a kind of yardstick by which to judge themselves. Despite Jews’ greatly reduced numbers, the city still honored Jewish holy days by adjusting its mundane rhythms. New York Jews knew they lived in American Jews’ capital city; the cluster of national Jewish organizations announced this fact. These organizations, able to mobilize effective protests or to advocate for a cause, focused on problems facing Jews throughout the world. Jewish cultural creativity also endured along with effervescent, experimental, multiethnic commitments to new forms of democratic urban community. City of Promises portrays the history of Jews in New York City from 1654 to the present. Its three volumes articulate perspectives of four historians. In the first volume, Howard Rock argues that the first two centuries of Jewish presence in the city proved critical to the development of New York Jews. He

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sees an influential template in communal structures created by colonial Jews and elaborated in the nineteenth century by Jewish immigrants from central Europe. Rock emphasizes the political freedom and economic strength of colonial and republican Jews in New York. He shows that democratic religious and ethnic community represented an unusual experiment for Jews. Using American political models, Jews in New York innovated. They developed an expansive role for an English-language Jewish press as a vehicle for collective consciousness; they introduced fraternal societies that secularized religious fellowship; they crafted independent philanthropic organizations along gendered lines; they discussed the pros and cons of reforming Judaism; and they passionately debated politics. They were the first American Jews to demonstrate how political and economic freedoms were integral to Jewish communal life. Although many of them arrived as immigrants themselves, they also pointed a path for future migrants who confronted the city’s intoxicating and bewildering modern world. In so doing, these eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Jews laid the foundations for the development of a robust American Jewish community in New York. In the second volume, Annie Polland and Daniel Soyer describe the process by which New York emerged as a Jewish city, produced by a century of mass migration of Jews from central and eastern Europe as well as from the Middle East. Focusing on the urban Jewish built environment — its tenements and banks, its communal buildings and synagogues, its department stores and settlement houses — the authors convey the extraordinary complexity of Jewish immigrant society in New York. The theme of urban community runs like a thread through a century of mass migration beginning in 1840. Polland and Soyer revise classic accounts of immigration, paying attention to Jewish interactions in economic, social, religious, and cultural activities. Jews repeatedly seek to repair fissures in their individual and collective lives caused by dislocation. Their efforts to build connections through family and neighborhood networks across barriers of class and gender generated a staggering array of ethnic organizations, philanthropic initiatives, and political and religious movements. Despite enormous hardship and repeated failures, Jewish immigrants in New York developed sufficient institutional resilience to articulate a political vision of social solidarity and reform. New York Jews also stepped forward into national leadership positions by establishing organizations that effectively rallied American Jews on behalf of those still suffering in Europe.

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New York City became the capital of American Jews in these years and the largest Jewish city in history. In telling the story of twentieth-century New York Jews in the third volume of the series, Jeffrey S. Gurock looks to the neighborhood, the locale of community and the place where most Jews lived their lives. Jews liked their local community and appreciated its familiar warmth. But New York Jews also faced demands for political action on behalf of a transnational Jewish world. During the crucial decade from 1938 to 1948, New York Jews debated what course of action they should take. How should they balance domestic needs with those of European Jews? World War II and the Holocaust demonstrated the contrasts between Jews in New York and Jews in Europe. Gurock shows how Jewish neighborhoods spread across the boroughs. He describes Jewish settlement in Queens after World War II, illuminating processes of urban change. Ethnic-group conflict and racial antagonism left deep scars despite efforts to overcome prejudice and discrimination. New York Jews were found on both sides of the barricades; each decade produced a fresh conflagration. Yet Jewish New Yorkers never ceased to lead movements for social change, supporting women’s rights as well as freedom for Soviet Jewry. New York City retained its preeminence as the capital of American Jews because of deep roots in local worlds. These urban neighborhoods, Gurock argues, nourish creative and unselfconscious forms of Jewishness. Each volume contains a visual essay by art historian Diana L. Linden. These essays interpret Jewish experiences. Linden examines diverse objects, images, and artifacts. She suggests alternative narratives drawn from a record of cultural production. Artists and craftspeople, ordinary citizens and commercial firms provide multiple perspectives on the history of Jews in New York. Her view runs as a counterpoint and complement to the historical accounts. Each visual presentation can be read separately or in conjunction with the history. The combination of historical analysis and visual representation enriches the story of Jews in New York City. In the first essay, Linden emphasizes the foreignness and loneliness of being Jewish in the colonial and republican periods, even as Jews integrated themselves into Christian society. They were the first to create a new identity as “American Jews.” The second visual essay chronicles the challenges of navigating a rapidly expanding city. It explores contrasts of rich and poor. Jews in immigrant New York fashioned new charitable, educational, and cultural institutions as they established the city as the capital of the

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American Jewish world. The third visual essay takes as its theme New York Jews in popular American imagination. It presents many meanings and identities of “New York Jew” over the course of the twentieth century and the beginning years of the twenty-first century. These different viewpoints on Jews in New York City situate their history within intersecting themes of urban growth, international migration, political change, economic mobility, religious innovation, organizational complexity, cultural creativity, and democratic community. Jews participated in building the Empire City by casting their lot with urbanism, even as they struggled to make New York a better place to live, work, and raise a family. Their aspirations changed New York and helped to transform it into a city of promises, some fulfilled, some pending, some beckoning new generations. Deborah Dash Moore

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GENERAL

EDITOR’S

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

All books are collaborative projects, but perhaps none more than this three-volume history of Jews in New York City. The eminent historians directly involved in the project, Jeffrey S. Gurock, Annie Polland, Howard Rock, Daniel Soyer, and art historian Diana L. Linden, have devoted their considerable skills not only to their own volumes but also to evaluating and enhancing each other’s work. Editorial board members helped to guide the project and served as crucial resources. City of Promises began during my term as Chair of the Academic Council of the American Jewish Historical Society, and I owe a debt of gratitude to David P. Solomon for making a match between Jennifer Hammer of New York University Press and the Academic Council. Good ideas have legs, but they require the devotion and support of influential men and women. City of Promises fortunately found both in William Frost z”l of the Lucius N. Littauer Foundation and Jennifer Hammer of NYU Press. Bill Frost generously underwrote the project when it was just an idea, and I think that he would have treasured this history of a city he loved. Jennifer Hammer worked prodigiously to turn vision into reality, never faltering in her critically engaged commitment despite inevitable obstacles. I am indebted to both of them for staying the course, and I greatly appreciate the opportunity to work with Jennifer, an excellent, flexible, and insightful editor. City of Promises received additional important financial support from individuals and foundations. I want to thank the Malkin Fund, The Marian B. and Jacob K. Javits Foundation, Hugo Barreca, David P. Solomon, and an anonymous foundation donor for significant support, as well as several other individuals including Judd and Karen Aronowitz, David and Phyllis Grossman, Irving and Phyllis Levitt, Irwin and Debi Ungar, and Rabbi Marc StraussCohen of Temple Emanuel, Winston-Salem, North Carolina. All recognized the importance of this project through timely contributions. I appreciate their generosity. Several students at the University of Michigan provided assistance that helped to keep the volumes on track. Alexandra Maron and Katherine Rosenblatt did valuable research, and I am grateful for their aid.

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These volumes are dedicated to my family of New York Jews. Without their steadfast encouragement, and especially that of my husband, MacDonald Moore, City of Promises would not have appeared. Dedicated to my grandchildren, Elijah Axt, Zoe Bella Moore, and Rose Alexa Moore, authors of future chapters Deborah Dash Moore

AUTHOR ’S

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

One of the pleasurable tasks of writing a book is the opportunity to acknowledge the many people who helped make this volume possible. The College of Arts and Sciences of Florida International University, where I am now Professor Emeritus, and the then chair of the History Department, Mark Szuchman, supported this project, giving me office space and financial assistance. The university’s interlibrary loan department was a valuable resource. I wish to thank Clifton Hood, David Cobin, William Pencak, Jonathan Sarna, and Holly Snyder for making their work available to me. My research assistants, Jessica Barrella, Jill Strykowski, and Shoshana Olidort, provided important support and material. Hasia Diner discussed the project with me and read drafts of the first chapters, as did other anonymous readers to whom I am appreciative. Rabbi Emeritus Marc D. Angel most generously made available the invaluable collections of the venerable congregation Shearith Israel. The staff of the American Jewish Archives was very helpful, especially Dana Herman and Camille Servizzi. A few knowledgeable personal friends, notably David and Phyllis Grossman and Ruth Marks, read key chapters, offering useful analysis. I owe much gratitude to Leo Hershkowitz, the dean of early American Jewish history, who kindly read my chapters as they were completed and provided wise advice. Without his pioneering work, this book could not have been written. Deborah Dash Moore, the general editor of this series, also my Brandeis classmate and my coauthor of Cityscapes, went over the manuscript with enormous care, asking probing questions that were often difficult to answer but took me to the heart of each issue. Jennifer Hammer of NYU Press too examined every line with meticulous diligence and expertise. Together, Deborah and Jennifer added immeasurably to the merits of this book. Finally, I would like to thank my wife, Ellen, who stuck with me through the long hours I spent on this project, was always supportive, read the chapters with a critical eye, and was there for me when I needed her. Forever grateful. H o wa r d B . R o c k

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Haven of Liberty New York Jews in the New World, 1654 – 1865

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Introduction

In the late summer and early fall of 1654, twenty-three Dutch Jews huddled together on the French ship St. Catrina, suffering the rolling waves of the North Atlantic while praying that they not fall victim to an early season hurricane. They were one of the last contingents of Dutch Jewish settlers to leave the Dutch colony of Recife, Brazil, following its fall to the Portuguese. But unlike their compatriots, who had chosen to return to the homeland, these souls had decided to venture what wealth they had to remain colonists in still another Dutch outpost, New Amsterdam. Why? Recife had been a good undertaking for Jews, who made up half the population, built two synagogues, and lived a harmonious communal life with their own rabbi. Perhaps New Amsterdam might be the same. Little did they know that the new Dutch West India Company outpost they were sailing toward, a small port on the tip of a rustic island filled with Indian trails, was a primitive, often violent colony, known for its tippling and bawdy houses, for its ugly street fights, and for an unstable mixture of men and women from all over Europe. They were unaware that the leader of the colony, the wooden-legged Peter Stuyvesant, was an ardent Dutch Reformed company veteran who, unlike the authorities in Amsterdam, held many traditional anti-Semitic prejudices and had no use for Jews in a colony already overrun with unwanted faiths. And they had no idea — nor, given the harsh welcome they received, would they have believed — that they were among the first Jews in a settlement that was to become America’s largest city and to house the world’s largest Jewish population. The quest for rights and recognition that their landing began ultimately helped create one of the great cultural

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and religious centers of Judaism. The story of the journey from these first poor settlers, wondering what kind of dilemma they had created for themselves by taking a different path, to the Jewish communities of twentieth- and twentyfirst-century New York is long and diverse, filled with promise and disappointment, resulting in a community that became an important and sometimes a leading part of American society. In 1945, at the end of World War II, the Jewish Publication Society released Hyman Grinstein’s The Rise of the Jewish Community of New York, 1654 – 1860. This pathbreaking study, a volume that focused on the years 1825 – 1860, was to become a classic. Grinstein mined a dazzling array of sources, from synagogue and benevolent-society minutes written in English, Hebrew, German, and Portuguese to an abundance of printed primary documents, many of which are not available today, to offer the reader a journey into the depths of both synagogues’ and communal societies’ formation, accomplishments, and divisions. The book’s publication came just as American Jews were struggling to absorb the meaning of the Holocaust. With the tragic destruction of the centers of Jewish life and learning in Europe, the Jewish center of gravity and population shifted to America, and especially to New York City, a metropolis containing two million Jews, by far the largest concentration in the world. Now that America emerged as a focus of a devastated Jewish universe, it was important to study the history of American Judaism, beginning with its origins. In the effort to recognize the importance of American Jewish history, Grinstein sought to demonstrate that the early decades of American society were critical seedbed years for the far more populous generations to follow. The hundreds of thousands of immigrants who set foot on Ellis Island arrived at a country whose Jewish population had already undergone generations of change — conflict and consensus that established traditions and associations that were part and parcel of American society. Those early transformations of American and Jewish society prepared a template of possibilities for the several million Jewish immigrants who were to make New York a city of promises. What better place to demonstrate the importance of early American Jewry than New York? New York both as a British colony and as one of the original thirteen states was first to extend political citizenship to its Jewish residents. Its metropolis housed the country’s first synagogue. While New York’s original Jewish population numbered no more than thirty or forty families, never reaching more than five hundred individuals before 1825, by the 1830s more

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Jews lived in New York than any in other American city, a standing New York never surrendered. Whether New York’s Israelite community was a few hundred or at forty thousand in 1860, a quarter of all Jews in the republic, it stood at the forefront of every issue facing Jewish America. New York served as the pivotal point in the contest between Reform and Orthodox Jewry in the 1850s. The city’s residents founded B’nai B’rith, the first secular Jewish fraternal organization, and built the nation’s second Jewish hospital. As New York City became the nation’s leading economic and cultural center, it was not surprising to find Jewish financial and industrial leaders or Jewish impresarios in the musical and theatrical life of the metropolis. Jews participated actively in Democratic, Whig, and Republican politics. New York, in sum, became the epicenter of American Jewry. New York Jews’ triumphs and problems from the Dutch colonial years through the Civil War shaped what became the most prominent and most powerful Jewish community in the world. Jews in the early days of New York were very much a part of the fabric of the general society at both a local and national level. They were knowledgeable and, depending on their circumstances, involved in American culture and affairs. Prior to 1870, it thus makes sense to view the Jews of any period through the currents of contemporary American institutions and conflicts. In the early republic, for example, Jews viewed their own lives and institutions through the lens of Jeffersonianism and Hamiltonianism, the two great ideologies competing to become the legacy of the American Revolution. In antebellum New York, Jews lived in a dynamic society, one that offered both great opportunities and perplexing dilemmas. Achieving Americanization without the loss of a coherent Jewish community and individual Jewish identity, and even surviving in an environment largely void of European persecution and discrimination, posed a difficult problem. A society shaped on the one hand by the American version of the Enlightenment and on the other by potent strains of evangelical Protestantism unleashed by the Second Great Awakening sorely tested the viability of Jewish customs and religion. The emergence of Reform Jewry and the national fraternal society B’nai B’rith were important responses, but when these were placed alongside the Orthodox community and the growing numbers of unaffiliated Jews, a confusing scene emerged. The tension that grew between Sephardic (Jews of Spanish descent) and Ashkenazic (Jews of central and eastern European descent) ethnic groups, among German, Polish, English, and Russian Jewish immigrants and

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between them and native-born American Jews continually threatened communal fragmentation. Striving for unity amid these centrifugal forces was never an easy task. As we will see, all of these dilemmas revolved around one overarching theme. What makes these first two centuries so momentous is the synthesis that New York’s Jewish citizens achieved between the American republicanism that emerged and matured in the colonial, revolutionary, and early republican eras and flourished in the decades prior to the Civil War and their life as a community, both secular and religious. As perhaps never before in history, Jews engaged in republican movements, including the American Revolution, and then incorporated their ideas and ideals into their way of life. This could be seen in their synagogues’ organization, in their enthusiastic participation in politics, in their integration into the life of the new nation, and in their expressions of intense patriotism. It was the republican revolutionary framework that allowed Reform Judaism to grow so quickly in New York in one decade and to flourish in the nation as a whole — unlike in a less hospitable, nonrepublican Europe. Republicanism presented challenges to Jews, particularly the dilemma of how to achieve integration without assimilation. But the republican moment makes these years particularly meaningful. In this era, New York’s Jews incorporated American revolutionary ideology into the core of their individual and collective lives. Republicanism formed the seeds of the city of promises.

CHAPTER

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A Dutch Beginning

Upon viewing Manhattan Island in the early seventeenth century, Dutch poet Jacob Steendam remarked, “This is Eden, where the land floweth with milk and honey.” The “sweetness of the Air” transfixed the first explorers, astonished at the freshness and fragrance of the climate and by an island of “hilly, woody Country, full of Lakes and great Vallies.” Visitors marveled at vast meadow grass, at fields flush with strawberries, at woods filled with towering trees of walnut, chestnut, maple, and oak, at abundant wildlife as beavers, wolves, and foxes roamed and doves, swans, and blackbirds took flight, and at waterways where whales and porpoises whirled freely while oysters and lobsters flourished. The trails of the Lenapes, a nomadic confederation of Indian tribes, crisscrossed the island, connecting their fields of maize, squash, melons, and tobacco. On the east side, a dangerous estuary flowed into the Atlantic, while on the west side, a wide stream emptied as well into the sea, a river that was to be named after the English explorer Henry Hudson, who sailed the Halve Maen (Half Moon) into its waters in 1609. Three hundred years later, Steendam’s “land of milk and honey” housed the world’s largest and most prosperous Jewish urban population. The journey to this new world begins in fifteenth-century Spain and continues into Portugal, Holland, and Brazil before the landing on Manhattan Island in 1654.1

■ Sephardic Exile and Dutch Welcome On a sultry early August morning in 1492 at the port of Huelva in southern Spain, Christopher Columbus sailed on the first of three epic voyages. On those same docks, a resident might have viewed hundreds of Spanish Jews, part of the 150,000 expelled from the kingdoms of Aragon and Castile by King

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The famed Prototype View of 1664 portrays New Amsterdam as a small Dutch village in 1655. Visible are the fort, church, and city hall (far right). Note the gabled Dutch homes. For the interior layout, see the Castello plan in the “Visual Essay.” (Courtesy Museum of the City of New York, Print Archives)

Ferdinand and Queen Isabella. The conjunction of these world-shattering events proved pivotal in Jewish history. The Jews of Spain, known as Sephardic Jews, equipped with mercantile skills and close family networks from centuries of Iberian residency, became significant factors in the new world. As states that became the homes of the exiled Spanish Jews claimed possessions in the new world, the refugees joined colonists risking their fortunes and lives in America, opening a new era for the Jews of Europe.2 Jews flourished in Islamic Spain as essential aides to Islamic leadership and commerce. Following the “Reconquista,” largely complete by the thirteenth century, Christian rulers welcomed them in similar roles. In Catholic Spain’s reorganization and economic growth, they held important administrative positions in government and vigorously pursued international trade. Jewish support enabled the monarchy to grow at the expense of the aristocracy.3

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Spanish Jewish society was largely autonomous before the expulsion. The Spanish government allowed the Jewish community to have its own councils enforce religious and even civil and criminal law, provided they did not interfere with affairs of state and church. While most Jews were not affluent, the well-educated economic and political elite dominated the councils. Many lived in Spain’s grandest villas and produced a rich collection of Judaic law and literature. In the fifteenth century, however, the persecution of Jews, never absent despite their critical contribution to the state, increased, spurred by the inception of the Inquisition in 1478. Over one hundred thousand Jews became conversos, converts to Christianity. While a number of Jewish communities, including one in Barcelona, could no longer survive in the Christian world, a significant population persevered, often with the help of Ferdinand and Isabella, who looked to them for financial aid. The pressures of a militant Catholic Church, however, forced the monarchs to accede to papal pressure and order the expulsion of all practicing Jews in 1492.4 The Spanish exile expelled Jews with their household goods except for their gold and silver. The outcast Jews also carried years of mercantile practice with them, as well as family ties to conversos remaining in Spain, who while living as Christians did not sever their bonds of kinship. Spain’s exiled Jewish population found refuge in many parts of the Mediterranean and Asia, including North Africa, Italy, and Ottoman Greece and Turkey. The great majority, however, perhaps 85 percent and numbering 85,000 to 115,000, traveled to Portugal, whose monarch, King Emmanuel I, welcomed this well-connected group. An Iberian nation, it offered Jews the greatest continuity with their former lives. In Portugal, Sephardic Jews continued to trade with Spain and strove to maintain a coherent community. However, in 1497, Emanuel I forcibly converted all Jews, while promising not to inquire into their religious beliefs for forty years. Not wishing to lose their valued commercial expertise and wealth, he forbade Jews, now unwilling conversos, to leave the country. A few managed to flee, but most remained. With the death of Emanuel in 1521 and the inception of the Portuguese Inquisition ten years later, however, emigration increased, not so much in the chaotic manner that marked the Spanish exodus but through planned departures. Some Jews left in fear of religious persecution and some for greater economic opportunity. As the Inquisition had not yet begun operation in Portuguese Brazil, a number of Portuguese conversos emigrated there as well as to France and Holland.5

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The Portuguese Jews (as they were known) who chose to immigrate to Holland, a country that had never housed a sizable Jewish population, found a land in transition. They arrived during the long birth of the Dutch Republic, one of the great accomplishments of early modern Europe. Beginning in 1568, the United Provinces (the seven Dutch-speaking provinces of northern Netherlands, with Holland as the largest province and Amsterdam the largest city) waged an eighty-year war of independence against Spain, which had inherited the Netherlands in 1517. During these years of conflict, the Dutch people witnessed thousands of their brethren put to death and withstood long sieges. At the core of their endurance and final victory in the seventeenth century were the Netherlands’ heritage of constitutional freedoms, representative government, and a strong Protestant faith founded in the Calvinist Dutch Reformed Church.6 The Netherlands, with vibrant stock and commodities exchanges, innovative banking and credit facilities, a strong army, heterogeneous population, and republican government, stood at the forefront of what historian David Israel terms the “Age of Mercantilism.” In this world, commerce and the good of the state prevailed over religious conflict and dogma. The state determined to intervene in the economic life of the nation to ensure its continuing growth. The movement toward a mercantile Europe, neither a clear-cut nor simple transition, reflected a steady if uneven shift over two hundred years (1550 – 1770). By 1570 – 1600, a new religious skepticism and statecraft emerged that held the economic, political, and military health of the state primary.7 The Dutch Republic in the seventeenth century was “the most tolerant of European societies.” Within this framework, the Jewish population grew and flourished, its numbers rising rapidly from 800 in 1610 to around 2,000 in the 1640s and 1650s to 3,350 by 1680. Most Jews were Sephardic, descendants of immigrants from Spain and Portugal; a smaller, separate, less influential Ashkenazi community was also present, immigrants from German states and eastern Europe. Portuguese Jews built on their legacy of internal governance, crafting a largely autonomous society. Its governing body, the Mahamad, whose membership included the city’s most prominent Sephardic Jews, conducted schools (in Hebrew and Portuguese), supervised the morals of the city’s Jews, monitored religious observance, took responsibility for social welfare, censored the increasing number of books published by the Sephardic population, and negotiated with Christian society. Its ultimate form of discipline was

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excommunication for those who violated community norms, and it wielded that discipline against rationalist philosopher Baruch Spinoza. The Mahamad also built the famed magnificent Esnoga synagogue, completed in 1675, which served the needs of the city’s Jewish community for generations.8 Many occupations were either foreign to Jews or forbidden by the guilds of the city’s craftsmen, but the Sephardic legacy of commercial expertise fit well within Amsterdam’s economy. Leading Portuguese Jews of Amsterdam were merchants. While Jews constituted only 1.5 percent of the population, they composed between 4 and 6 percent of the major stockholders of the Dutch West India Company and more of the Bank of Exchange. They engaged in commerce with their former homelands, Spain and Portugal, particularly Portugal, a trade that reached its height during a twelve-year truce between these nations and the Dutch Republic from 1609 to 1621. With trade restrictions lifted, numerous Dutch ships entered Iberian harbors or Iberian colonial harbors; Sephardic merchants built fifteen ships a year for the Brazilian trade alone. The Dutch Republic understood the value of Jewish capital, commercial acumen, and mercantile connections.9

■ Brazilian Community In 1621, the Netherlands granted the Dutch West India Company, a joint stock company formed by Netherlands merchants and well capitalized at 7.5 million guilders, a state monopoly of trade in Africa and the Americas. The company had the power to maintain garrisons, to appoint directors, and to sign alliances with other nations. Under the supervision of the Estates General, the Netherlands legislature, it could procure troops and warships. Its most important initial objective was to seize control of Brazilian sugar production and its European markets from the Portuguese. In 1630, the company captured a sector in northeast Brazil; from Recife, the region’s largest city, it maintained control there until the Portuguese recaptured it in 1654.10 Dutch Recife was the prelude to Jewish immigration to New Amsterdam. The Dutch West India Company, not having adequate resources, relied on Jewish wealth and expertise. Dutch Jews possessed manpower, capital, and important connections with Portuguese merchants and the Brazilian trade. Recife and its environs attracted Amsterdam’s Jews; as many as a third of the city’s Jewish population emigrated. At the outpost’s height, it housed between 850 and 1,000 Jewish residents, nearly half the colony. Recife tempted Jewish

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artisans precluded from their craft in Amsterdam as well as wealthy traders; prominent Portuguese Jews purchased sugar plantations. While the Jews of Brazil did not achieve full religious or political equality, and while their prominence produced resentment among non-Jewish immigrants, they attained considerable autonomy and protection amid financial opportunity. When Christian merchants complained that “every contact with a Jew ends in bankruptcy,” the governor reported that Jews were “reliable political allies.”11 Recife’s Jewish community mirrored Amsterdam’s. Control of Jewish life lay with the Mahamad, five leading members of the community. The Mahamad protected synagogue property, provided regular services, supervised religious observance, maintained a cemetery, established schools for Jewish children, and provided poor relief. The colony housed two major synagogues, Zur Israel in Recife and Magen Abraham in the outlying town of Mauricia. The Recife synagogue, built of stone and caulk, boasted two stories. Its spiritual leader, the first rabbi in the new world, was Isaac Aboab da Fonseca, a grammarian, mystic, and popular preacher.12

■ The First “Twenty-Three” When Henry Hudson arrived in North America, he sailed under a Dutch flag. Commissioned by the Dutch East India Company, Hudson’s reports of abundant furs aroused the interest of the merchants of the sister West India Company walking the docks of Amsterdam. In quest of these skins, the company founded the colony of New Netherland. In 1623 – 1624 settlers were sent to Fort Orange (later the site of Albany) and along the Delaware and Connecticut Rivers to harvest furs. When the first ships returned brimming with pelts, more settlers were sent, and the tip of the island named Manhattan (“Island of Hills” based on Indian language) was chosen as the site of a fort to protect the company’s possessions throughout the province. (Governor Peter Minuit purchased the island from the Indians for the famous sixty guilders [$24] of trade items.) Because of intense warfare for furs among Indian tribes, and the shifting alliances of Iroquois and Mahicans near Fort Orange, the West India Company focused its settlement on Manhattan, its immediate surroundings, and the Hudson River valley.13 Poet Steendam’s vision notwithstanding, early New Amsterdam was largely a horror story. The company’s directors — most notoriously, Willem Kieft, who arrived in 1638 — mismanaged the settlements. While Kieft provided settlers

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the opportunity to acquire private property, repaired a number of the buildings on the island, and fostered the settlement of nearby outposts, he was personally corrupt while cruel to the Lenape native peoples. The colony, meanwhile, soon housed a collection of various nationalities, from Danish to French, speaking eighteen different languages and known for drunkenness, promiscuity, and disrespect for law and order. Kieft’s downfall followed a war that killed sixteen hundred Indians and a few hundred colonists, destroying new settlements. Kieft was recalled, and the fate of New Netherland hung in the balance. Unlike Recife, which produced valuable goods and a clear profit for the company, New Amsterdam was less productive, had fewer valuable foodstuffs, was constantly under English threat, and never became the focus of the company’s directors.14 In a final effort to salvage the outpost, the company appointed Peter Stuyvesant director general, a position he held from 1647 until the British conquest in 1664. Stuyvesant fought for the West India Company in the Caribbean and in a battle in St. Martin lost his right leg, which was replaced by his famous wooden limb. The son and son-in-law of Reformed Dutch clergymen and a strict Dutch Calvinist, he brought order and growth to New Amsterdam, requiring landowners to replace the run-down dwellings that littered the island with sturdy buildings. New immigrants arrived, a municipal government system similar to that in Amsterdam matured, and Stuyvesant refurbished the fort. Houses rose in the Dutch gabled style as the population grew slowly to fifteen hundred by 1660. The company remained powerful but no longer controlled daily life. The city’s burghers wrested increasing power from Stuyvesant as they instituted laws for the price of bread, regulation of markets, and provision of orphans. The transition of a tavern into the noted Stadt Huys (city hall) signaled that New Amsterdam was a seaport dominated, like its namesake, by a prominent merchant class, whose efforts produced an entrepôt for furs, tobacco, and foodstuffs.15 Such was the site of the first North American Jewish settlement. Nearly every community has a mythic founding. So it was with the Jews of America. The original myth, based on a 1784 article written in Hebrew by Dutch poet David Franco Mendes, tells of a group of twenty-three Jews fleeing Recife who were captured by a Spanish ship and recaptured by a French warship. In Mendes’s words, “God caused a Savior to arise unto them, the captain of a French Ship, . . . and he conducted them until they reached the end of the inhabited earth

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called New Holland.” Contemporary research questions this tale. In the exodus of Jews from Brazil following Dutch capitulation to the Portuguese, Jews received the same right as other Dutch residents to leave freely within three months and to take all their “movable property.” Almost all returned safely to the Dutch Republic. One group, however, planning to sail to Martinique and from there to New England or New Amsterdam on the Valck, encountered adverse winds, forcing them to land in Spanish Jamaica (rendered “Gamonike” by Dutch officials of New Amsterdam). Obtaining permission to depart from Spanish authorities, this band, which historian Jacob Marcus estimates consisted of “four married males, six adult married and widowed women and thirteen children of various ages,” traveled to Cape St. Anthony, Cuba. There they hired the French vessel St. Catrina to take them to New Amsterdam with their goods, at the high cost of 2,500 guilders, likely more than the worth of their possessions.16 The choice of New Amsterdam by these refugees fit within the vision of Amsterdam’s Jewish elders that the vast lands of New Netherland replace Brazil as a haven for Portuguese Jews. An enticement may have been the description of New Netherland published in Holland by Adriaen Van der Donck: “a very beautiful, pleasant, healthy, and delightful land, where all manner of men can more easily earn a good living .  .  . than in the Netherlands or any other part of the globe that I know.” The elders’ scout and emissary was likely merchant Jacob Barsimon, who, preceding the twenty-three, arrived on the Peartree from Amsterdam in mid-August 1654. He entered the outpost legally with a passport issued by the West India Company at the same time that another Amsterdam Jew, Menasseh ben Israel, was successfully entreating Oliver Cromwell to allow Jews to reenter England in a similar quest to locate new areas of settlement for Dutch Jews.17 The St. Catrina sailed into New Amsterdam in early September. Aboard it, according to Solomon Pietersen, another Dutch Jew who traveled to New Amsterdam legally on the Peartree and who acted as attorney for the immigrants, were “twenty-three souls, big and little.” These twenty-three, whose number comes from only this one statement, and who have become legendary, disembarked just before the Jewish New Year. They were the first Jews to celebrate Rosh Hashanah in what was to become the United States. Clearly they were not the first Jews in New Amsterdam, as Pietersen, Barsimon, and a third man, Asser Levy of Vilna, all merchant traders, disembarked from the Peartree.18

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On arrival, the twenty-three Jews found themselves in peril. At Cape St. Anthony, Master Jacques de la Motthe of the St. Catrina signed an agreement with the Jewish passengers “in solidum,” making them collectively responsible for the cost of passage. When their resources proved insufficient, he went before the Dutch court in New Amsterdam; it gave the Jews forty-eight hours to pay. Three days later, the court concluded that the required amount (1,567 florins) had not been remitted, “though they have property sufficient to defray the debt,” and authorized Master de la Motthe to seize the property of “the greatest debtors” and vend them at auction. When that sale proved insufficient, the master returned to court and asked that Israel and Moses Ambrosius be held in custody until the debt was satisfied. The court granted the request, providing de la Motthe pay the cost of confinement. Significantly, in accord with Dutch policy of religious toleration, a delay in the proceedings was granted for the two days of the Jewish New Year. It is likely that a number of Christian citizens aided the Jews by buying their goods at nominal prices and returning them to their owners. In addition, minister Johannes Megapolensis helped the refugees as an act of Christian charity. He did so, however, in anger over the behavior of the Jewish merchants who had come over on the Peartree. These local Jewish merchants, who “would not even lend . . . a few stivers” to the refugees, had “no other God than the unrighteous Mammon” and were of “no benefit to the country, but look at everything for their own profit.” The twenty-three appealed to their counterparts in Holland “by the ships sailing for Patria.” Their Dutch brethren ended the saga by providing funds to discharge the debts.19 Only a few of the twenty-three are found in the records of New Amsterdam. Historian Leo Hershkowitz, who wrote the most recent analysis of these immigrants, can only identify five Jews who arrived on the St. Catrina as living in New Amsterdam: Abraham and David Israel, Judicq (Judith) de Mereda, Moses Ambrosius, and likely Ricke Nunes. He identifies seven other Jews in New Amsterdam in 1655 who had been in Brazil but may not have arrived on the St Catrina but on the Peartree or another ship. Other Jewish names appear in various records from 1656, 1661, 1662, and 1666. What are we, then, to make of Pietersen’s account of the twenty-three Jews? As there is no apparent reason why Pietersen would have lied, the most likely explanation is that a significant number of refugees arrived on the St. Catrina entwined in debt, with no Jewish community to assist them and no means of support or income. Encountering

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a small seaport governed by a strict Calvinist more invested with religious zeal than were the company’s directors, whose concern was to maintain New Amsterdam as a profitable Dutch Reformed outpost of the company, they likely departed within the next few years.20 Stuyvesant believed that “diversity and toleration would undermine social harmony.” Alarmed by the poverty of the Recife Jews and the possibility that they might either demand poor relief or become “fly-by-night” traders like the itinerant Christians who paid little in taxes, he petitioned the West India Company’s directors for permission to deport the refugees. Stuyvesant wrote that “the Jews who have arrived would nearly all like to remain here,” an important indication of the refugees’ original intent. Stuyvesant echoed Dominie Megapolensis, who had called the Jews an “obstinate and immovable” people, whose settlement would cause even more confusion by adding their practices to those of Catholics, Quakers, and Lutherans. Invoking traditional anti-Semitic attitudes, the director first decried Jews’ economic practices, their selfishness and “customary usury and deceitful trading with the Christians,” and he belittled their religion as poison to a community: a “deceitful race, — such hateful enemies and blasphemers of the name of Christ.” On practical grounds, he warned that the Jews, “owing to their present indigence, . . . might become a charge in the coming winter.” Thus, he concluded, “for the benefit of this weak and newly developing place and the land in general,” it was “useful to require them in a friendly way to depart.” Five months later, the inferior magistrates and leading burgomasters (merchants) affirmed Stuyvesant’s request and included mercantile itinerants such as Pietersen, Barsimon, and Levy, Jewish merchants who might become competitors, resolving that “the Jews who came last year from the West Indies and now from Fatherland, must prepare to depart therewith.”21

■ Seeking Rights in New Netherland In response to the Stuyvesant’s deportation request, the Jewish elders ( parnassim) of Amsterdam wrote to their city fathers, the “Right Honorable Mayors and Councillors of the City of Amsterdam,” that “many and various persons and households of . . . [the Jewish] nation” were “well disposed” to set out for New Netherland “on the same footing and condition extended to all,” there to “enjoy freedom to exercise their religion as they were permitted in Brazil.” If these conditions were met, “many of their Nation” would settle in the new

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world and “contribute considerably” to peopling the new colony. Despite the trauma of Brazil, these Jewish pioneers were “willing again to try their fortunes and settle over there provided that they [were] given the opportunity to practice their religion in full freedom (but quietly and with due obedience), and provided that they [were] given the same protection as are the other inhabitants, and were admitted to the same rights of housing, commerce, trade and liberty.”22 A second petition was sent to the directors of the West India Company by “the merchants of the Portuguese Nation residing in [the] city.” These burghers, noting that “many of the Jewish nation [were] principal shareholders,” argued that closing New Amsterdam to Jews would “result to the great disadvantage of the Jewish nation.” All of the exiles from Brazil could not return to Amsterdam “because of the lack of opportunity” and could not return to Spain or Portugal “because of the Inquisition.” Too, the merchants declared, the “Honorable Lords, the Burgomasters of the City” and the “Honorable, High Illustrious Mighty Lords, the States General” had “in political matters always protected and considered the Jewish nation as upon the same footing as all the inhabitants and burghers.” As foreign nations with less liberty allowed Jews to “live and trade in their territories,” they asked that the “Jewish nation” be allowed, like other inhabitants, to “travel, live and traffic there, and . . . enjoy liberty on condition of contributing like others.”23 Given the weight afforded economic reasoning in this era, the influence and wealth of Amsterdam’s Jews, and their presence in the company, it is not surprising that, in one of the founding documents of American Jewish history, the company rebuked Stuyvesant. While it agreed in principle that “the new territories should no more be allowed to be infected by people of the Jewish Nation,” mercantile interests took precedence over Calvinist doctrine. Noting the sacrifice of the Jewish nation in the taking of Recife and the “large amount of capital they still ha[d] invested in the shares of the company,” the directors, “after many deliberations,” declared, “these people may travel and trade to and in New Netherland and live and remain there, provided the poor among them shall not become a burden to the company or to the community, but be supported by their own nation. You will now govern yourself accordingly.” Without the aid of the Jewish community of Amsterdam, Jews in New Netherland would have had no opportunity to contend for the rights of Dutch citizenship. Those in New Amsterdam could now carry on the struggle. The

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company’s directive gave them the opportunity to pursue this quest in a hostile climate.24 The next two years, 1655 – 1656, proved critical. Jews of considerably greater stature than the Recife immigrants, who came to New Amsterdam after the twenty-three, led the mission. The most prominent were five Sephardic merchants, Abraham de Lucena, Salvador D’Andrada, Jacob Cohen Henriques, Joseph D’Acosta, and David Ferera. Of these, the most important were the merchants D’Acosta and Cohen Henriques, both West India Company shareholders and past members of Recife’s Mahamad. D’Acosta was a “principal shareholder,” while Cohen Henriques was the son of principal investor Abraham Cohen. D’Acosta, who leased a house on Pearl Street in 1656, came with a four-year contract as agent for a company formed in Amsterdam to trade with New Netherland. These merchants, with other Jewish residents, including members of the twenty-three who had not yet departed, created a critical mass that included men with leadership skills and standing. That, in turn, allowed the Jews of New Amsterdam to effectively seek the rights that their Dutch brethren possessed.25 Jewish settlers sought first to acquire the religious privileges held by the Jews of Amsterdam and Recife. By 1614, the Jewish community of Amsterdam had gained the right to build and worship in their own meeting place, and Amsterdam housed a number of synagogues. Evidence that New Amsterdam’s Jews sought similar standing can be found in the concern of the religious governing body, or classis, of Amsterdam’s statement in 1655 that “even the Jews have made request of the Honorable Governor and have also attempted in that country to erect a synagogue for the exercise of their blasphemous religion.” Stuyvesant confirmed this application of New Amsterdam’s Jews, writing that though Jews were no longer hindered “with regard to trade,” they yet sought other rights and “have many times requested of us the free and public exercise of their abominable religion, but this can not yet be accorded to them.” Stuyvesant resisted, fearing that “to give liberty to the Jews will be very detrimental there, because the Christians there will not be able at the same time to do business. Giving them liberty, we cannot refuse the Lutherans and the Papists.” Dominie Megapolensis also wrote Holland that if immigration of Jews were permitted, “a great lot would follow and build here their synagogue,” a good reason that “these godless rascals .  .  . may be sent away from here.”

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Given the alarm of Dutch officials, it is likely that Jewish colonists sought the right of public worship in the first years of their settlement, as they had done in Recife.26 The West India Company, in its initial response to Stuyvesant, only granted Jews the right to practice their faith within their homes. The directors considered Stuyvesant’s concern about the spread of organized Judaism “premature,” instructing him, if and when it did occur, “you will do well to refer the matter to us in order to await upon the necessary orders.” A later communication noted that Jews “exercise in all quietness their religion within their house” and advised them to live close to each other as they did in Amsterdam. The company directors envisioned New Amsterdam with a group of Jews living in a tightly knit community — but without public worship.27 Little evidence remains of the religious practices of the Jewish community. However, it is suggestive that in 1655 Abraham de Lucena, on behalf of the Jewish elders of Amsterdam, provided the Jews of New Amsterdam “a Sephfer Thora of parchment with its green veil and cloak and band of India damask of dark purple.” Another sign of Jewish religious activity was Jacob Barsimon’s unwillingness to appear in court in 1658 on a Saturday to answer a summons; default judgment was not entered against him, “as he was summoned on his Sabbath.” Too, the Jewish citizens, “being we ar all mortall men,” requested land for a burying ground from the burgomasters in 1665. In February 1666, they received permission to “purchase a burying ground,” in particular, “a little hook of land” outside the city. This was the origin of the Chatham Street cemetery. It is also noteworthy that the outpost’s two Jewish butchers were excused from slaughtering hogs; they supplied kosher meat to the community. The only Jew to remain through the decade was Asser Levy, a butcher and trader, whose will inventory included instruments for kosher slaughter.28 Thus, the evidence, though limited, indicates that Jews remained ritually observant — to what degree is unknown. Did they, now in possession of a Torah, conduct regular religious services inside their homes? It seems likely that they did, but the unfriendly environment helped persuade most Jewish settlers to return to Amsterdam’s public synagogues and well-placed community. An alternative path to civil acceptance was conversion to the Dutch Reformed Church. Solomon Pietersen made that choice, but he appears the exception; most Jews maintained allegiance to their faith.29

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A second critical right sought by New Amsterdam’s Jews was free access to the marketplace and public square. Though ordered by the directors of the West India Company to give the Jews full “civil and political” rights, Stuyvesant and the burgomasters resisted. In 1655, Asser Levy and Jacob Barsimon requested permission to stand guard with other citizens rather than pay a tax for a substitute. They were denied that privilege: “first in the disinclination and unwillingness of these trainbands [guards] to be fellow-soldiers with the aforesaid [Jewish] nation” and second because “the said nation was not admitted or counted among the citizens, as regards trainbands or common citizens’ guards neither in the illustrious city of Amsterdam nor (to our knowledge) in any city in Netherland.” When Levy and Barsimon complained of the tax burdens, the municipality instructed them to “depart whenever and whither it pleases them.” Levy persisted, however, and won the right to do guard duty in 1657. Also in 1655, New Amsterdam’s burghers implemented a second form of discrimination. Imposing a special assessment on city residents to guard against Indian attack, the city fathers assessed the seaport’s prominent Jewish merchants, who made up only 5 out of the 210 citizens with ratable assets, the sum of 100 guilders each. These merchants, composing one-thirtieth of the taxable population, had to pay one-twelfth the required amount.30 Jews gained the right to trade freely and purchase real estate, privileges long common to their Dutch counterparts, but only through persistent efforts. In 1655, merchants de Lucena, D’Andrada, and Cohen Henriques, requested permission to trade on the South River (Delaware) and at Fort Orange (the Hudson River valley and northward). They reasoned that “as the Jewish residents received consent from the West India Company to trade and travel freely,” to “enjoy the same liberties,” they must receive consent to travel and trade to all places “within the jurisdiction of the Government.” The director general and council declined the request for “weighty reasons.” A councilor declared that it “would be injurious to the community and the population of the said places to grant the petitions of the Jews,” though he allowed goods already bought to be sold. In addition, despite company orders to the contrary, Jews were unable to purchase real estate. In December 1655, Salvador D’Andrada, a “Jewish merchant . . . in the city,” petitioned to ratify the sale of the house he was leasing. As the lawful proprietor of the dwelling that he had purchased “at a public sale,” he wished to “enjoy the rights and privileges” of ownership. The council declined the petition “for pregnant reasons.”31

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The following March, the Jewish merchants renewed their requests, quoting the directive of the West India Company that they be permitted “to live and traffic and to enjoy the same liberty” as in Holland. As they were paying more than their share of taxes, they must be given “the same liberty allowed to other burghers as well in trading to all places within the jurisdiction of this Government as in the purchase of real estate,” a privilege granted by the West India Company. The council replied that Jews had the same rights as other merchants and refused to reconsider the issue of real property ownership. However, in June 1656, the company directors, fearful that they would lose Jewish trade to Jamaica and England, again rebuked Stuyvesant, stating that they wished that the director and council “had obeyed [the company’s] orders,” which they “must thereafter execute punctually and with more respect.” After this rebuff, Jews were allowed to trade and to maintain retail shops.32 The right of full citizenship remained to be won. In April 1657, Jewish merchants D’Andrada, Cohen Henriques, De Lucena, and D’Acosta, noting that in 1655 they had petitioned for a Jewish citizen to become a burgher, to be treated “as other inhabitants of New Netherland,” on the grounds that Jews enjoyed the privileges of burgher standing in Amsterdam and that, they claimed, “as long as they have been here, have, with others, borne and paid, and still bear, all Burgher burdens.” They again asked “to enjoy the Burger right” in conformity with the directives of the West India Company. Responding, the city fathers agreed to admit Asser Levy to burgher standing, stating, “The Burgomasters of this City are hereby authorized and at the same time charged to admit the petitioners herein and their Nation to the Burghership, in due form.” The Jewish merchants prevailed, but not without initial defeats, numerous slights, appeals, and the support of Amsterdam’s Jewish community and the directors of the West India Company. Jews also won the right to purchase property; in 1660, Asser Levy purchased a house on Stone Street, later the site of the Mill Street synagogue. He became the first Jewish citizen to possess real estate in what was to become New York City. In 1678, after the English took over the colony, he bought property north of Wall Street for use as a “public slaughter house.”33 With mercantile freedom, Jewish merchants traded throughout New Netherland, including the Hudson and Delaware River valleys, and with the West Indies, Europe, Virginia, and Maryland. Although the most common and valuable commodities were fur, tobacco, and liquor, they also traded in food-

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stuffs. They shipped goods and liquor to settlers and Indians in exchange for furs and tobacco. Much of the exchange was done through barter, including leasing homes for beaver and brandy. Jewish merchants both imported and distilled liquor, which was ubiquitous in New Amsterdam.34 Legal disputes constantly troubled the merchants’ business careers. Joseph D’Acosta defended a number of suits, some over damages to his ships’ cargo. In one instance, merchant Johannes Vervelen told D’Acosta, “You are a Jew, you are all cheats together.” D’Acosta left for Holland in 1660 at the end of his four-year contract. Lawsuits entwined Jacob Cohen Henriques, a trader with Curaçao, importing “Venetian pearls, Venetian pendants, thimbles, scissors, knives and bells.” Authorities charged him with smuggling tobacco, fined him for baking bread with the door open — perhaps an attempt to break the monopoly of the city’s bakers — and accused him of engaging in a fight in a canoe over the vessel’s ownership. He departed soon after this complaint. Dutch prosecutors arrested and fined Abraham de Lucena for selling at retail and for keeping his store open during the weekly Sunday sermon, demanding an unusually steep fine of 600 guilders. With Salvador D’Andrada, de Lucena became entangled in a suit over tobacco ownership. In another case, the court required him, David Ferera, and D’Andrada to pay freight for a shipment of goods on the Great Christopher despite de Lucena’s claim that pipes of brandy were missing. In 1660, he and his wife appeared before the magistrates over charges and countercharges of slander. That same year, rather than pay three beavers for his burgher right, de Lucena took leave of the city. In 1656, Jacob Barsimon faced charges of striking Isaac Israel, a Jewish trader, on the Delaware River. Barsimon left New Amsterdam in 1660. A bitter dispute embroiled David Ferera, agent for Amsterdam merchant Moses de Silva. The City accused him of stealing a chest of clothes, which he contended was his own, from Bailiff Dirck van Schelluyne’s home. He then allegedly seized beaver skins put up as bond. For showing disrespect to a public official, the court ordered Ferera whipped and banished. D’Acosta managed to rescue Ferera from the humiliation of a public lashing — a penalty possibly imposed because of anti-Semitic prejudice — by paying a steep fine of 170 guilders. Ferera departed for Maryland, where he continued to trade until at least 1659. D’Andrada appeared in court over a charge that he had stolen a small silver cup. He, too, soon quit New Amsterdam.35

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These incidents indicate that the early Jewish merchants could be, in Jacob Marcus’s words, “a rude and conglomerate lot.” Or perhaps this aggressiveness stemmed in part from the inordinate stress of leading the struggle for civil rights in New Amsterdam, a struggle likely requiring a contentious nature.36

■ A Jewish Pioneer One Jewish resident, Asser Levy, remained in New Amsterdam the full ten years to Britain’s seizure in 1664 and then lived under English rule. He was one of the two Jewish male citizens who took the oath of allegiance to the British Crown. He and his wife, Miriam, both died in New Amsterdam/New York, he in 1682, she in 1685. Levy was not a member of the Portuguese Jewish community but an Ashkenazi Jew who immigrated from Vilna to Amsterdam perhaps because of the Chmielnicki pogroms of 1648 – 1649. From there, he came to New Amsterdam in 1654, likely on the Peartree, arriving as an obscure immigrant who had not achieved burgher standing in Amsterdam. As noted, Levy petitioned to do guard duty rather than pay a tax, and, with the help of prominent Sephardic merchants, he obtained burgher standing. From then on, he became increasingly wealthy. A butcher by trade, Levy left his heirs a full stock of butcher’s implements. As he prospered, he ventured into the fur trade, buying beaver at Fort Orange (Albany) in 1660. He also invested in real estate, accepting a mortgage for land near Fort Orange in 1660 in exchange for a loan he had made, and in 1661 he purchased “a house and a lot lying in the Village of Beverwyck,” possibly to establish trading rights. That same year, he bought his historic home on Stone Street. When he died, Levy ranked among the top third of the New York’s population. His will inventory reveals that he owned an assortment of fine ware including “two bedds,” “twelf Cussons,” “two looking glasses,” a “Sabbath lamb,” a gold “bodkine,” silver cups and “sawsers,” and a “spice box.” He and his wife dressed well: he wore a “black velvet jacket and broadcloth black coat and breeches” with a “silver banded sword” and a black hat; Miriam treasured a Dutch gown adorned with the gold bodkin, gold pendants, scarlet petticoat, and a lace cap. They owned a “Negro boy.” The couple had no children, only relatives in Amsterdam. The presence of religious objects, including multiple sets of dishes, suggests that Asser and Miriam, despite the absence of many Jews in the seaport, remained to some degree observant. They were the first “Jewish pilgrims” of New Amsterdam and New York.37

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■ The Dutch Years What can be said of the Jews’ ten years in New Amsterdam? They were never truly welcome. Traditional anti-Semitism lay at the root of the hostility: witness the condemnation by devout Calvinist director Stuyvesant that Jews practiced an “Abominable religion.” Dutch merchants also resisted Jewish competition. Jewish residents had to overcome ongoing opposition to their right to trade and faced constant legal harassment. Finally, the commercial connections developed by Dutch Jewry, specializing in the sugar trade and as brokers, did not help in a colony whose chief commodity was furs, a staple unfamiliar in Sephardic Atlantic networks. So few Jews settled in New Amsterdam. Prominent merchants, men who might have become the core of a vital Dutch Jewish community, departed by 1660. A few additional Jewish traders ventured to America and returned to Amsterdam in the years before the Dutch residents capitulated to a British fleet in 1664, but no Jewish mercantile community emerged. Only a handful of Jewish residents lived in the city in the 1660s. If there was greater freedom and opportunity in Amsterdam and larger Jewish communities in Suriname and Curaçao, why stay in New Amsterdam? If the Dutch West India Company, already in dire financial straits, did not foresee New Netherland as a major trading post, economic opportunities were not going to improve. The vision of the Jewish elders of Amsterdam, that New Netherland would be home to a large Jewish community and play a significant role in the Atlantic trading network, foundered. No Jewish births were recorded. In 1663, only a year before the British conquest, de Lucena’s Torah returned to Amsterdam, the final signal of the failure to establish a Jewish community.38 Yet the relentless effort of Jewish merchants, inspired by the Dutch legacy of toleration and entrepreneurial freedom and aided by fellow Jews in Amsterdam, gained them the right of trade, burghership, citizenship, and land ownership. Even if few Jews remained, these rights endured, and, when the British took possession of New Amsterdam, they recognized them. This is the critical legacy of the Jewish experience in New Netherland: religious toleration, economic opportunity, and equal citizenship. The terms of capitulation that guaranteed the Dutch their traditional rights included the Jewish population. The Dutch decade was prelude to a long era of colonial British rule that was far more welcoming to Jews. The Jewish community that matured in newly named New York achieved far greater standing.

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Though the community was small in number, its leaders developed important positions in British Atlantic commerce, valuable political connections, unmatched religious toleration, and widespread social acceptance, laying a cornerstone for future generations of American Jews. A commercial acumen, following in the footsteps of these first Jewish merchants, came to define much of the New York Jewish community in its first 175 years. The British colonial experience produced a solid Jewish community, led by a strong mercantile elite, with a political and economic clout well beyond its numbers. The story of the Jews of early New York in this volume highlights these political and economic strengths, which played a key role in shaping the rest of Jewish life and culture as it developed in this new world. These strengths also brought into play the difficulties of balancing efforts at commercial success in a Christian world with the requirements of religious observance, a theme that resonated for generations to come. Too, the winning of rights in New Amsterdam laid the foundations for Jewish entry into American republican traditions, an auspicious beginning which has shaped American Jewry in New York and beyond to the present day.

The Merchant’s Exchange opened on Broad Street in 1751. Financed by local merchants and the Common Council, the ground level contained an open-air marketplace for street sales, while the upper floors housed elegant meeting rooms for dinners and concerts. It represented the commercial side of this thriving British port. (Courtesy Eno Collection, New York Public Library)

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A Merchant Community

In 1708, twenty-year-old Jacob Franks, son of Abraham Franks, one of London’s twelve Jewish stockbrokers, arrived on the docks of New York City, a small colonial seaport in the far-flung British Empire. What motivated Franks to leave Britain? He sought a chance to make his fortune. The same impetus spurred other Jewish emigrants. Many young single men of middling status from the Ashkenazi population thought of America as a final destination, and those who intended to return often remained. Relatives proved critical, as a successful New Yorker would commonly persuade a cousin, uncle, brother or sister to join him. This was the age of the “Port Jews,” mercantile entrepreneurs who dominated the Jewish community.1

■ New Amsterdam Becomes New York During the seventeenth century, the British and Dutch, so close in religious leaning, parliamentary maturity, commercial entrepreneurship, and imperial ambition, entered into wars over dominion of the Americas, particularly the Caribbean. The American coastline from Massachusetts to South Carolina housed a series of British colonies differing in government, culture, and religion but all professing allegiance to the Crown. The one gap was New Netherland, a key English rival. An isolated enemy colony could not stand, and in 1664 the Duke of York, brother of Charles II, sent an expedition to New Amsterdam, whose residents, seeing a British fleet in the harbor, quickly capitulated. Colonel Richard Nicholls, the commander of the British fleet and first governor of the newly named New York (after the king’s brother), while demanding “full and absolute power and authority,” gave Dutch inhabitants significant

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concessions. He declared that “all people shall still continue free denizens and enjoy their lands, houses, goods, ships wheresoever they are within this country, and dispose of them as they please. . . . The Dutch here shall enjoy the liberty of their consciences in divine worship and church discipline.” This liberty was central to British mercantilism. Commercial regulation assumed more importance than religious orthodoxy. Thus, in 1674 Governor Andros received the following orders: “permit all persons of what Religion so ever, quietly to inhabit within ye precincts of your jurisdiccion without giving ym any disturbance or disquiet whatsoever, for or by reason of their differing opinion in matter of Religion,” with a critical proviso that they “give noe disturbance to ye publique peace nor doe molest or disquiet others in ye free exercise of their religion.”2 Discriminatory rules against Jews selling by retail were allowed to lapse, permitting Jews to enter the handicrafts. While either citizenship or endenization was required to engage in trade within the British Empire, neither was difficult to acquire. A few Jews became denizens, resident aliens admitted to commercial rights within English territories, but after 1715, when the New York Assembly passed legislation allowing naturalization to any foreigner in the colony who either owned real estate or was present in New York prior to November 1, 1683, most sought citizenship. In 1740, Parliament, viewing citizenship as a tool to populate its colonies, naturalized all residents of the colonies who had lived there for seven continuous years (13 George II, 1740). The act included a clause allowing the exclusion of the phrase “upon the true faith of a Christian” in oaths required of voters and holders of government positions. Colonial (but not English) Jews could hold office and vote. Between 1688 and 1770, fifty-seven Jewish residents of New York were admitted to freemanship, which carried the right to engage in a retail trade, to vote in municipal and colonial elections, and to hold public office, with or without real property. The rights won by the Jews of New Amsterdam with difficulty against Calvinist Stuyvesant were part and parcel of the English governing outlook in New York. The free environment proved pivotal in New York Jewish history, as it allowed for the growth of a strong synagogue community and a wealthy, influential elite.3

■ Colonial New York Early in the British colonial era, Dutch and increasingly dominant English interests clashed in New York, leading to Leisler’s Rebellion in 1689, an attempt

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to restore Dutch Calvinist governance. After this unsuccessful uprising, Anglicization proceeded unhindered; all succeeding factions were British. Politically, New York Colony included commercial interests revolving around New York City, where sugar refining and artisan manufactures thrived together with commerce with the motherland and the West Indies, a fur-trading faction centered in Albany, and an agricultural combination on Long Island and the large Hudson River estates. These rival interest groups dominated the political scene, producing closely fought elections for the colony’s Provincial Assembly and the city’s Common Council, contests that included Jewish voters.4 During this era, the population of New York City increased from about 1,500 at the close of the Dutch era to 3,000 in 1680, 11,000 by 1743, and 21,000 in 1770. From the mid-1770s on, this included a large black population of 11 – 15 percent, including the largest number of slaves in the northern colonies. The number of Jews in New York City remained fairly constant, with about 100 souls in the 1680s, 200 in 1730, and 250 in 1750 and prior to the Revolution. Until the mid-eighteenth century, New York City housed the only organized Jewish community in mainland North America, though it was far smaller than settlements in Dutch Curaçao and Suriname and British Jamaica.5

■ Moving to America Jacob Franks left an English community whose modern origins date to the arrival of Dutch immigrants in the mid-seventeenth century. By 1700, five hundred largely Sephardic Jews lived in England with a limited degree of autonomy and self-government. In the 1700s, the influx of poor Ashkenazi immigrants outnumbered the Sephardim, causing the population to increase to six thousand by the mid-eighteenth century. Jews held mercantile positions on the high end and were street peddlers and small retailers on the low end. Other than not having the right to hold office and vote, disabilities all nonmembers of the Anglican Church endured, Britain offered considerable freedom. Jews adapted well to English life, dressing in current English fashion. Few English Jews maintained strict ritual observance, nor did many achieve a high level of Jewish education. Few rabbis lived in England. Despite Britain’s tradition of toleration, anti-Semitism remained common.6 The Jewish community that developed in eighteenth-century New York built on both the Dutch and English models. As in Britain, the first immigrants

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were largely Sephardic, and their traditions held sway at the city’s only synagogue, Shearith Israel, constructed in 1730 on Mill Street. As in Amsterdam, by the early eighteenth century, Ashkenazi immigrants outnumbered Sephardic Jews, but both worshiped and accepted the supervision of this one synagogue. Yet, as in Britain, New York’s synagogue elders possessed less legal authority than did the leaders of the large Esnoga sanctuary in Amsterdam. What influence and control the Jewish community exerted over its members came through moral suasion and, if necessary, social ostracism, not legal authority. The city’s small Jewish community enjoyed a stronger sense of common identity than London’s. Finally, since New York’s Jews did not depend on their European brethren as had the Jews of New Amsterdam, commercial rather than paternal ties developed between London and New York. Elite American traders had relatives in London as agents, and British mercantile families had similar connections in New York.

■ Jewish Merchants of New York: The Early Colonial Era Understanding the Jewish world of colonial New York begins with a portrait of their leaders, the merchant elite, and the Atlantic network in which they lived. Not all Jews were wealthy. But a good number were, and those who were not sought to become so. As historian Eli Faber notes, “Whether Sephardic or Ashkenazi, Jews who settled in colonial America .  .  . aspired to become merchants participating in transatlantic commerce.” Even if one began as a shopkeeper, he wanted to die as a merchant. Of the twenty-three Jewish wills probated in New York between 1704 and 1774, nineteen of the deceased identified themselves as merchants.7 Among the more interesting Sephardic Jewish merchants was Joseph Bueno de Mesquita, whose life spanned nearly a century. Born in the early seventeenth century near the Spanish-French border, he moved first to Amsterdam, where he married in 1641, and finally to New York around 1680. Until his death in 1708, he traded with London and the Caribbean. Records of his shipments include textiles from London on the Helena, sugar and rum from Barbados on his sloop Mary, cargoes of dry goods and rum from London on three different ships in 1703 and 1704, and a 1705 transport of a large consignment of furs (including 1,064 pounds of elk and eighty-six fox skins). During King William’s War (1689 – 1697), fought between Britain and France both in Europe and in America, he supplied gunpowder to Albany. A man of prominence, he partici-

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pated in provincial matters. He was likely the same Joseph Bueno who, though no pirate, sailed with Captain Kidd and was asked by Governor Bellomont in 1698 to value the spoils of the notorious buccaneer. In 1704, Governor Edward Cornbury accused him of bribing a government official over an attempt to sequester cocoa (he was never charged). The incident revealed another of his connections, namely, with the chief customs official in New York. At his death in 1708, Bueno, one of the wealthiest New Yorkers, left his wife £600. His estate included five slaves and the furniture of a well-to-do home (“Striped Satin,” “leather Couch,” “Blew Linon,” kitchen and dining-room accessories). His Jewish possessions included both a Hebrew Bible and a Torah scroll with a silver bell. A Torah, an expensive item, speaks to the centrality of Judaism to the fabric of his life.8 Luis Gomez, scion of a great mercantile family, followed a slightly different path to prosperity. Born Moses Gomez in Madrid, he changed his name to honor the French king who gave his family asylum. After living in England, he moved to New York, becoming one of the two wealthiest merchants on Queen Street. A West Indian trader, many of his children were born in Jamaica, as was his first wife. It was not uncommon for Jewish merchants to live periodically in the different ports of their mercantile network. The importation of fine goods (Persian silk, calico) from London and trade in wheat added to his fortune. In 1710, as the first merchant to export wheat to the Madeira Islands, he imported the island’s coveted wines. He supplied a military expedition in Canada with flour and butter. Gomez speculated in real estate, buying hundreds of acres in Orange and Ulster counties. In the fifty years prior to the Revolution, seven of his descendants served as parnas (president) of the community’s synagogue.9 Ashkenazi Jews also figured among the first generation of Jewish merchants. In addition to Asser Levy, the most prominent Ashkenazi merchant of the early generations was Moses Levy, father of Jacob Frank’s wife, Abigaill. Born in Germany in 1665, he immigrated first to London and then to New York. Like the others, he traded with the West Indies. One typical shipment sent axes to St. Thomas in exchange for cocoa. He distilled rum, provoking a municipal regulation outlawing distilleries within a mile of city hall. Levy traveled frequently; on one trip to London, he placed son-in-law Jacob as his representative in New York. In 1711, he supplied British forces in Canada with corn and butter. He speculated in real estate in Westchester and Manhattan. Respected by the entire community, he died in 1728 worth about £6,000.10

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These early Jewish merchants made their presence felt in the life of the city’s political economy. Governor Bellomont complained to the Board of Trade that he was ill treated by most of the city’s merchants, and, he said, “were it not for one Dutch merchant and two or three Jews that have let me have money, I should have been undone.” Governor Robert Hunter relied on Ashkenazi merchant Nathan Simson for loans to pay soldiers during Queen Anne’s war early in the eighteenth century. Simson, an English émigré who returned to Britain for the final years of his life with a fortune of £60,000, became so prominent that New Yorker Francis Harison wrote him two letters asking him to intervene in Parliament on his behalf for the position of comptroller of the Port of Boston. Powerful political figures regularly turned to wealthy Jewish merchants for assistance.11

■ Jewish Merchants of New York: The Later Colonial Era In the second half of the colonial era, Prime Minister William Pitt inundated New York with British military funds to prosecute the French and Indian War, a conflict that saw England incorporate Canada and Florida to become the dominant imperial power in North America. In this period, a new generation of Jewish merchants emerged as the community’s leaders. The Gomez family produced prominent sons including Moses and Daniel. Daniel, perhaps the most successful, exemplifies a prosperous mid-eighteenth-century Sephardic merchant. Born in New York on 23 June 1695 and naturalized a British citizen in 1740, he early partnered with his father and brother in the West Indian trade, making frequent visits to the island of Jamaica. There he met and married his first wife, Rebecca de Torres, who bore him a son, Moses, before her death after five years of marriage. His second wife, Esther Levy from Curaçao, died childless in 1753. Gomez became a major English importer, advertising in one of America’s earliest newspapers, the New-York Gazette, announcing a typical shipment from Liverpool: “earthenware in casks and crates, Cheshire cheese, loaf sugar, cutlery ware, pewter, grindstones, coals, and sundry other goods too tedious to mention.” Fluent in Spanish, he traded with leading West Indian merchants, specializing in sugar, and with merchants along the mainland. Like many Jewish merchants, he partnered and traded both with fellow Jewish traders and with such eminent Christian New York families as the Beekmans, Van Cortlandts, and Van Wycks, as well as with New York’s governor, George Clinton. His ships could be sighted in

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ports as diverse as Barbados, Curaçao, London, Dublin, Boston, Charleston, Newport, and Philadelphia.12 Daniel Gomez speculated in real estate and by his twenties had bought land in Ulster and Westchester Counties and New Jersey. Likely in concert with his father, he purchased twenty-two hundred acres in Newburgh on the western bank of the Hudson River. He aimed to control a rocky point of land that jutted into the river, a site where Algonquin Indians gathered for ceremonial dances, preparing for hunting expeditions or warfare. Gomez built a blockhouse as a trading station, six miles from Newburgh, the closest nonnative habitation. Constructed of stone, lime, and mortar, it was known as “the Jew’s house.” There Gomez and his associates spent weeks in isolation, trading hatchets, knives, and trinkets for furs. Prominence as a merchant meant leadership in the Jewish community. Gomez fulfilled these expectations, participating actively in the building and life of congregation Shearith Israel, which elected him parnas eight separate years. An ardent American patriot during the Revolution, he fled to Philadelphia, where he died in 1780.13 The other leading Jewish figure in mid-eighteenth-century New York was Ashkenazi Jacob Franks, “New York’s most successful Jewish merchant in the colonial era.” Like so many Jewish colonial American merchants, he married within the group of Jewish merchants, wedding Abigaill Levy, daughter of Moses Levy. Franks stood at the center of a network that included his son David in Philadelphia and his sons Moses and Naphtali in London (both of whom became wealthy Englishman). He traded numerous commodities with London and the West Indies. An advertisement in the New-York Gazette of April 16, 1739, for example, included items ranging from nails, spades, and frying pans to bohea tea. Rum, wine, rice, and skins filled the holds of his ships.14 Details of Franks’s business appear in a 1743 message to his partner/son Naphtali in London, a letter that described the interests of a prosperous New York Jewish merchant. Franks expressed concern with invoices and bills for the loading of tea sold on three months’ credit, commented that he was in the process of loading five “wessels” for London, noted that a ship of his had left for Jamaica with building materials, and mentioned that he recently spent £3,000 “our currency” for another craft and £1,500 for a shipment of “bread.” The letter also referred to difficulties with insurance and debt collection, problems with notes owed him ranging from £30 to £100, the state of the tea trade

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This engraving of the south prospect of New York Harbor from 1760, during the French and Indian War, includes captured French ships. The city has a prosperous, mercantile look, as the war brought increased British expenditures that arrived through prominent merchants, including Jacob Franks. (Courtesy Collections of the New-York Historical Society)

with Boston, and a desire for a shipment of guns and cannon. He relied on his uncle in London for collateral for some shipments.15 Franks, like many of his earlier Jewish merchant counterparts, was an army purveyor, an agent for the king in New York and other northern colonies. During King George’s War against the French and Spanish, he dispatched foodstuffs and building materials to Jamaica and outfitted General James Oglethorpe of Georgia for an attack on Florida. Franks received sugar in exchange. During the French and Indian War, son Moses was the Frankses’ British liaison. Moses played an integral part of a syndicate of highly placed London merchants who became the largest purveyor of goods to British forces. Working through subagencies in New York and Philadelphia, the Franks family made commissions of greater than 10 percent on their provisions. In Philadelphia, son David was a partner in army supply. Government contracts from the 1740s through the 1780s were worth more than a million pounds sterling, allowing the Frankses to amass far more wealth than any other colonial Jewish family.16

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Yet Jacob Franks was not only a rich man but also a Jewish scholar, parnas of his synagogue, and head of one of the leading families of New York. At home in the midst of fellow Jews of every standing, he also felt comfortable in the homes of New York’s Christian elite. He lived in the Dock ward on Duke Street near the residences of Robert Livingston, Abraham DePeyster, and Stephen Bayard, all wealthy merchants. Like them, he owned a country house in Flatt Bush on Long Island. His family was keenly aware of and involved in local, national, and international politics. Franks dressed as a gentleman of the English upper class. His household contained slaves and servants. He held the deferential expectations of a member of the eighteenth-century gentry. One of the leading women in the city, his wife, Abigaill, was as educated and informed as a European woman of means, though she acquired her education in the colony.17 The Franks and Gomez transactions reveal common traits of an eighteenthcentury Jewish merchant. Unlike New Amsterdam, a port that was not critical to the Dutch commercial empire and did not deal with goods with which Jews were familiar, New York occupied an important place as a site of legal trade with the English Atlantic network and surreptitious exchange with Dutch, French, and Spanish Caribbean partners. A Jewish merchant traded many goods, often in his own ships, importing manufactured wares to America, West Indian staples to Britain, and whatever the market demanded from America to the West Indies. Jewish merchants possessed a vast network of connections, often negotiating temporary partnerships or agent agreements with relatives as well as non-Jewish business partners.18 Shipping involved risks, given storms, piracy, and war; the price and demand for goods could change markedly in the time it took for a ship to cross the Atlantic. For example, after Queen Caroline’s death in 1737, merchant Rodrigo Pacheco gambled that mourning cloth would be in high demand and dispatched a large shipment to New York, hoping to be first to deliver the garments. He was second but still profited. On the other hand, Nathan Simson found himself with one thousand barrels of onions in Jamaica and no buyers. Any shipment meant considerable risks. Consider Pacheco’s 1732 ship, outfitted in New York with “choice flour, pork, peasee. Tarr, staves . . . ,” that sailed to Jamaica, where it sold the cargo for “sugar, Rum, Limes, Negros and Cash,” after which it proceeded to South Carolina to trade for rice and then to Lisbon, the end of the voyage. Would it travel safely? Would the goods be in demand

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at arrival? Would they be able to sell and barter them (both were common) to local shopkeepers and country merchants? Would a hurricane destroy their ship, as happened to Simson in 1722 when he lost 110 barrels of flour? Would a war suddenly be declared? A conflict between the Dutch and Spanish prevented Simson from collecting a debt in Amsterdam. Jewish merchants tried to reduce their risks with international and local connections. Speaking Spanish, Portuguese, Yiddish, German, and Hebrew, they relied on counterparts from thriving Jewish communities in Curaçao, Suriname, Jamaica, and Barbados. Together, they knew the markets and were as up-to-date as possible on supply and demand. With so many unknowns in the Atlantic trade, bonds of consanguinity proved invaluable.19 Jewish merchants actively pursued related enterprises. As early as the 1670s, Asser Levy was an incipient banker, with four hundred outstanding loans at his death in 1682. The New York firm of Levy and Marache ventured into insurance brokerage. The Gomez family and Judah Hays loaned money and issued and accepted bills of exchange. A Jewish supplier in Pennsylvania, for example, sent a London bill of exchange to Hays for credit. Merchants also engaged in manufacturing. David Hays owned a vinegar manufactory in the city, and the Gomez family produced snuff as well as pickling beef and pork for export. And, with other merchants, the Gomezes prepared and exported kosher meat to the Caribbean. Moses Levy manufactured soap, and others produced candles and chocolate. Jewish entrepreneurs operated as many as seventeen distilleries in New York.20 Early in the colony’s history, Jewish merchants played a role in the Atlantic trade far greater than their numbers would suggest. Customs records indicate that in the early eighteenth century Jewish commerce constituted 12 percent of port entries. However, trade patterns changed as the colony matured. Moreover, the Jewish population remained static as the colony’s grew. In turn, the proportion of enterprise handled by Jewish merchants diminished. The average dropped to 7 percent by 1725, to 3 percent in 1735, and to 2 percent by midcentury. While early exchange was largely with the Caribbean and London, by the 1730s the majority of trade occurred within the British Empire. At midcentury, Madeira became an additional major port. By then, many Jewish merchants had non-Jewish as well as Jewish partners.21 Colonial New York was a litigious society, and Jewish merchants, like their Christian counterparts, were often in court. A few examples are illustrative.

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Moses Levy initiated a five-year case in chancery court in 1722 against Nathan Simson and Jacob Franks, executors of his brother Samuel Levy’s estate. Moses, accusing Samuel of throwing salt in a shipment of cocoa and then selling it to him, won the suit. In another case, a mariner sued Moses over nonpayment of salary. Moses lost that case in a jury trial but won a similar case against Thomas Rollins, also a sailor, whom, Moses argued, was paid in London. The most famous case, over rights to a Spanish ship captured as a war prize, lasted fifteen years, ending in the Privy Council (royal cabinet). The Jewish merchants who bought the ship claimed the cargo as rightfully theirs, defeating the British owners of the privateer and the Crown, which claimed part of the merchandise as contraband. While not professional lawyers, merchants became well versed in pertinent aspects of the law and competently represented themselves and fellow traders.22

■ A Colonial Silversmith of Consummate Skill A number of Jewish residents desirous of merchant standing began as tradesmen/artisans. Craftsmen were generally of middling status, trained in the traditions or “mysteries” of their crafts through a seven-year apprenticeship and years as journeymen, working for skilled master craftsmen. They manufactured products ranging from rough garments, shoes, and loaf bread to intricate woodwork and silver and gold objects treasured today. The most celebrated colonial Jewish artisan was Ashkenazi Myer Myers. Son of shopkeeper Solomon Myers, an immigrant perhaps from Amsterdam, he became New York’s most noted silversmith. Myers served a seven-year apprenticeship, becoming a freeman of New York. He found success from his formidable talent and from his marriage to Elkalel Cohen, daughter of wealthy merchant Samuel Myers Cohen, with connections to the prominent Jewish Philadelphia Gratz family. Myers’s commercial and professional achievement allowed him to purchase a large double house on King Street, thirty-four feet by seventy-eight feet, twice the size of an average English silversmith’s household. His home included a residence, a store, and a workshop. Myers employed his silversmith brother to purchase goods in London for retail sale in his shop and entered into a partnership with Benjamin Halsted, a silversmith with lesser skill but valuable capital. Myers’s patrons included the first president of Kings College, William Samuel Johnson, the Livingston family, and the Brick Presbyterian Church. His physician, Peter Middleton, introduced him to

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the Duane and Morris clans. Perhaps his greatest honor came upon his election as president of New York’s Gold and Silver Smith’s Society in 1786.23 Myers stayed abreast of European trends by learning readily from immigrants. His style progressed first to the rococo, stressing curvilinear elegance in the natural beauty of shells and flowers, and then to neoclassicism, centering on the restraint, balance, and proportion of geometric forms. His preference for the neoclassical lasted beyond the Revolutionary era. He employed European-trained engravers, chasers, and piercers. Myers crafted decorative pieces of hollow silver, such as coffee pots, work that was done only by the finest silversmiths and was always “bespoken” or preordered by his patrons. Myers also imported gold and silver jewelry. He attracted a middling clientele with silver flatware and tankards and with repair work.24 Mercantile aspirations led Myers to invest in the Spruce Hill Lead Mine in Connecticut, a failure that cost him a considerable part of his wealth, led to suits for debt, and forced him to sell his residence on King Street. Fortunately, his skill returned him to solvency.25 Despite intimate business ties to the city’s prominent Christian families, Myers strongly identified with the Jewish community. A leading member of Shearith Israel, he served three terms as parnas. He crafted silver for religious occasions including weddings and funerals, often modest items such as spoons whose simplicity bespoke a Jewish intention of maintaining a low profile. Few Jewish families bought expensive hollow ware. The silversmith best expressed his Jewish commitment by producing five pairs of Torah finials (decorative holders). Myers followed Maimonides’s decree for “silver and golden pomegranates,” visible in the finials’ bells (likely imported from Holland) and in the finely wrought engraving. He produced finials for Shearith Israel and for the Jews of Newport and Philadelphia. They remain “unique examples of eighteenth-century American Jewish religious silver.”26 Myers was the most famous Jewish artisan in colonial America, but he was but one of many Jewish craftsmen. The need for kosher meat, which New York exported throughout the Caribbean, guaranteed a livelihood for butchers. Jewish shoemakers, soap makers, watchmakers, tailors, and wig makers also found sustenance in New York. Benjamin Seixas, advertising his wares, declared that he “makes and sells all sort of saddles, chairs, chaises and harnesses.” Jacob De Acosta announced that anyone who had broken glasses or china could have them fixed “in the neatest manner ever seen in this city”

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and that the work would not be “botched up for half price.” Levy Simons, an “Embroiderer from london,” announced that he could embellish gold and silver, silks, aprons, shoes, and other items “in the neatest and newest fashion.” London “taylor” Michael Hyams wished to “acquaint gentlemen and ladies” of his “peculiar method” of making dresses as well as officers’ uniforms and ladies’ riding garments. Simon Franks, a wig maker from London, announced his knowledge of the “best and neatest Fashion,” and that he cut and dressed “Lady’s Wigs and Towers” in a mode “better than is pretended to be done by some others.” Free of restrictive guilds, Jews entered the artisan classes, the heart of eighteenth-century seaports’ populations.27 Jewish grocers, retailers, and physicians, similar in standing to artisans, also lived in colonial New York. One shopkeeper, Moses Jacobs, “lately from Germany,” announced that, among his wares, was an “iron mould poder” to remove stains and a “Venetian tooth-powder” to whiten good teeth and prevent teeth “that are rotten from growing worse.” He also sold “an excellent worm-powder” that produced “an effectual cure in a fortnight.” Jewish physician Dr. Elias Woolin of Bohemia, advertised in 1740 that he had served in his “Imperial Majesties Army” as “Chirurgeon” for four years. In 1752, Jacob Isaacs, also from Germany, stated that he treated venereal diseases, promising “wonderful cures.” Andrew Judah informed the public in the New-York Gazette that “a medicinal doctor” had “lately arrived in the city.” Judah was Shearith Israel’s physician, treating the poor; the congregation paid bills up to sixteen pounds. Abraham Abrahams, the first Jewish graduate from King’s College, became a physician.28 Silversmith Myers and most fellow artisans and physicians occupied the middling class of New Yorkers. Historian Jacob Rader Marcus’s analysis of New York colonial tax records reveals that most Jews were in the uppermiddle ranks of society during colonial wars and in other years in either the middle or lower-middle orders. They paid taxes and usually owned their own homes. Jews were also present at the bottom of the economic ladder. Given the uncertainties of the colonial markets, it is not surprising that a number of Jewish merchants failed. Some, such as Isaac Levy, Moses Hart, and Hayman Levy, went bankrupt. Levy, who supplied the British during the French and Indian War, became insolvent in 1765, asking Newport merchant Aaron Lopez for aid. (Lopez could only send him a few candles to sell, as he had a New York agent.) A few merchants and tradesmen landed in debtor’s

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prison. In 1773, shopkeeper Michael Jacobs sent a letter (with his mark, since he could not write English) to prominent merchant Solomon Simson seeking assistance, pleading that he had languished in debtor’s jail for “upwards of twenty-six weeks, . . . which has so reduced him that he . . . cannot afford himself the common necessary’s of life.” Still others absconded. Gerardus Beekman, a prominent merchant landowner, tried to find the whereabouts of debtor Ralph Isaacs. Moses Franks of London eventually informed him that Isaacs was last seen in Holland, the location of “new scenes of villainy.” A last, uncommon resort was crime. Moses Susman, indicted for stealing “Gold Silver money bag rings &c.” from fellow Jew Moses Levy, was hanged on the City Common in August 1727.29

■ Slavery in New York A resident of New York standing outside the Mill Street synagogue in the 1730s could not have missed the arrival of Lewis Gomez, one of the city’s wealthiest Jewish merchants. The family marched in procession, led by the elder Gomez. Following them were his personal slaves carrying the family’s prayer books and prayer shawls. In a ceremony symbolic of the deferential nature of colonial American society, upon reaching the synagogue the slaves entered, placed the books and shawls on the proper chairs, and left as the family took their seats.30 Slavery was a major part of New York’s colonial life from the Dutch era on. During the second and third decades of the eighteenth century, with Caribbean trade flourishing, the city’s slave population increased to over 15 percent of the population. By the end of the era, New York housed more slaves than any colony north of Maryland. Men of both middling and genteel standing might own slaves. Slaves worked on the docks, as assistants to craftsmen, and, most commonly, as household servants for the city’s elite. Wealthy slave owners leased slaves to tradesmen in need of temporary labor.31 Extant wills and the 1703 census indicate the common ownership of slaves among wealthy Jews. In 1703, four out of the six Jewish families listed owned slaves. Thirteen of the twenty-three extant wills written prior to the Revolutionary era (1765) bequeathed slaves. In 1740, Uriah Hyam, a little-known member of Shearith Israel, left his son Andrew Israel in Jamaica: “my Negro boy named cavandro.” Joseph Bueno de Mesquita willed his “Loving

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wife rachell .  .  . & to her heires forever” most of his fortune, his household goods, and, the will states, “all the slaves now belonging to mee.” Samuel Myers Cohen bestowed on his spouse: “all those negroes Slaves I have which I shall die possessed of.” Merchant Isaac Gomez provided his ailing wife his home and “as many of [his] Slaves as are necessary to attend her.” Isaac Pinheiro bequeathed his son Jacob £250 and “A Negro Boy Named andover,” and his son Moses £100, “together with one Negro boy, named sharlow.” He left both sons, “to share and share alike,” fifteen “Negros” in Nevis. Silversmith Myers owned slaves and a “servant man.” In 1763, he offered a reward for the return of his “Negro Wench,” Daphne, who was “tall and not very black.”32 A few Jewish merchants manumitted slaves. Moses Michal, who lived both in New York and Curaçao and who wrote his will in Dutch, on the one hand left his children two slaves, tham and prins, and on the other gave his “Negro piro freedom and discharge of all Slavish service.” Similarly, Benjamin Gomez, parnas for three terms, bequeathed his wife two slaves and gave his married daughter Rachel his household furniture, plate, jewels, linen, and his “two slaves ishmael & jenney to her & her heirs forever.” Yet he also directed that his “Mustie Wench kattey” be “made free from the Yoke of Slavery” in gratitude for her “fidelity & faithfull Services” to his daughter Rachel, by then deceased. Gomez also freed another slave.33 Beyond ownership of slaves, a number of Jewish merchants participated in the slave trade, though their consignments represented a small fraction of these enterprises. Jewish shipowners participated in 8.3 percent of the New York slave trade, importing 377 slaves of the 4,363 known to have arrived in the seaport between 1715 and 1765. A quarter of these came directly from Africa on 14 slave ships; 140 vessels originated in the Caribbean. Jews partnered in two African voyages: Nathan Simson was a colleague in the importation of 100 slaves in 1717 with two non-Jewish partners, and in 1721 Simson joined Isaac Levy (then in London but later a resident of New York) and Richard Janeway and William Walton to import 240 slaves on the Crown Galley, from Madagascar through Brazil and Barbados. The latter voyage was horrific, as only 117 Africans survived the diseases on board. Of those who made it to New York, 106 were sold at auction to ninety-five different New Yorkers; the other 11 were too sick for sale. Other Jews, while not owning ships, participated in the trade. Mordecai Gomez and two of his brothers imported 61 slaves: 55 in partnership

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with non-Jews, 6 on their own. Moses Levy and brother-in-law Jacob Franks imported 71 slaves: 52 in partnership with Gentile merchants, 19 on their own. Robert Pacheco imported 21 slaves in tandem with non-Jewish partners. The widow Simja da Silva De Torres imported 3 slaves in 1728 via the Duke of Portland and 4 in 1742, one of whom was, she said, “for my person.” Jewish merchants took part in New York’s slave trade, a trade that provided income for a few leading families.34 Colonial New York witnessed two slave revolts, the first in 1712 and the second in 1741. Jews were involved in the second revolt, a plot that historians have debated as a possible political fabrication. The outbreak allegedly began with ten separate fires (including one in Fort George) within a few weeks. Fear spread of a Spanish/Catholic conspiracy. Over a hundred blacks were arrested and held in the city hall dungeon. Thirteen were burned at the stake; seventeen were hanged, as were four whites suspected as ringleaders. Jews owned five of the arrested blacks. Transcripts — Mordecai Gomez served as the Spanish translator during legal proceedings — indicated that Samuel Myers Cohen’s house was a target, and he testified against two slaves for stealing goods worth five pounds. When Hereford, one of his own slaves, was implicated, Cohen insisted on personally interrogating Jack, the accuser. Under cross-examination, Jack recanted his testimony, and Hereford was discharged. Cuffee, Luis Gomez’s slave, went to the stake, condemned as a ringleader. The court transported Cajoe, Mordecai Gomez’s slave, and Windsor, another of Myers Cohen’s slaves, to the West Indies. Diana, slave of David Machado; Jack, the slave of Judah Hays; and Lucena, slave of Jacob Franks were arrested but never tried.35 Well-to-do Jewish merchants, dressed in the stylish English waistcoats and linen of their Christian counterparts, shared a common attitude to slavery. They accepted it as part of daily life. On average, they owned no more and no fewer slaves than their non-Jewish peers. At Passover, they did not relate the story of their exodus from Egyptian bondage to African-American slavery. Colonial Jews sought standing in a society in which slave owning was the norm. Like their neighbors, they accepted this institution as part of the accepted social hierarchy and organization. The merchant princes of New York were the undisputed leaders of the city’s small but coherent Jewish community. Clothed in fashionable eighteenthcentury English attire, Ashkenazi and Sephardic merchants worked and mixed

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easily with each other and with their Christian counterparts while yet retaining their Jewish identity and allegiance. They took advantage of the political freedom and economic openness of New York Colony to make the city an ever welcoming haven for Jews and a fertile ground for the growth of Jewish republican ideals.

A Chanukah menorah from the seventeenth or early eighteenth century, probably made in Holland. (Courtesy Congregation Shearith Israel)

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A Synagogue Community

Abraham Rodriguez de Rivera was born on the Iberian Peninsula late in the seventeenth century. There he married and fathered a son. After the death of his wife, he remarried and later immigrated to New York with that son, his new wife, and their two children. Upon arrival in the new world, he adopted the name Abraham. (His original name is not known.) His wife took the name of Sarah. His children were named Isaac, Jacob, Rebecca, and Rachel. In coming to the new world, they believed that they were following the example of their biblical patriarchs and matriarchs as they journeyed to the Promised Land. In 1730, during Abraham’s residency in New York, the city’s Jews consecrated the first synagogue built on the North American mainland; Abraham contributed the substantial sum of eight pounds. The community named it Shearith Israel (Remnant of Israel ), indicating that they saw themselves as refugees. Would New York be a new homeland, a permanent haven, or would it be a harbor of exile, looking to a future Zion? The divergent meanings expressed in these symbolic name echoed through New York City’s Jewish history for generations.1

■ New York’s First Synagogue In 1682, under English rule, New York’s Jews began to gather for private religious services. (The mayor and Common Council banned public worship until 1691.) The return of British rule in 1691 following Leisler’s Rebellion opened public worship to the Jewish community. Tradition places a religious meetinghouse in the mid-1690s at a home on Beaver Street. The first evidence of a synagogue is a house on Mill Street on the site of a horse mill. Tax rolls indicate that the Jewish community leased it as a place of worship in 1703,

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using it continuously from 1709. Assessment rolls term the dwelling the “Jew synagogue” and the house next door as rented to “the Jew Rabby [teacher].” Rent was eight pounds. This early congregation named itself Shearith Jacob, the remnant of Jacob, referring to Micah’s promise that Jews would prosper in the midst of other nations. While its bylaws are lost, records from 1720 to 1722 reveal a congregation with thirty-seven active members. Unlike its successor, it owned no building.2 In 1728, the Jewish community, headed by prominent merchants including Sephardi Luis Gomez and Ashkenazi Jacob Franks, formed a new congregation; in 1730 its members raised funds needed to purchase a lot and construct a new building, the first home of Shearith Israel. While New York’s Jews provided the major backing, contributions arrived from many Jewish communities including Boston, Barbados, Jamaica, Curaçao, and London. A third of the £600 collected came from outside New York. Unlike the wooden-frame rented house, the synagogue was constructed of brick with a floor of Bristol stone covered with sand. Its interior followed the Sephardic architectural style of London and Amsterdam, with the ark at the east end, separated by banisters. The ark held the congregation’s Torah scrolls, the Pentateuch, decorated with silver finials. Benches ran north and south; women’s benches were in a separate gallery/balcony that extended over three-quarters of the room and had its own entrance. The president (parnas) and vice president had their own seats (banco) near the ark. Space was reserved for standees and processions. Seven candles, each “as large as a man’s arm,” illuminated the elevated reading desk in the center, three feet above the floor. Five candelabras lit the sanctuary; the centerpiece featured thirty-two candles. Along with tablets depicting the Ten Commandments, a perpetual lamp hung in front of the ark. Most visitors noticed the ark. The synagogue’s exterior, standing thirty-five feet square and twenty-one feet high, was not ornate. The lot included a courtyard large enough to accommodate a mikveh (ritual bath) using water from the spring that fed the original mill. In 1731, with the help of a London merchant, the congregation erected a two-story building to house a school and administrative offices. In 1758, Shearith Israel purchased a third building as a home for the shamash, or caretaker. The synagogue’s cemetery, acquired by the Jewish community in 1682, was located on New Bowery near Chatham Square.3 The Jews of New York, following the model of Amsterdam and London, formed a “synagogue community.” Living in a Christian society, numbering

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less than 1 percent of the city’s population, they made the synagogue their spiritual center of gravity and the focus of the community’s ethnic identity. The rules and rituals for which it stood governed much of the nonbusiness lives of its members. Since riding on the Sabbath was forbidden, most Jews resided within close walking distance in the South, East, and especially the Dock Ward, the site of Shearith Israel. Following Jewish dietary laws, most members ate only at their own or each other’s kosher homes, enhancing the sense of community. As the only synagogue in the thirteen colonies from 1730 to 1763, the sanctuary drew crowds during autumn High Holy Days as Jews traveled to New York from Philadelphia and as far as Halifax in Canada. Wills indicate devotion to the synagogue; many members left it part of their fortune. Rachel Luis in 1737 ordered her “houshold furnitur” sold, including all “potts and pans,” to buy a “Shefer Tora [Torah] for the use of Kall Kados [Holy Congregation] of Sherith Ysraell.” Joshua Isaacs bequeathed fifty pounds “to teach poor Children the Hebrew tongue.” Widow Simja De Torres left five pounds, Mordecai Gomez twenty-five pounds, and Solomon Simson twenty pounds. Material gifts included rams’ horns, wine goblets, pointers for reading the Torah, decorative hangings, and tablecloths.4

■ Synagogue Governance Authority at Shearith Israel reflected the deference common to colonial America and to the traditions of the Sephardic communities of Amsterdam and London. That the synagogue never sought a rabbi before the 1840s in part reflected the desire of its lay leaders to be at the helm of the Jewish community. Shearith Israel employed three officials. The hazan, the spiritual leader of the congregation, circumcised male newborns, prepared male youth for bar mitzvah, and, when a teacher was not employed, ran the school. He conducted services twice a day during the week and three times on the Sabbath. Though not ordained, he was fluent in Hebrew and could respond to religious questions not demanding intensive Talmudic inquiry. Assisting him was the shamash, who kept the sanctuary clean and supplied with wood, water, and candles. The bodeck/ shochet provided certified kosher meat for the community and beyond.5 The most important synagogue official, the parnas, or president of the congregation, was not an employee. As the lay chief officer, he oversaw the three paid officials, distributed funds to the poor (or secured their exit from the city), supervised the congregation’s finances, and maintained order in the

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synagogue, including mediation of disputes, religious and otherwise. The position was time-consuming, and many of the men most in demand, the leading married merchants of the city, given the requirements of their trade, often declined to serve more than once or twice and preferred to pay a fine for their refusal. In 1751, the congregation split the position into six-month segments to attract candidates. Members of the Gomez and Franks families, the congregation’s most prominent families, served most often, though many men of standing held this honored position. A small governing board, known in Amsterdam as the Mahamad and in New York as the adjuntos or elders, assisted the parnas. Composed of the city’s distinguished Jewish citizens, the board elected the next parnas, advising him on synagogue issues. Jews who supported the synagogue by paying seat assessments were the members ( yehidim). Those who did not pay could stand at religious services.6 While London and Amsterdam had both Ashkenazi and Sephardic synagogues, New York, with its small Jewish population, supported only Shearith Israel from 1730 to 1824. Though Ashkenazim outnumbered Sephardim after 1720, the synagogue followed Sephardic traditions. It incorporated the practice of European Sephardic synagogues of placing authority in the hands of the parnas and the elders who made most decisions; yehidim participated in governance for the election of the hazan, shamash, and shochet and at times of crisis. Shearith Israel adopted the Sephardic practice of positioning the hazan in the center of the synagogue when leading prayers; Hebrew pronunciation followed the Sephardic manner; morning blessings took place in the synagogue rather than at home. The early minutes of the synagogue were in Portuguese, and, until the Revolution, the prayer for the king was offered in Spanish. Despite Sephardic ritual, Ashkenazim regularly served as parnassim. Shearith Israel ignored the advice of the rabbi of the Curaçao congregation to get the Ashkenazim to “signe an agreement” to limit their authority. When internal dissension endangered the congregation, as in 1746 when “something must immediately be done,” the elders turned to Jacob Franks, an Ashkenazi, and Mordecai Gomez, a Sephardi, for resolution. Still, intermarriage between Ashkenazim and Sephardim could occasion tension within the small community.7 Since New York had no public education until the 1820s, the congregation maintained a school, offered gratis to poor members. The first academy,

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founded in 1730 and named Yeshivat Minchat Arav, taught Hebrew for three hours a day; secular subjects were quickly added. Wealthier Jewish New Yorkers employed the school for part of their children’s education. Jacob Franks sent his sons and daughters to the synagogue school in the morning for instruction in “french, Spanish hebrew and writing”; in the afternoon, George Brownell taught them “Reading Writing Cyphering, Merchant Accoumpts, Latin, Greek, etc.” At Shearith Israel’s school, the teacher was either a “ribbi,” an instructor whose duty was to teach and accompany the children to Sabbath services, or the hazan, who taught for an additional fee. In 1775, for example, the elders contracted with the hazan, for an additional twenty pounds salary, to keep daily school at his home, “Fryday afternoons Holy Days and Fast days Excepted,” for six hours in summer and four hours otherwise. He taught “Hebrew, Spanish, English, writting & Arithmetick.” The elders visited monthly. Minutes reveal that schools held sessions only periodically. Even so, the congregation increased Jewish and secular literacy, allowing the next generation to surpass their parents’ education and fit more comfortably into British-American society.8 The congregation accepted responsibility for poor relief, seeing it as a begrudging, discretionary obligation. The congregation was charged to assist the poor “with as much as the Parnaz and his assistants shall think fitt.” One of the largest expenses of Shearith Israel, relief strained synagogue resources. In 1728 – 1729, the elders allocated thirty pounds for obras pias (work of the poor), an expense second only to the hazan’s salary. The next year the amount (fiftythree pounds) exceeded his salary, and it increased to seventy-eight pounds by 1748. The congregation availed itself of one solution: it shipped the indigent out of the city. If a poor Jew, incapable of maintaining him- or herself “should happen to come to this place,” he or she would be entitled to eight shillings a week for twelve weeks. After that, the parnas was to “despatch them to sum othere place,” assisting them in “their Voyage.” For example, on September 18, 1755, the elders resolved “that the widow Abrams and her family shall be shipt off & her passage paid,” and on July 7, 1756, they ordered that “Mrs. Hannah Louzada should be dispatched to Lancaster.” In 1765, the congregation gave Aaron Pinto “three Corse Shirts,” as he was “almost naked.” He was then “to be dispatchd by first oppty” to Newport “to take passage to Surinam.” If he refused to leave, he must remain “at his own Expence.”9

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■ Ritual Observance Ritual observance was central to eighteenth-century Jewish identity in colonial New York. Tradition dictated life-cycle events. Circumcision, the foremost requirement, took place eight days after the birth of a male child, provided a mohel (ritual circumciser) could be found in time. Male children celebrated bar mitzvah at thirteen. Celebrations began immediately after the service and ran for two days, at which “anybody who was anybody” began to “blow their heads off.” Saturday night was for dancing, and Sunday an open house. When children sought a marriage partner, the father of a prospective groom asked the future bride’s family for consent to proceed. If the couple wished to wed, the groom requested permission from the congregation. The two families prepared a carefully written contract according to ancient custom, including sections ensuring the bride’s financial security if she became a widow. Weddings occurred on Sundays in the bride’s home, outside if weather permitted. For funerals, the coffin of the deceased would be carried “on the shoulders of the members of the congregation” in procession to the sacred burying ground.10 Sabbath, from Friday evening to Saturday evening, anchored the week. Jewish law and custom permitted no work, no writing, no transaction of business. It was a day of profound rest. Jacob Franks’s wife, Abigaill, noted its importance to an observant family: “I never knew the benifit of the Sabath before,” she wrote to her son in London, “but Now I am Glad when it comes for his [Jacob’s] Sake that he may have a Little reLaxation from t[ha]t Continuall Hurry he is in.” Swedish botanist Peter Kalm, visiting America in 1747, was impressed with Sabbath observance. He noted that New York’s Jews “never cook any food for themselves on Saturday but that it is done on the day before; they keep a fire in their houses on Saturday in the winter.” Jacob Franks, because he could not handle money on the Sabbath or a holiday, asked his merchant friend Isaac Watts to temporarily pay an account when funds were due on a High Holy Day. The congregation conducted weekly Sabbath prayer services at the synagogue; Jewish holidays were celebrated similarly.11 A critical area of ritual observance, kashrut, included the supply and inspection of kosher meat. The ritual slaughterer (shochet), one of the three paid officials of the synagogue, was carefully supervised. In 1771, for example, the board inquired whether malpractice of its bodek/shochet caused a number of kitchens to become traif, or nonkosher, preventing Jewish residents from

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The Omer Counter used by Congregation Shearith Israel in the eighteenth century. The Omer represents the commandment to count forty-nine days beginning from the day on which the Omer, a sacrifice conaining an omer, a measure of barley, was offered in the Temple in Jerusalem, to the day before an offering of wheat was brought to the Temple on Shavuot. “H” stands for Homer (Omer), “S” stands for semana (week), and “D” stands for dia (day). (Courtesy Congregation Shearith Israel)

using their dining facilities. As members supplied kosher meat to coastal and Caribbean communities, the synagogue determined to ensure its beef met requirements of Jewish law. Elders spent hours dealing with the inspection and labeling of beef. When Jamaican Jews accused the New York congregation of laxity, parnas Sampson Simson responded that “every quarter [of beef] is seal’d with Led. [lead] & the persons who put up Beef take care to see it cut up & properly sent to their Houses.” The elders, he declared, “have the principles of our Holy Religion truly at Heart and that we shall not knowingly permit any thing in our power to be done Contrary thereto.” When scarcity threatened, the community limited the exportation of beef to ensure ample meat for the congregation, levying a forty-shilling fine on anyone who “takes any beef or fatt on any fryday or Hereb Yomtob [holiday eve] for Exportation or Sale.”12 Shearith Israel viewed itself as the guardian of Jewish tradition in New

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York’s hinterlands. In 1757, the congregation’s elders, concerned that too many people “that reside in the Country . . . do dayly violate the principles [of their] holy religion such as Trading On the Sabath, Eating of forbidden Meats & other Henious Crimes,” warned country brethren either to return to strict religious behavior or to lose the “Mitztote [privileges] of the Sinagoge.” The following year, believing that their decree had “in some measure succeeded,” the elders reconsidered “the admonition read last Kippur” and invited “whosoever may thinck that they are quallified, but wrongfully debard” to participate in synagogue rituals. The elders saw themselves as “fiatful Sheepherds [who] call into the fold the wandring sheep”; their concern was “establishing & supporting [their] holy religion.” Expressing the same unease, merchant Uriah Hendricks rejected a suitor for his Aunt Hava, though the young man had sufficient money, because he “continually Break Shabbat & Eat trefat & have no Regard to Religion.”13 How observant were New York’s Jews? Kalm noted that Jews “commonly eat no pork” but that those traveling on business did not hesitate to break the dietary laws, “even though they were in company of Christians.” Such laxity likely triggered the congregation’s concern with country Jews. It is not possible to go into the homes of the Livingstons, Morisses, Gomezes, and Frankses to see how the Jewish mercantile elite behaved when they dined with their Christian counterparts. Some may have compromised. Yet Jacob Franks’s wife, Abigaill, instructed son Naphtali not to eat anything but “bread & butter” at her brother Asher’s home in London or anywhere where “there is the Least doubt of things not done after [their own] Strict Judaicall method.” She cautioned, “wathever my thoughts may be Concerning Some Fables, . . . I look Opon the Observence Conscientioussly and therefore with my blessing I Strictly injoyn it to your care.”14 Not only did ritual observance inform New York Jewish social and religious life, but it also linked New Yorkers to Jewish communities in the Caribbean, Europe, and North Africa. Although it served as a strong bond within the community, how strictly the city’s Jews observed religious ritual is impossible to determine.

■ Conflict in the Synagogue Maintaining peace in the synagogue and community proved the elders’ most difficult and time-consuming task. Synagogue minutes reveal periodic congre-

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gational conflict, often so intense that it threatened not only the comity but the very existence of the synagogue. There were two basic themes: the difficulty that the dues-paying members had with those not paying their fair share, and the difficulty in mediating between highly sensitive members. Shearith Israel’s income came chiefly from seat assessments, gifts, legacies, fines, and offerings. The problem of fiscal accountability surfaced in 1737 when the synagogue’s board decreed that “every family or private person that carries on trade in the country” must pay yearly dues of forty shillings. Those who refused would receive “no benifit nor Mitzvah” from the congregation, including the right of burial in the synagogue’s cemetery. In 1747, at a general meeting to discuss Jews who did not support the synagogue, the “the Mejorety of the Jehidim here present” levied a tax to cover synagogue costs. Anyone who paid timely would “be intiteled to a Siat in the Sinagog,” be listed in the book of “Jehidim,” and could become parnas or an adjunto provided he “behaves with decency quiatly and peasefuly.” Any member refusing to pay his assessment for four successive quarters would have his name “Rased out of the Book of offerings,” would not be given the honor of being called to the Torah, and would no longer be “Loock’t upon as a Member of [the] Congregation.”15 Five years later, financial pressures produced “all manner of discord & Division amongst the Members,” many of whom resented fellow Jews who received benefits without supporting the synagogue. Addressing unacceptable acts of protest, the elders declared that a member called to the “Sepher” (Torah) had to follow the parnas’s request or pay a fine of twenty shillings. Responding to members’ outrage, they decreed that a Jew who “in his lifetime” had “absented himself from the Sinagogue” or was “no ways a benefactor to the Congregation” would not have his “corps” interred “within the walls of [the congregation’s] Burrying Ground,” absent a special exemption.16 The most common source of turmoil was the issue of authority. Although deference was part of the social fabric of colonial America and the Sephardic tradition, many members were educated, prominent figures who had difficulty respecting any power other than themselves. Recognizing the problem, the earliest minutes of the synagogue delegated “authority to the Gentm That shall be elected yearly [the elders or adjuntos] . . . that with the fear of God they may act as their Conscience shall dictate them for well Governing” of the congregation. If “any persons or persons whatsoever shall offer to give any affront or abuse, Either by words or action to any person or persons within the

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said Sinagog,” they were to pay the parnas a fine of twenty shillings. If they refused, “the whole Congregation” would “assist” in its collection, suggesting ostracism. Three years later, the elders issued a regulation “for the peace and harmony of the Kahal [community] and of the holy synagogue,” stating that a member called to the “Sepher Torah,” the central act of the Sabbath service, had to offer blessings for the health of the parnas and the congregation. Refusal incurred a fine of thirty shillings. The parnas represented the congregation; disrespect undermined the entire community.17 In 1746, conflict ignited beyond the elders’ capacity for control and conciliation. Calling a special meeting, the yehidim charged the parnas, two elders, and the two of the city’s most eminent Jews, Jacob Franks and Mordecai Gomez, with the task of preparing “good and wholesome Laws.” In the meantime, the yehidim, “finding it necessary for the peace of our said congregation that something must immediately be done,” decreed that any member disturbing “the devotion and quiet of our holy worship,” would be ordered out of the synagogue by the parnas, not to return until he paid a fine of up to five pounds. Fifty members signed the decree.18 Despite the work of Franks and Gomez, disputes continued. In 1748, the conduct of Judah Hays, a dealer in wholesale and retail goods and a synagogue founder who served twice as parnas, became a serious issue. Hays was outspoken in synagogue, insulting authority. Responding to his behavior, the elders stipulated a twenty-shilling fine for any member causing a disturbance or speaking without the parnas’s consent, other than “in their proper turn or place.” In addition, the elders excused Hays, “for sufficient reasons” and “at his request,” from attending meetings of the congregation. The following year, “frequent disturbances” disrupted New Year’s services when the parnas refused to carry out his duties. As a result, synagogue notables, including Daniel Gomez and Jacob Franks, agreed to accept the position of parnas in set order.19 In 1755, the most troubling controversy during the colonial era erupted. On the evening of Kol Nidre 1755, a warm night, Gitlah, wife of Solomon Hays, sat in a packed women’s gallery with an invited guest. (Solomon, brother of Judah, was a shochet and a merchant.) The sash on the window had been removed because of the day’s heat. Unexpectedly a storm drenched Mrs. Hays. Without consulting the elders, Solomon went to the women’s gallery and replaced the sash, only to have it removed, with permission of the elders, by ladies in the gallery. Mrs. Hays then closed the window, but women in the

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gallery, uncomfortable in the stifling sanctuary, again reopened it. Ensuring it would not again be shut, Moses Gomez, son of Daniel Gomez, went upstairs and removed the window entirely. This encounter concluded in the courtyard with the physical ejection of Hays, who continued to vociferously protest, from the synagogue. The elders fined Hays twenty shillings. Hays responded by filing assault charges against the parnas and a number of elders. Shearith Israel reacted to this public, legal attack with its first and only excommunication, issuing an edict, read in February, May, and October of 1756, stating that no member of the congregation was to have “Conversation Correspondance or Commasty With him [Hays] because he has Candellise [Scandalized] us amonst the Christens.”20 The trial of the assault charges against Moses Gomez and the elders lasted nineteen days, with nine witnesses for the Crown and forty-five for the elders. The prosecutor, using Solomon Hays’s testimony, argued that when Hays reproved Gomez, stating, “So you show your Authority that you are an Elder,” Gomez struck Hays in the face “so that Blood flew from his Mouth.” Then the elders forcefully removed Hays from synagogue grounds. Members of the synagogue, the prosecutor reasoned, were angry at Hays for charging that Daniel Gomez practiced usury in his business; for exposing two Jewish residents of Albany as noncitizens, causing them to lose trading privileges; and for alleging that the congregation attempted to cause the Christian wife of Isaac Isaacs “to renounce her Savior, and become a proselite to the Jewish Religion.” These incidents led to an “inveterate Hatred” toward “Informer” Hays. The jury found the elders innocent and ordered Hays to pay the costs of the defense attorney.21 The dispute simmered for five more years. Seeking revenge, Hays began writing a book detailing sins of the synagogue. But the pains of ostracism took their toll. In January 1760, at a meeting of the elders, Hays made “proper submission for the Injuries done the Congregation,” paid a hefty twenty-pound fine, gave bond for good behavior, and pledged to “deliver up a certain book in his possession wrote against [the Shearith Israel] Society.” The elders then readmitted him as “a member of this Kaal,” adding the words “Salom hal Israel” (peace upon Israel).22 But trouble in the women’s gallery had not ended. In 1760, what seemed more like a comic opera roiled the synagogue again. This time Judah Hays’s wife, Josse, was “turned” out of her seat by Judah Mears, who wanted it for his

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A stone from Sheaerith Israel’s first cemetery. The position of the hands indicates that the man buried was a Cohen, a descendant of the priestly tribe. Maintenance of the cemetery was one of the synagogue’s most important responsibilities. (Courtesy Congregation Shearith Israel)

daughter. The congregation tried to make peace by widening the seat so both could be accommodated, but to no avail. Judah Hays, refusing to settle, was fined and threatened with excommunication. He refused to pay. Three years later, after Josse’s death, Jacob Franks paid the fine, and Judah was readmitted to the “Rights and Ceremonies of the Synagogue,” though his name no longer

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appeared in congregational minutes. In 1796, the synagogue removed the offending banca, “the cause of much dissatisfaction.”23 Jews valued deference and decorum as part of their European tradition and as a means to win acceptance within the Christian community. However, the importance of status and standing within the small community and congregation could overcome the forces of comity and restraint. Too, the resentment of members against Jews not paying dues or attending services indicated the synagogue’s belief in its centrality. Members expected Jews to give the congregation allegiance and took umbrage at some Jews’ willingness to remain outside of synagogue governance. Unlike Amsterdam, the American synagogue possessed no legal authority to maintain order and discipline. That Shearith Israel, serving a population of 200 to 250 Jews, Ashkenazi and Sephardic, many proud and difficult, held together despite serious stress and disorder represented a significant accomplishment. The congregation proved its centrality to the maintenance of Jewish identity and society in colonial New York City.

■ The State of Religious Belief The state of religious belief beyond ritual observance of the colonial community is difficult to evaluate. Extant wills offer evidence of core beliefs. In the earliest known Jewish New York will (1704), merchant Joseph Tores Nunez stated in the opening paragraph, “I do recommend my Soule to God that gave it me & my body to the Earth there to be decently buried in hopes of a glorious resurrecion at the last day.” Four years later, Joseph Bueno used the same phrase in his will. In 1716, the second hazan of the congregation and a merchant, Abraham Haim De Lucena, wrote, “I bequeath my Immortal Soul into the hands of the Almighty God of Israel My Creator Trusting in his Mercy for pardon of All my sines, and hoping for A Joyful resurr[ection] to Life Eternal.” Although most colonial Jews “never doubted that there was life after death,” the word resurrection, was used only in the first decades of the eighteenth century. Those who inserted it in their wills lived most of their lives in the seventeenth century. Its use may reflect the legacy of medieval Catholicism on Jews who had lived in Catholic Europe, as well as the messianic belief in resurrection of medieval Judaism. More common in the mid- and later eighteenth century was Samuel Myers Cohen’s statement, “I bequeath my soul unto God that gave it trusting and alone depending on his mercy for my Eternal Salvation,” or Mordecai Gomez’s assertion in 1750, “I committ my

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Precious and immortal Soul into The hands of God who gave it To me and my body to The Earth to be buried in the Jews Burying Ground according To the Jewish Custom.” In both cases, they expressed belief in an external soul as separate from the body.24 If the concept of resurrection receded, piety did not. Within Daniel Gomez’s ledger book, in the midst of ordinary business entries in the mid-eighteenth century, a prayer is suddenly interjected; Be mercyfull to me, O Lord, forgive my Eniquettys. I am morning for my transgretions, they Compres me with tearror of Your Wroth, being sensible, of my sin I begg for forgivnes, and as Your, goodnes, is great, I rely on your mercey and beseach your blesing that I maye be preservd under the Shado of your wings; not for aney wourdenes in me but for your goodnes Sake maye my souel Cleave to the they Comandments and maye I walke in uprightnes, that I maye be one of your belovd Chosen Israelite amen.

The mixture of business entries and soulful prayer is an indication of how “Jewish merchants in eighteenth-century British America expressed, defined and were defined by their religiosity.” Prominent Jewish merchant Aaron Lopez of Newport advised bankrupt New Yorker Hayman Levy that, given the “instability of human affairs,” it must be “consolation” to know that such events “are the decrees of a just [and] wise Ruler, who directs all events for our own good.” The words of these prominent Jewish merchants provide evidence of a strong faith. A religious perspective could bring solace and meaning to businessmen dealing with the vicissitudes of fortune. There was little space between the counting house and the synagogue.25 The hazans of the synagogue give further insight into Jewish piety. The most distinguished colonial figure was Joseph Jeshurun Pinto, hazan from 1758 to 1766, hired from London (though born in Amsterdam) following a lengthy search. Pinto, who earned the title of “Learned Scholar” at the Ets Haim Rabbinical Seminary in Amsterdam, possessed an “introspective spiritual personality,” questioning his fate and seeking to know God’s purpose.26 For Pinto, a Hebraic scholar, though he taught languages on the side, the role of hazan was a full-time rather than a part-time position. He prepared time tables for the Sabbath and compiled a book of the particular “traditions, customs and ceremonies of the New York congregation.” For example, on the seventh night of Passover, the anniversary of the consecration of the syna-

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gogue, the ark would be open throughout the service. Or during Tisha B’Av, the fast commemorating the destruction of the Temples in Jerusalem, the hazan would interject Spanish paraphrases for each verse when chanting from the Book of Lamentations.27 Pinto was the first to publish an English translation of Jewish liturgy in America, The Form of Prayer, a special 1760 prayer service of thanksgiving for the British victory in the French and Indian War. That service invokes a traditional deity, the “Most gracious Lord of the Universe, god above all Gods, and exalted beyond the highest Powers, the Great, the Mighty, and the Omnipotent, who alone can perform Wonders, and in whose Hand is the Salvation of Kings and who directs the whole Power of Earthly Princes.”28 In 1766, Isaac Pinto, a scholarly merchant, teacher, and translator unrelated to the hazan, published a translation of both the Sabbath and High Holy Day services. His preface noted that services were conducted in Hebrew in “Veneration” of the “sacred” language in which God first revealed himself and to preserve it in the “firm Persuasion that it will again be re-established in Israel.” However, as Hebrew was “imperfectly understood by many, by some, not at all,” a translation was in order. The book began with an exhortation to “mortal Man” to “Consider that thou art going to present thyself before the Eternal Omnipotent and Omniscient Being . . . ; Consider . . . that he beholds and observes thee.” If “thou adorest him as thou oughtest, and as is thy duty, thou obtainest Salvation.” Failure to act “bringst Condemnation on thyself.” (The emphasis on salvation may reflect Dutch Calvinist influence, though the piety is in harmony with the language of Jewish wills.) The service would be recognizable at a contemporary Jewish gathering. It began with opening prayers and psalms; included the “Barchu,” “Ahavat Olam,” the “Shema,” the “Kedusha,” the reading of the Torah with prayers in use today; and ended with a “Musaph” service, the “Kaddish,” and the hymns “En Kelohenu” and “Adon Olam.”29 Peter Kalm and physician Alexander Hamilton visited the synagogue in the mid-eighteenth century. Kalm was impressed with the modernity of the service, noting that both men and women dressed in the English fashion and that men kept their hats on during the service. During prayers, men “spread a white cloth over their heads,” with the wealthier sporting a “much richer cloth than the poorer ones.” He noticed that the men had Hebrew books for prayer and song and that the hazan, whom visitors mistook for a rabbi, read prayers while elevated in the center of the room. Hamilton observed “an assembly of

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about fifty of the seed of Abraham chanting and singing their doleful hymns round the sanctuary” while dressed in “robes of white silk.” He could not get the “lugubrious songs” out of his head for a day. The “seven golden candlesticks transformed into silver gilt” in front of the hazan captured his attention. Hamilton compared the women’s gallery to a “hen coop” in which females either prayed “or talked about business.” Kalm saw an educated modern congregation, Hamilton a scene from the Middle Ages. New York’s Jews were modern in the street, but in their sanctuary they held fast to venerable traditions.30 Did the Enlightenment, with its critical view of traditional religion, hold any sway within the Jewish community? While it is difficult to measure its impact, skepticism was present in the letters of Abigaill Franks. The wife of New York’s most prominent Jewish citizen, Abigaill socialized with the best families of New York. A highly educated, well-read woman, she expressed impatience with eighteenth-century Judaism. Writing to her son, she remarked that the author of a recent book on religion was unlikely to be Jewish, for the writer “thought too reasonable.” Critical of the Judaism practiced in New York, she stated, “I cant help Condemning the many Supersti[ti]ons wee are Clog’d with & heartly wish a Calvin or Luther would rise amongst Us, . . . for I don’t think religeon Consist in Idle Cerimonies & works of Supperoregations Wich if they send people to heaven wee & the papist have the Greatest title too.” Abigaill, whose thoughts were often contradictory, was referring to traditional Jewish rituals. While advising her son to strictly observe the dietary laws and noting the Sabbath’s beneficial impact on her husband, she nevertheless could think of Jewish customs as outdated superstition.31 Abigaill Franks, unlike her seventeenth-century progenitors, had little use for the traditional concept of resurrection. In comforting her son over the death of his father-in-law, she wrote that “all the difference after deaths is a mans works here on Earth for that never dyes” and that he or she who has “Left soe Great and Good a name may be Said to have Livd full of days and dyed in a Good Ould Age.” Those who have the “happyness” to be his “relations” will, she trusted, “fallow his Steps in dischageing theire duty to God an man” in the “Severall Stages of Life” that the “Allmighty” yet allows them.32 But Abigaill’s Jewish identity also had a pious aspect. In 1740, she wrote Naphtali that, as she and her husband were well, “I bless god this Leaves Us praying the Allmighty to preserve you in the Same and All other Felicity.” Learning of the death of her son’s infant child, she counseled that it was “the

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Will of that Divine Power to wich all must submit and say with Aaron it’s the Lords doeing and Wee must be Silent.” An age of skepticism influenced Jewish religiosity. However, in the case of Abigaill Franks, when it came to dietary advice to her son, tradition prevailed. And, in times of crisis, such as the death of a child, traditional Judaic piety also triumphed. This was likely true for much of the community.33

■ Abigaill Franks: Faith, Reason, Intermarriage, and Women’s Place in the Community Abigaill Franks wrote about far more than religious beliefs. Her remarkable letters to her son Naphtali, in London as a partner of his father and to seek his fortune, provide a unique window into the life of New York’s Jewish community, its ties to the outside world, and the place of men and women in that world. Abigaill came to New York from London as the daughter of Moses Levy and his first wife, Rycha. At sixteen, she married Franks, also a London émigré, in part to be rid of her stepmother, Grace Mears, whom she intensely disliked. The Franks lived well in New York and Long Island. Abigaill bore eight children, four of whom survived to adulthood. She devoted herself both to their education and to her own. A highly educated woman, she would have been comfortable in a contemporary Berlin salon. Abigaill diligently sought reading material, following the Gentleman’s Magazine, “the New Yorker of the eighteenth century.” She casually quoted Joseph Addison on conscience and commented that while Smollett’s The Adventures of Roderick Random,“pleassed Me Much,” Fielding’s Joseph Andrews “Exceeds him.” She admired Pope’s poetry: “I read him with Some Sort of adoration.” She asked her son for a multivolume history of Poland (in French) and for new books in history, literature, or philosophy. Her wit and erudition are apparent when in telling her son of the death of Bilah Hart, wife of her brother-in-law, she quotes a proverb in Spanish (“A pain in the elbow and the pain for a [lost] spouse hurt a great deal but lasts a short time.”). She follows this quip with a quote from Genesis on the comforting of Judah following his wife’s death. She mused, “I could with Vast Pleassure Imploy three hours of the 24 from my Family Affairs to be diping in a good Author: And relinquish Every other Gaity Commonly Called the pleassure of Life.”34 Abigaill was politically well connected and well informed. During the 1730s, when a serious dispute broke out between, on the one side, Governor

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Cosby and the Delancey family (the family representing the British court party, favoring a strong executive, either monarch or governor) and, on the other side, William Morris and the Livingston clan (representing the country party, favoring a stronger role for Parliament or Assembly), the Franks sought good relations with both. Abigaill stated that she and her husband chose not to take sides; a successful merchant needed allies with both factions. She mixed easily in the homes of notable neighbors including Robert Livingston, perhaps the most esteemed New Yorker, as well as Stephen Bayard and Jacobus Van Cortlandt. It gave her “a Secret pleasure,” she confided, to “Observe the faire Charecter” her family held “in the place by Jews & Christians.”35 As for Abigaill’s Jewish female compatriots, she preferred the cosmopolitan world. “I don’t offten See . . . any of our Ladys but at Synagogue for they are a Stupid Set of People.” Abigaill had little respect for women’s synagogue talk, with its “Variety of News & Tatle,” about which, she said, “I Never am Concerned [and] I dont Care to trouble my Self.” She had limited tolerance for Sephardic pretension. She told her son that the “Portugueze there are in A Violent Uproar” about the coming marriage of Sephardi Isaac Mendes Seixas and Ashkenazi Rachel Levy. She found the controversy trivial, and she wrote merely “to fill a space.” In addition, as a woman of reason, she had little patience for Jewish miscreants, male and female, who were “soe stupid to think all Villiany is to be forgiven Provided they can call themselves good Jews.”36 Abigaill was an ardent British patriot. Aware that her husband was a supplier of the British military in North America, she freely commented on foreign policy. In 1740, at the beginning of King George’s War, a conflict that pitted the British against the Spanish, she supported the Duke of Argyle’s belligerent policy toward Spain, as “Very agreeable to Our Politicians,” viewing him with “A Mixture of Pride as Well As Patriotism.” She regretted that the British did not give greater support to Admiral Vernon’s campaign in the Caribbean, for if he “had bin Assisted [in] a Just manner the Spanish West Indias would by this have bin Very much demolished [if] not the best part in the possession of the English.” When the war ended status quo antebellum in 1748, she remarked that her “Paciffic dispossition” ought to be grateful, but she still wished that “for the honor of Brittian Our Ennimies had bin a little more humble.”37 Abigaill offered advice on proper social conduct. Early in her correspondence, she urged Naphtali, “[Do] not be So free in y[ou]r Discourse on religeon be more Circumspect in the Observence of some things Especialy y[ou]r

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morning Dev[otio]ns.” She likely worried that the laying of tephelin (phylacteries) could be misinterpreted by non-Jews. Displeased by his argumentativeness, she warned him, “[You are] Soe Intent by your Disputes to think Anyone will follow you. It shows in one of your Age” a certain “Self-Opinion,” which, if not “Nipt in the bud,” will “grow opon you.” Two years later, she advised him, as he was “Now Launcht out Amongst Strangers,” to be “Exceeding Circumspect”: “In Your Conduct be Affable to All men.” Naphtali must not be fooled by “fair Speeches of friendship” but rather must be “a Very Just Observer” of his “word, in all Respects,” lest “Ill Habits” become “Customs.” As Naphtali prepared to marry first cousin Phila, Abigaill wrote about the “marri’d state”: without the Ingredient of good Sence & good Nature it Must be Very Insiped for I think there is required the Same Maxims & Reasson to Make a Friendship in Mariage as in any other Article of Life And As you Say you are now blessed with the Utmost of your wishes I dare Say You will Endeavour to Live Up to the Charector You have allways Injoye’d of being Guided by Reasson and Lett that charming Guide be your Director in Every Minutt Circumstance.

Abigaill advised her son to seek moderation and to make his wife a friend. Never make an issue of religion or self-worth; always strive for reason. In that, she was a child of the eighteenth century.38 Abigaill never reconciled her Enlightenment values, including a critique of Jewish religion and its practices, with her piety or her dedication to ritual. Moreover, despite her intellectual cast and her contempt for the superficial lives of the women of Shearith Israel, she often gossiped. Her letters are replete with the problems of her relations, marriages — troubled and otherwise — and of anger and contempt toward her despised stepmother. Moreover, though she denigrated the pettiness of the Sephardic community, when David Gomez, son of prominent Sephardic merchant Luis Gomez, sought the hand of her daughter Richa, she condemned him as a “stupid Wretch” who would never have her consent and, she trusted, would never get her daughter’s.39 The greatest test of Abigaill’s belief in reason, moderation, and circumspection came with her daughter Phila’s elopement. A few years before, Abigaill had criticized her daughters for aiming too high, asking her son, “doe you Expect Your Sisters to be Nuns for Unless they can Meet with a Person that Can keep them a Coach & Six I suppose they must not think of Changeing there Condition?” Would “chance,” she wondered, “Pres[en]t a Worthy Person?”

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Indeed, not in the eyes of Abigaill, for Phila, who had told her mother “that noe Consideration in Life should Ever Induce her to Disoblige Such good Parents,” deceived Abigaill by clandestinely marrying out of her religion, living at home six months without divulging her espousal, then sneaking out one night to join her husband, Oliver Delancey. Oliver, the younger brother of the leader of a politically privileged family, James Delancey, was known as a rake, prone to violence and profanity.40 Devastated, Abigaill retreated to her Long Island home, nursing a festering sense of betrayal. It was of no consolation that the Christian community did not criticize Phila for marrying “a man of worth and Charector.” Rather, she said she had been “Soe Depresst that it was a pain to [her] to Speak or See Any one.” She wrote Naphtali (already informed by his brother), lamenting, “[I can never regain] that Serenitty nor Peace within I have Soe happyly had hittherto.” She refused to leave home: “My house has bin my prisson.” Though Oliver asked to see her, she refused. However, if she met him on the street, she said she would “be Civill.” As for her errant daughter, she said, “I am determined I never will See nor Lett none of ye Family Goe Near her.” Jacob Franks acted more propitiously. A businessman who wanted good relations with the Delancey family and a father who wished to protect his daughter, he determined not to interfere with Phila’s £1,000 inheritance for fear that she be “Ill Used by her husband or Relations which at present is other ways.” Understanding that she “heartily Repents” her behavior, he was “Inclined” to give her “Liberty to Come to See us [her parents] but can Not Bring y[ou]r mother to It.” After settlement of the legacy, neither of Phila’s parents spoke to her again.41 One intermarriage followed another. Abigaill’s son David, after moving to Philadelphia, married Margaret Evans, daughter of the recorder of Pennsylvania. David, who at his bar mitzvah read the entire weekly portion from the Torah in a virtuoso performance, did not convert to Christianity, but his children were baptized. Abigaill reacted as she did with Phila: “If I cant throw him from My heart I Will by my Conduct have the Appearance of it.” Once again, she endured a “Firey Tryall” and determined she would have no contact with two children whom she raised and cherished ever so closely.42 In the contest between reason and faith, ties of religion and ethnicity won out in Abigaill’s heart, as she unconditionally broke off relations with her children. They, on the other hand, grew up in a cosmopolitan community. The

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Franks family is reminiscent of the fate of the children of Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelssohn, who worked to reconcile faith and reason, Christian and Jew. Like Abigaill Franks, Mendelssohn remained an Orthodox Jew his entire life. And, like Abigaill Franks, some of his children and all of his grandchildren converted to or were born into Christianity. All of David Franks’s children were raised as Christians, as were Phila’s. Abigaill’s son Naphtali remained Jewish, but his children converted, as did the children of her other London son, Moses. David Franks’s family in Philadelphia became members of the “Christian establishment,” and Oliver and Phila Delancey moved to England as loyalists and entered Christian society there. So, despite Abigaill’s intense loyalty to her Judaic roots, she, like many of her German Jewish counterparts, had children who, raised in the spirit of the Enlightenment, found little value in the rituals and tenets of Judaism, given the opportunities that awaited in the Christian world.43

■ A Woman’s Place Was Abigaill a typical Jewish woman of eighteenth-century colonial America? Clearly not. Born into a prominent family, she socialized with the province’s elite. She was extremely well read; most women were not. She was politically well informed. She found her fellow women of Shearith Israel “a Stupid Set of people” and chose not to socialize with them outside the synagogue. What of these women? Colonial American women who were not among the elite generally lived monotonous lives dominated by domestic chores, marriage, childbirth, and child rearing. Jewish women were part of that society, though there were some differences. First, European Jewish tradition sanctioned women’s entering the marketplace to allow their spouses time to study. Second, many Jews in New York did not marry, and a number of these women likely worked in market trades open to females, such as teaching, retailing, or the needle trades. Third, rabbinic law and tradition “gave a sense of authority to Jewish women in marriage that their Gentile counterparts did not always find,” including considerate treatment of the wife, the sacredness of household peace, the option of divorce, and provision for a wife who became a widow. Nor did Judaism accept the concept of original sin, of man’s fall from grace due to the cunning of a woman.44 Women most commonly entered the mercantile world after the death of a well-to-do spouse; eighteenth-century society deemed it acceptable for a

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woman to take on her husband’s trade. Esther (Hester) Brown Pardo, wife of Saul Pardo, the first hazan in New York, continued his commerce with the West Indies. In 1708, she imported twenty-five gallons of rum from St. Thomas on the sloop Flying Horse. Widow Rachel Levy imported rum from Boston and Rhode Island. Simja De Torres, whose husband, as noted in chapter 2, died twenty-two years before her death, traded in slaves for at least fourteen years. When synagogue charity proved inadequate, Hetty Hays opened a kosher boarding house, perhaps to serve the community of Jewish single men, and Grace Levy and Rebecca Gomez opened retail and grocery stores.45 Most Jewish women devoted the majority of their hours to raising their children in a traditional Jewish home. Maintaining a kosher home required an extensive commitment of time. A member of Shearith Israel reminisced that the “women of the congregation were real actors in [the] kitchen business.” Women cooked and baked for themselves; servants could not work in the kitchen without the immediate supervision of the woman of the home; otherwise the dwelling would be “treifa” (unclean). If a woman suspected that the rules of kashrut, including separate dishes for meat and dairy products, were not followed, she was obliged to report it to the synagogue. One woman, so concerned about the kashrut of her home that she climbed a ladder to inspect the dishes in detail, slipped and fell, losing her life. Most homes produced a specialty food such as a unique pound cake or “stickies, . . . dough with sugar and stuff over them,” or “sopes peridoes,” a type of French toast eaten at Purim. If the burdens of maintaining a kosher kitchen gave special meaning to life, it also meant added work.46 Jewish women attended synagogue, though they had a lesser role than Christian women did in church. Unlike the men, attendance for women was optional, except on Purim and High Holy Days. With the women sitting in the balcony’s sixty-five seats behind a latticed “breast work as high as their chins,” few could see clearly, and none participated in the service’s rituals. Yet due to the presence of Jewish schools and Judaism’s stress on literacy, many Jewish women could follow the service. Two of the three Jewish women leaving eighteenth-century wills signed their name.47 Historian Holly Snyder argues that the book of Esther and the holiday of Purim strongly influenced Jewish women in colonial America. Esther’s courage in risking her life to save the Jews of Persia inspired descendants of Jewish Marranos, who secretly practiced Judaism while in danger of the Inquisition.

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Esther maintained her humility after becoming queen to King Ahasueras, deferring to her husband and to her cousin Mordecai. A Jewish woman, while praised as valiant at the Sabbath table, was expected to assume the “traditional models of humility, obedience and modesty” of eighteenth-century British society.48 If women’s position in the home and synagogue was submissive, they were also heirs to a tradition of piety expressed in tkhines, female petitional devotions on matters such as pregnancy and childbirth, as well as visits to the cemetery and special prayers for the Sabbath, festivals, and High Holy Days. If women were not allowed a ritual role in Jewish services, those who sought deeper religious solace could gain some comfort and spiritual life from a tradition of private prayer.49

■ Conversion, Assimilation, and Anti-Semitism: The Place of Jews in Gentile Society The entire Jewish community faced the dilemma of the Franks family. Would a small society of less than 1 percent of the population survive as an identifiable community? Would the children of the community marry within? If not, assimilation threatened its existence. Historian Robert Cohen discovered that Jewish families tended to have about five children, though not all lived to adulthood. Women married around the age of twenty, men at twenty-seven, and marriages lasted close to thirty years. Most surprising in the demographic evidence is the number of young Jewish men and women who remained single. In New York, 45 percent of men and 41 percent of women did not marry. Possibly the paucity of eligible compatible mates, the transience of men seeking fortunes in the West Indies, or the sense of common identity and shame of marrying outside the religion kept many young Jews from marrying. The rate of intermarriage was only between 10 and 15 percent. Low marriage rates enhanced the importance of new Jewish immigrants in ensuring a population adequate to maintain a community, however small.50 The synagogue did not sanction conversion as a solution to the problem of intermarriage. There were rare exceptions, such as Frances, wife of Parnas Isaac Isaacs, who became part of the 1755 controversy when Solomon Hays accused the congregation of persuading her to renounce Christianity. In 1763, the elders passed a resolution prohibiting any member from assisting “in making proselytes, or performing the marriage of any jew to a proselyte.”

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Consequently, when Benjamin Jacobs petitioned the congregation to marry a Christian who was “desirous to live as a jewess” and to be “married according to the manners and custom of the Jews, as it is her desire to live in the strict observance of all [Jewish] Laws and customs,” the elders denied the request. Opposition stemmed from lack of a rabbi to perform the conversion ceremony and fear of angering the Christian community. There were, of course, intermarriages, the majority being Jewish men wedding Christian women. Some were performed in civil ceremonies, after which the couple might maintain a presence in the Jewish community, while others took place in a Christian church, with the couple separating from the community.51 New York’s Jews were patriotic Britons who participated in the political life of New York Colony to a greater extent than did Jews of the other colonies. To make this transition easier, they occasionally Anglicized their names. The Bueno family took the name of Bones, Rachel Luiza changed her name to Rachel Lewis, Rodrigo Pacheco became Benjamin Mendes Pacheco, and Luis Gomez became Lewis Moses Gomez or Moses Gomez. Many served the Crown. Mordecai and Daniel Gomez were named Spanish interpreters to the Admiralty and Supreme Courts. In 1731, Rodrigo Pacheco attained the most prestigious office, the colony’s agent to Parliament. Jewish citizens, if freemen or property owners, could vote and run for office. The highest elective positions they held were constable, assessor, and collector of taxes. Jews served in the militia; in 1738, eleven members of Shearith Israel were enrolled. The congregation prayed weekly for the health of their king in Spanish. At a special service following the French and Indian War, they offered “Thanksgiving to Almighty god,” that he had given the king’s generals “such Power, Strength, and Wisdom, to conquer all the Country of Canada and reduce the same to the happy Dominion of his Sacred Majesty, King george the Second, whose Name be exalted, as a Banner to be displayed for Glory and Renown.”52 As Jews strove for acceptance as loyal British patriots with the right to lead their lives and work in the marketplace in harmony with the majority Christian society, they encountered anti-Semitism, long a Western tradition. Recorded references to Jewish citizens note a separate identity. Luis and Daniel Gomez’s trading house in upstate New York was known as “the Jew house.” Governor Cornbury in 1704, discussing a dispute in the cocoa trade, labeled one of the merchants involved as “one Joseph Bueno, a Jew.” In 1765, the Board of Trade charged that “a Jew,” Hyam Myers, “seduced” two Mohawk Indians

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into coming to London to be exhibited for profit and ordered them back to America. Christians also used the word Jew as a term of opprobrium. Merchant Gerardus Beekman, commenting on the problems of selling his “Muscavado Sugar,” wrote, “I have almost turned jew in running from merchant to merchant to offer them.”53 Overt anti-Semitic acts occasionally occurred. In 1668, the excuse of a Christian trader charged with cheating a Jewish merchant was that his poor flour was only “for a devilish Jew.” In 1743, during a Jewish funeral, “a Rabble was got together,” led by “one whom by his dress would have thought to be a Gentleman.” As the coffin was lowered, he waved “an image,” likely a crucifix, and uttered a Latin paternoster, insulting the “dead, in such a vile manner, that, to mention all would Shock a human ear.” The reporter lamented that these “liege citizens” have “too often felt the heavy hand of their Outrageous and principled Neighbors.” Historian William Pencak identifies the leader of the mob as Oliver Delancey, bitter over the Franks family’s reaction to his marriage. Oliver was also indicted in 1740 for attacking the home of a “poor Jew and his wife who had lately come from Holland.” Delancey’s crowd broke the couple’s windows, “tore everything to pieces and then swore they would lie with the woman.”54 In politics, it is noteworthy that merchants as wealthy and prominent as Luis and Daniel Gomez or Jacob Franks were never elected to either the Assembly or the Common Council. Had figures of this stature been Christian, they would have served on one or both of these bodies. In 1737, strong antiSemitic statements were expressed in the Assembly following a close race between Cornelis Van Horne and Adolph Philipse, representing the followers of Lewis Morris and Governor William Cosby, two bitter political factions struggling for control of the Assembly. As part of the Assembly’s investigation of the contest, it stated that, as Jews did not vote for Parliament in England, “It is the unanimous Opinion of this House that they ought not to be admitted to vote for Representatives in this Colony.” William Smith, Sr., a proponent of disallowance, invoked the “bloody tragedy [crucifixion] at Mount Calvary,” stating that as Jews had been fortunate “to escape with their lives,” they should not object to the mere loss of their votes. Pencak asserts that this was the rhetorical height of anti-Semitism in colonial British North America. Exacerbating some of these problems, the closeness of the synagogue community could give the appearance of clannishness, eliciting common prejudice.

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In 1765, Major Rodgers of the British military published a Concise History of North America in which he wrote disparagingly that the Jews “who have been tolerated to settle here . . . sustain no very good character, being many of them selfish and knavish (and where they have the opportunity) an oppressive and cruel people.”55 Yet these incidents were exceptional, not the rule. Three years after William Smith’s angry tirade, the naturalization law of 1740 affirmed Jews’ right to vote in New York. Jews and Christians more often than not cooperated with each other. Nearly every major Jewish merchant partnered with non-Jewish merchants. Jews and Christians joined the same Masonic lodges and served together in the militia. British forces in America welcomed Jews as military suppliers. The elite of the Jewish community in New York socialized with the Christian elite. Five prominent New York Jews contributed to the construction of the Anglican Trinity Church in 1711, including merchants Luis Gomez and Moses Levy. During a smallpox epidemic, Mordecai Gomez housed the New York Assembly at his estate in Greenwich Village. Moreover, artisans such as Myer Myers worked with non-Jewish partners and journeymen as well as with a largely Christian clientele, who bought his silver because it was the best in town. As Peter Kalm remarked, the Jews of New York “possess great privileges; . . . they enjoy all the privileges common to the other inhabitants of this town and province.” When Mordecai Gomez died, the New-York Gazette eulogized him as an “esteemed fair trader, and charitable to the poor, . . . with an unblemish’d character, [who] left a large family, by who he is deservedly lamented, as he is by all his acquaintances.”56 Unlike the Jews of New Amsterdam, the Jews of British colonial New York did not have to struggle with British authorities and British merchants for political and economic rights. They possessed nearly the same political and religious freedom as their Christian neighbors did. Their leading merchants ranked among the wealthiest New Yorkers. An accepted part of the colony’s life, though they were small in number, they played a significant role in its economy. Their struggle was not, as in New Amsterdam, for the right to live in the city, to practice their religion, and to seek their fortunes. They strove, instead, to maintain a cohesive ethnic and religious society, to overcome pressures of assimilation that inevitably pushed at so tiny a sector of the population, and to practice and preserve ancient rituals in a world ever more part of the Enlightenment. In this they succeeded. Though their population did

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not grow, as did the city’s, with the help of immigration and an active synagogue they sustained their community, passing on their traditions and standing to future generations. If we return to our original question at the outset of this chapter — whether New York was to be a permanent home or a harbor of exile — the Jews of colonial New York looked to America more and more as a haven than as a refuge. They identified with British-American culture, an affiliation that caused many to cast their lots with the Americans in the ensuing Revolution.

A carefully executed painting by Howard Pyle titled The Continental Army Marching Down the Old Bowery New York, as the army entered the city after the British evacuated on November 25, 1783. (Courtesy Collections of the New-York Historical Society)

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The Jewish Community and the American Revolution

In 1782, near the end of the War for Independence, Hazan Gershom Seixas, in exile in Philadelphia, studied the calculations of a German rabbi whose numerical analysis of the words of the book of Daniel concluded that the messiah would appear in 1783. At the same time, Seixas was working for reform of Pennsylvania’s constitution to allow full political participation by Jewish citizens. Was the American Revolution a millennial sign of the return of Jews to Zion, or was it a sign of a new republican order and a new era in American Jewish history? The war, Seixas declared, was “a wonderful display of . . . divine providence,” an act of God whose ultimate meaning was yet to unfold.1 In 1760, the 250 Jews in New York City were, like most colonists, patriotic citizens of the British Empire and proud of the recent military conquest of Canada in the French and Indian War. Yet between 1765 and 1775, the majority of the Jewish community, like their Christian counterparts, turned from loyal Britons to rebellious Americans. In a long encounter that deeply altered the outlook and way of life of America’s foremost Jewish community, many of the city’s Jews endured exile and took to arms against their once-beloved mother country. Most New York Jews prospered during the late 1750s and early 1760s. Merchants gained fortunes on an unprecedented scale supplying his majesty’s forces in the struggle against the French and Spanish. However, the war’s end with the 1763 Treaty of Paris, the departure of troops, and the cessation of expenditures triggered a severe recession in the American colonies. Strained by a large national debt, the British determined to tighten supervision of its

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widening empire. Accordingly, it introduced measures that hit the economies of the colonies’ major seaports, including New York, which, by 1775, had grown to a population of twenty-five thousand, second only to Philadelphia’s forty thousand inhabitants.2

■ The Coming of Revolution The 1764 Sugar Act, which not only increased the price of foreign molasses but also cracked down on smuggling, imposing onerous bonding procedures on coastal and Atlantic commercial shipping, came into effect as the economic slowdown began. The notorious Stamp Act followed in 1765, imposing duties on domestic wares such as newspapers and playing cards as well as on shipping documents. The impost hurt both the New York City’s commercial elite and ordinary citizens. Violating the colonists’ understanding that the mother county was a source of nurturance, it initiated a growing sense of alienation as British Americans saw their interests as distinct from those of Britons not residing in the colonies. These perceptions led to an intense constitutional examination, in the newspapers and colonial legislatures, of the rights of colonists. The Stamp Act also unleashed social friction among the lower and lower-middling classes. Taken aback by the militant reaction as Americans took to the streets and began a boycott of British shipping, the British repealed the Stamp Act. Unwisely they followed it with the Townshend Acts in 1767, a tax applying only to imports. This, too, triggered a strong reaction, a policy of nonimportation by merchants and artisans.3 As incident upon incident played out, the city’s Jewish mercantile elite, the leaders of their community, joined other merchants and artisans pondering how to respond to British policies. After passage of the Stamp Act, Jewish merchants were likely signers of a nonimportation resolution, though no lists are extant. After the Townshend Acts became law, ten prominent Jewish merchants, including Uriah Hendricks (later a loyalist), Hayman Levy, Jonas Phillips, and Manuel Josephson, joined 190 New York traders who pledged not to import “articles as are or may hereafter be subject to duty, for the purpose of raising revenue in America.” Sampson Simson served as one of the city’s mercantile spokesmen. Appealing to resistance to British measures, Jewish merchant Isaac Adolphus advertised his hosiery as “equal in price and superior in goodness to British goods, . . . which, if the Patriotic Americans should approve, large quantities can readily be furnished.”4

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These Jewish merchants were part of the conservative wing of the growing revolutionary movement. They did not go as far as artisan radicals, who advocated total nonimportation, instead resolving not to import articles subject to the Townshend taxes. Two Jewish merchants, Isaac Pinto and Isaac Solomon, weary of conflicting demands from merchants wanting to continue trade and from artisans demanding strict nonimportation, and exhausted by the “frequent applications made to them to sign papers,” publicly announced that their initial agreement was sufficient. Another moderate merchant, Jacob Abrahams, found himself “ducked in the creek” in New Jersey for his more conservative stance.5 Despite these tensions, however, until 1773 life for the Jewish population continued with some degree of normalcy. The city’s papers published numerous ads of ambitious Jewish merchants. Jonas Phillips, insolvent in 1764, regained his footing and advertised in 1770 as an auctioneer and broker who “buys and sells all sorts of goods on commission” for home or abroad, selling objects ranging from Irish linens to toothpick cases. Benjamin Seixas, saddler, told the public that at his shop “nearly opposite to his Excellency [British commander] General Gage,” a buyer might find saddles, chairs, harnesses, and combs, “which he will sell cheap for cash.” Manuel Josephson advertised children’s toys, silks, and refined English sugar.6 Noncommercial life also proceeded with a sense of normality. The death of noted merchant Sampson Simson in 1773 elicited notices in the city’s newspapers describing “An Israelite, indeed, in whom unfeigned reverence for the Supreme Being, Integrity of heart and Humanity were Characteristick,” a man “always upright in his dealings,” a “ real Friend to the Liberties of his country.” The New-York Gazette advertised a sermon of Rabbi Haim Isaac Karigal, a visitor from the Holy Land, and Jacob Moses sought the return of a “runaway negro” who spoke English but “has a slow way in his speech.”7

■ Pre-Revolutionary Synagogue Tensions Congregation Shearith Israel, center of the Jewish community of New York, experienced periods of both normalcy and serious tension. The elders continued to handle routine issues such as an ongoing debate over the hazan’s salary. However, given the agitation embroiling the city, it is not surprising that the congregation suffered internal conflict so severe that it reached beyond the synagogue into the courts. It is not known if the quarrels were related

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to differences about imperial politics, but given the volatile political climate, tempers were short. The synagogue took to keeping secret minutes to record its worst quarrels. In 1767, Isaac Pinto was fined for “abusing” the parnas; a shamash was suspended for insubordination. In 1771, a general meeting had to be called because of “disorder” in the synagogue when parnas-elect Moses Gomez refused to assume his position. Congregants complained that the shochet was not doing his duties.8 As the legitimacy of governance was questioned in the streets, so too was it at issue in the synagogue, magnifying internal struggles. Two disputes ended with public civil trials. In 1770, Manuel Josephson disparaged eighty-four-yearold Joseph Simson, father of merchants Solomon and Sampson Simson, because the elder Simson’s prayer shawl was unkempt and because of his flawed speech and unseemly gestures. Sampson labeled Josephson a “dirty hog” for teasing a man “old enough to be [his] grandfather.” He also claimed that Josephson had been a dishonest merchant both in Pensacola and in New York and belittled his lowly origins as a “shoeblack.” At the ensuing trial, Josephson, responding through witness Solomon Hays, claimed that the elders, “all of one Family,” were deadly plotters who “if it was not for the Christian Law . . . would kill many.” The court found for the synagogue and against Josephson.9 A dispute in 1772 involved a charge of assault against Solomon Simson and Benjamin Seixas. The problem began with an internal quarrel within the Hays family. Judah Hays disinherited his son Michael and Michael’s daughter Rachel. When Michael brought his newborn daughter to the synagogue to be named, Barak, Michael’s brother, called his brother a “bastard” and shouted, “Father, what can you expect from a parcel of Scoundrels?” When Parnas Hayman Levy attempted to expel him, Barak unbuttoned his waistcoat and prepared “to fight any scoundrel that should dare to touch him.” After he was physically removed from the sanctuary, Barak filed charges against Solomon Simson and Benjamin Seixas, the two elders who ejected him. Judge Robert Livingston ruled against Barak, who with brother Solomon was expelled from the congregation. That year the elders also suspended Manuel Josephson for insulting the parnas (“if you are Parnass over the Bog House, you are not Parnass here”).10 Historian William Pencak terms these confrontations a generational feud between families who ran the synagogue and those who felt neglected, a struggle in which “elite Christian magistrates .  .  . supported… elite Jews” in

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a challenge to authority. The American Revolution too can be thought of as a generational struggle, a conflict among elites, and a challenge to authority. Tensions inflamed the city and shook the comity of the synagogue.11

■ 1776 The Boston Tea Party of 1773 and the punitive Coercive Acts that followed proved to be the tipping points of the American Revolution. Positions hardened; reconciliation became nearly impossible. Fierce ideological debates filled pages of the city’s newspapers. Hostility heightened in 1770 when a British soldier in New York killed a seaman with a bayonet as soldiers attempted to remove a liberty pole. As British control weakened, merchants, preferring conciliatory resistance, and artisans, desiring radical measures, strove for political supremacy, ultimately forming a joint governing committee. After the Battle of Lexington and Concord in April 1775, British authority collapsed. The remaining troops were removed.12 On April 19, New Yorkers quickly learned that eight minutemen, members of the local militia, had been killed by British soldiers on a bridge at Lexington. They carefully followed the proceedings of the Continental Congress in Philadelphia; the courage displayed at Bunker Hill cheered them, as did the appointment of George Washington as commander in chief. Even so, New York, with the exception of its artisan community and a few upstart merchants, remained a conservative province, reluctant to advocate independence. When the British arrived on Staten Island in the summer of 1776 with the largest forces yet seen in North America, New Yorkers could no longer avoid a decision. Commanded by Admiral Richard Howe and General William Howe, the flotilla contained thirty thousand British soldiers and Hessian mercenaries. They confronted Washington’s Continental army, recently arrived from Cambridge. With invasion imminent, the Declaration of Independence, signed on July 4, was read with great ceremony to the Continental Army. The city’s Jewish community had to choose either to join the American patriot cause and likely leave the city or to remain loyal to George III. It was not an easy decision for many. Some argued that to leave New York would mean the end of Shearith Israel, the oldest synagogue in the thirteen colonies, the fruits of the work of so many families over many years. Jonas Phillips, who moved to New York from Albany, emerging as a prominent merchant and member of the synagogue, “worked energetically among the other members of the Congregation

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in which his influence was beginning to be felt, to range them upon the side of liberty, notwithstanding a determination upon the part of many to remain in New York, and continue the Synagogue under Tory supervision, of which faction there was a large and important clique in New York.” When members argued that leaving would mean the end of the synagogue, Philips rejoined “that it were better that the Congregation should die in the cause of liberty than to live and submit to the impositions of an arrogant government,” and the “position was finally decided upon favorably.”13 Phillips’s courage derived in part from his analysis that the Americans would prevail. In Philadelphia in 1776, he wrote Gumpel Samson, a merchant in Amsterdam, predicting the Revolution’s outcome, but not without misgivings: “The war will make all England bankrupt. The Americans have an army of 100,000 fellows and the English only 25,000 and some ships. The Americans have already made themselves like the States of Holland. The enclosed [Declaration of Independence] is a declaration of the whole country. How it will end, the blessed God knows. The war does me no damage, thank God!”14 By contrast, a year earlier, Oliver Delancey, Phila Franks’s spouse, who became a loyalist and British general when put to the final test, wrote to brotherin-law Moses Franks in London (after Abigaill’s death, there was a reconciliation within the family) hoping the well-connected Moses could use his influence within the British government. Delancey declared that the provinces were “in a ferment,” and, if “violent Councils prevail in England,” then “adieu to Peace of Government for the People of this country have more firmness than any of their Neighbors.” The consequence would be “desolation Bloodshed and an Eternal Warr,” ruin for both sides. He still held “faint glimpses of the Hope of Peace and the Enjoyment of Former Happiness.” It was not in the interest “of the Child to Affront Parent or the Parent to use Cruel Chastisement on its Ignorant Offspring.” The Franks family, whose leadership in America now focused on David in Philadelphia, vacillated between its loyalty and connection to the British government and its American roots. David Franks became a reluctant loyalist: after the war he went into exile in Britain and then returned to the United States, a broken man who lost most of his wealth.15 During the pre-Revolutionary years, Hazan Gershom Seixas, a young man who had been an eager and ambitious student of Hazan Pinto and who so impressed the congregation with his quick grasp of Jewish learning that it appointed him hazan in 1768 when he was only twenty-three, saw the British

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The British attempted to capture Fort Lee in New Jersey by crossing the Hudson River and climbing the Palisades. Engraving probably by British captain Thomas Davies. (Courtesy Prints Department, New York Public Library)

as oppressors and American colonists as defenders of liberty. A few months before the British invasion, Seixas, recently turned thirty, spoke to his congregants, beseeching God to prevent the horrors of civil war. Like many New England ministers, Seixas saw divine meaning in revolutionary events. He likened British tyranny to Pharaoh and the colonists to the children of Israel. With the British flotilla weeks away from New York Harbor, Seixas pleaded to God, “put in the heart of our Sovereign Lord, George the third, and in the hearts of his Councellors, Princes and Servants, to turn away their fierce Wrath from our North America. . . . [May] there may no more blood be shed in these Countries, . . . That thou mayest once more plant an everlasting peace between Great Britain and Her Colonies as in former times.” After the British arrival, with invasion imminent, Seixas “personally addressed . . . every member of the synagogue on the question of closing it rather than let it be a Tory congregation,” an issue that was “fiercely contested, even families being split as a result.” In August, days before the battle, he gave a sermon lamenting that

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this might be the last service at Shearith Israel. He carried most of the synagogue’s Torahs and valuables in a locked box north to Stratford, Connecticut, and then to Philadelphia.16 Most Jewish citizens who went into exile did so before the Battle of New York. Perhaps they understood the military situation better than Washington, who placed part of his army in Brooklyn, anticipating that the British would attempt to scale Brooklyn Heights, only to suffer horrendous casualties as at Bunker Hill. But General Howe outmaneuvered Washington, sending troops behind his forces in Brooklyn, forcing American recruits to retreat toward the East River, where they were rescued at the last minute by fog and Marblehead fishermen who ferried the soldiers to the mainland at night. Still, the situation remained perilous. The city had to be abandoned; otherwise the British would trap the army at the tip of Manhattan Island. During the hasty retreat that followed, merchant Jonas Phillips slipped out of the city with his fifteen children. Amid the noise of cannon and musket fire, merchant Isaac Moses began to walk northward, refusing to ride on the Sabbath. Reaching the present TwentyThird Street, he found a farm that would shelter him. Saturday night he and his family boarded a wagon and followed the army into Westchester. He later found his way to Philadelphia, where most exiled New York Jews gathered.17 What motivated Jews to abandon their beloved synagogue and a city that had safely housed Jews for over a hundred years? First, they were part of the community and with their fellow Americans shared in the growing alienation from the British. Second, the freedom, respect, and economic opportunity they found in New York put many in alliance with rebel leaders of the colony, their partners and compatriots. Third, they may have felt conflicted allegiance to an English government that treated its Jewish citizens as “second class,” whose royal privileges were given but to favorites, including only a few Jews, most notably the loyalist Franks family.18 Finally, they lived in a colony, now a state, that offered Jews full rights of citizenship, including the right to vote. There was no question that the state’s constitutional convention would continue the province’s egalitarian heritage and grant Jews “full political equality.” Indeed, “New York in 1777 was the first state in the western world to confer total citizenship upon the Jews.” At that convention, during a moment of wartime peril, John Jay, later chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, told fellow New Yorkers that they were born “equally free with the Jews,” a people notable for their resistance to tyranny. Tyrants attempting to persecute the Israelites

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“receive[d] the rewards justly due for their violation of the sacred rights of mankind.” If America, like the Jews, turned away from its “sins,” then its “arms will be crowned with success, and the pride and power of [its] enemies, like the arrogance and pride of Nebuchadnezzar, will vanish away.” For Jay, the Jews were an exemplary people for a new nation. In this political climate, most Jews chose to support the Revolution.19

■ Jewish Loyalists and Jewish Life in Occupied New York Following Washington’s departure, New York became British military headquarters until Evacuation Day in November 1783. Loyalists seeking refuge under British military protection replaced New Yorkers who fled. The city’s population swelled to twelve thousand in 1777 and then to thirty-three thousand two years later, taxing its resources. Blacks seeking freedom crowded the outskirts of the seaport. A great fire destroyed a third of the housing stock on the city’s west (Hudson River) side in September 1776, making shelter scarce and costly. The military commandeered most public buildings and churches, including the Presbyterian and Dutch Reform churches and the French and Quaker meeting places. Many residents lived in “canvastown,” a makeshift camp of tents in the ruins of the fire. Inflation drove the price of food up 800 percent. The city remained under martial law throughout its occupation, governed by a commandant who used arbitrary power in issuing passes, permits, and regulations. Despite the war, British military officers did not refrain from gaiety, including theater productions and parties. They attended races “at the Flatlands [Long Island]” that, according to Rebecca Franks, “swarmed with beaus and some very smart ones,” and they celebrated the queen’s birthday in 1780 with transparent paintings and illuminated lamps.20 When the British arrived, a number of prominent Jews who remained loyal to the Crown decided to stay, including Barak Hays, Uriah Hendricks, and two Gomez bothers, Abraham and Moses Jr. There was no correlation between synagogue infighting and decisions on loyalism, as both Manuel Josephson and the Simsons fled into exile, while Barak Hays did not. Sixteen Jews joined 932 New Yorkers who signed an Address of Loyalty to General Howe, expressing gratefulness for “his Majesty’s paternal Goodness” and pledging “true allegiance” to their “Rightful Sovereign George the Third.” The signers affirmed that the “constitutional Supremacy of Great Britain, over these Colonies” was “Essential to the Union, Security, and Welfare, of the whole Empire.” Occupied

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New York housed perhaps thirty Jewish loyalists. Despite the declaration of loyalty, only Barak Hays was known as a fervent British patriot, moving to Montreal after the war. More typical were merchants Uriah Hendricks and Samuel Lazarus, loyalists who continued to reside in the city after the war — with little difficulty.21 The preservation of Shearith Israel was clearly on the mind of the remaining Jewish inhabitants. The elders left Torah scrolls for use by Jewish loyalists. The British army considered using the sanctuary for a hospital, but the influence of Barak Hays, furrier Lyon Jonas, and Alexander Zuntz, a Jewish sutler (army supplier) who accompanied the Hessian troops, persuaded military authorities to spare the synagogue. Jonas was the synagogue’s titular head, but Zuntz became its leader. That two soldiers who vandalized the synagogue were punished severely indicates that the British valued Jewish loyalty and support. Abraham Abrahams likely served as hazan during British occupation, along with two professionals. Isaac Touro, formerly hazan in Newport, moved to New York in 1780 before settling in Jamaica. North African Jacob Raphael Cohen landed in New York from Montreal in 1782 and served until Seixas returned after the war. Services were held irregularly, when a minyan could be gathered.22 Life in occupied New York was difficult for all except nearby farmers, privateers, and select merchants. No fewer than five hundred ships crowded the city’s docks. Newspaper ads provide evidence that a number of the remaining Jewish merchants earned a living supplying the town’s refugees, soldiers, and locals. Uriah Hendricks bought space in the New-York Gazette and Rivington’s Royal Gazette from 1777 through 1782, placing ads that offered spermaceti candles from Rhode Island and imports from London, including bohea tea, striped blankets, silk waistcoats, Irish beef, and, strangely, in 1781, “Superfine Philadelphia table flour fit for the nicest pantry.” Barak Hays purchased even more ads, as he auctioned “rum, sugar, etc, a negro, dry goods,” as well as linens, indigo, feather beds, and ironware. In 1782, with the war ending, he wrote that, “intending to go to Europe,” he desired “all those that are indebted to him since his Majesty’s troops took possession of this place, pay off the same,” to prevent further sale “at prime cost.”23 Alexander Zuntz opened a store on King Street by 1780 advertising that “alexander zuntz from Hesse Cassel” sold imports from London and Germany, including “millinery ribbons in the latest London fashion.” In 1781, he offered for sale “a true Steiner Violin,” a variety of sheet music, and the

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“newest fashion” of men’s and women’s shoes “by the trunk.” Other ambitious Jewish entrepreneurs included Jacob Abrahams, who bartered oil; Mrs. Moses, who promised to “cure permanently anybody of fever and ague”; Jacob De Costa, who sold textiles, coffee, and mahogany furniture; Abraham Abrahams, who vended hog tails and cut tobacco; Rebecca Gomez, who traded “Vinegar spices, Pepper Mustard,” and other foodstuffs; and Samuel Levy, who carried “all kinds of English and other soal and upper Leather.” On Nassau Street, Rebecca and Moses Gomez Jr. offered “Chocolate manufactured in the best manner and warranted pure.” Rebecca also sold tea, sugar, pickles, and indigo. Haym Salomon, a newcomer to New York, traded “Ship bread and fresh Rice” at 222 Broad Street, prior to his flight to Philadelphia in 1778.24 A visiting German mercenary, Johann Conrad Dohla, wrote that the Jews of occupied New York were unlike “the ones we have in Europe.” Rather, they “dressed like other citizens, get shaved regularly; and also eat pork, although that is forbidden in their Law.” Jewish women sported “curled hair” and dressed in “French finery such as are worn by the ladies of the other religions.” Jews and Christians “intermarry without scruple.” Given the small number of Jews remaining in the city, lack of a significant synagogue community profoundly diminished religious observance and identity.25 While most Jewish New Yorkers living in occupied New York concerned themselves with getting by day to day in the midst of military occupation, there were exceptions. Abraham Wagg, a former aide to Prime Minister Robert Walpole during the South Sea Bubble, a speculation that cost many a fortune, lived in New York in 1770 as a grocer and chocolate maker. An observant Jew, at age forty-nine he married twenty-nine-year-old Rachel Gomez of the elite Gomez family. Fate was unkind to him. He lost a young son and suffered a disabling accident while on fire patrol. Unable to work, he returned to Britain in 1779 with his wife and three children, living in Bristol, where five more children were born. Losing his American property, he spent the rest of his life in penury. While Wagg’s attachment to the Crown never faltered — he joined the civic militia in 1777 — he took a hard analytical view of the Crown’s dilemma. In 1778, he wrote a treatise arguing that conquering America, a task requiring 117,000 men, was not worth the cost. Because “English blood flows in the viens [sic] of Americans,” America was a natural ally of Britain. He advised the British to use its troops to protect Canada and its West Indian possessions. In 1782, he sent a letter to prominent British merchant Solomon Henry urging

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the British, in making peace with America, to destroy the Franco-American alliance. Wagg possessed a global perspective wider than most loyalists embroiled in the heat of conflict.26 The foremost representative of Jewish loyalist aristocracy, the family of David Franks, moved to New York. Daughter Rebecca’s letters give a sense of her society. In words that might have gladdened grandmother Abigaill’s heart, if Rebecca had not been raised a Christian, Rebecca scorned New York’s women, who knew how to entertain only by opening “the card tables” and could not “chat more than a half hour,” and then only “on the form of a cap, the colour of a ribbon, or the set of a hoop stay or jupon [petticoat].” Gotham’s ladies were solely interested in impressing men, none more than a British officer: “I sincerely believe the lowest ensign thinks ’tis but ask and have; a red coat and smart epaulet is sufficient to secure a female heart.” Despite these words, Rebecca too succumbed to a redcoat. The New-York Gazette of January 28, 1782, announced that she wed Sir Henry Johnson, a British officer. Despite her Christian upbringing, she was known as a Jew. After the British evacuated New York, the couple made their home in England, with her descendants prominent in Burke’s Peerage. Even so, late in life, Rebecca reminisced, “I have glorified in my rebel countrymen! Would to God I, too, had been a patriot!” — a late conversion to the American cause.27 At the other end of the spectrum were Jewish loyalists in need of aid. Hazan Touro in 1781 wrote Sir Guy Carleton, commander in chief, pleading that “the distresses” that he had “sufferd from Persecution for his attachment to [His Majesty’s] government” had so “reduced” his circumstance that he had to ask for funds to move to Jamaica. This was but one of various petitions. Except for established merchants and the elite such as the Franks family, life was not easy for Jews in occupied New York, most of whom left no record of their lives.28

■ Military Service Most Jewish New Yorkers who served in the military chose the state militias. Prior to the war, in September 1775, saddler Benjamin Seixas, brother of Reverend Gershom Seixas, was a third lieutenant in the Fusiliers Company of the First Battalion of the New York State Militia and a signer of a “petition of New York Officers” from New York City to the “Committee of Safety for the Province of New York.” With his fellow officers, Seixas urged New Yorkers “capable

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of bearing arms” to prepare themselves by training at “least once a week,” as “the safety of the nation may be longer preserved by every citizen being a soldier than by particular persons solicited for that purpose.” In 1776, Benjamin fled to Connecticut to stay with relatives. Another member of the New York militia, Hart Jacobs, petitioned the Provincial Council in January 1776 for exemption from watch duty, stating that “it is inconsistent with his religious profession to perform military duty on Friday nights, being part of the Jewish Sabbath.” Permission was granted. Much had changed since Asser Levy’s struggle to enroll in the New Amsterdam militia.29 Fifty-five-year-old Jacob Mordecai enlisted as a private in the Fourth Battalion of the Pennsylvania militia, as did his son-in law Isaac Moses. Hayman Levy and son Eleazar served as militia privates. (Levy complained for years about the destructive use of his property at West Point by Washington’s army and his failure to receive compensation.) Eighty-four-year-old Daniel Gomez left New York stating that he could “stop a bullet as well as a younger man,” but he did not serve. His grandson Daniel, however, joined the Philadelphia militia, as did Abraham Judah and Jonas Phillips. Manuel Josephson escaped occupied New York in 1776 in a “leaky boat” with information about the British. Other New York Israelites served in Connecticut militias.30 One Jewish New Yorker served with the Continental army. Isaac Franks, son of a nephew of Jacob Franks, seventeen years old at the outbreak of war, enlisted in Colonel John Lasher’s “six month regiment” and fought with Washington at the Battle of New York in 1776, only to be captured and imprisoned. Franks escaped, crossing the Hudson “in a small leaky skiff with one single paddle to the Jersey shore,” where he reconnected with Washington’s army and served as the forage master at West Point. From 1780 to 1782, he was an ensign with the Seventh Massachusetts Regiment of the Line. After the war, he moved to Philadelphia.31 New York’s Jewish community made its most important military contribution in finance. Jews had gained valuable experience in privateering in the French and Indian War and knew how to prepare a merchant vessel to raid British shipping. Privateering significantly assisted American strategy and finances. In 1776, Americans outfitted 136 vessels with 1,360 guns; in 1782, 323 ships with 4,854 guns sailed the Atlantic. Americans captured over six hundred British ships worth $18 million.32 The foremost Jewish privateer, Isaac Moses, immigrated from Germany to

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New York in 1764, becoming a British citizen four years later. A prosperous merchant in New York, he became the wealthiest Jewish citizen in Philadelphia, worth £115,000 in 1780. He outfitted eight ships, from the Chance in 1779, a schooner with six guns, to the Marbois in 1780, a brig that held sixteen guns and a crew of eighty-five. Moses was joined by many partners, including financier Richard Morris and New Yorkers Benjamin Seixas and Solomon Marache. In addition, in 1780, Moses participated with other merchants to raise bonds of up to £260,000 “in gold and silver” to provision the army. Moses personally pledged £3,000. He also supplied capital for a bank “for furnishing a supply of provisions for the Armies of the United States.” His goal was, he said, “our own freedom and that of our posterity, and the freedom and independence of the United States.” After the war, Moses and several fellow merchants petitioned the New York legislature for land seized from former loyalists, particularly the Delancey family. Because the war caused interruption of trade, they argued, they remained indebted to British merchants “for considerable sums.” “Nearly ruined” by their patriotism, they asked that loyalist estates be converted into a fund to reimburse them “for their many and good sacrifices.” Alternatives proposed included the sale of “immense tracts of unappropriated lands” or that their losses “be funded as a state debt.” Estates were confiscated and sold, but proceeds did not compensate the merchants.33 Reverend Seixas contributed spiritual support to the war. In a 1782 consecration sermon for Philadelphia’s first constructed synagogue, Mikveh Israel, he blessed the efforts of the Continental army. Appealing to the “high & Exalted King of Israel, Lord of Hosts,” who was “near to all those that call upon him . . . in time of their distress,” Seixas asked the “King of Kings” to protect General Washington and the Continental Congress and to “save and prosper the Men of these United States, who are gone forth to War. . . . May thy Angels have them in Charge, and save them from Death,” implanting “Amity, brotherly Love, peace and Sociableness.” He evoked a millennial end of this great struggle, a “Covenant of Peace, until time shall be no more, so that Nation shall not lift up their sword against nation, neither shall they combat or make war any more, Amen.”34

■ Exile and the Quest for Equality The Jews of New York made significant nonmilitary contributions to Philadelphia’s Jewish community. Prior to the war, Philadelphia had a tiny Jewish

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population of perhaps twenty-five families. During the war, many Jewish refugees fled there, to the capital of the new republic. For many New Yorkers, it became their home away from home. They established themselves in trade and devoted themselves to remaking the city in the ways of their former life. Isaac Moses, Benjamin Seixas, Jonas Phillips, Hayman Levy, and Matthew Josephson became major figures in the community. Reverend Seixas arrived from Connecticut in 1780. New York’s Jews inspired Philadelphians to erect the synagogue Mikveh Israel (services had been in rental quarters). Isaac Moses headed the committee to build the synagogue, a red-brick building similar to Shearith Israel and dedicated in September 1782. Mikveh Israel hired Gershom Seixas as hazan, and former New York elders wrote its bylaws. New Yorkers supporting the new synagogue wondered if they would ever leave their adopted city. A few, including Jonas Phillips and Manuel Josephson, remained in Philadelphia. Most, however, returned to New York.35 Gotham’s Jews possessed political equality and wanted the same rights for Jews throughout the new American nation. They started where they lived, in Pennsylvania. The commonwealth’s new constitution contained a “test oath” requiring members of the General Assembly to affirm that the Old and the New Testaments were the result of “divine inspiration.” Jews could not take such an oath. Gershom Seixas, along with Mikveh Israel’s president, Asher Myers, Bernard Gratz, and Haym Salomon, wrote the Council of Censors, charged with reviewing Pennsylvania’s constitution. The act, they declared, placed a “stigma upon their nation and the commonwealth,” inconsistent with the Pennsylvania constitution, which stated that “no man who acknowledges the being of a God” could be deprived of his civil rights. Jews, “allied with the great design of the revolution,” had proven that they were “as fond of liberty as other religious societies can be.” They served in the Continental Army and paid taxes. They “stand unimpeached of any matter whatsoever against the safety and happiness of the people.” The Jewish people, Seixas argued, would thrive in Pennsylvania if the Test Act were eliminated, adding to the prosperity of the commonwealth. If not, they would go elsewhere. The petition was tabled, but the constitution written in 1790 dropped the offending clause.36 In 1787, Jonas Phillips sought similar relief from the Constitutional Convention meeting in Philadelphia. Condemning the Pennsylvania constitution’s Test Act, Phillips declared that “all men have a natural & unalienable Right to worship almighty God according to the dictates of their own Conscience

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and understanding” and that no man could be compelled to attend religious services “against his own free will and Consent,” or deprived of a “Civil Right” because of his “Religious sentiments or peculiar mode of Religious worship.” Noting Jews’ patriotic service as “faithful whigs” during the war, a conflict in which they offered “their lifes & fortunes,” Philips asked the convention to eliminate the offending words. Phillips, however, was confused over the purpose of the Philadelphia gathering. The convention’s mandate did not include state bylaws. Delegates did unanimously approve a clause providing “that no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office of public trust under the United States.” Philips’s letter became part of the legacy of political equality that New York’s Jewish leaders left to Jews of the new republic.37

■ A New Beginning On November 25, 1783, General Guy Carleton loaded the last of the British troops and departing American loyalists on British frigates and sailed for England. On a day that would be celebrated as a major Gotham holiday for the next hundred years, George Washington triumphantly entered the battered city of New York. Many residences stood in shambles, public buildings and churches in need of repair. But 1783 ushered in a time of great hope. Once in possession of the city, New Yorkers organized quickly, electing new aldermen. The state appointed James Duane mayor and confiscated loyalist estates including the Delancey’s vast urban holdings. Thousands returned, and in two years New York grew from twelve to twenty-four thousand inhabitants, among them Alexander Hamilton and Governor George Clinton.38 Jews rejoined those who had lived in occupied New York. Despite anger at loyalists, the two groups reintegrated without significant resentment. Newspapers of the mid-1780s reveal a revival of Jewish commerce by both merchants who stayed and those who returned. Uriah Hendricks continued to advertise imported goods from London, including leather, pewter, and china, and Abraham Abrahams manufactured and sold snuff. Hayman Levy offered wine, tea, and an assortment of European imports. Benjamin Judah announced that he had beaver hats and “Scotch snuff in bladders” for sale. Haym Salomon, while yet residing in Philadelphia, opened a brokerage office in New York, noting his position as “Broker to the Office of Finance,” his connections with “French Merchants,” and the “affection of merchants of the United Provinces.” Benjamin Seixas resumed business, not as a saddler but as proprietor of an “auction

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store,” where buyers could find “Bohea tea in chests, Gin in cases.” He stood “ready to receive all kinds of Dry Goods, for public or private sale.”39 A declining economy tempered early optimism. The British opened the mother country to American trade but prohibited American ships from critical trading venues in the West Indies. In addition, the British influx of manufactured goods that poured into the country drained needed specie. By flooding the New York market with manufactures, the British made it difficult for local artisans to compete. In addition, imposts levied by the New York State Assembly threatened trade wars with nearby states. The city and nation fell into a severe recession. Jews were not immune. Alexander Zuntz, Jacob Mordecai, Lion Hart, Moses Franks, and Ephraim Hart all posted notices of insolvency. Even Isaac Moses’s firm failed in 1785.40 The delegates in Philadelphia in 1787, responding to the nation’s fiscal crisis, crafted a constitution intended to reestablish credit, to set up a national market, and to launch a strong federal government. In comparison to the statecentered Confederation established during the war, the federal Constitution was a revolution in itself. Most urban dwellers, almost certainly including the city’s Jewish community, strongly favored ratification. In New York’s famous July 1788 parade urging the state’s delegates in Poughkeepsie to approve the federal charter, Jewish artisan Asher Myers led the city’s coppersmiths.41

■ The Revival of Shearith Israel In this atmosphere, Shearith Israel resumed operations. Unlike in Pennsylvania, the political and religious freedom of Jews in New York was never in doubt. New York’s constitution of 1777 declared that “Free Toleration be forever allowed in the state.” The synagogue’s minutes, picking up in 1783, note the appointment of a temporary parnas. Among its first issues, the synagogue faced a request of Benjamin I. Jacobs: “to admit his being married to a Woman not belonging to our society, with intent to make her a Proselite.” The congregation denied his petition, continuing its prewar policy against conversions. Certain doctrines did not change, even with the Revolution. But this was an internal affair. Determined to demonstrate Shearith Israel’s compatibility within a republic, the elders, “Members of the Antient Congregation of Israelites, lately returned from Exile,” welcomed the arrival of Governor Clinton. Though they might be “small when Compared with other Religious Societies,” they declared, no other congregation “has Manifested a more Zealous

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Attachment to the Sacred Cause of America.” The Jews of New York City looked forward to living “under a Constitution, wisely framed to preserve the inestimable Blessings of Civil, and Religious Liberty.” They said that both the teachings of “our Divine Legislator to Obey our Rulers” and the “Dictates of our own reason” led members to pledge to discharge “the duties of Good Citizens.” They would, they trusted, receive “an equal share of [the governor’s] patronage.” They prayed that “the Supreme Governor of the Universe” would take the governor “under his Holy Protection.”42 That same year, the congregation offered a prayer in Hebrew, praising the Revolution’s achievements and the blessings of peace, but also proposing that the war and its outcome perhaps foreshadowed the promised return to Zion: “as Thou has granted to these thirteen states everlasting freedom,” so it may be that God will “bring us forth once again from bondage to freedom,” and the “dispersed . . . shall come and bow down to the Lord on the holy mount of Jerusalem.”43 The congregation sought to regain its former leader, Gershom Seixas, then hazan at Mikveh Israel. In November 1783, while Seixas was negotiating a contract with the Philadelphia congregation, Shearith Israel wrote, asking him to return. In reply, Seixas wondered if he would be able to render the New York congregation the “degree of general satisfaction, which is absolutely requisite for any person who serves in that Vocation.” He expressed concern that he was “unacquainted with the Spanish & Portugueze languages.” He also remarked that he had been informed that the synagogue was again in turmoil, with “many parties . . . form’d (and forming) to create divisions among the reputable members of the congregation,” resulting in a “general disunion.” Finally, Seixas noted that as he had “a family to provide for,” he could only leave Philadelphia on certain conditions: “some encouragement from you that my salary will be made equivalent to what I receive here.” However, if he could conduct decorous services, if “some regular form of government be adopted so as to have a proper subordination in the society,” and if Shearith Israel afforded him “a comfortable maintenance,” he would be “very willing” to rejoin the congregation.44 Negotiations concluded with the synagogue offering Seixas £200 a year, a salary placing him among the city’s upper-middle class, along with six cords of wood, matzos, and travel expenses from Philadelphia. Upon arrival in New York, he gave a welcoming sermon in which he thanked “Almighty Providence” that the congregation was “again restor’d to [its] former place of

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Residence in Peace.” As “just Tribute due to Omnipotence,” Seixas requested, in the name of the parnas, that “stricter attention may be paid to the Rules of Decency & Decorum,” which tend to “excite Devotion especially in Time of divine Service.” Services must command “Respect” instead of “Contempt.” The “Evil Practices,” namely, the behavior “of a few weak & inconsiderate set of men” who left the Synagogue during prayers, talking and laughing with each other, must cease. Men and women should consider “in whose Presence they are & to Whom they address themselves.” Seixas stated that he did not intend “to arrogate to himself any power which is not legally entitled to by the Nature of his Office.” His motivations were only his zeal for holy worship and an “innate Principle of Benevolence.” Aware “of the Difficulties attending those who govern,” he called on members to join him, “Heart & Hand.” Seixas, an ardent revolutionary, sought to create in the synagogue a dignified republican order, the kind of order envisioned by the Constitution of the United States.45 In 1784, the New York legislature passed an act allowing for the incorporation of religious societies. On May 24, 1784, the congregation of Shearith Israel crafted articles of incorporation, establishing a governing Board of Trustees. Six trustees were elected: Myer Myers, Hayman Levy, Solomon Simson, Isaac Moses, Solomon Myers Cohen, and Benjamin Seixas, men from families that composed the leadership of pre-Revolutionary Shearith Israel. In August, a meeting of the congregation — with thirty-two members attending — decided to write a new charter. However, delays occurred, and the first constitution was not promulgated until after the federal Constitution was ratified in 1789.46 Under incorporation, a dual system of government prevailed. The Board of Trustees assumed authority above the elders (adjuntos). At times elders and trustees worked together, and at times they were in conflict. A dispute erupted in 1785 over the right of the charitable society Gemilut Hasidim, responsible for the care and burial of the dead, to collect money at the synagogue. (The society wished to supplement its dues with synagogue collections.) The parnas and elders agreed to the society’s request with conditions, but the trustees rejected this decision. Asking the trustees to reconsider and “rescind the same,” the elders declared that they were “of the Opinion that the Parnassim & Adjuntas have a right to grant Indulgences to any useful & religious Institution in this Congregation,” provided it not interfere with the congregation’s funds. The trustees replied that they had consulted counsel and “that the right of granting Liberty to the Hebra Gemiluth Hazedim, is vested in the Trustees only.” The

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elders, “wishing to unite with the Trustees,” conceded. Although they hoped the trustees might consider the “Advantage” to the congregation of allowing them the “Liberty” that they, the parnassim and adjuntos, thought justified. But they understood where authority lay. In 1791, the trustees took on all fiscal and religious supervision. The parnas became the presiding officer of the trustees.47 The right to negotiate with the hazan shifted to the Board of Trustees. In charge of finances, the board assumed responsibility to hold the synagogue together when funds were short. In the mid-1780s, with a number of leading Jewish merchants bankrupt, the congregation could not collect funds to pay its officers. Consequently, in the winter of 1785, because of the congregation’s “distressed Situation,” the board decided that Seixas, along with the shamash, shochet, and clerk, were “discharged in Tammuz next ensuing.” Fortunately, funds were found to avoid this action, though the shochet departed for Philadelphia. That year, Seixas wrote the trustees of his need to have “some certain assurance” in his salary’s “being punctually paid when due”; otherwise he would have to find “a different manner to obtain a Livelihood.” Unfortunately, economic conditions remained perilous, and in 1787 Hazan Seixas resigned. Instead of leaving, however, he accepted a reduction in his salary, first to £170 and then to £120 a year plus firewood, “upon the assurance given [him] by the Board of Trustees that whenever the funds of the Synagogue were adequate they would be ready to fix [his] Salary equal if not Superior to what it had always been.” After ratification of the Constitution in 1789, the economy strengthened; Seixas’s salary improved, and he went on to a distinguished career, becoming one of New York’s most prominent clergy.48 The board took charge of the sale of seats in the sanctuary, its most important source of revenue. Front seats in the women’s gallery cost fifteen pounds, and were given to married ladies and family representatives. Back seats were valued at three pounds each. In 1785, the elders requested a conference with the board to agree on “some decisive plan for the immediate regulation of said seats.” The problem involved three young sisters, Abigail, Becky, and Sally Judah, who refused the seats assigned them and occupied others. The trustees, following unsuccessful negotiations with the head of the family, troublesome brother Benjamin Judah, announced a fine of three pounds, four shillings ($25) each time a member took a seat without permission of the trustees. The young women still refused their assigned seats, declaring, “when the gentlemen trustees can convince us that we are subject to any laws they choose to make which

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is to hinder us from attending Divine Worship, they may endeavor to exercise their authority.” Reverend Seixas wrote the board that the mother of the three sisters “is willing to pay for her own and her Daughters Seats the same price that the ladies of [the] Society did.” While he hoped his intervention to promote “Peace and concord in [the] Holy Congregation” might prevent legal measures, it brought only a rebuke from the board and an apology from Seixas for interfering. The trustees took the case to Mayor’s Court, which, after testimony of ten congregants, found the girls guilty of trespass. Their mother vowed she “would have nothing further to do with the congregation.” Eventually Becky and Sally were forgiven “for the sake of peace.” Abigail rejoined as well and two years later unsuccessfully applied to become the first female shamash. Through such actions, the board established its authority to oversee “good order and decency in the Holy place of Worship” and to be the final arbiter with the congregation’s charity societies, its elders, and individual congregants.49 With the rise of the Board of Trustees, the “synagogue community” yielded to a corporate model. The old system saw the Jews as an inward-looking community living within a Gentile world, keeping to themselves as much as possible. In the new republic, Jews were part and parcel of the commonwealth, and their synagogue was a chartered institution of the state.

■ A Revolutionary Legacy Revolutionary experience gave New York’s Jews a heightened sense of common citizenship. Longstanding Jewish preference for restraint receded. While living in Philadelphia, mixing with Jews from different colonies, they became more cosmopolitan. A new generation of merchants replaced the Frankses and Gomezes. Even in New York, where Jews had always had political rights, these rights were now those of any American citizen, not a privilege granted by a Christian elite to a quiescent minority. The Revolution marked a new beginning for New York’s Jewish community. Patriotism, unrestricted citizenships as founders of the new republic, and a spirit of egalitarianism replaced a sense of separateness. The promise of the new nation to the hundreds of thousands of Americans who lived through the hard years of war was as much a promise for the city’s Jewish community. They were now adept, politically aware, loyal republican citizens. But living in a revolutionary republican society presented New York’s Jews with both momentous opportunities and momentous challenges in the first decades of the early American republic.50

This lithograph from Valentine’s Manual, from a painting by George Catlin, portrays Five Points in 1828, before it became notorious for vice and poverty. In the late twenties it was a vibrant mixed neighborhood symbolic of the high economic ambitions of the new republic. Many Jews sold garments and other wares along the five streets that gave the site its name. (Courtesy Collections of the New-York Historical Society)

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The Jewish Community of Republican New York

On a spring day at the end of April 1789, George Washington took the oath of office as the first president of the United States on the balcony of Federal Hall, New York’s city hall. For the next year, New York served as the capital of the United States. While the nature of republicanism continued to be the subject of fierce debate, the early republic inaugurated a new era for the Jews of New York. An open egalitarian society signaled the beginning of the integration of Jews into the mainstream of American life. The impact of republicanism deeply influenced the emerging Jewish community. When Washington took his oath, six years after British troops evacuated the city, New York’s population had reached 33,000, of whom around 350 were Jews, slightly more than 1 percent. By 1810, the city’s population had grown to over 96,000, but the Jewish population, at 450, had declined in proportion to 0.5 percent. Fifteen years later, a mere 500 Jews lived in a city of 166,000 inhabitants, about 0.3 percent. Jews were becoming an even smaller minority, their immigration limited by continuous wars in Europe. In 1790, the city still centered on today’s Lower Manhattan, stretching only a few miles north of Wall Street. By 1810, it had progressed north as far as Houston Street, and by the 1830s, it had passed Fourteenth Street. The lower part of the city, the site of Shearith Israel, became increasingly commercial. Pearl Street, the area’s main thoroughfare, was known for its large warehouses. While a few of the wealthier citizens stayed in the vicinity of the Battery, the park at the tip of Manhattan Island, most moved near the new city hall, built in 1815 a mile further north up Broadway. The city’s neighborhoods were mixed,

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although the more opulent residents tended to live in the center and west side of the island, and poorer artisans and laborers toward the East River, with a few remaining in Lower Manhattan.1 Home to the first Congress, New York directly witnessed the nation begin to implement its republican revolution. Two visions emerged, each with appeal to the Jewish community. On the one hand, the liberal Jeffersonian understanding stressed egalitarianism, promising greater opportunities for all classes in the nation’s political, cultural, and social life. On the other hand, Hamiltonian republicanism emphasized deference, reasoning that even in a republic those who had less education, wealth, and breeding ought to willingly defer to those who had greater wisdom, usually the wealthy and better educated.2

■ Entrepreneurial Horizons The American Revolution unleashed far more than a political movement. Republicanism increased the entrepreneurial expectations of New Yorkers, who had previously worked under the restraints of British mercantilism and a paternalist society. The prospect of an open market widened the horizon of economic enterprise for newly aspiring artisans, merchants, and manufacturers. Jews as well could freely venture into all areas of the marketplace. Soon after the Revolution, New York emerged as the nation’s financial center. Its merchants, such as Elisha Peck, Anson G. Phelps, John Jacob Astor, and Nicholas Low, cornered the cotton trade, became expert at speculation and insurance, and launched ambitious economic adventures, including clipper ships to China. In 1825, with the opening of the Erie Canal, New York began its journey to a world-class metropolis. It became the entry point for immigrants and the choice entrepôt for all imports and for exports from the West. In 1821, only 38 percent of the nation’s imports arrived in New York; by 1838, that figure rose to 62 percent. No city could match its merchants, artisans, or manufacturers. Growth brought increased economic stratification: by 1800, 20 percent of the population owned 80 percent of the city’s wealth, while the bottom half owned less than 5 percent. This inequality grew greater as the age progressed.3 New York’s Jewish population most commonly fell within the middle or lower-middle classes. A study of the New York directories from 1789 to 1830, incorporating most men and a few working women, revealed that the most common Jewish entry was “merchant,” with 127 of the 306 probable Jewish

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entries, or about 41 percent. The next highest categories (aside from the sixtyfour “unlisted”) were “auctioneer” and “broker,” related professions, with eighteen each. The three together composed over half the listed occupations.4 With a Jewish population of less than 1 percent, New York’s wealthy Jews no longer possessed the economic standing of earlier years, but prominent figures existed. These included the wealthiest Israelite, Harmon Hendricks, second son of Uriah Hendricks. His father imported metals among many items. Harmon, partnering with agents in England, Jamaica, and major American seaports, expanded his father’s wholesale trade, moving from plates and glasses to kettles and pianos, iron and tinplate. Working out of a store on Pearl Street, he advertised the sale of “British copper, riverts, pewter ware” and “tons of pig iron.” Hendricks’s most important accomplishments were as a copper manufacturer. In 1812, he opened a copper-rolling mill in New Jersey that built boilers for Robert Fulton’s early steamboats. He and his brother-in-law Solomon Isaacs acted as agents for Paul Revere, to whom they sold copper and saltpeter, often on credit. In April 1805, Hendricks wrote Revere that he not been able to sell copper for some time, as it was “so extremely scarce & high in Europe” that he had no “surplus.” Recently, however, he had obtained seven tons of “India Block Tin,” which he offered at a discount of twenty-six and a half cents per pound on three- to six-months’ credit. At one time, he considered a plan in which he and Revere would corner the American copper market, though the scheme never materialized. He remained one of Revere’s most trusted associates. Hendricks became wealthy, purchasing thirty acres of real estate along Broadway and loaning the government $60,000 to help finance the War of 1812. At his death in 1838, he was worth over $3 million. Like many prominent Jews, he played an active role at Shearith Israel, where he served as parnas.5 Four Jewish businessmen joined twenty Christian New Yorkers to found the New York Stock Exchange in 1793. They included investor and real estate speculator Ephraim Hart, partner of John Jacob Astor, as well as Alexander Zuntz, Benjamin Seixas, and Isaac Gomez. Auctioneer Isaac Moses, who owned sixteen separate real estate lots at his death in 1816, was known for his collection of European paintings. Simon Nathan was one of four Jewish merchants active in building the Park Theater. Eminent merchant Solomon Simson gained renown for the use of swift clipper ships that sailed to the Far East. Simson used his vessels to learn more about Jews in these remote venues. In 1787, he exchanged letters with Jews in Malabar, India, learning that there were

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two groups of Jews there, white Jews who had emigrated from Palestine and black Jews who were descendants of converts. A letter to China in 1794, inquiring whether Jewish descendants of the ten lost tribes lived in the East and declaring that thirty to forty Jewish families lived in peace in New York, never reached its destination.6 Most Jewish merchants worked on a smaller level. Many bought goods at auction and sold them in retail stores, sometimes advertising their goods. Jacques Ruden, a small-scale merchant, supplied lumber toward the building of the new city hall until his death in 1806. He learned to work with wood in Dutch Suriname, a colony he left in 1800. For every Harmon Hendricks, there were many small retailers and grocers earning a meager livelihood.7 While craftsmen constituted the majority of the working population in early republican New York, relatively few Jews labored in these trades. Jewish craftsmen ranged from the highly successful David Seixas, son of Hazan Gershom Seixas, a manufacturer of sealing wax, ink, and crockery, to shoemaker Isaac Moses, so poor he was given a synagogue seat at no charge. From 1786 to 1830, two bakers, two chair makers, and three butchers were listed in city directories, along with a single clock maker, shoemaker, carpenter, and sailmaker. The largest craft, tailoring, numbered six men in thirty years. Nine Jewish smiths worked in the city, including goldsmiths, silversmiths, coppersmiths, and blacksmiths. Among them was Asher Myers, younger brother of the famous silversmith Myer Myers, a brazier who soldered the copper roof of the old city hall and sold two bells to the city for its new city hall and jail.8 Jewish artisans displayed their enterprise in the city’s newspapers. Solomon Emmanuel told customers he carried “a general assortment of Gold, Silver Metal and Tortoiseshell Watches.” Silversmith Daniel Coen set up a lottery for the “Encouragement of literature,” entitling the winner to an “Elegant Tea Sett of Silver Plate,” which could be seen at his “lucky Lottery Office” on Maiden Lane. Solomon Hays, “well acquainted with the Indian and French languages,” sold furs on Chatham Street. He welcomed a partner who could “advance [him] from 8 to 10 thousand dollars.”9 Printers achieved the most prominence. Benjamin Gomez, the city’s first Jewish publisher, produced more than twenty books either singly or with Naphtali Judah. He published deist John Priestley as well as Robinson Crusoe and Tom Jones. Judah, who printed the radical tracts of Thomas Paine, advertised his imports, including forty “boxes of playing cards” as well as “an

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assortment of books, writing, wrapping and bonnet papers, . . . gold leaf, ink powder, quills.” He gave “the highest prices” for “clean linen and Cotton Rags, old Sail Cloth and Junk” and sold “Lottery tickets in the Third Class for encouragement of Literature,” with a top prize of $25,000. Publisher Naphtali Phillips owned the National Advocate, hiring Mordecai M. Noah as editor. Solomon Jackson edited the first American Jewish periodical and, in the 1830s, published the first Haggadah printed in America.10 Jews readily entered the professions. Sampson Simson, son of Solomon Simson, graduated from Columbia College and then studied law under Aaron Burr. He practiced briefly before retiring to the life of a philanthropist. Six Jewish physicians are listed either in the New-York City Directory or in the records of Shearith Israel, including Dr. Saul Israel, who specialized in treating deafness. The first American-born Jewish physician to attend medical school was Walter Jonas Judah, grandson of Polish immigrants. Walter attended Columbia College in the early 1790s and then the college’s medical school from 1795 to 1798. In 1798, a yellow-fever epidemic devastated the city, killing 2,806 inhabitants, nearly 4 percent of the population. Refusing to leave the city, as so many residents of means did, Judah treated patients daily. Unfortunately the fever struck him, and he died as one of its victims, worn down, his epitaph states, by “his exertions to alleviate the sufferings of his fellow citizens.” Judah pioneered what was to become a common Jewish profession in New York.11 The number of slaves in New York increased markedly in the decade following the Revolution, and as Jews continued to own slaves as commonly as their non-Jewish peers did, many Jewish merchants and craftsmen owned them in the 1790s as well. The 1790 census lists seventeen Jews owning slaves; one, Isaac Gomez Jr., a founder of the New York Stock Exchange, possessed seven. Three Jews owned three slaves, six held title to two, and the rest to one. Most slaves were household servants. The Gradual Manumission Law of 1799 rapidly reduced the number of slaves in New York, as slaves bought their freedom. (The 1820 census listed only four Jews owning slaves.) For example, in 1818, Jacob Levy Jr. pledged freedom to his bondsman in three years: “upon the express condition that the said George Roper shall during that term well & faithfully serve me & my family as a Slave, & dutifully obey all my lawful commands.” The Manumission Society listed one Jew, Moses Judah, among its 340 members between 1785 and 1815.12 While the number and proportion of poor Jews is unknown, the minutes of

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Shearith Israel indicate a few of these individuals, such as shoemaker Moses. In 1805, Eleazar Levy pleaded that he was old, infirm, and destitute; with winter in sight, he needed provisions. He received $150 over the year. Simeon Levy requested aid — “for my sake and the sake of my young and suffering family” — lest he be “committed to the Common Jail.” Indentured servant L. E. Miller asked the congregation to redeem him from his “deplorable situation” among the “goyim,” stating he would serve any “Yehida” (Jew). The congregation declined to intervene. Catherine Abrahams, who wrote that she was in a “Destitute” situation with a blind son, weak sight of her own, and an ill husband, received $2 a week. During the severe Panic of 1819, caused by a sharp drop in the price of cotton and the near total halt of bank credit, Abraham Barnet, confined in jail, appealed for aid. A member of the congregation for eighteen years, he received $25.13 Disability, mental illness, and crime also existed among the city’s Jews. Of the few recorded cases, Shearith Israel’s clerk, Isaac Gomez, was a “Cripple,” and Isaac Abraham’s son was blind. In 1824, brothers John and Raphael Hart, aged thirty and twenty-four, each took his own life with a pistol in their Nassau Street lodgings. These suicides likely stemmed from mental illness. In one instance of criminal behavior, one of the city’s Jewish merchants was arrested in 1816 for scuttling his ship and attempting to collect insurance while he hid the cargo. Also disturbing the community’s harmony were bitter intrafamily disputes that resulted in litigation over finances.14 The presence of poverty, disability, and crime did not diminish the entrepreneurial enthusiasm of New York’s Jews as they embraced the republican spirit of enterprise. Whether it was Asher Myers crafting bells for city hall, Harmon Hendricks constructing a copper-rolling mill, or Solomon Simson launching clipper ships, Jews took advantage of the new marketplace. Success was uncertain, as ambitions were often higher than a man’s reach, but a venturesome spirit penetrated the Jewish community. Less tight-knit, and still largely mercantile, it branched into more trades, working with non-Jewish and Jewish partners, competitors, and clientele.

■ Republican Fraternalism Early national New York nourished numerous fraternal societies. Many included both Jews and non-Jews, an important sign of Jewish emergence into the broader world. Naphtali Judah, Mordecai M. Noah, and Emmanuel Hart

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were grand sachem and sachems (leaders) of the venerable Tammany Society, an elite fraternal/political organization. With Benjamin Seixas, they were also members of the prestigious Mechanics Society. Benjamin Hart belonged to the St. George Society, one of the New York’s oldest organizations. Myer Myers assumed the presidency of the New York Gold and Silver Smiths Society after the Revolution. Solomon Simson was a member of the Chamber of Commerce and the Mineralogical Society. Joel Hart helped found the New York Medical Society in 1806. Daniel Peixotto, the son of Moses Peixotto, the hazan who succeeded Gershom Seixas in 1816, edited the New York Medical and Physical Journal, later serving as president of the Medical Society. Moses Judah, as noted, belonged to the Manumission Society.15 While no Jews served on the Common Council or as mayor, a number won election as tax assessor, and two achieved high political office. Mordecai M. Noah served as consul to Tunis and sheriff of New York; Ephraim Hart, father of Joel, was consul in Scotland. In the military, Dr. Jacob La Motta was surgeon of the Third Brigade of the 51st Regiment of the New York State Militia. Haym Salomon, Aaron Levy, and Eleazer Philips were officers in the militia, and Bernard Hart was brigade quarter master. Captain Mordecai Myers fought in the War of 1812.16 By far the most popular fraternal organization for Jews of middling standing and above was the Masonic Order. Despite its medieval origins, the Masons accepted all who believed in a “supreme being” and were pledged to good deeds and the pursuit of knowledge. Masons acquired reputations as supporters of progressive causes; their ornate buildings often hosted antislavery gatherings. Jewish Masons included leading figures in the community such as Mordecai Myers, Sampson Simson (Solomon’s son), Seixas Nathan, and Moses Peixotto. A number attained high rank: Joel Hart was a Grand Orator and Keeper of the Seals and later Deputy Grand High Priest of the Grand Chapter, Royal Arch Masons. Peixotto was Captain of the Life Guard, Simson a Lieutenant Grand Commander. Historian Samuel Oppenheim finds at least fifty New York Israelite members in Masonic records of the early republic. Jewish Masons established a Jerusalem chapter within the different lodges. Participating at events such as the interring of the dead from the Jersey prison ship, a vessel notorious for holding American Revolutionary prisoners in sickly conditions, causing most to die, the chapter’s members crafted a prayer for Jewish Masons. Their entreaty beseeched the Lord, “excellent thou art in

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thy truth, Enlighten us . . . in the true knowledge of Masonry.” Jewish Masons pleaded not to be numbered “among those that know not thy statutes, nor the divine mysteries of thy secret Cabala,” and that the “ruler of this Lodge may be endued with knowledge and wisdom” to explain secret mysteries, as Moses did “in his Lodge to Aaron to Eleazar and Ithamar [the sons of Aaron] and the several elders of Israel.” That so many of the city’s leading Jews were Masons, joining with Christian Masons in a fraternity of science and ritual, speaks to their integration into elite society in republican New York.17

■ Republican Politics New York’s Jewish population joined the rest of the growing seaport community in one of the greatest contests in American political history: the battle over the legacy of the American Revolution. With the new nation deeply divided over the meaning of 1776, the 1790s became one of the most passionate political decades in American history. The Hamiltonians, soon to become the Federalist Party, sought a strong central government. They passed legislation creating a potent national bank, similar to the Bank of England; encouraged the growth of manufacturing, including factory production; and became staunch supporters of Britain and fierce opponents of the French Revolution. Federalist ideology embraced deference. Centered in the North, with limited southern support, Federalism was generally uncomfortable with slavery. Its backers supported the Constitution in 1788 and were likely to be orthodox Christians. Jeffersonians, when confronted with Hamilton’s economic plan, formed the Democratic-Republican Party, the nation’s first political party and ancestor of today’s Democratic Party. Supporters of an agriculturally based society with weak central and stronger state governments, they were hostile to financial speculation, regarding banks, and particularly a national bank, with fear and suspicion; they preferred that factories remain in England. Many followers initially opposed the Constitution. They supported the French Revolution from its inception through the Days of Terror and continued to see Britain as a foe of American independence. Advocates of political egalitarianism, they argued that a shoemaker could make as wise a choice regarding government policies as a learned attorney could. Defenders of civil liberties and a free press, some tended to deist theology. Centered in the South, the party sympathized with slave owners. New Yorkers could not have been closer to the dispute, as Hamilton formu-

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lated his controversial economic program, including federalizing state debts and chartering a national bank, in New York. Even after the city lost its standing as capital in 1791, it remained a key factor in the partisan struggle. The outcome of the 1800 Assembly elections in the city was central to Jefferson’s election as president. In contest after contest, whether for the Common Council or State Assembly, citizens debated the fate of the nation. Federalists accused Republicans of standing for godlessness and anarchy, while Democratic-Republicans argued that the Federalists stood for the British aristocracy that they defeated in ’76. Nothing less than the definition of American republicanism was at stake.18 Jews entered the political fray, an important sign of their integration into the political heart of the new republic. In the tumultuous 1790s, though Jews aligned with both parties, the majority were Jeffersonians. Federalists savagely attacked the Democratic Society, an association that backed both Jefferson and the French Revolution. Jewish members of New York’s Democratic Society included Isaac Gomez, Isaac Seixas, Naphtali Judah, and Solomon Simson; Simson became the organization’s vice president. (He was also elected assessor in 1794 and 1795.) In 1798, an ad in both the Commercial Advertiser and the Argus announced that Jeffersonians gathered at Martling’s Tavern, in a meeting chaired by Solomon Simson, agreed to draft a “respectful address” to Congress, calling on it “to take effectual measures to prevent further depredations upon American commerce by the British Government, or any other nation.” At a time when most people in the nation regarded the French as the major enemy of America, the Democratic-Republicans continued to single out the British.19 The year 1798 occasioned one of the most notable sermons of Shearith Israel’s spiritual leader, Hazan Gershom Seixas. He delivered this discourse at a time of fear and frenzy. Hostilities with France seemed inevitable because of French seizures of American ships in the midst of its war with Britain, and Federalists were using the charged national atmosphere to implement their recently passed Alien and Sedition Acts, closing newspapers and jailing opponents. Protestant ministers were not reluctant to condemn the French and their anticlerical revolution. Seixas, however, while criticizing France as “a conquering nation” that threatened conflict, yet recalled it as a nation that but “a few years past” was America’s ally: “when we were oppressed by the ravages and devastations of an enraged enemy.” Resisting Federalist attempts

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to destroy its opposition, Seixas argued that when “various opinions” were at play, the solution was “strictly adhering to the grand principles of benevolence towards all our fellow creatures.” Americans ought to follow God’s commandment to “love thy neighbor as thyself.” A year later, Seixas beseeched the Lord to remove the “spirit of envy and jealousy” from the nation’s leaders, producing “peace and harmony” in the branches of government and a society united “in the bonds of brotherly and social love.” Naphtali Judah printed the 1798 sermon and advertised it for sale from May 30 through June 18. In 1803, with the Jeffersonians in power, Seixas expressed hope that the “evil spirit of disunion” would remain far from the “Rulers and Administrators of the government.” His call for unity reflected the republicanism of the founders in Philadelphia: that political parties were unnecessary; and that the United States could unite under nonpartisan leadership. But when he had to make a choice, Seixas sided with the Jeffersonians.20 Taking a different position, Jewish merchant Benjamin Judah, a Federalist supporter, wrote Alexander Hamilton from London in 1798 that he might be able to procure arms in Europe “on the lowest Terms.” Judah, “roused to a just sense of dignity,” wished his country to defend its claims against “an insidious foe.” He regretted that war with France portended, but as it was a “cause on which depends . . . [the] independent existence” of the United States, “every American must feel the ardour of aiding his country to justify her rights.” The battle for America’s future even divided Jewish households: real estate entrepreneur Aaron Levy supported the Federalists, while his wife championed the Jeffersonians.21 The memoir of Mordecai Myers, a New Yorker politically active in the 1790s who later became a captain in the state militia, reveals the opportunity for Jewish grass-roots political enterprise. In the election of 1800, when he was twenty-four, Myers described Aaron Burr telling fellow DemocraticRepublicans, “we must, at the next election, put a period to the [Federalist] ‘reign of terror.’ ” Burr constructed a winning ticket by sponsoring “inspiring speeches” by some of the “most active and patriotic Democrats, young and old” in each ward. Burr chose Myers as one these ward spokesmen, and the Democratic-Republicans carried New York, providing the electoral votes that made Jefferson president. Myers’s republicanism endured. In 1812, he wrote publisher Phillips for copies of the National Advocate. Pleased “with the Mater it contains,” he declared that “the time has arrived when the nation requirs

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John Wesley Jarvis’s 1820 portrait of Mordecai M. Noah, New York’s most prominent Jewish citizen. (Courtesy Congregation Shearith Israel)

all its advocats”; a “republican paper” was a “grate Treate.” After leaving the armed forces, Myers served in the New York Assembly. Though he intermarried, he identified as a Jew.22

■ Mordecai M. Noah After 1800, Jefferson and the Democratic-Republicans controlled New York politics. Federalists put up serious opposition only in times of crisis such as the Embargo of 1807 – 1808, which closed all ports to both French and British ships and shipping, and the War of 1812. Otherwise the party could only support one of the Democratic-Republican factions that emerged in the wake of Federalist powerlessness. The key political Jewish figure in this era was Mordecai M. Noah, who moved to New York in 1817. Prior to Noah’s arrival in New York, he had achieved a reputation as a playwright, diplomat, editor, and politician. Born in Philadelphia in 1785, his father, a German immigrant, abandoned his family in bankruptcy, shortly before the death of his mother, leaving Noah in the hands of his grandparents Jonas and Rebecca Phillips. Jonas Phillips, a prosperous Philadelphia merchant formerly of New York, stood at the forefront of the movement for full Jewish citizenship. Noah spent his childhood in Philadelphia and New York.

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Though apprenticed as a teenager to a carver and gilder, the theater proved more attractive than woodwork. As a youth, Mordecai hung out at the John Street Theater in New York. At twenty-three years old, he published his first drama, a tale of a wife who dressed as a man to save her spouse. With his grandfather’s training, Noah entered politics as an ardent Jeffersonian. In his twenties, reminding President Madison of the “strong attachment” of Jews to the nation, he lobbied for a diplomatic appointment. When this proved unsuccessful, Noah began his career in journalism in Charleston, South Carolina. A supporter of Madison and the War of 1812, he depicted Madison’s foe, Dewitt Clinton, as a would-be “Roman Dictator.”23 In 1813, Noah won appointment as consul in Tunis, only to be abruptly recalled in 1816. His ambition unshaken by this setback, he accepted an invitation from his uncle to become editor of the National Advocate. The Advocate, the partisan newspaper of Tammany Hall, the Democratic-Republican Party’s headquarters, supported the Madison and Monroe administrations against the “forbiddingly aristocratic” Clinton. As editor, he opposed all Clintonian projects, even the Erie Canal, a position he later regretted. In 1824, upon the retirement of President Monroe, he supported Treasury Secretary Crawford for president, accusing rival Andrew Jackson of attempting to establish “military despotism.” Though of middle-class means, Noah became the most significant Jewish citizen in the city, New York’s foremost representative of Jeffersonian republicanism.24 Noah championed patriotic, secular Jeffersonian republicanism, a position he articulated in orations before the Tammany and Mechanics Societies. He colorfully described the hardships of Revolutionary patriots, exposed in “rags and tatters” to the “chilling blasts of winter.” Soldiers of ’76, though “weak in numbers,” understood that they were endowing “millions yet unborn” with the treasure of “rational liberty.” Revolutionary veterans could rest assured that the cause of liberty yet burned in American hearts. With the help of immigrants, coming to a land where “establishing merit is the only passport to power,” and of artisan citizens, exchanging “cramped and uncultivated” minds for “study and reflection,” America would prove false the “maxim of tyrants,” that “man cannot govern himself.”25 Noah’s plays elaborated republican themes. The preface to The Grecian Captive, paying homage to the source of republican thought, declared, “we, citizens of a free country, cannot observe with indifference the present struggle

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for liberty in Greece.” She Would Be a Soldier, taking place during the War of 1812, attacked paternalism and extolled the republican virtue of American women. Noah depicted an independent lady, “a stranger to falsehood and dissimulation,” spurning a father’s order to marry a man of means and — like the real Deborah Sampson, who fought in the American Revolution while impersonating a man — joining the army in male disguise. Noah lauded the American Indian, symbol of Tammany and the American spirit, who told his British patron, “We fight for freedom, and in that cause, the great king and poor Indian start on equal terms.” With egalitarian sentiment, he scorned the English as aristocratic, condescending dandies.26 Noah’s journalism also espoused secular republican thought. Noah promoted universal (male) suffrage for New York’s newly drafted 1820 constitution and championed an improved water supply, a modern police force, reform of the penal code, and manual-labor classes for youths. His reflections on daily life, published in essays in the Advocate, reveal Jeffersonian values. Noah criticized luxury. “Dress is exorbitantly extravagant — simplicity is unknown,” he lamented. Dressing up a three-year-old with a “cambric dress .  .  . [with] wreaths of embroidered flowers, pantalets, silk stockings, and pink kid slippers” wasted money. The expense of dinner parties, $500 a table, serving only to weaken “the organs of digestion,” could clothe and school “for the winter, nearly sixty poor children.” Men, “toiling in the sun,” only a step from ruin, paid rents of over a thousand dollars a year to satisfy the demands of “amiable” wives. The “extravagance” expected by women caused too many men to remain single.27 In Jeffersonian spirit, Noah declared, “no occupation is more useful, more valuable to a country, than that of agriculture,” and he welcomed immigrants to farm America’s vast lands. He advocated public support for female education. A woman could be “accomplished” without being a “pedant,” be “learned, yet amiable,” possess both a “strong mind” and “soft manners.” The institution of slavery troubled Noah in 1820. Owners of an illegal slave ship (the importation of slaves was outlawed by Congress in 1808) deserved “solitary confinement.” Nothing justified this practice among “men whose birthright is liberty, whose eminent peculiarity is freedom.” Acknowledging “repeated instances that the intellect of the blacks is capable of high cultivation,” he yet distinguished between the slave trade and the traffic of domestic slavery. While the latter might be “deplored” as a “domestic evil,” the trade must be “cursed.”28

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Noah also assumed position as the most prominent leader of the city’s Jewish community. In 1818, a year after moving to the city, he delivered the consecration address at the newly rebuilt Shearith Israel. His oration enunciated a Jewish persuasion of Jeffersonian republicanism. Noah began with a survey of Jewish history, noting Jewish gifts to civilization through the “laws of Moses” and the many centuries when “Jews have been the objects of hatred and persecution.” Only in “our country, the bright example of universal tolerance, of liberality, true religion and good faith,” did Jews find acceptance. In a nation where justice is administered “impartially,” where “dignity is blended with equality,” and where “merit alone has a fixed value,” this troubled people found peace and safety. Noah’s oration contained no references to revelation, salvation, punishment of sin, and repentance. Rather, it asserted that Judaism, “the religion of nature — the religion of reason and philosophy,” would flourish in a republican society.29 Noah’s closing words expressed the conservative republicanism of the synagogue’s leaders. Though not rigorously observant, he declared it the duty of Jews to maintain “strict observance of the Sabbath day” and the “religious tenets which make [Jews] a distinct people.” To those who found it difficult to reconcile ancient laws and customs with the modern age, Noah asked, “who is he that can amend them?” For “once innovate upon their principles and who can say where it will end; what dangers may not arise, what destruction may not be anticipated!” Jews, even in an enlightened world, must follow tradition.30 Noah sent Thomas Jefferson, whose ideals inspired his republicanism, including its Jewish strain, a copy of his 1818 dedicatory speech at Shearith Israel. Jefferson replied that Noah’s historical summary offered “remarkable proof ” that every religious sect “in power” practiced intolerance, in opposition to “the moral basis, on which all our religions rest.” Jefferson also endorsed Noah’s hope that the Jews of America would place “its members on the equal and commanding benches of science.”31 Jefferson’s letter to Noah might also have spurred a movement based on reason and universality of morals, but Noah was more the politician than the philosopher. While he personally shunned some traditional practices, he remained loyal to the traditions of Shearith Israel. When Canadian Moses Hart published a pamphlet “in a classical deistic tradition” emphasizing a unitarian God and reward and punishment in this life, it found little favor in New

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York’s Jewish community. No Jewish leader in the 1820s used republicanism to found a reform synagogue in New York. That came in the next generation. Noah’s thoughts led him in a different direction.32

■ Ararat For Mordecai M. Noah, America was the Jews’ “chosen country.” As a former diplomat who had served in the Middle East, Noah believed that Jews would not immigrate to Palestine “if they recovered it tomorrow.” Too, he doubted that “animal sacrifices would ever be restored.” Thus, a return to Jerusalem to build the Temple was no longer central to Jewish civilization. Jeffersonian America represented the future. The homeland of the Jewish people should be there, not in a backward corner of the world where Jews lived as second-class citizens. The “restoration of the Jewish nation to their ancient rights and dominion more brilliant than they are at present” ought to be in the United States, where the most enlightened country of an enlightened age would provide Jewish immigrants from throughout the world with equality and opportunity.33 In 1820, Noah asked the New York State legislature to put Grand Island in the Niagara River on the market as a colony for world Jewry. As title to that land was not yet secure, the petition died. In 1824, however, the legislature sold Grand Island. Speculators purchased the land. Noah bought a few acres. His movement would have to negotiate with these investors.34 In Buffalo on September 25, 1825, Noah donned ceremonial robes “of crimson silk, trimmed with ermine” borrowed from a production of Richard III, and, to the music of Handel’s Judas Maccabeus and accompanied by Seneca Chief Red Jacket, led a procession to St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, where the new colony’s cornerstone, inscribed with the Shema, lay on the communion table. There Noah, “under the auspices and protection of the Constitution and laws of the United States of America” and “by the Grace of God, Governor and Judge of Israel,” did “revive, renew and reestablish the government of the Jewish Nation.” All Jews would find “asylum” in this “free and powerful country,” where they would live in peace in the colony of Ararat (the resting place of the biblical Noah’s ark), with the tools of “learning and civilization” and relearn how to till the soil. They would also learn the “science of government,” in harmony with American republican ideals. Although Noah was to be a appointed judge to begin the colony, all further judges would be elected. Noah believed

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that the “Mosaic constitution he advocated conformed to the U.S. Constitution and the laws of the land.”35 Although no Jew would be forced to immigrate to the new colony, Noah urged all Jewish people to go to Ararat: “that thou mayest prosper in all thou doest.” “Caraites and Samaritan” Jews, who, with Indians, were believed to be descendants of the ten lost tribes, would “unite with their brethren, the chosen people.” Polygamy would be forbidden. All prayer would be in Hebrew, though sermons could be “in the language of the country.” He proposed to pay the colony’s expenses through a tax on world Jewry.36 Noah received encouragement. The Commercial Advertiser wrote that, in these “enlightened times,” Jewish immigrants, with the benefit of their “wealth and enterprise,” would have “every inducement to become valuable members of society.” In Germany, Eduard Gans and Leopold Zunz, leaders of a society devoted to the “advancement of science and knowledge among the Jews,” made Noah an “Extraordinary Member” of their Verein (society), assuring him that “the better part of the European Jews are looking with the eager countenance of hope to the United States . . . to exchange the miseries of their native soil for public freedom.”37 Once Noah announced his specific plan, he also met ridicule. Newspapers charged that “the corner-stone” was a ruse to “fill the pockets of Mr. Noah and his associates.” American Jews attacked his project as “profane” and “contrary to scriptural authority.” European Jews judged Noah a “crazy man.” Ararat became “a source of amusement” for Noah’s political foes. Today only the cornerstone remains. Noah likely did not comprehend the difficulties of assimilating Jews into American culture while also maintaining a separate ethnic identity. Simultaneous “integration and segregation” would be difficult, if not impossible, to achieve.38 It is best to see Noah’s project less as a forerunner of Zionism and more as a vision of a Jeffersonian New York Jew. Noah saw America as a tolerant, enlightened society. There, in “pursuit of happiness,” Jews could find fulfillment — at least until a distant messianic future. If the Jews of America could no longer identify with a closed synagogue community, they could still maintain communal identity in a republican nation. Other religious groups, such as the Mormons and the Moravians, successfully sought a religious haven in the American West. Why could it not work for Jews as well?

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■ Anti-Semitism Acceptance of Jews into the mainstream of American life did not go unchallenged. The partisan battles of the 1790s ignited anti-Semitic charges. In 1790, a Democratic-Republican newspaper printed a letter from a “Citizen” accusing (Hamiltonian) speculators of descending to the level of Jews. Though these people were uncircumcised, “their minds are far gone in Israelitish avarice.” Those who were made rich by Hamilton were “brokers, speculators, Jews, M[embers] of C[ongress] and foreigners.” As Jews migrated to the Jeffersonians, anti-Semitism became the province of the Federalists. Printer James Rivington published a preface to a novel singling out Solomon Simson as a leader of men who “will easily be known by their physiognomy; they all seem to be, like their Vice-President [of the Democratic Society], of the tribe of Shylock; they have that leering underlook, and malicious grin that seem to say to the honest man — approach me not.” Rivington linked Jews with blacks and the Haitian Revolution. Jeffersonians responded that “it is a good maxim not to ridicule religion.” Alexander Hamilton represented Jews in his law practice and wrote of the “progress of the Jews” as “entirely out of the ordinary course of human affairs,” the result of “some great providential Plan.” Yet, at the height of reaction in 1798, he compared his political enemies to “Shylock the Jew.” During the 1790s, “a wide and fetid stream of antisemitism” ran through “Federalist thought.”39 Twenty years later, Mordecai M. Noah ran for sheriff. Appointed to this position in 1820, the highest political office yet achieved by New York’s Jews, he acquitted himself well, working for debtor reform. When the office became elective in 1821, anti-Semitism emerged as a major issue in the contest. The Evening Post reminded voters that Noah’s opponent was “an old member of the church.” The Commercial Advertiser expressed alarm that on the second day of the election “the Jews prevailed against the Gentiles.” A leader of the Protestant missionary American Society for Meliorating the Condition of the Jews claimed that a recent outbreak of yellow fever was God’s “judgement” for prominent citizens “publically abetting the election of an infidel in preference to a Christian.” Noah wrote that on the eve of election “Churchmen, Sextons, Bell-ringers [and] Deacons . . . of the Church Militant scoured the wards to oppose what they called the unbeliever.”’ Lamenting that the election had

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become a religious war that could threaten members of other sects, he lost, attracting 41 percent of the vote.40 Historian Jacob Marcus argues that most Americans believed that, as the new nation was Christian, Jews were not entitled to political rights. Leading writers vented anti-Semitic remarks. For example, while a young politico, Washington Irving smeared a Clintonian Democratic-Republican as a “little ugly Jew.” In America, as in Europe, “the word ‘Jew’ was a synonym for a cheat.” However, given New York’s political heritage, the impact of anti-Semitism should not be exaggerated. Jews made significant strides in the marketplace, mainstream culture, and politics. For example, The Merchant of Venice played to large audiences in 1810 – 1812; Shylock was depicted as “diabolic, enraged and vengeful.” In another production in 1820 – 1821, Shylock was portrayed as a “person of mixed and justifiable emotions.” And then in a later production, he was depicted as a “guardian of Hebrew law and grandeur,” to equally appreciative audiences. American republicanism’s better angels flew more freely in New York City.41 Although American missionaries saw themselves as anything but antiSemitic, when they attempted to convert Jews, they aroused antagonism in the Jewish community. This movement began in the United States with the Second Great Awakening and the formation of such organizations as the American Tract Society and the American Bible Society. Intensity increased with the arrival in 1816 of Joseph Frey, a converted Jew knowledgeable in Greek, Latin, and Hebrew. With local clergy, he formed the American Society for Evangelizing the Jews, whose name was changed to the American Society for Meliorating the Condition of the Jews to secure incorporation. The society, drawing the support of John Quincy Adams and the president of Yale, published a magazine in 1823, Israel’s Advocate. Many of the city’s ministers joined Frey’s effort at a “large meeting.” In his autobiography, Frey termed the Jews a fainthearted people, as “the mere idea of going among Christians excites in [them] a timidity indescribable.”42 In 1822, a converted Polish Jew, Bernard Jadownicky, with European success converting Jews, traveled to America. Spurning old methods of handing out Bibles and sending missionaries to debate, he advocated a colony. Frey’s society also endorsed colonization, claiming the moment of mass conversion was at hand. In 1824, however, the society, reporting its effort to purchase thousands of acres of upstate New York land unfeasible, recommended a “plan

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of amalgamation” in which Jewish immigrants would be met on arrival and given instruction in agriculture and the Gospels, becoming a new Christian “band of brethren.”43 New York Jewry responded. An anonymously written pamphlet, Israel Vindicated, warned that there was no excuse for Jews not defending themselves from “base and unfounded charges.” Missionary societies’ descriptions of Jews in a “degraded and uncultivated state” made it more difficult for Jews to attain greater standing. Deficiencies in Jewish occupational structure resulted from anti-Semitism. Those who opposed toleration, an integral part of a republican society, did the work of “tyrants.” Printer Samuel Jackson’s periodical, The Jew, published in 1823, targeted missionaries. Noting that twenty Christians expressed an interest in conversion to Judaism, Jackson saw the emissaries as cowards, unable to defend their own faith. As a result, “disbelief of the gospels has increased.”44 Republican America offered those who wished to convert the Jews the liberty to organize and disseminate their literature. But it also gave the Jewish community a free hand and a free pen. Missionaries encountered little success in New York, a state in which Jews found much opportunity. More important, the Jewish community claimed its voice and learned how to use it, both to defend itself against missionaries and to fully participate in the republican life of the new nation.

In 1818, the congregation of Shearith Israel decided to remodel its original building rather than to construct a synagogue uptown. The new sanctuary was 60 percent larger than the original Mill Street synagogue and seated three hundred. (Courtesy Congregation Shearith Israel)

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A Republican Faith

In 1790, the congregation of Shearith Israel drafted a new constitution. It included a bill of rights, which opened with a ringing statement: “Whereas in free states all power originates and is derived from the people who always retain every right necessary for their well being individually, . . . therefore we the profession [ professors] of the Divine laws . . . conceive it our duty to make this declaration of our rights and privileges.” The first right, entitling “every free person professing the Jewish religion, and who lives according to its holy precepts” to a seat in the synagogue “as a brother” and as a “subject of every fraternal duty,” hinted at a worldwide brotherhood of Jews, perhaps reflecting the French Revolution’s idea of fraternité. While most rights were traditional, such as a member’s prerogative to have the hazan officiate at a wedding, these compelling words marked a new era in the practice of Judaism in New York. As republicanism reshaped the Jewish community’s secular world, it also dramatically changed the world of Jewish spirituality.1

■ Republicanism and Shearith Israel Shearith Israel resumed services immediately after the British evacuation, but its future course was in doubt. The concept of the synagogue-community was incompatible with a republican society in which Jews no longer had to seclude themselves around a plainly constructed sanctuary. Could their synagogue redefine itself to remain central to the community? The congregation’s new constitution, completed under the leadership of Jeffersonian Solomon Simson a year after the U.S. Constitution was ratified, attempted to combine both synagogue traditions and republican ideals.

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By the end of the eighteenth century, New York had grown northward toward the present Houston Street. While all neighborhoods were mixed, the wealthy tended to move from their downtown residences to new brownstones in the center of the island above Chatham Park and, after 1812, the new city hall. The working classes tended to reside in the wards adjoining the East and Hudson Rivers. (Courtesy Prints Division, New York Public Library)

The charter’s preamble, similar to the opening lines of the Bill of Rights, declared that the congregation had authority, “in the presence of the Almighty” and in “a state happily constituted upon the principles of equal liberty civil and religious,” to formulate a “compact” containing “rules, and regulations” for the “general good.” The “congregation of yehudim,” fulfilling their duty “to themselves and posterity,” pledged to “perform all acts” required for the support of their “religious and holy divine service.”2 The constitution offered membership to every Jewish male at least twentyone years old (except indentured or hired servants), not married “contrary to the rules of [the Jewish] religion,” and “conforming hereunto.” It enumerated the duties of the president or parnas and the council of elders, the maamad. The new compact allowed all members to vote for members of the board. (The

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transfer and settlement of power from the elders to the trustees was still in progress, and the constitution was unclear about the relationship of the two.) The constitution directed that arbitration would end the internal controversies that had so often divided the congregation.3 The congregation’s bylaws detailed duties of the hazan, shochet, and shamash; the right of three members to call a synagogue meeting; and the means to secure revenue. They included a clause forbidding any Jew who violated Jewish “religious laws by eating trafa, breakeing the Sabath, or any other sacred day” from being called to the Torah or running for congregational office. On July 11, 1790, the Board of Trustees ratified the charter, repealing all prior congregational laws, and reminded the congregation that the “temporalities” of the congregation were vested in its hands.4 The writing of the 1790 constitution coincided with a second expression of the congregation’s republicanism. Following the example of the Newport congregation, they penned a joint letter (with congregations in Richmond, Charleston, and Philadelphia) to President Washington. The congregations declared that they would “yield to no class of their fellow-citizens . . . in affection” for the nation’s glorious leader. The “wonders . . . the Lord of Hosts had worked” in ancient Israel were visible in the “late glorious revolution” and in the federal Constitution, a compact that sealed “in peace what [Washington] had achieved in war.” The Jewish community prayed that God would protect Washington in his remaining days and assured him, “when full of years, thou shalt be gathered unto thy people,” that his name and virtues “will remain an indelible memorial on our minds.” Washington responded that the affection of America’s Jews was a “treasure beyond the reach of calculation.” In the new republic, “the liberality of sentiment toward each other, which marks every political and religious denomination of men in this country, stands unparalleled in the history of Nations.” Agreeing that “the power and goodness of the Almighty” were visible in “our late glorious revolution . . . and in the establishment of our present equal government,” he wished America’s Jewish congregations “the same temporal and eternal blessings” that they “implore” for him. The Jewish community was a partner in the republican experiment.5

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■ A Republican Synagogue Community Shearith Israel remained the only synagogue in New York throughout the first thirty-five years of the early republic. While critical to the perseverance of Judaism in Gotham, it no longer served as the cornerstone of Jewish existence. The population of Jews in New York rose, but the congregation’s membership did not. There were more choices. Jews could choose to affiliate with the Masonic Order or the Mechanics Society. However, most seats at High Holy Days were filled. For example, in 1815, the congregation sold all but 25 of its 132 men’s seats and nearly all of the 72 seats in the women’s gallery. Yet only about fifty of those purchasing seats were members; the others just bought seats for the holidays. For many Jews, the synagogue assumed relevance for only part of their lives: primarily life-cycle ceremonies and the High Holy Days. Thus, New York’s Jews initiated a practice that became increasingly common.6 The early republican era was difficult for Shearith Israel. The physical condition of the synagogue continued to deteriorate. Services, lasting as long as four to five hours, were often conducted in a cacophonous manner, as congregants, when they were not gossiping, prayed at their own rates. Attendance was another problem. It was more and more difficult to gather a minyan of ten adult males; at times, only three men turned up at the daily service. In 1814, the trustees declared that diminished Sabbath attendance made the required two shillings per offering (aliyah, or call to the Torah) burdensome for conscientious attendees. Haym Salomon wrote in 1825 that the present generation had “fallen on evil times”; some Friday evenings, only “three heads of families” and the “reader” were present. Attendance waxed and waned but remained problematic throughout the era.7 Shearith Israel’s financial crises offered further evidence of its weakened standing in the Jewish community. Minutes of the Board of Trustees focus on the synagogue’s dire circumstances. The sale of seats and members’ dues and contributions were not adequate; as a result, synagogue employees came under stress. In 1805, the shamash requested a raise from a fifty-dollar salary that “will scarcely find bread.” Though aware that “the funds of the society will not afford him” what his family needs, he sought some increase in compensation. Clerk Isaac Gomez in 1807 stated that he had “waited for a long period

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previous to this application in order that the funds might be in a better state.” In 1813, the clerk again asked for a raise, stating that he received “only a pittance” because of the “deranged state of the funds of the Congregation.” That year, the board failed to pay the Mechanics Bank $300 due on a note until a trustee loaned it the funds. An 1815 report found “the finances of the Congregation in a very deranged state,” with the “dignity of the Board” harmed by its inability to pay debts.8 The trustees pursued debtors. In 1812, declaring that the “immoral” neglect of financial responsibilities could “destroy the well being of the Congregation,” the board ruled that members in arrears would lose their vote and other “rights privileges and immunities” until they paid their debts. The board also turned outstanding debts, including those of members, over to a “trusty and vigilant marshall,” attorney John Ackerman. Economic conditions improved after the War of 1812, allowing Jewish leaders to collect funds to refurbish the synagogue. The Panic of 1819, however, caused “retrenchments.” While internal quarrels and market conditions were factors, limited allegiance and identity also caused problems, as income remained insufficient for many years.9 Though there were yet no independent Jewish welfare societies, a few semiautonomous organizations emerged in the early republic, loosely affiliated with Shearith Israel. The first society, Hebra Gemiluth Hasidim (Society for Dispensing Acts of Kindness), began its work in 1785 with fifty-five members. Members paid a four-shilling initiation fee and dues. For five years, this organization dispensed medicine, fuel, and money to those in need; visited the sick; and prepared the dead for burial. In 1802, Hebra Hased Vaamet (Society of Kindness and Truth), with its own constitution, took over the duties to the dead and dying, and it remains an ongoing institution. Shearith Israel provided the society its hearse and keys to the cemetery. In 1827, Hased Vaamet published a “Compendium of the Order of the Burial Service.” Rules prohibited moving a dying person from his or her residence unless directed by a physician; no noise was permitted to disturb the dying. With death near, the members of the society gathered in a circle. After the last breath, they recited the Shema and then the word “one” seven times. In 1798, the charitable society Kalpe Mattan Basether emerged with the help of Reverend Seixas. It sought to give charity in secret, one of Judaism’s highest forms of alms. Directors were “in no case” to “divulge the names of persons receiving aid” or how

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the directors spent their grants. The Hebrew Benevolent Society began in 1820, focusing on English and Polish Jews. In 1825, it aligned with a new congregation, B’nai Jeshurun.10

■ A Hamiltonian Synagogue American republicanism possessed two outlooks vying to become the nation’s creed. The Hamiltonian version that stressed deference and tradition found a home in Shearith Israel at the same time that the egalitarian Jeffersonian strain was defeating Hamilton’s conservative republicanism at the polls. As the city fathers attempted to establish order within a republican framework by laying out the rectangular grid that was to define Manhattan Island, so, too, the prominent Jews who led Shearith Israel attempted to establish an ordered structure.11 This quest appears in the constitution that the congregation ratified in 1805. The new charter contained neither a bill of rights nor a statement proclaiming the right to enact compacts. It named only a single governing body, the Board of Trustees; the president of the board was parnas. The corporate structure was fully in place. The compact stressed order and decorum. The board could levy a fine of up to $250 for disruptive behavior, a much larger sum than was permitted in 1790. To “promote Solemnity and Order” during worship and make members’ prayers “acceptable to almighty god,” article 8 of the bylaws required members not to chant a psalm until the hazan “shall signify the tone or key, in which the [psalm] is to be sung.” Members could pray “with an equal voice but neither higher nor louder than the [hazan].” Members were to exit “in a quiet and orderly manner.” Jews living within “the corporation of the city of New York” who were not members had to pay ten dollars if they wished any of “the rights, benefits or immunities” of members. The congregation expected all Jews to support the synagogue. This charter reflected an increase in the influence of conservative republicanism, as the need of making a living and raising families replaced the initial wave of republican enthusiasm.12 The Board of Trustees, legal head of a chartered corporation, exercised tight control over the hazan, shochet, and shamash; disbursed charity; and oversaw the school. Though the hazan was the religious leader, the board governed. It demonstrated no reluctance in disciplining Hazan Peixotto when he acted in an “unbecoming manner” by showing discourtesy to the acting parnas. The trustees expected obedience.13

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The board feared innovation. Traditional Sephardic ritual (even though most members were Ashkenazi) and order of prayers continued. In 1818, when a group of young congregants proposed forming a choir to beautify the service, the trustees extended the “thanks and approbation of the . . . congregation for their good intention” to “give the service that solemnity that [the] prayers and psalms should have.” But, they warned, “innovations” must be approached “with great cautions and defference” so as not to create a greater “evil.” Too often, factions, “from private pique,” attempted to control the service, causing older members to cease attending. The board encouraged the youths to continue their rehearsals and to create a new, acceptable “harmony in singing.” There is no evidence that this movement went forward.14 In 1820, the board deplored “attempts to introduce a mode of offering,” unknown to the congregation, which could “subvert the usages and customs . . . established by [the congregation’s] fathers.” A member who dared “interrupt the solemnity of . . . holy worship” incurred “the displeasure of the great Creator of the Universe.” The requirement to wear tallit (prayer shawls) at services was another issue of contention. A number of members chose not to wear the shawls, claiming that doing so was not required by Jewish law. The committee investigating this question found no “imperative religious obligation.” However, as the custom had been “strictly observed,” any “departure,” they declared, would be an “innovation,” which could lead to further “deviations” and, finally, to the “subversion of all the venerable & established usages of this Congregation.” Consequently, only men wearing tallit would be called to the Torah. These conservative trustees stressed tradition over experiment.15 Dr. John Pierce of Brookline, Massachusetts, a minister who understood Hebrew, visited the synagogue in 1812 and reported favorably on its Sabbath prayers. The gathering was decorous, as men wearing “white sashes” (prayer shawls) went “with great ceremony” to the altar to take out the Torah. The service, “consisting of prayers and singing from the Psalms and recitations from the law, was performed by young and old, and altogether in the Hebrew language.” New England ministers demanded decorum, and Pierce saw little of the cacophony common to services at the time. Perhaps the trustees achieved a measure of success in their quest for order, or perhaps the presence of a visiting Christian divine had a quieting impact.16 The congregation’s decision to replace the crumbling, demoralizing, and “deplorable” 1730 structure proved to be its most important accomplishment

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in the early republic. Fewer and fewer congregants trekked downtown to attend services in a cramped, unattractive setting. During the window of opportunity that the more prosperous years of 1817 and 1818 provided, a number of leading members raised the funds for and oversaw the construction of a new sanctuary. Harmon Hendricks gave $250 and an interest-free loan of $1,000 (later increased to $2,000). Jews from beyond New York contributed, including the congregation of Curaçao (600 pieces of eight).17 The decision to rebuild rather than to relocate exemplified conservative members exerting control. It would have been wiser to move where the wellto-do Jewish population was living, north of city hall, in the tree-lined neighborhood of upper Greenwich, Laight, Charlton, and Wooster Streets, but devotion to Mill Street prevailed. The new brick and stone building, thirty-five feet by fifty-eight feet, was 60 percent larger than the original structure and nine feet higher, with 167 seats for men and 133 in the women’s gallery. The candelabra remained, illuminating the Roman cement floor. Naphtali Judah donated a white marble tablet chiseled with the Ten Commandments. The synagogue made a few nods toward egalitarianism. All men’s seats were priced at four pounds. A “plane turned mahogany banister” allowed women a better view than the previous breastwork had. Despite these reforms, the decision exacted a price. Attractive as the new sanctuary was, it filled its seats only in the first years. In 1822, only 102 of the men’s seats were sold and only 108 of the women’s.18 Deferential republicanism emerged in disciplinary cases before the board. In 1796, a congregant landed in jail for disturbing the service. The board received a letter from his wife, “G. Philips,” pleading for release. She acknowledged that “he deserved some punishment” but promised that, if he was released “from confinement,” she would “keep him from going to Synagoge any more.” In 1806, the trustees summoned a congregant for refusing to stand on Yom Kippur. Learning that he was ill, they revoked his fine. The shamash was brought before the board for refusing to open a window when ordered by the parnas. After a suitable apology and a “promise of good behavior,” he was allowed to keep his position. The board called congregant Solomon Levy before it for refusing to accept the honor of the sepher (being called to the Torah, requiring a two-shilling offering). Levy was acquitted on the grounds that he intended no insult. In 1809, the board tried E. N. Carvalho for “eating Trephah.”

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While the 1805 constitution no longer required observance of ritual, and it was not uncommon for members to violate dietary laws, this was not permitted for applicants for office, in this case, acting hazan. Jacob Hart testified that Carvalho ate lobster at the house of a man named Nunes. Carvalho replied that when he ate with Nunes, the food was always “Casher” and that he had his “Negroe boy” superintend its preparation. He vowed that he was “as cautious eating at Mr. Nunes’ House, as he would be at the house of a Goye.” Carvalho was acquitted.19 In 1818, the board summoned a constable to remove the wife of David Levy from a seat in the women’s gallery that was not assigned to her. (After her ejection, she took a seat in the back.) In 1820, the trustees confronted “Rabi Pique,” their learned Belgian teacher, accusing him of alcoholism and meddling “in the arranging of the service,” causing “a scene highly disgraceful in itself.” The board instructed Pique not to “interfere with any service or order of prayers” and to obey the hazan, the “officer of the congregation.” Unable to reform, Pique was terminated.20 Those who were summoned before the board struck a deferential attitude. With Jeffersonian ideals prominent in the republic, the congregation’s acceptance of deferential Hamiltonian republicanism was at issue with any break in decorum or any innovation.

■ A Jeffersonian Synagogue The Jeffersonian republicanism that propelled Jefferson and Madison into the presidency also played a major role in synagogue affairs. One tenet of Jeffersonianism, the right to challenge authority, confounded the Board of Trustees from 1811 to 1814 over election of new trustees, amid allegations that “presiding trustees” refused to appoint legal inspectors. For reasons not spelled out in the minutes, the congregation voted out two long-serving members. Three resignations followed immediately. Isaac Moses, noting that he had been a trustee for years, abandoned his post with “great pain and anxiety” because of a “combination tending to destroy the peace and happiness of the Congregation” by driving away men “who have unremittingly and honestly laboured to promote their prosperity” and selecting individuals who “have been steadily hostile to the present constitution,” a charter “drafted and ratified by the congregation.” M. L. Moses vacated his seat because that same “Combination” threatened to

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undermine “the Harmony and prosperity of the Congregation.” Seixas Nathan stepped down because of “the late Election of a Gentleman to the Trusteeship who has uniformly refused to subscribe to either [the constitution or bylaws].” The synagogue’s eminent treasurer, Solomon Simson, resigned, and bookkeeper Solomon Seixas left his position in July 1813, “in consequence of the election of the two late elected members, . . . who disgrace the station of the Trustees.” Seixas also resigned his seat in the sanctuary, as he was “no longer coming to Synagogue.” He pledged to return when “respectable members” replaced these trustees.21 None of the 1811 trustees remained a member of the 1812 board. The new body included Hayam Solomon, son the of the famed revolutionary of the same name, representing Ashkenazim critical of laxity in religious observance, and Benjamin Judah, a synagogue gadfly, who resigned in 1824 after being expelled on Yom Kippur eve for defying the parnas regarding an open door. Strife continued in 1814 when Judah declared himself president by virtue of seniority. Judah also became parnas, a position that normally accompanied the presidency, by voting twice (once as president) to break a three-three tie. A contentious period ensued: the board had difficulty reaching a quorum, the synagogue failed to pay its notes, and Judah peremptorily postponed the sale of seats. Rebuked by fellow trustees for actions contrary to the constitution, Judah, together with Isaac Gomez Jr., resigned the following April. Haym Salomon had already left. The intrigues within the synagogue leadership and the bitterly contested elections reveal the presence of the more egalitarian strain of republicanism, as members shunned deference in order to oust traditional leadership. Generational conflict and friction between Ashkenazi and Sephardi members also contributed to the conflict.22 Jeffersonian republican appeals surfaced during these schisms over the election of the shochet. Whatever members did outside their homes, the availability of kosher meat remained of great importance to the community. In 1813, there were no Jewish butchers; non-Jewish meat handlers under the Common Council’s supervision supplied kosher meat. (In 1805, the council’s Market Committee revoked the license of a butcher who deceptively offered nonkosher meat as kosher.) These butchers slaughtered from their stock under the watch of the shochet. The shochet’s contract required him to have meat available on a daily basis. He received a salary for his services ($400 in 1813) and kept beef tongues as a perk.23

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An election took place in January 1813, shortly after the overthrow of the former Board of Trustees. Thirty-five members voted for one of two candidates. The first, current shochet Abraham Abrahams, faced criticism for laxity and self-serving interpretations of his contract. Opposing him was Mark Solomon of Charleston, South Carolina, a former New York shochet. The new board was likely looking for a change since, though the vote favored Abrahams 25 – 18, it was unable to reach agreement with him over salary demands and working conditions. Consequently, the board gave the contract to Solomon and ordered Abrahams to return the congregation’s knives and pincers.24 Though Abrahams did not win appointment, a number of members of the congregation continued to employ him. In response, the board wrote the Common Council requesting an ordinance prohibiting the sale of “meats sealed after the customs of their Society” by anyone not under contract with the synagogue. Under Jewish law, they wrote, it was unlawful for a Jew to eat “flesh” unless “killed, inspected & sealed” by shochetim “duly authorized by the Mahamad or Trustees of the Synagogue & by them pronounced to be sound.” Unfortunately, “certain persons” not employed by Shearith Israel had “killed & sealed meat.”25 On February 1, the Common Council complied, forbidding sale of “meat known as Jews meat” by those not “engaged” by Shearith Israel, with a penalty of twenty-five dollars per offense. The synagogue now possessed a legal monopoly. Members employing Abrahams petitioned the council to repeal the measure as an “encroachment on our religious rites and a restriction of those general privileges to which we are entitled.” They were certain that the council “did not intend to impair the civil rights, or wound the religious feelings of [their] sect.” The trustees, in other words, had misled the council. The council repealed the act. Among the opponents of the trustees were former board members Nathan and Moses, former treasurer Simson, and industrialist Harmon Hendricks.26 Furious at the repeal, the board termed the rebellious petitioners, their congregants, “wicked and irreligious, . . . tending to destroy the respectability of the Congregation.” Moreover, the trustees said they objected to fellow members making public “an unfortunate Schism in our society.” This was critical, as the council’s decision turned on its intent not to “interfere in [the] controversy.” Aware of republican disdain of monopoly, the board retreated, stating that as it did not aim to prevent other shochetim from working, “far be it from

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The expression depicted on the seal of congregation Shearith Israel, that the world stands on justice, truth, and charity, is a republican Americanized translation of a saying from Pirke Avot (Ethics of the Fathers), which is in harmony with the republican ideals of the early republic. (Courtesy Congregation Shearith Israel)

the Trustees to impose shackles upon any man’s conscience.” If members “opposed to the Shohet employed by the Trustees” chose not to eat of the meat he supervised, “let them employ a Shohet of their own and designate it by a particular mark of their own.” The trustees intended to safeguard congregants who looked to them “for direction in all their religious concerns.” Their petition for reconsideration was unsuccessful, its arguments undermined by the board’s contradictory statements and the negative votes of trustees Isaac Gomez Jr. and Solomon Seixas, who declared that the appeal was “inviting insult and only intending to create Schisms in the Congregation to a greater extent.27 This dispute demonstrated that Jeffersonian republicanism endured within the congregation. Jeffersonians opposed restraints on competition as Britishlike efforts to create favorites in the marketplace and to limit entrepreneurial opportunity. It also showed the pragmatic nature of republican ideology. Unlike political allegiances, which tended to harden over time, congregants could advocate different strands of republican thought according to their circumstances. While in office, the former trustees championed deferential Hamiltonianism; in opposition, they employed Jeffersonian egalitarianism to oppose the new trustees’ rejection of Abrahams. The board, they argued, had jurisdiction in the synagogue, not in the marketplace.28 Jeffersonianism emerged in the educational endeavors of Shearith Israel.

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The congregation’s attempts to maintain a school in the early republic were no more successful than they had been in the colonial era, despite a $900 grant in 1801 from Myer Polony to support a Talmud Torah. The enthusiasm of its first teacher, Hazan Seixas, who believed that education was “the first thing that ought to be pursued in life, in order to constitute us rational,” and that children deserved “a compleat and full knowledge of the Hebrew language,” did not prevent enrollment from shrinking to a dozen students. After Seixas stepped down, the school often failed to meet because the congregation was unable to hire a competent teacher.29 Jeffersonian thought supported common school education in the belief that a democratic society required an educated citizenry. In 1811, Shearith Israel learned that Albany was considering funding a common school system. This was an opportunity for educational revival. The trustees, with the help of Mayor DeWitt Clinton, applied for state funds. Persuaded “that the Legislature will look with an equal eye upon all occupations of people who conduct themselves as good and faithful citizens,” the trustees argued that the Jewish community deserved “the same countenance and encouragement which has been exhibited to others.” After an initial rejection, the congregation received $1,565.70 “for the instruction of poor children in the most useful branches of common education.”30 Funding dropped markedly when the legislature voted to devote the bulk of its funds to nondenominational schools. In 1813, learning of the establishment of Free School No. 1 and lawmakers’ intent, the trustees petitioned Albany. Acknowledging that education was the “best pledge of republican institutions,” the congregation yet found the free school “exceptionable on the score of religious instruction.” Its five hundred pupils would not receive spiritual education there or from “irreligious parents.” The appropriation would “encourage parents in habits of indifference to their duties of religion,” leading children’s minds toward “fraud and deception.” The petition failed. The Polonies Talmud Torah continued to struggle. At one point, it had but two students. In the Age of Jefferson, Jewish parents, integrated into New York society, did not look to the synagogue for the education of their children.31 Jeffersonian civil libertarian ideals became an issue at Shearith Israel in 1823 when the board suspended David Seixas, son of the late hazan, from receiving honors for a year for insulting the new hazan with “passion and temper

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inconsistent with decorum due” to the “Holy Place of Worship.” The board’s failure to maintain Seixas’s widowed mother at the agreed amount angered him. Seventeen congregants wrote the trustees that its decision was a violation of bylaws, which allowed a member charged with insulting the parnas in the discharge of his duties the right to a hearing before the board. Seixas never received that opportunity. The petitioners, ready to “attest that there was nothing inconsistent with decorum” in Seixas’s actions, reasoned that if this action was permitted, they too could be subject to “similar ex parte interpretations.” Indeed, “laws . . . enacted for the rights and Liberties of individuals ought not to be thus precipitously disrespected.” Nothing should be done to weaken members’ allegiance to the congregation’s constitution, a charter in conformity “with that universal law of our country which requires the accuser and accused to be confronted.” Eschewing deferential expectations, these members invoked egalitarian republicanism to defend their rights.32

■ Secession The final and most significant example of Jeffersonianism came with the revolt of Ashkenazi members, leading to the formation of a second congregation, B’nai Jeshurun, in 1824. In the 1776 Declaration of Independence, Jefferson affirmed that a people under a government that denied them the “unalienable Rights” of “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness” possessed the right “to institute new Government.” While Jefferson was not writing of Jewish congregations, B’nai Jeshurun was born within this spirit. The movement began with an incident of synagogue discipline. English Ashkenazi pawnbroker Barrow Cohen refused to make an offering when called to the Torah. (Though Cohen was of low economic standing, his status as a Kohen, a Jew whose ancestry was among the priestly tribe of ancient Israel, allowed him significant synagogue honors.) The Board of Trustees summoned Barrow for a hearing. With Ashkenazi Jews an ever-increasing majority of the congregation’s membership, and Cohen’s recognized position as a leader of dissident Ashkenazi, the board understood that this was more than the usual case of disruption. It decided that no one but the president could ask questions. Other trustees would have to submit queries in writing; if the president deemed the request improper, Cohen would be asked to leave while the board discussed the issue.33

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After seceding from Shearith Israel in 1825, the members of the new congregation, B’nai Jeshurun, purchased the First Coloured Presbyterian Church on Elm Street and remodeled it with new chandeliers and brick columns. It seated six hundred, twice the capacity of Shearith Israel. (Courtesy Collections of the New-York Historical Society)

At the hearing, Cohen, while admitting he made no offering, stated that he acted “according to the Constitution of th[e] Congregation.” If the trustees proceeded “contrary to the Constitution,” he would “apply elsewhere.” He made no offering, because “as a Congregator his rights were taken from him.” Trustee Haym Salomon became irate, declared the proceedings “illegal,” and left the hearing. Attempting to avoid internal conflict, the board declared that Cohen was ignorant of the law and had no desire to insult the trustees. Thus, it only directed him to behave properly while attending “Divine Worship.” It also

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repealed the requirement of offerings for those who were called to the Torah. Spurning this offer of reconciliation, Cohen wrote the board that its “insinuation” to his “future behavior” merited “nothing but contempt.”34 Cohen’s hearing rallied the Ashkenazi faction against what they saw as a domineering board insensitive to their concerns. They next requested permission to conduct their own services in the morning, at a time when the synagogue was not in use. Their request, they stated, was not meant as separation but to operate independently within the synagogue. They pledged to collect offerings, “keep a regular account,” and use the customary Sephardic “minhog” (tradition). They expressed their confidence in the trustees, who had “no ground for refusal”: “The trustees will cheerfully concur in the promotion of our zeal and attention to the worship of our holy religion.”35 The Ashkenazi faction organized its own society, Hevra Hinuch Nearim (Society for the Education of Youth), in 1824. Its constitution pledged loyalty to Shearith Israel, strict performance of Jewish law, and regular attendance at services “at such times and places as shall be directed.” An executive committee of five elected members was to govern the society for three-month terms; then a new committee would take on authority. Committee meetings were open to the public. The hazan would possess no greater standing than any other member of the society, nor would he dress differently, except when wearing tallit. A member of the synagogue could join the society if he received a majority vote of members. This rule was “not intended to exclude any brother Yehudah” from “joining therein, provided he conduct himself with propriety.” The society would distribute honors “in such a manner that each person shall have an equal portion”; offerings were lowered from two shillings to six and a quarter cents. The society intended to foster Ashkenazi identity and increase religious observance. Egalitarian governance would replace the authoritarianism of Shearith Israel.36 The Board of Trustees responded in two ways. First, they rejected the petition “under the full conviction that they cannot recognize any society or association for religious worship distinct from Shearith Israel.” They were backed by fifty-three members, who gave the trustees “full and entire approbation of their conduct,” in opposition to measures that have “a tendency to destroy the well known and established rule and customs of [their] ancestors as have been practiced . . . for one hundred years past.” Second, with the advice of an

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attorney, the trustees interpreted their act of incorporation as allowing them to restrict membership. With a vote required for all new members, the congregation rejected all but two of the first sixteen to apply. The synagogue also sought Jewish legal sources to forbid Barrow Cohen from receiving honors even if he were the only Kohen present, including the priestly benediction. Immigration of Ashkenazi Jews created fear, distancing one part of the membership from its republican roots while driving the other into radical republican remedies.37 The final step was secession. In October, the Ashkenazim met at Washington Hall and established a new congregation. In a letter to Shearith Israel’s trustees, the founders of the new society stated that being “educated in the German and Polish minhog,” they found it “difficult” to practice the Sephardic ritual. Second, despite the still small Jewish population in New York and sparse synagogue attendance, the Ashkenazi dissidents contended that an increasing Jewish community made it impossible for Shearith Israel to handle all the Jewish congregants, “particularly on Holidays.” Finally, “the distant situation of the shool” from their homes made it difficult to attend services. The secessionists “respectfully trust[ed]” that their decision would be “Satisfactory” to the board. They did not “capriciously . . . withdraw” from the “ancient and respectable congregation,” but acted only from “motives of necessity.” In closing, they invoked the “religious and . . . equitable claim” that, they said, “we have as Brethren of one great family.” As part of a community larger than any one synagogue, the new congregation, B’nai Jeshurun, trusted that their endeavor would “be recognized.” Shearith Israel’s board considered the letter, postponed action, and never responded.38 Prominent members of Shearith Israel, including Noah and Hendricks, both Ashkenazim, signed the secessionists’ letter. It was time to let their brethren go; the growing city could encompass more congregations. The new synagogue filed articles of incorporation with the state and drafted a constitution whose preamble praised the “wise and republican laws of this country .  .  . based upon universal toleration given to every citizen and sojourner the right to worship according to the dictate of his conscience.” Within a year, with the help of Hendricks, the congregation purchased the First Coloured Presbyterian Church on Elm Street, in the heart of Five Points, a mixed working-class neighborhood that included many Jewish residents. The sanctuary, remodeled with chandeliers and brick columns, seated six hundred, twice the size of

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Shearith Israel. Soon the two congregations treated each other on a friendly basis. Shearith Israel loaned B’nai Jeshurun four scrolls for the dedication of the Elm Street synagogue in 1827, and prayers were offered in each synagogue for the welfare of both sets of trustees.39 B’nai Jeshurun was the first of many new synagogues. Bolstered by increasing numbers of immigrants, congregations split and split again. Historian Hyman Grinstein contends that if Shearith Israel had been more forthcoming, secession might have been avoided, even with new congregations. Instead, “they destroyed the very institution both sought to save — the united Jewish community of New York.” The dream that Shearith Israel would become “the largest congregation in the New World” would not come true. The founding spirit of Shearith Israel, threatened by attacks on its authority, withered as egalitarian republicanism blossomed in the new Ashkenazi society. B’nai Jeshurun, representing a younger generation with fewer men of wealth and prestige, would become one of the largest synagogues in the city.40

■ Republican Jewish Women Did republicanism alter the lives of New York’s Jewish women? Immediately after the Revolution, it will be recalled, the three Judah sisters defied Shearith Israel’s Board of Trustees over their seat assignments. When they were denied what they considered their rightful seats, they told the board, “when the Gentlemen Trustees can convince us that we are subject to any laws they choose to make which is to hinder us from attending Divine Worship, they may endeavor to exercise authority.” They did not stop their confrontation until a judge in civil court ruled against them. Yet this act of defiance to male authority did not herald a new era of politically active Jewish women, demanding a greater role in congregational governance or in ritual observance. Nor did women, Jew and non-Jew, find significantly greater opportunities in the marketplace. However, the new nation, building on the heightened political awareness and ideology of the Revolution, expected women, including female Jewish citizens, to be educated “republican mothers” whose moral behavior would nurture republican children. The success of the republic depended on their virtue.41 Shearith Israel found that its female scholars, if few in number, were highly motivated. Seven girls were among the thirty-five students receiving Hebrew

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Grace Nathan, wife of merchant Simon Nathan, was an educated correspondent with her relatives. Devoted to Shearith Israel and her brother Reverend Gershom Seixas, she composed poetry expressing her strong religious feelings. (Courtesy American Jewish Historical Society)

instruction when its school opened in the 1790s. In 1808, six girls attended, three from the Seixas family. The next year, five of them received prizes, as opposed to only three of sixteen boys. In the synagogue, two women applied to be shamash in 1788, though neither won appointment. The removal of the balustrade in the remodeled 1818 synagogue allowed greater participation in the service. The proportion of women’s seats increased to 44 percent. A mixed choir sang at the dedication. In 1820, Richa Levy, first vice president of the Female Hebrew Benevolent Society, an organization “established by the Ladies of [the] congregation for the relief of indigent females particularly,” sent the Board of Trustees a letter from The “Board of Managers” seeking permission to solicit offerings at the synagogue for the society. Their petition granted, the society continued for fifty years. Women composed a larger part of attendance at religious services and were more active in synagogue affairs, but within a segregated, auxiliary role.42 Republican New York housed more educated women than had the colonial seaport of Abigaill Franks. Unfortunately, few of their writings survive. Reverend Seixas’s daughter Sarah, married to Jewish scholar Isaac Kursheedt,

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for example, wrote informative letters to her father, but, unlike her father’s responses, none remains. However, seven letters written to her by Hazan Seixas’s sister, Grace Nathan, a woman of wide literary tastes, are extant. Like Abigaill, Grace read voraciously, consuming all of Lord Byron’s work with relish and approval. Her letters contain French and Spanish phrases, and her grammar and syntax are without error. Like brother Gershom, she was an ardent nationalist. In 1814, she wrote her niece, “I am so true an American, so warm a patriot that I hold these mighty [British] Armies and their proud-arrogantpresumtious, and over-powering nation as Beings that we have conquered and shall conquer again — this I persuade myself will be so. And may the Lord of Battles grant that it may be so.”43 Grace Nathan focused her life around family affairs and faith. Family was foremost. Discussing the troubles of her aunt Zipporah, she wrote that despite her sorrows, “she has some resources of comfort, her own conscience and the kindnesses of her children. Can there be in nature more lasting Enjoyment?” Grace continued, “I answer, there cannot be.” The lives of children and relatives, celebration of the Sabbath and holidays, trips to the synagogue, Jewish ritual and customs, weddings and funerals, and the business of Shearith Israel were always on Grace’s mind. Jewish festivals were particularly important: “I will now wish you a happy Yom Tov and hope you may go out on these approaching Sacred days [Shavuoth]. Tis a Festival I always took pride & pleasure in & I contemplate going to shool. I shall throw off some of my deep mourning [for her husband] and wear white Bonnet and Handkerchief.”44 Grace Nathan lived nearly seventy-nine years, a long life for the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. She witnessed a great deal of suffering, including painful fatal illnesses of both her beloved husband, Simon, and brother, Gershom. Never bitter, she was a woman of consolation; friends and relatives went to her for succor when in bad health. She reported to Sarah in one letter that Mrs. Gideon Moses was confined to her room; Hetty Seixas was “bringing up blood” for three weeks, which doctors attributed to “tight corsets”; the mind of Sarah’s uncle was “almost a blank”; cousin Sarah (a different woman) was in bed sick with “gout in the stomach”; Becky Hart suffered from “the burnings of St. Anthony’s fire.” The lesson of these infirmities: the “mutability of Life.” Not that the suffering and loss she witnessed and endured made her callous. Five years after the death of her husband,

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auctioneer Simon Nathan, despite attempts to cleanse herself of a constant sorrow, she lamented, “I carry that within no time can change however it can soften.”45 Nor did tribulation make Grace a religious skeptic, despite her admiration of Byron’s romanticism. When niece Sarah was in distress, tormented by her son Asher’s life-threatening accident and by the grave business troubles of her husband, Israel Baer, Grace assured Sarah that she will “offer up Morning & Evening Prayer for his [Asher’s] well being — and coming from a Contrite heart God will hear it.” For Sarah’s husband’s difficulties, Grace counseled the “Lesson of Submission to the Divine Will.” As Grace neared the end of her life, she wrote her son, “I am perfectly resigned to meet the last earthly event — grateful to God for the blessings He has given me. I die in the full faith of my religion.”46 In her private moments, Grace Nathan composed poetry. Perhaps anticipating Virginia Woolf, she wrote, “I still hold possession of my Room, & God only knows if ever I shall hold any other.” In that room, she read other poets and wrote “her productions In the Rhyming way.” One, composed in 1822, was a dedicatory poem for the new cemetery of Shearith Israel: Within these walls made sacred to the dead, Where yet no spade has rudely turned a sod, No requiem chanted for a spirit fled, No prayer been offered to the throne of God. There in due form shall holy rites be given, And the last solemn strain float so high in air, That listening Angels shall bear it to Heaven, And the soul of the just be deposited there.

Many of her poems find analogies between the lives of plants and those of men and women. In a verse written shortly before her passing, a vine brought thoughts of the seasons of life and death: A vine late luxuriant and gay, Which I ever beheld with delight Is now falling with Autumn’s decay And leaf by leaf leaving the sight.

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It soon will be stript so entire That only the vine will remain Again I may live to admire The quitting it will not cause pain. For either event I’ll prepare And tho’ I am called from the view The vine will continue to bear The root will the foliage renew. To this vine I have likened my day I have flourished thro’ seasons — been blest And when nature may call me away I shall hope for the sunshine of rest.47

Grace Nathan’s letters reveal one of the worlds of Jewish women in early national New York. Women affiliated with Shearith Israel formed a network of friends and relatives, their lives centered on Jewish ritual and the Jewish calendar. Within the limits permitted women, they maintained a sense of independence and dignity and were knowledgeable of national affairs, evincing the passion and optimism of American republicanism. Nathan’s life also exposes the limitations of an intellectually gifted woman in the early nineteenth century. Though she possessed an excellent education and intellect, the latter improved by reading contemporary literature, a separate career or literary life was unlikely — not that Grace Nathan would have found this a problem.48 Much less is known about Jewish women unaffiliated with Shearith Israel. With the freedom available in republican society, their families lived lives with fewer Jewish ties and mixed freely with the Christian world in the open republican society. Some women emerging from these families would intermarry. While most would not, their identification with Jewish society and with Shearith Israel, while not broken, was weaker than in the close synagogue community of colonial New York.49 Because the Jewish community so deeply incorporated the republican values of the new American republic, republicanism deeply influenced the Jewish spiritual life of both women and men, a life still largely centered on congregation Shearith Israel. Republican divisions that sundered the American

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political community also divided congregants. The republicanism that so pervaded all aspects of American public life and penetrated into the private lives of the nation’s citizens took root among the Jewish community of New York, which fashioned a unique combination of traditional practices and republican ideology.

The Reverend Gershom Mendes Seixas in 1784, as he was retaking the position of hazan at Shearith Israel after the Revolution; artist unknown. (Courtesy Museum of the City of New York)

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New York’s Republican Rabbi and His Congregation

As spiritual leader of Shearith Israel from the late colonial period to the end of the War of 1812, Gershom Seixas lived in three separate eras of American history. The only Jewish trustee of Columbia College in the nineteenth century, he represented Judaism in early national New York. A Jeffersonian republican and a devout, traditional Jew, his life was also a model for Jews in New York who strove to be Jewish citizens of the new republic. Born in New York of an obscure merchant, Gershom Seixas, under the influence of Hazan Joseph Jeshurun Pinto, gravitated to the synagogue from an early age, becoming hazan in 1768, when he was only twenty-two. Except for the war years in Philadelphia, he served until his death in 1816. During his tenure, Seixas led daily, Sabbath, and holiday prayers; circumcised Jewish boys; taught school; conducted weddings, funerals, and bar mitzvahs; and comforted the sick and bereaved. In addition to being the first Jewish trustee of Columbia College, he also served on the board of the city’s Humane Society. He mixed with John Jay and Alexander Hamilton and was likely present at Washington’s inauguration. A man of average height and stature, eschewing a beard, and known for his generous but not outgoing personality, Seixas dressed in the manner of the city’s divines, in a black gown with a double white collar. Over the years, “his integrity, his innate dignity and his sound judgment in all his dealings with the Jewish and Christian communities” made him both a beloved leader of the congregation and the chief representative of the Jewish people in the nation’s largest city.1 Seixas knew the problems of Shearith Israel. During the War of 1812, he

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anguished over the “state of the finances of the synagogue.” Regarding internal disputes, Seixas wrote his daughter, “There is talk of doing something to rectify the affairs of the Shule. How much it will be affected I know not.” Another letter complained that “Shule affairs” were in the “same mismanagement” as when she had left them, with “no prospect for the better.” Respected as he was, the Board of Trustees considered him an employee and not a policymaker. He could not curb the divisive forces in the congregation. But if he was unable to heal the wounds of the synagogue, he could set an example and offer comfort as a spiritual leader.2

■ Seixas and Jeffersonianism Jefferson’s religious convictions were entwined within Jeffersonian republicanism. Historians identify two major historical strands of republican thought. The first, classical republicanism or civic humanism, dating from Aristotle’s Athens and Machiavelli’s Florence, stressed virtue and the common good. In a republic, each citizen’s duty is to place the good of the whole ahead of his or her personal concerns. Republican society would succeed or fail to the extent that the republic contained virtuous citizens willing to make personal sacrifices needed for the welfare of the commonwealth. The second strand, based on the writings of John Locke, emphasized individual liberties. The state allows each citizen full access to the public square and the marketplace to pursue his or her goals unobstructed by the state, church, or aristocratic privilege. The two strands were not mutually exclusive; New York’s Jeffersonians held aspects of each. They expressed a sense of patriotic public duty and sacrifice, with distaste for excessive extremes of wealth and for a deferential society. They also championed an egalitarianism that allowed ambitious artisans and merchants to enter the marketplace unfettered by traditional and deferential barriers. Jeffersonians detested opposition “aristocrats” (Federalists) who used economic coercion to maintain a deferential society.3 Jefferson’s republican religious creed centered on his belief in the power of science. Two of his three heroes, Francis Bacon and Isaac Newton, were scientists. Jefferson possessed absolute faith that scientific law controlled the world according to the dictates of reason. A monotheist, he had no patience for the supernatural. He regarded Jesus as a great moralist, but when he made his edition of the Bible, he excised all miracles. Concepts such as the Trinity had no place in modern religion. Jefferson considered Judaism one of many American

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religious sects, each with the same “moral basis, on which all our religions rest.” Finally, Jefferson passionately championed religious liberty and the separation of church and state; he considered the passage of the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, which he drafted, one of his greatest accomplishments. He wrote Shearith Israel that American law protected “our religious, as they do our civil rights, by putting all on an equal footing.”4 Although no American read as many books as Thomas Jefferson did, Seixas was an avid reader. Both read the English deists Tindal, Bolingbroke, and Priestly, and both were familiar with Voltaire and the French philosophes. Jefferson numbered many scientists as friends, and Seixas was close to New York chemist and congressman Samuel Latham Mitchill. Jefferson was an admirer of Tom Paine, whose Age of Reason, a critique of Christianity as contrary to reason, was the largest-selling religious book in the eighteenth century, going through seventeen editions from 1794 to 1796. Staunchly republican printer Naphtali Judah, whose shop insignia included an image of “Paine’s head,” published Seixas’s 1798 sermon critical of the Federalists during the height of Federalist repression, with journalists under arrest for printing tracts critical of the government.5 In Philadelphia, fighting for the rights of Jews in the new republic, Seixas echoed Jefferson’s belief in the separation of church and state and in religious equality. Back in New York, his sermons — given at important occasions, commonly days of special prayer, thanksgiving, and celebration — reflect the influence of Jeffersonian republicanism. Seixas shared Jefferson’s faith in science based on a rational universe, governed by “nature and nature’s god.” He viewed God as the prime mover or designer. In 1789, Seixas spoke of the “works of an almighty providence” that enabled humanity to contemplate the future and increase knowledge, specifically the “movements of the heavenly spheres,” which proved “the necessity of a great first cause.” Ten years later, he described humanity “called into an existence from Nothing,” endowed with the power to distinguish between good and evil and to “prefer the good and refute the evil.” In 1803, he described the “disinterested benevolence of our Creator,” which humanity must strive to imitate. God endowed humanity with “the faculty and power of reasoning,” a great gift, as “it is by reason we arrive to the knowledge of infinite Goodness.” Seixas’s faith in human understanding and research made him confident that “the sacred text of scripture” would be “verified” in his day by science.

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Commenting on methods to combat yellow fever, he stated that “supernatural means are never used upon any occasion where natural means can affect any particular purpose.”6 Like Jeffersonian republicanism, Seixas despised excessive inequality. During the deadly yellow-fever epidemics that plagued New York in the 1790s and early 1800s, he sympathized with the middling and wealthy classes who had been forced to relinquish the “advantages of trade,” but he focused on the plight of the “poorer class of people” who could not leave the city. While leaders of the congregation fled, Seixas stayed behind in every epidemic, founding a relief society, Kalfe Sedaka Mattan Basether (Collection for Charity Given Secretly). He displayed Jeffersonian egalitarianism when he disparaged “a myriad of fattened lambs” in comparison to “purity of Heart” and “sincerity of worship.” A man must “subdue the passions of his carnal appetite,” for “worldly riches” are “as nothing when put in competition to the promised state of happiness.” The duties of a righteous person were to God, to “ties of consanguinity,” and to society, “each and every individual.” Doing God’s work included the classical republican duty: responsibility for the common good. “Virtue” was not “of a passive nature.” It must be “active, fulfilling the Law of God, exercising ourselves in good works, and by an exemplary Life, inducing others to pursue the path of righteousness.” A citizen’s duty was to “ameliorate” the condition of his or her brethren.7 Seixas was circumspect. He never publicly referred to Jesus, using the Hebrew word talui, meaning “crucified one,” when discussing him. However, in a personal letter to his daughter, he described an encounter with George Bethune English, a Harvard linguist who had written a book that sought to undermine the New Testament. Although Seixas would not assist English, he had no doubt that his plan to “explode the trinatarial system gradually” through rational argument would be “accomplished.” He believed that English “adduced many stronger proofs against the pretended Messiaship of the Talui.” Jefferson, too, rejected the Trinity and supernatural renditions of Jesus’s life. Seixas saw Christianity as an irrational religion. For Jefferson, it was a true religion, once excesses of historical misunderstanding were corrected. But both placed human reason and scientific investigation at the forefront.8 Republican, revolutionary patriotism pervades Seixas’s writings. In a Hebrew oration written for the Columbia graduation address of Sampson Simson, Seixas recalled the moment that the “inhabitants of North America”

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crushed the “Yoke of subjection.” At that time, “Jews from throughout the Union, placed their lives in their hands,” and, as “the Lord was with them,” achieved “freedom and Independence.”9 In other sermons, Seixas clarified the meaning of the Revolution for the city’s Jewish community. The struggle to achieve American republicanism expressed God’s will. The “conclusion of the last war” and the “establishment of public liberty” were “a wonderful display of divine providence,” including the “general approbation and adoption of the new constitution.” What were the responsibilities of Jews in a republican society? Jews were fortunate to live in a country where they “possess every advantage that other citizens of these states enjoy,” under a “magistracy” that sanctioned “every religious mode of worship” and a government “earnestly endeavoring to promote their spiritual happiness.” In return, the Jewish community must “support that government which is founded upon the strictest principles of equal liberty and justice.” In the language of classical republicanism, Seixas asked congregants to join fellow citizens for the “public good,” suppressing “every species of licentiousness.” They must “not be deficient” in promoting “the welfare of the United States” and must “return thanks to benign Goodness” for placing them “in a country where they are free to act, according the dictates of conscience,” where “no exception is taken from following the principles of [their] religion.” This was the most they could expect “in this captivity.”10 Seixas entered American politics as a revolutionary. In the political battles of the 1790s, uncomfortable with Federalists’ deferential expectations, his allegiance was with the Jeffersonians and their egalitarian stance. In condemning the partisanship of the era, he invoked the classical republican ideal of national unity, seeking an end to party politics, a restoration of national unity, and “peace and tranquility” among the nation’s political leaders. During the War of 1812, Seixas’s republican revolutionary spirit reemerged, overcoming his hatred of war as the “greatest of punishments that could be inflicted” on humanity. The Jewish community had to support the conflict; it was “sufficient” that their “rulers . . . have declared war.” It was their “bouden duty to act as true and faithfull Citizens, to support and preserve the honor — the Dignity — & the Independence of the United States of America! That they may bear equal rank, among the Nations of the Earth.” Describing soldiers on the New York frontier as “destitute of food, of raiment and of every necessarie of life,” facing “mercenaries” of “an implacable inhuman enemy,” he beseeched God:

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“deliver us . . . from those that rise up against us” and “frustrate the designs and machinations of the enemy.” Shearith Israel held three services in support of the war effort; despite the Jewish community’s small size, it collected a ninth of the city’s relief funds. For Seixas, at stake was the rescue of American republicanism.11

■ A Traditional Rabbi While Seixas and Jefferson enjoyed reading common authors, Seixas devoted many more hours to books Jefferson could not and did not read. Seixas spent most of his days studying the Hebrew Bible and its commentaries, most notably the medieval scholar Rashi and sixteenth-century rabbi Joseph Caro, who compiled the Shulchan Aruch, a comprehensive code of Jewish law. It is unlikely Seixas studied in any depth either the Talmud, the key Jewish text of European yeshivot (centers of religious study), or nineteenth-century Jewish thought. Seixas’s religious outlook was rooted in a careful reading of Hebrew Scriptures, particularly the Pentateuch and the Prophets. Significant changes to Jewish theology following the destruction of the Second Temple (70 CE) and in the medieval and early modern eras did not play a large role in his perspective.12 Republicanism and Seixas’s orthodoxy shared a common acceptance of monotheism. Seixas declared, “there is no part of our belief so highly obligatory upon us as acknowledging the Unity of God.” It was the “most essential doctrine of the Jews,” who would suffer “pangs and tortures . . . rather than to deny it.” Monotheism also fit within Jefferson’s Unitarian concept of God. Other religious doctrines were more difficult to reconcile.13 Salvation emerged as a central theme of Seixas’s sermons. In 1789, he reminded his congregants that “the Almighty” was “ever watchful over his people.” God was “weighing their actions” and “rewarding and punishing them according to their merit or demerit.” All men and women must be aware that “when divested of their bodily affections” with only the “immortal part” of their existence remaining, they would have to “give an account of [their] actions.” Only those with a “firm belief in God” could “truly hope for Salvation.” But “faith alone” was “not sufficient to procure salvation.” Only following God’s commandments led to “happiness both here and hereafter.” The “fear of God” must be constantly in mind.14 Sin and reformation were intertwined with salvation. Seixas provided con-

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gregants with evidence of God’s wrath as a consequence of sin. The ten lost tribes were dispersed because the Jews were “sinners in the eyes of the sight of their Creator,” unwilling to “follow His commandments.” The Romans destroyed the Temple because of the “abominations” of the Jews, who were “so refractory they were never at peace.” And the “late melancholy visitation” of the yellow-fever epidemic (1799) was “a manifestation of his displeasures,” a moment when “the finger of God” pointed out “the atrocities of our sins.” These events of ancient and current history called for “strict reformation.” Each Jew must review his or her behavior: “Examine well yourselves and you will speedily discover wherein you have deviated from that path of rectitude. See that you have not defrauded the Widow and the Orphan, that you have acted honestly in your dealing with each other. Have you distributed charity to the Poor: have you been ready to assist your brother, in the time of his distress?” Seixas viewed the most grievous sinners as those who violated ethical commandments; his most constant criticisms fell on those who failed to help the less fortunate. Those who truly changed their character for the good could take comfort that the “visitation of Justice” in the form of yellow fever “was still blended with mercy.” Survivors must “rejoice that he has saved us alive, that we may have time to repent us our manifold Sins, and to become regenerated.”15 Salvation implied a day of judgment, a world to come. Influenced by New York’s Protestant environment, Seixas warned congregants, “awaken from your lethargy before it is too late.” Life “becomes a burthen” to a man who “denies the Providence of his maker,” even if he possesses “worldly riches.” Pity him on his deathbed, “calling for mercy in his last moments.” While moving through life “in the slough of dissipation,” he looked at God as “afar off.” Now, facing the “presence of infinite justice,” he has only “horror” for his prospects. In “paroxysms of Phrenzy,” he beholds the “moment of his dissolution,” the “abyss of destruction.” This is the “miserable end of sinners” who “persist in wickedness.”16 “Were it not for the hopes and promises of an hereafter,” what person would wish to be “a creature of this transitory existence,” with its troubles and pains. For the pious, though “the blessings of this life are many,” they cannot compare “with those of the life to come.” While humanity can conquer the “ills of life” only with “grace,” Seixas yet taught that behavior “depended entire upon the freedom of the will.” Humanity possessed the “glorious prerogative” of “the power of free agency.” The choice of a life of “virtue” prepared humans for their “future state, when our immortal Soul shall be freed

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from this unstable tenement of flesh.” God “leaves us to choose between the extremes of Good & Evil, with their subsequent reward or punishments.” With this awesome fate in mind, who would not “forego the transient pleasures of this precarious Life”?17 Seixas articulated a third traditional theme: restoration. The “sins of [Jews’] progenitors” transformed Jews into “wandering exiles through the habitable Globe.” But the long banishment was nearing an end. The war convulsing the world in 1798, revealing the “depravity and corrupt state of human nature,” signaled that “the glorious period of redemption is near at hand,” when God would keep “his divine promise” to collect “the scattered remnant of Israel.” The scourge of yellow fever, “certain evidence of the authenticity of divine revelation,” was, “to a reflective mind,” also a signal of “that great and glorious day” when the “people of Israel, . . . purged of [their] Sins,” would be released from “their long and gloomy captivity” and be “reinstated in [their] land, there to dwell in Safety, in Peace, in Happiness.” Though American Jews had “the good fortune to live in a free land,” they could not “perform the rites and ceremonies of [their] temple service.” These rituals could “only be observed in the holy land,” within a rebuilt “sanctuary.” While Seixas always believed that true “reformation of [Jews’] conduct” hastened the day when God would “fulfill his divine promise,” when it was clear that revolutionary events gave no evidence of restoration, Seixas provided the cause: the “spirit of disobedience” — the failure of Jews to follow God’s laws such as observance of the Sabbath and dietary laws led to “Misery and Desolation! continuance of captivity and the oppressions of Man.” Toward the end of his life, he wrote his daughter, “[Only] a reformation among ourselves, . . . repentance and amendment, [will] reinstate us in the sight of our Creator, to obtain his divine Grace, to restore us to our own Land, where we may dwell in Peace — in happiness! According to the words of our sacred Prophets.”18

■ Reconciling Seixas’s Theology There are compelling contradictions between Jeffersonian republicanism and aspects of Seixas’s religious outlook. It is possible to reconcile classical republicanism and the biblical prophets, both demanding that the common good come before individual advancement, disdaining excessive inequality, and insisting on the primacy of virtue. Parallels also exist between republican millennialism and Jewish millennialism. Many republicans, most notably Thomas

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Jefferson, believed that the American Revolution heralded a new age in world history, one that overthrew centuries of traditional governance and ideology for a new republican creed. So, too, Judaism looked to a messianic age of national restoration. Seixas held both visions. In the throes of revolutionary enthusiasm, while working for changes in the Pennsylvania constitution to allow Jewish citizens to participate fully in revolutionary liberty, Seixas was studying the calculations of a medieval German rabbi that, based on a reading of the book of Daniel, the world as known would end in 1783. He also preached that the end of the war would bring a “permanent Peace . . . until time shall be no more.” On another occasion, he expressed confidence that the false logic behind the concept of the Trinity would be undermined “before the coming of the great day.” Both Judaism and republicanism anticipated a new age in history. Jefferson, however, would not have countenanced the coming of a messiah to lead the Jews back to Palestine to resume superstitious, ancient customs. Too, Seixas’s sturdy patriotism lay uneasily with his sense that American Jews remained in captivity, awaiting restoration in Palestine. In sum, Seixas had only partial success in his attempt to blend Jeffersonian republican ideals and biblical Judaism.19 Jefferson’s concept of a benevolent God who shuns the supernatural, seems to contradict Seixas’s declarations that God was yet punishing Jews with pestilence. Moreover, the idea of personal salvation and a world to come where the righteous are rewarded and the wicked punished, compelling concepts in Seixas’s sermons, are difficult to reconcile with deistic Jeffersonian thought. Jefferson accepted an afterlife and the fear of reward and punishment as a means to maintaining a moral society. That was not Seixas’s understanding.20 However, it is important to understand that whereas Gershom Seixas’s early career took place during the Revolution and its aftermath, in his later years he lived in New York during the Second Great Awakening, a time of rising evangelical religious sentiment. Deism attracted fewer and fewer Americans. Jefferson’s belief that America would become a nation of Unitarians proved a false prophecy. As Mark Noll, a prominent interpreter of the history of American Christianity, has shown, the Christian Protestant churches of America, especially the evangelical sects, synthesized Christian theology with the tenets of republicanism, blending a communal quest for virtue with a liberal republican quest for individual freedom. Their fundamentalist thought encompassed reason, including the maxims of Scottish commonsense philosophy that God gave

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humanity a universal moral sense, the basis for ethics and moral absolutes. Thus, “by taking on a version of republicanism, evangelicals put themselves in position to offer their religion to the new nation as a competitor to the rational, moralistic faith of the founders.” And the “struggle was almost no competition.” The founders’ deistic ideals found little welcome among the young men and women of the new republic, while evangelicalism rapidly expanded.21 Seixas knew and frequently associated with the Protestant ministers of New York, a community that included figures such as Methodist bishop Francis Asbury and Presbyterian minister Samuel Miller. Though Seixas had strong differences over the divinity of Jesus, he would have been familiar with their writings and some of the books that they read. This likely accounts for the prominent place in his sermons of doctrines such as salvation, a day of judgment, and concern for the hereafter, dogmas not commonly stressed in contemporary Jewish thought. Moreover, he would have read the works of Christian thinkers that provided a synthesis between orthodox religion and republicanism. While it is impossible to know with any certainty, the evolving pietistic republicanism, replacing in part Jeffersonian thought, may have offered Seixas resolution between his republican and his biblical outlook. His sermons never raise any doubts about the compatibility between traditional Jewish doctrine and republicanism. Nor does Seixas’s life display mental anguish over conflicting ideological worlds. While during his last seven years “disease marked him as a proper victim,” subjecting him to a “tormenting and chronic complaint,” even “sufferings beyond the ken of human understanding,” he remained cheerful and affable to the end, comforted by his “old friend Job.” He continued to delight in informal merriment with his wife and fourteen living children, good food, and festive occasions such as the holiday of Purim. He died in 1816, one of New York’s most beloved citizens, at peace with himself. Near the end of his life, he wrote his daughter that fifty years earlier, he read Voltaire and Rousseau, European philosophes whose anticlericalism would have been impossible to reconcile with evangelical concepts of republicanism, implying that he no longer found their ideas influential. He also wrote that that he now cautioned friends, “we are not in the Latter days yet”; and he said that “the latter days in Scripture” referred to subsequent ages, and until then, the world would continue as it is. By 1815, it is likely that along with his Jeffersonian republican fervor,

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perhaps replaced by a new more fundamentalist republicanism, the millennial excitement of revolutionary ideas in a revolutionary environment had also diminished.22

■ Jewish Identity in Republican New York Historian and biographer Jacob Marcus stated that the Reverend Seixas “had one foot in the nineteenth century.” That is, part of him still lived in the world of Jewish textual study, and part of him was at home in republican New York, conversing with Christian divines on salvation and the nature of the soul. But what of the rest of New York Jewry? Unlike Seixas, New York’s Jews had little or no understanding of the evangelical republican synthesis. (More a pastor than a theologian, Seixas did not use his sermons to resolve potential contradictions.) Seeing the widespread distribution of tracts aimed at the Jewish community by missionary societies, Jews distrusted Protestants’ motivations. Jews’ religious framework contained no room for a messiah, much less a personal rebirth into the arms of a once-human God in whom they did not believe. Did they find republicanism compatible with a stronger devotion to Orthodox Judaism in the manner that Christians found harmony in the piety of Baptist and Methodist churches? Could Jews remain faithful to their heritage and traditions, withstanding the assimilationist tendencies of a republican society that accepted them as full citizens? Or, unlike their Christian neighbors, would they become less attached to religious practices, finding that Jewish rituals prevented their integration into the new republic? Entering republican society, including the maelstrom of party politics, Jews of republican New York left the tight-knit synagogue community of the colonial era. The transition came with momentous changes to Jewish practices that formerly kept Jews and Gentiles apart, particularly the dietary laws and laws of Sabbath observance. Some Jews remained observant. Harmon Hendricks and his family kept their rolling mill closed on the Sabbath and strictly observed kashrut. When on the road, “they were ready to live on bread and rice if kosher food was not available.” Sampson Simson, law graduate of Columbia, was “a very pious man, . . . an uncompromising orthodox Israelite” who was “so precise in his religion” that he had “his Matzos baked in his own house.” Hendricks and Simson were financially independent, like Jacob Franks of the colonial era. Their money and its influence broke down interfaith barriers.

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But those without fortunes who wanted fewer barriers between themselves and their fellow citizens often discarded practices that separated them from their Christian neighbors. Republicanism weakened Jewish religiosity. Given the small attendance at the synagogue’s school and services, many Jews maintained their rituals, if at all, within their homes. Mordecai M. Noah, for example, observed the High Holy Days, kept a kosher kitchen, and fasted on Tisha B’Av, but as an editor, he worked on the Sabbath when necessary. Dining with many non-Jews, he did not maintain kashrut outside his home. He deemed prayer with phylacteries a custom of “Israelites of old.” He and many fellow Jews did not permit Jewish observance to interfere with their integration into republican America.23 Historian Hyman Grinstein argues that a number of factors caused the falling off of ritual observance, including the cessation of inquiries into the practices of members of Shearith Israel, much less those of the Jewish community as a whole. These factors include increased mixing of Jews and non-Jews, economic circumstances forcing Jews to work on the Sabbath or fall behind their Christian competition, lack of religious education, and the rise of deist doctrines. Most important, the republican environment fostered the separation of church and state, removing religion from the public square. Jews could enter the public sphere no longer needing the shelter of the synagogue community; they could rely on the state instead.24 Integration, though, did not mean loss of identity as Jews. Although the rate of intermarriage doubled in the early national era to about 30 percent, 70 percent still married within their faith, limiting their choice of spouse to less than 1 percent of the population, a strong signal of a common identity. Unlike Abigaill Franks’s offspring, conversion was not a requirement for acceptance in American society. To be sure, that a Jew did not maintain kashrut out of one’s home did not mean he or she abandoned it. Concern with the practices of the shochet indicates that a significant number of Jews followed dietary laws at home. That a Jew did not attend synagogue regularly did not mean that he or she was not present on High Holy Days. Most seats were sold. That a family did not send its children to a Jewish school did not mean it did not expose them to Jewish customs. Jews adapted, each family in its own way, as most strove both to remain Jewish and to enter the mainstream of republican life. There was no single path. Manuel Josephson, a learned Jewish merchant who lived in New York until the Revolution, declared that “North American

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congregations . . . in reality . . . have no regular custom.” Marcus has termed the early republic an era when “there were almost as many Judaisms as there were individuals.”25 Seixas represents, better than any other citizen living in New York in the first two hundred years of Jewish settlement, the synthesis of republican ideology and traditional Jewish thought. This was an not an easy synthesis: Jeffersonian thought and orthodox Jewish doctrine, like reason and revelation, are not easily reconciled. Yet his life and his sermons demonstrate that Jews were able to embrace republican America and yet retain their singular identity. Republican New York drew its Jewish community into the heart of its culture, and the community splintered but did not disintegrate. Bonds of ethnicity and nationhood remained strong enough to maintain Jewish identification. The character, standing, and words of Reverend Seixas undoubtedly contributed to the maintenance of Jewish identity. A much beloved man — at his death, two long eulogies were given, and the Jewish community went into profound mourning — his example and presence provided an important living symbol of the Jewish embrace of republican society and thought. When the first wave of European immigrants arrived in the 1830s, they found a recognizable Jewish population, but one becoming increasingly different from the Jewish society of the old world.

Beginning in 1862, the annual Purim Ball was the highlight of the season for prominent members of the Jewish community. No costume was too spectacular or extravagant. Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, 1 April 1865. (Courtesy Library of Congress)

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Beyond the Synagogue in Antebellum New York

Historian Naomi Cohen argues that Jewish “emigration foreshadowed a secularization of their faith.” The act of choosing to emigrate, separating from the community in Germany, as well as other central European countries, in itself repudiated tradition. Jewish newcomers wanted to fit into American society as quickly and easily as possible. Yet, while many immigrants grew lax in observing ritual law and chose not to join a congregation, they did not cease to identify as Jews. The vast majority married within their faith. For these Jews, institutions beyond the synagogue allowed them to maintain a coherent unity.1

■ New York in the Antebellum Era When Isaac Mayer Wise, the future leader of the Reform movement in America, disembarked in New York in 1846, he recalled witnessing “such rushing, hurrying, chasing, running,” the likes of which he had never seen before. The culture of this “large village” did not impress him. The source of his displeasure stemmed from New York’s entrepreneurial energy as the city, in the three decades before the Civil War, became the nation’s most vibrant municipality. Spurred by the emergence of the Erie Canal as the entrance to the West, by the city’s enterprising merchants, by an industrious workforce, and by a massive influx of Irish and German immigrants, New York grew from a seaport of 200,000 in 1830 to a metropolis numbering 814,000 individuals in 1860 (and a metropolitan area of well over a million).2 The growth in entrepreneurial energy that Wise encountered, to be matched by an ever more vigorous democratic politics and a maturing American culture, was part of the second phase of American republicanism, also known

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as the Age of Jackson and the antebellum era. A population rapidly growing from the inflow of immigrants from Germany and Ireland witnessed major advances in industry and agriculture, the growth of manhood suffrage, and an ever more competitive and hard-fought political scene. This was the period of Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, stressing the pervasiveness of the democratic spirit throughout the United States, an ethos that reinforced the republican disdain of aristocracy and privilege. It was also an age that produced enormous wealth, much of it concentrated among the elite entrepreneurs who lived in American’s prominent cites, men such as I. M. Singer, inventor of the Singer sewing machine, an instrument that revolutionized the garment industry. No city was more representative of these new strains of republicanism than New York, America’s cultural and financial capital.3 At the hub of the nation’s growing rail system, Gotham became America’s leading manufacturing center. The city housed the nation’s garment trade, major iron works, and a multitude of assorted industries such as the Singer Sewing Machine Company. New York’s merchants established the country’s first department stores. New York became the axis of the nation’s communication network. Telegraphy permitted almost instantaneous news of business and current events. The rise of the rotary press, with a capability of producing two hundred thousand copies per hour, allowed an 80 percent drop in the price of a newspaper. Dailies and weeklies blossomed, and their pages enticed both the elite and working classes with news, politics, sports, court trials, theater, investigative exposés, and gossip about the rich and famous. They ranged from the New York Herald (circulation of fifty-two thousand in 1853) to low-circulation weeklies. The latter included two English-language newspapers aimed at the Jewish population, the independent Asmonean, edited by English immigrant Robert Lyon, and the Orthodox Jewish Messenger, edited by Reverend Samuel Isaacs, rabbi of congregation Shaaray Tefilah, newspapers that give us an invaluable picture of the Jewish community in the 1840s, 1850s, and 1860s.4 Housing the New York Stock Exchange and the Gold Exchange, New York was the American center of market speculation. Its banks provided the investment capital for the West and the South. The California gold rush brought the city both capital in newly minted gold and an outlet for its manufactories supplying western speculators. New York developed close ties to the South: its bankers accepted slave property as collateral; its brokers sold southern

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New York was a city of immigrants prior to the Civil War. The first place in the new world that an immigrant would see was the reception center at Castle Garden, on the southern tip of Manhattan. (Courtesy Museum of the City of New York)

railroad and state bonds; its wholesalers sold southerners household goods; its traders and ship owners monopolized the sale of cotton.5 The city’s wealth produced an affluent elite; the number of families worth more than $100,000 multiplied sevenfold in the antebellum era. Both old wealth such as the Astor, Schermerhorn, Beekman, and Livingston families and new wealth in such figures as Peter Cooper, George Templeton Strong, and August Belmont moved uptown into mansions and brownstones, where these genteel families lived in an elegant lifestyle north of Union Square and Grace Episcopal Church on Tenth Street and Broadway. Many built summer homes in Queens, Brooklyn, and Long Island. Female dress attained new heights of ornamentation, preventing fashionable ladies from doing domestic work. A new opera house opened at Astor Place, a new theater on Park Place, and a new Academy of Music on Fourteenth Street. Works by Mozart, Donizetti, and Verdi were performed regularly.6 In the thirty years before the Civil War, thousands of immigrants settled in New York. Pushed out by a potato famine in 1845 that spread from Ireland to the southern and western German states, the failure of the German Revolution

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By 1860, the city extended northward toward Central Park. Kleindeutschland, the home of many of the city’s immigrant German Jews, is the large bulge at the center of the picture. (Courtesy Eno Collection, New York Public Library)

of 1848 — an unsuccessful movement to bring democratic government to central Europe — and unemployment in Britain, an average of 157,000 immigrants arrived at Castle Garden in New York each year. In 1854, 319,000 entered Manhattan. Approximately one of every five or six remained in the city, where they joined thousands of native-born Americans who left their farms or workshops to try their luck in the metropolis. By 1855, over half the population of the city was immigrants, with 176,000 from Ireland and 98,000 from Germany. Two of every three adults in Manhattan were born abroad. New York was an immigrant city.7 While life for most newcomers was better than in Europe, with more meat and nicer furniture, the immigrants remained one bad recession from the pawn shop. Many German arrivals lived in tenements in Kleindeutschland in Lower Manhattan, stretching from Canal to Rivington Streets, pushing east to Avenue D and north toward Fourteenth Street. A tenement there, twenty-five feet by seventy feet, three to five stories, with twenty-four two-bedroom apartments each, with only a single window for the families and their boarders, usually housed more than 150 tenants.8

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About 150,000 Jews figured among the immigrants arriving in America in the 1830s, and especially the 1840s and ’50s. While many traveled on to Chicago, Cleveland, and St. Louis, thousands remained in the city. Before largescale immigration began in the 1820s, Jews composed less than 0.5 percent of the city’s population. By 1840, their population had reached seven thousand (2.2 percent), and then sixteen thousand in 1850 (3.1 percent), and by 1859, they numbered near forty thousand (5 percent), half of whom were German Jews. By the mid-1840s, New York was home to a quarter of the American Jewish population. These newcomers included eastern European Jews from Russia and Poland who either came through Germany or who became German due to German annexation of their towns.9 Most immigrants arrived poor; the wealthy and more highly educated preferred to stay in Europe. Many were single men and women. They came from lands that were intermittently hostile to Jews, restricting access to professions, trades, real estate, and even marriage. In New York, much of the nonimmigrant Jewish population moved to the west side as far north as Thirty-Seventh

Many German immigrants sold used clothing along with other ware in the Chatham Square area, which become well-known as a Jewish business neighborhood. This is an 1859 scene. (Courtesy Museum of the City of New York)

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Street but congregated most commonly near Fourteenth Street and Seventh Avenue. Immigrant Jews settled among the Catholic and Lutheran German immigrants. In the 1830s, the Five Points neighborhood attracted many poor Jewish immigrants. By the 1850s, most new Jewish arrivals, especially those of German descent, lived in Kleindeutschland in an area bounded by Grand, Stanton, Ludlow, and Pitt Streets. In 1856, the New York Times reported two dwellings housing thirty-two families, “mostly German Jews,” on Hester Street. Toward 1860, immigrants moved as far north as Twentieth Street. Immigrant synagogues could be found in both Five Points and Kleindeutschland.10 In the early 1830s, with the Jewish population between one and three thousand, most Jews worked as small merchants, clothiers, or brokers. Immigrants seeking to join the ranks of their brethren received the advice “to go and peddle.” Given a “hastily fixed up basket,” they headed “into the country.” Perhaps half of immigrant German Jews took up peddling when they arrived. The other common alternative was the needle trades. By 1855, 95 percent of tailors in the city were born abroad, 55 percent in Germany. The majority of Jewish immigrants did not ascend the socioeconomic ladder. They remained small grocers and shopkeepers, workers in the garment industry, and craftspeople from jewelers to carpenters, eking out a living as their families squeezed into crowded tenements. Most spoke no English and were uncomfortable with American customs. Struggling to make ends meet, they became a “troubled, unhappy generation.”11 Though most Jews remained in the lower and lower-middle classes, opportunity and mobility were possible. Some peddlers made the transition to merchant standing within five to ten years, while workers in the garment industry joined successful peddlers and native-born Jews in manufacturing and selling clothes, wholesale or retail. The value of the clothing market in New York rose to $17 million by 1861. The used-clothing market grew rapidly, as many New Yorkers were unable to buy made-to-order goods. Jews in New York acquired a reputation for their shops in the Chatham Square neighborhood that sold secondhand clothing, or “slops.” In New York in Slices, journalist George Foster described this area, known as “Jerusalem”: Clothing stores line the southern sidewalk without interruption, and the coat-tails and pantaloons flop about the face of the pedestrian. . . . In front of each, from sunrise to sundown, stands the natty, blackbearded and fiercely moustached proprietor. . . .

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Stooping as you enter the low, dark doorway, you find yourself in the midst of a primitive formation of rags, carefully classified into vest, coats and pantaloons.

Isaac Mayer Wise termed the area a “disgrace.” However, many of these clothiers were far from aggressive petty retailers, their reach extending to the southern and western trade. In the robust economy of the era, at least a quarter of the immigrant Jewish population rose to the middle class by the 1850s, joining native-born Jews as merchants, wholesalers, retailers, skilled craftspeople, and professionals.12 A few did even better; an 1861 publication listed nine German Jewish firms with over $100,000 in capital. (Four were in the garment trade, three were importers, one manufactured iron, and one processed tobacco.) During the Panic of 1857, a harrowing recession caused by the overextension of banks and a fall in the price of wheat, the Asmonean, hoping to persuade wealthy Jews to help those without work, published the names of fifty leading Jewish firms, averaging 278 employees each. Most were in textiles; a few worked in importing and dry goods. The shirtmaking firms of Einstein & Jacobs and Stettheimer & Rosenbaum each employed eight hundred workers, while the clothing manufacturer Laisch, Stubblefield & Barnett employed fifteen hundred. An 1853 list of the “Principal Merchants” of the city included at least 105 Jewish firms, or 4 percent of the total. The 1850s was a fertile decade for Jewish enterprise. In 1853, for example, 51 Jewish firms imported “Dry Goods, Fancy Goods, Straw Good, Hats, Caps and Furs”; six years later, there were 141. The number of importers of watches and jewelry rose from two to twenty in the same period. Many of these men had connections in the South and West, including Joseph Seligman, whose family firm made a fortune supplying first the California gold rush and then the Union cause, and New York merchant Levi Strauss, who became a legendary success outfitting miners in California, while his purchasing office and manufacturing operations remained in New York. This wealth, immigrant and nonimmigrant, provided the resources to build Jews’ Hospital and the Hebrew Orphan Asylum, to patronize the arts, to organize lavish balls, and to construct elaborate synagogues.13 It is important to note that the German Jewish immigrants, who composed perhaps 15 percent of the German community, did not identify as a distinct subgroup. Rather, they maintained their German identity and mixed harmoniously with their fellow Germans, whether in trade-union activity or singing

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societies or other German cultural events. While there was considerable antiSemitism in Germany, there was little among Christian Germans in America. The Jewish and non-Jewish Germans lived together in Kleindeutschland as immigrants in a new world with far more in common than not.14 What kind of Judaism would survive within this new Jewish community, rich and poor, increasingly foreign born, and increasingly German? Already in the early republic, the synagogues were failing to fulfill the needs of Jewish republican citizens, who sought to enter more deeply into the life of the new nation. Immigrants, particularly German immigrants, equated Orthodox religion and practices with the European ghetto and political servility. The Judaism they had known carried a shameful social stigma. Isaac Mayer Wise reminisced that in 1846 New York, most poor Jews were ignorant of Jewish learning, while the better-off “kept aloof from Hebrew society” and “despaired of the future.” Yet neither the native born nor the immigrant community abandoned Judaism. Immigrant Jews needed each other in a foreign land, and common ties of ethnicity, language, and culture remained strong, while deeply ingrained tradition, practice, and commonality caused many of the older generations to maintain loyalty. But if the synagogue, despite a strong presence in New York, would not or could not fully satisfy needs for bonding, where would these yearnings find an outlet?15

■ Fraternity For immigrants living in tenement houses, simple ties of neighborhood counted most in the early years. Once immigrants acquired a foothold in the city and overcame the anxieties of subsistence, they sought deeper bonds in benevolent and fraternal organizations, adding to those of the native born and immigrants of an earlier generation. Though Jews composed less than 5 percent of the population, no less than ninety-three Jewish organizations flourished between 1843 and 1860. In comparison, non-Jewish ethnic and religious groups formed ninety-six organizations.16 In the 1840s, Henry Kling, who worked in the paper business, and Isaac Dittenhoefer, who owned a dry-goods store, began meeting Sunday mornings at Stensheimers’ Café in Kleindeutschland with like-minded German immigrants including a cantor, a shoemaker, and a jeweler. These gatherings culminated in 1843 in the formation of B’nai B’rith (Sons of the Covenant), a secular fraternal organization combining the traditions of Judaism and Freemasonry

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and replacing the synagogue with a “lodge room.” They called the president of a lodge the Grand Nasi, the vice president the Grand Aleph, and the secretary the Grand Sopher. The lodges, incorporating special handshakes and passwords, conducted their meetings in German for the first decade. B’nai B’rith spoke to the concerns of immigrants. Concerned with “the deplorable condition of Jews” in their “adopted country,” members attended to the needs of the sick, poor, and needy. They also strove to support “science and art.” Jewish peddlers found fellowship in lodges in many American cities. The society sought to bridge the gap between immigrant standing and citizenship. By 1851, New York had seven hundred members, with new lodges opening each year.17 As B’nai B’rith grew, it determined to remain a Jewish organization helping immigrants integrate into American society and to work toward universalist goals. Responding to a Baltimore lodge’s request to admit non-Jews, the New York chapters replied that the order was “adapted . . . solely for Israelites.” Members organized the Maimonides Library “to provide instruction for the masses.” By the end of the 1850s, with immigrants attaining greater economic standing, the lodges switched to English and dropped many rituals. These changes represented an ideal, stated in the preamble of the society’s constitution, of a “dignified representation of the Israelites in America in a religious and a social point of view, and the elevation of the masses in a moral and intellectual direction.” Lodge members also participated in the discussion society that led to the formation of Temple Emanu-El, the city’s first Reform congregation. Dr. Leo Merzbacher, rabbi of Emanu-El, wrote the preamble of the society’s constitution and was spiritual adviser to B’nai B’rith.18 Anniversary dinners revealed lofty patriotic ideals. In 1851, the Lebanon Lodge, the first lodge “working in the English language,” held its “ordinary exercise,” listened to an address by President Sigismund Waterman, a highly knowledgeable Israelite who graduated from Yale’s medical school after immigrating from Germany, and then proceeded to New York’s Masonic Hall for an elegant dinner. There members toasted sister lodges, “valuable links in the great chain of brotherhood,” the “glorious West and the Impulsive south,” and “the United States,” their “adopted country,” the “Palestine of the modern Hebrews.” The final toast, to the “Unity of Israel throughout the world,” expressed “the destiny of the Order,” the “quiet haven of universal brotherhood and happiness.”19 As B’nai B’rith grew in size and standing, it became increasingly concerned with the character of its members and its appearance. At the installation of

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a new Jordan Lodge in 1852, Grand Nasi Henry B. Jones, the head of B’nai B’rith, warned that the organization could be damaged by the admission of “bad men, capable of imposition and fraud.” The lodges’ “investigating committees” had to be “strict and close” in winnowing out unworthy candidates — three black balls barred any applicant — and in expelling unseemly members. Jones warned that sometimes “an officer is elected to the President’s chair who is not able to read correctly.” To encourage a greater “desire for literary cultivation,” lodges must avoid disseminating printed work “full of typographical and grammatical errors.” Members must consider themselves “priests in the service of the order of the promotion of intelligence, morality and purity of character.”20 B’nai B’rith lodges acted as adult literary societies, guided by the ideas of German liberal intellectuals. The society’s pride, the Maimonides Library Association, held eight hundred books available for loan for a dollar a year. Lodges sponsored cultural evenings on such subjects as “Religious Education,” “Ideas on a Universal Religion,” “A Solution to the Slavery Question,” and “The Condition of Political Parties in America.” Speeches were replete with radical statements, inspired by leaders of the failed liberal revolution of 1848. Henry Jones called on members to “forget every distinction which position and wealth, intellect and education creates between man and man.” President Julius Bien declared, “Science is the Messiah of the human race, leads to human happiness and leads toward the realization of the ‘brotherhood of man.’ ”21 Immigrants founded B’nai B’rith to find common fraternity in a foreign world and then to make America their “Palestine,” to become literate, moral citizens of their “adopted land.” Advocating a creed of brotherhood and commonality and a devotion to science and humanity, lodges provided important benefits to widows and children — all beyond the synagogue. Some young men of ambition created an alternative fraternal outlet in the 1850s in the literary society. Prompted by a notice in the Asmonean, the founders of the Young Men’s Literary Society met and recruited twenty young men. Though the club stated that it did not want many of the “lower classes who sought admission,” the majority were workingmen. After delivering the inaugural lecture at Stuyvesant Hall, “Literature: Biblical and Post Biblical,” Reverend Morris Raphall, spiritual leader of B’nai Jeshurun and the foremost religious leader in the city in the 1850s, declared that he was glad to assist “efforts to promote mental culture and to spread and popularize knowledge among

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[the Jewish] people.” He advised the young men on the importance of mental cultivation: “You are American Jews. You are citizens of the glorious commonwealth in which the predominance of mind over matter has been most fully established.” At the next lecture, Isaac Mayer Wise journeyed through world history, concluding that commerce and art were central to the overthrow of despots and that Russian Jewish merchants spurred the downfall of serfdom.22 Members held optimistic visions for their people in the young America of 1853. In the society’s second year, spokesman Mosely Lyon declared the society’s “manifesto to the world”: “We are the young men of Israel, Joined together to raise from its position of mediocrity the literary fame of the great mass of the Jewish race. .  .  . We number among our elders the peers of any wise men of the Gentile, but perhaps with a few exceptions, their labors are confined to the quiet closet of the student and a chief quality of their character is their retiring modesty.” Lyon declared that the society revered the “kings of Intellect” that marked the Jewish people “from the time of Moses . . . to the day of Mendelssohn.” While persecutions had held back the Jewish people’s intellectual advance, in the “mighty republic of washington” Israelites witnessed the “victory of reason, love and knowledge over the cankering remains of prejudice, hatred and superstition.” The “men of the Ten Tribes” would soon be “awaking from their lethargy.”23 At the society’s third anniversary, in the presence of both sexes, it considered whether “a woman ought to move in the same sphere as men.” In 1857, during the Panic, it debated whether fashion was beneficial to humanity, deciding in the negative. At another meeting, Dr. Waterman compared Russian serfdom and American slavery. Because of the work of the society, President James Seligman declared, young men who once could barely “give utterance to a thought” were now “proficient in extemporaneous speaking and forensic discussion,” and those “of limited pecuniary Means” were able to peruse “the chronicles of past and present.”24 A fissure in leadership in the 1850s led to the formation of the rival Touro Society, which gave its lectures in German. In 1856, young attorney A. J. Dittenhoefer spoke at the Touro Society of the benefits of tolerance and the importance of a literary life. A merchant must be well-read. Dittenhoefer, noting that critics censured the Touro Society for admitting ladies to its library and lectures, declared that there was no reason to continue the “cold and icy prejudices of the dark ages.”25

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Literary societies reflected attempts by German Jewish immigrants, joined by non-German newcomers and native-born Jews seeking greater refinement, to provide a means of fraternization, to integrate into American society, and to discuss critical contemporary issues. These societies were both Jewish and secular. Their ambitions were perhaps premature, as they failed to enroll significant numbers of members. The Jewish Messenger deplored the lack of interest of young men in careers in letters. But the Jewish community of the 1850s focused on attaining an economic foothold in the new country. Relatively few, even of the successful, displayed interest in pursuing a literary life. Far more, however, expressed support for philanthropy.26

■ Philanthropy Benevolent charity societies that began prior to 1830 generally centered in synagogues, including the most notable citywide organization, the Hebrew Benevolent Society (HBS), which originated in Shearith Israel in 1822 and moved to B’nai Jeshurun before becoming independent. Its president for years was Mordecai M. Noah, New York’s most prominent Jewish citizen. The society’s funds available for charity increased from $600 a year in the late 1820s to $17,000 annually in the late 1850s. In 1841, it distributed $1,763 among 195 indigents; in 1858, it gave $3,567 to 2,025 different recipients. Funds came from membership dues and donations.27 The HBS, while it admitted Germans, was the bastion of the native born. Both a charitable and fraternal society for prominent Jews in the city, it served as the center of social and benevolent enterprise for the English-speaking community. The festivities of the charitable organization resembled those of fraternal societies. In 1849, for example, at its annual celebration (joined this one time by the German Hebrew Benevolent Society) in the Apollo Saloon, at Broadway near Canal Street, HBS members dined to orchestral accompaniment. City alderman and rabbinical luminaries attended, including Isaac Leeser of Philadelphia. Arms of the states decorated the room. Reverend Samuel Isaacs of Shaaray Tefilah, noting that he was once saved by assistance, spoke of the centrality of charity to Judaism. Dr. Max Lilienthal of Anshe Chesed spoke in German of the enduring suffering of Jews in Hungary and Russia.28 All anniversaries of the HBS’s founding, as well as those celebrating the founding of other societies, rejoiced in the glory of being a Jew in America. Reverend Isaacs spoke of the wonder of America, where “Jew and Gentile

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[were] meeting together for mutual advantage, without reference to creeds or parties,” where the “Hebrew” was accepted as a “friend and citizen.” Reverend Raphall lauded America as “the only Christian nation not stained by spoliation, cruelty or any wrong of any kind committed against the Jew.” He declared, “[I had not seen] religious liberty in its full extent — which is the perfect equality of all men before the law — until I set my foot on the shores of this, the State of New York.” Extolling America’s destiny following the victories of the Mexican War, Raphall predicted that America would soon hold “a leading rank among the nations of the earth,” while Europe was convulsed in “a mighty struggle” in search of “Liberty, Civil and Religious.”29 Community respect was as much a goal of the HBS as were charity and patriotic demonstration. The society received donations from Governor Hamilton Fish and letters from President Millard Fillmore and Senator Daniel Webster. In 1851, Reverend J. J. Lyons recited the prayer after meals “in a dignified and harmonious manner, eliciting the admiration of all the Gentile visitors, to whom the Hebrew service was novel.” The 1852 drive raised over $3,000, including donations from “esteemed Christian friends,” many from “Broad and Wall Street firms.” The Asmonean declared these men of commerce worthy of “the support of Hebrew merchants.” As the HBS rejoiced in its deeds, it celebrated its standing in non-Jewish society.30 As economic conditions worsened in the 1850s, the focus on charity sharpened. Reverend Raphall advised merchants attending the banquet that “they could not invest . . . in a better cause” than charity for an immigrant fleeing the “stringent laws against the Hebrew,” landing penniless in “this land of liberty.” The HBS “takes him by the hand,” producing “an honest and worthy citizen.” In 1852, President Harris Aronson, who succeeded Noah after Noah’s death in 1851, declared that “within the last two years there had been many applicants for relief from the society.” Since the poor lived in obscurity, “but few could tell of the misery and distress which was to be found in the city of New York.” In 1854, he reported that “the groans of hunger are more louder [sic] and more numerous than ever.” The “ship loads” of people from the “old world” who sought to find “the star of hope . . . in the West” exhausted the society’s funds. Reverend Isaacs pitied the “creatures . . . who pined in wretchedness.” When God “in his inscrutable wisdom” deemed that some should “pine in sorrow,” he endowed “his more favored children” with “innate love.” Charity, the “unseen cement,” bound the world in concord.31

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The declining economy pushed the HBS to its limits. In 1855, the Asmonean complained of “the great distressed state of the operatives in this city,” made worse by the benevolent societies’ bylaws limiting the distribution of their resources to a percentage of their collections and endowment. In December, Reverend Raphall, warning of the “alarming increase of pauperism among the Hebrews in this city, and the pernicious influence over their moral and religious conditions,” advocated construction of a “House of Industry.” During the Panic of 1857, which threw thousands of people out of work, the HBS held its annual meeting at B’nai Jeshurun without a celebratory dinner. In November, the society held a “speculation” (fundraiser) of music, using the “whole of the able corps of artists, vocal and instrumental.” The sense of charity, however, seemed absent when participants complained that Il Trovatore was “thrust at them” instead of I Puritani. Early the next year, Raphall thanked God that 1858 was “in full bloom.”32 Though the HBS was the foremost Jewish charity, it was but one of many. Second in size stood the German Hebrew Benevolent Society, which held similar festive anniversaries and which also attracted Dr. Lilienthal, Reverend Isaacs, and Reverend Raphall. President Joseph Seligman, of the rising mercantile family, noted that though the “Society is but Young,” he rejoiced in the “vigor and strength caused by its youth,” its harmony, and its “holy work.” Seligman described the “distress and suffering” of Jewish immigrants, of visiting committees who witnessed families “cramped up in a small room, prostrate with disease, no fuel to warm them, scarcely any clothing to cover them, no healing draft to alleviate their suffering.” He, too, spoke of the grandeur of America, a land where the nobility was not a social class but the “noble and liberal constitution,” accompanied by “free schools” and “free speech.” By 1860, the German Hebrew Benevolent Society’s disbursements equaled those of the HBS.33 In 1851, the Young Men’s Hebrew Benevolent Society, composed of “working men . . . who not only lend their names to a charity but give their time and labors to promote its ends,” numbered two hundred men, held funds of $1,725, and collected eighty tons of coal for the poor. That year they sponsored a presentation of A School for Scandal, at which, the New York Herald noted, “a most dazzling concentration of the beauty .  .  . of the fair daughters of Israel were in the ascendant.” Nine hundred dollars was raised. The Hevra Bikur Cholim Vkadischa, a traditional charitable society of Poles, celebrated anniversaries

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that were “a source of much delight” to Jewish immigrants, as they brought back “reminiscences of the customs of home.” The society, which administered to the sick and the dead, reported collections averaging $1,300 to $1,900 per year. At one dinner, a large American flag was displayed, accompanied by the banner of Hungary in support of Hungarian independence. Polish Jews toasted the United States, a land “great generous and free: the home of the wanderer, the asylum of the oppressed . . . we love and bless it every day of our lives.”34 Though synagogues were relegated to a lesser benevolent role, they took care of their members, providing women with a singular opportunity to participate in community affairs. In October 1850, the women of Shaaray Tefilah announced a capital fund of $700 devoted not only to the sick and dying but to the poor, “with a liberal hand.” In 1856, Shearith Israel’s sisters produced a fair to benefit the indigent; there a visitor could gaze on tableaus of a Jewish wedding, an infant school, “dolls in every variety of costumes, .  .  . giant scarfs [tallit], smoking caps, pincushions and all the various specimens of ladies work, . . . [displaying] the skill of the lovely Jewess, for fine embroidery,” as well as a “beautiful melodeon and a sewing machine.”35 Given the patriotic pride that charitable societies expressed at America’s progress, including the western conquests and migration, it is not surprising that the German Hebrew Benevolent Society provided immigrants with “the means to emigrate further West” and that the HBS declared that it “furnished means to a large number of individuals and families to depart from” New York City. In 1837, a new organization, the Society of Zeire Hazon (Tender Sheep), sought to purchase farm land and to aid immigrants building their farms. Both this plan and a similar effort in 1838 of a society centered at congregation Anshe Chesed to purchase land in Ulster County failed.36 In 1855, the president of the Lebanon Lodge of B’nai B’rith founded the American Hebrew Agricultural and Horticultural Association to buy land for immigrants. The society declared that as long as Jews practice “exclusively the commercial interest, it is clear that [they] pursue a course inimical to the welfare of [the] country.” Dr. Waterman argued that Jews occupied “an unnatural position” in the American economy, as almost no Israelite chose to become a “solid man of the soil.” The farmer, “far from the temptations of commerce,” enjoyed more independence than a merchant did. New immigrants were told to get a basket and peddle. Why not become a farmer instead of competing with country merchants? An Asmonean contributor agreed, writing that Jews

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were subject to “reproach” for their “exclusive pursuit of commerce,” with “some good show of reason.” At a meeting “crowded to capacity,” Reverend Raphall produced an “electric influence” with his portrayal of Jewish contentment in ancient agricultural society. Another attendee, however, opposed the plan because it led to Jewish separatism. Jews should not work in segregated colonies. D.  E.  M. Delara also protested on grounds of equality. Did Christian merchants in New York and Philadelphia pursue a course inimical to the country? Commerce “spreads civilization and peace, political order and law, supports the arts and sciences.” Societies, he averred, should be cautious before making statements that could incite anti-Semitism. The idea of returning Jews to agriculture, a long and vexing issue, repeatedly rose and died.37 In May 1847, congregation Shearith Israel held a service to encourage members to contribute to the relief of “the people of Ireland suffering from the severest dispensation of a wise Providence,” the potato famine. This was an exceptional plea. Although this was an era of nationwide reform movements, including sabbatarianism, temperance, women’s rights, and abolition, and although New York City was headquarters for many of these campaigns, Jews did not lead these movements, nor did the community express much interest. There are a number of reasons for this. Foremost may be that many reform movements were led by Protestants, whom Jews held in contempt and fear for missionary efforts that peaked in the antebellum era. Second, reform was largely a Whig effort, and most Jews were Democrats. Finally, a lingering “siege mentality,” the product of centuries of European persecution, made Israelites cautious of exposing themselves by pointing out flaws in society, and this mentality took time to dissipate. Their quest for acceptance in America preoccupied them instead.38 In 1830, Dr. Daniel Peixotto, member of the New York Medical Society and son-in-law of Gershom Seixas, addressed the issue of the lack of Jewish participation in reform efforts at an anniversary dinner of the Society for the Education of Poor Children and the Relief of Indigent Persons of the Jewish Persuasion. Noting the “benevolent spirit which so peculiarly illustrates the character of the present century,” Peixotto remarked that many Jews were “indifferent, if not hostile” to reform movements. Why did this society limit its efforts to the needs of the Jewish community? Because the first duty of a citizen was “to provide for his own wants.” The “proudest badge of any sect” should be that no member was “dependent on public eleemosynary institutions.” The limitation

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of Jews’ benevolence came not from “illiberality” but from “a sincere desire of rendering that good which is in [their] power.” In Peixotto’s view, in taking care of their own, Jews fulfilled their civic responsibilities.39

■ Jews’ Hospital Leaders of the Jewish community often expressed concern over the failure of the Jews of New York to act in unity — and with good reason. Immigrants who settled in Kleindeutschland apart from most other Jews, who spoke only German, and who tended to congregate among themselves created a sense of separation and, undoubtedly, resentment and antagonism among those Jews who had already put down roots in the community, spoke English regardless of their origins, and were comfortable in American culture. These differences appeared in the failure of the Hebrew and German Hebrew Benevolent Societies to form an umbrella philanthropic organization. Rather, the German community formed its own society, working in a separate sphere, despite pleas from both the Asmonean and the Jewish Messenger to unite for the good of the overall community. Even during the Panic of 1857, when thousands of people were out of work, the HBS, a “Sephardic stronghold,” feared that if the two organizations merged, most beneficiaries would be Germans. Divisions were also visible in the secession of some members of the Young Men’s Literary Society to form their own German-speaking organization and in the formation of B’nai B’rith, devoted to the needs of immigrants.40 A similar problem prevented construction of a community hospital. New York suffered serious epidemics: in 1849, cholera raged through the city, killing up to 40 a day and in one week carrying away 714, mostly from the crowded areas housing immigrants. The city contained a number of hospitals, including Bellevue, New York Hospital, a charity hospital for the poor on Blackwell’s Island, Lincoln Hospital for blacks, and St. Vincent’s, a Catholic institution. Yet no medical facility existed where Jews could obtain kosher food and avoid missionaries. The Asmonean asked readers to consider a poor Israelite, forced to enter a city hospital that housed patients of “the lowest grade of society.” Though this soul may not have been observant before, “the approach of death makes us wondrous orthodox.” If he refused the hospital’s nonkosher food, he would die; if he ate, he would suffer pangs of conscience. Nor could he put on tephillin without being subject to the “derision of the fellow sufferers or the jeers of their fellow inmate.” Israel’s Herold, a short-lived German-language

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weekly, carried an article by Dr. N. Waterman that declared that the city’s hospitals were of little use for the city’s German Jews, as “the doctors, who speak only . . . the English language, do not understand these sick people and cannot recognize their illness from their appearance.” An “invalid,” alone and afraid, “throws himself into his death bed in indescribable despair.”41 First attempts to found a hospital failed. In 1847, a movement fell apart because of “the evil which works itself into, and rankles in all our public undertakings, want of unity.” In 1850, the Asmonean noted that three organizations, the Hebrew and German Benevolent Societies and the Young Men’s Benevolent Society, set apart funds and created a board headed by President Noah to collect contributions for a hospital. Given the “divisive spirit of the times,” they attempted “to do too much.” The German Hebrew Benevolent Society stated that it was “thrill[ed] with joy” at the prospect, but the projected hospital was not “founded on republican and just principles”; in short, German Jews were underrepresented on its board.42 With the charities at loggerheads, a notice in the Asmonean announced a ball at Niblo’s Saloon at Broadway and Prince Street, one of the city’s eminent dining spots. The president of the sponsoring society, the Jews’ Hospital in New York, was seventy-two-year-old Sampson Simson, now a reclusive philanthropist. Wealthy members of Shearith Israel and Shaaray Tefilah joined him, including real estate dealer John D. Philips, Benjamin Nathan of the New York Stock Exchange, and Henry Hendricks of the copper-manufacturing family.43 The ad caused considerable excitement and intrigue. A “delegate to the Original Hospital Committee” asked the Asmonean for intelligence. Editor Lyon replied, “we have no information to afford.” The society’s ball, covered in detail in the New York Times, raised, after expenses, more than $1,000, a significant sum. Two years later, in November 1853, the founding committee laid a cornerstone, formed a board of directors, and drafted a constitution giving the board control of the hospital. No German joined the board. The hospital, organized privately, reflected the work of Jews with deep roots in the community, many affiliated with Sephardic Shearith Israel, who were able to find Christian donors if German Jews proved reluctant to contribute because of their exclusion from governance. While Israelite employees were difficult to procure, the constitution did state, “all persons employed in carrying out the objects of this Society shall, as far as practicable, be of the Jewish faith.” For the first time in American history, the directors proclaimed, “a refuge for the needy Israelite

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Jews’ Hospital soon after it opened in 1855. Jews’ Hospital was the greatest collective achievement of the city’s Jewish community prior to the Civil War. After the war, it was renamed Mt. Sinai and became public, open to the city’s entire population. (Courtesy Mt. Sinai Archives)

requiring surgical and medical aid” stood ready to receive patients. Given the hospital’s “invaluable benefit to the Israelites in the United States,” they appealed to the “benevolence and liberality” of the Jewish nation. Any congregation or society contributing fifty dollars a year had the “privilege” of sending the hospital one patient per year “not disqualified [through a mixed marriage] by the laws of the society.” This provision revealed that the sense of exclusiveness found in synagogues was also present in Jewish secular institutions.44 With $7,000 in hand, the hospital began to rise on land donated by Simson

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on the south side of Twenty-Eighth Street between Seventh and Eighth Avenues. At a celebratory dinner, Simson declared that soon the “last dying sigh of the expiring Hebrew” would be “heard by attending and sympathizing Jews.” Reverend Isaacs stated that Jews often claimed that city institutions “supplied all the necessities . . . without any additional trouble or expense.” They were wrong. While Jews shared common interests with all Americans, their religion was “perfectly distinct and separate from all other beliefs.” More than a medical institution, the hospital was a dwelling for the “spiritual happiness” of the Jewish community.45 The hospital’s consecration took place on May 17, 1855, after an unsettling dispute when the board refused to augment the number of German Jewish trustees. Built of brick and accommodating up to 150 patients, it rose four stories, with a wing on each side and a garden and courtyard in the center. Ceilings were a spacious sixteen feet high. The basement, used for a refectory and washroom, included a tablet “to the memory of Judah Touro,” the New Orleans philanthropist who bequeathed $20,000. The hospital’s synagogue housed a tablet with donors’ names. Despite festering ethnic and generational divisions, the hospital marked a major advance in the self-respect and standing of New York’s Jewish community.46 The consecration ceremony resembled that of a synagogue, including seven circuits of the Torah. It also celebrated how far the Jewish community had advanced in greater New York society. Attending the ceremonies, covered extensively by the New York Times, were Jewish dignitaries, the mayor, and the lieutenant governor. The president of the hospital sat under a flag featuring an image of George Washington. One patriotic toast declared, “Our Country, may she always be right, but right or wrong, our country.” Reverend Raphall proclaimed, in ecumenical spirit, “[Jews work in] fellowship to Catholic and Protestant, because we feel that we are the children of one Father, and servants of one God, who has created us.” Lieutenant Governor Henry Raymond responded that the Jewish community was “taking on the responsibilities of the state herself!” He pledged aid from the legislature.47 The staff of Jews’ Hospital included consulting physicians Chandler Gilman, professor of obstetrics at Columbia; William Detmond, an orthopedic surgeon from Germany; and two attending surgeons, including Jewish physician Israel Moses. Except in cases of emergencies, the hospital admitted only Jews. At first, fearful of epidemic, it refused to accept typhoid victims, but it

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soon relented. The hospital regularly submitted reports detailing patients treated. Its first report in 1856 recorded sixty-nine male and forty-one female patients, twenty of whom could pay; the largest number in the hospital at any one time was twenty-three.48 In 1856, a dispute over autopsies erupted at the hospital. Physician Simeon Abraham stated that though it was an unpleasant duty, the safety of the living required it. Referring to passages in the Talmud, he argued that the hospital followed Jewish law. Maimonides, he wrote, stated that it was not forbidden to examine a corpse before burial to ascertain the cause of death. The hospital’s board consulted with the chief rabbi of England, Dr. N. M. Adler, who replied that autopsies were forbidden desecrations that could only be performed in cases of suspected murder or to save lives in the context of an unknown disease. The directors acceded to Dr. Adler’s response but in practice often granted exceptions. This did not end the controversy. Physician Abram Arnold of Baltimore wrote that Dr. Adler’s decision was “a slur on the medical art, and is a discredit to any body of Jews which endorses it.” Should it be “published to the world” that Jews were willing to benefit by the “investigations undertaken by others, while [they] den[y] the means employed to attain them?”49 Jews took great pride in the work of the hospital. Jewish newspapers reported many dramatic stories. A Bavarian woman betrothed to a man in America journeyed across the Atlantic only to fall ill. After a miraculous recovery at Jews’ Hospital, she found and wed her beloved. A man with a fractured thigh had undergone treatment for six months “without any benefit.” After an operation at the hospital, he was discharged, “able to use his leg.” Seven-year-old John Roth, unable to support himself “on account of a congenital deformity of the feet and legs,” gained entry after being denied assistance elsewhere. After surgery, he walked home. Seven-year-old Henrietta Barnett, suffering from “scrofulous sores and diseased bone” and considered a candidate for amputation in London, was admitted in June and discharged in October “much improved.” Hanna Ahrens, “in the most abject state of distress” from severe chronic rheumatism, left the hospital “in perfect health.” In addition to healing, the hospital also brought “brethren back to their faith, rescuing them from public charities,” restoring them to “health and the abiding force and truth of Judaism.” One dying man of sixty had been a “philosopher” for years but at life’s end confided, “my philosophy fails.” Despairing of years of infidelity, he expressed thanks for “Jewish soup” that, he declared, possessed

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“an extraordinary healing power.” As death neared, he affirmed, “happy the child of mortality who, on the brink of the grave is here, his pillow softened by the members of his own community, his last moments attended by the voice of true sympathy.”50 Though never filled to capacity, Jews’ hospital kept as many patients as revenues permitted. In 1857, the hospital admitted 220 patients, 85 percent of whom were immigrants from Poland and Germany. In 1858, it reported that 54 of its 250 patients were peddlers, “a fact ascribable to so many immigrants being cast upon our hospitable shores without profession or trade.” It admitted forty-nine female domestics under similar conditions.51 Some tensions between the German-immigrant community and the Sephardic and native-born dissipated by the end of the 1850s. In 1857, the board amended the constitution in a manner to permit more German Jews to join. Lack of adequate financial support concerned the directors, given that the “Hebrew proportion [of the city] is increasing” and that “its members are participating in equal ratio with their fellow citizens in the accumulation of wealth.” Another signal of eased tension appeared in 1859, as the German and Hebrew Benevolent Societies merged, creating a unified organization. These two events symbolized that the maturing German-immigrant community had won acceptance as peers of the established Jewish community.52 Original plans called for an orphan asylum to accompany the hospital. Though this did not materialize, in the early 1860s the Jewish Messenger campaigned for this institution, expecting a “speedy response” from Jews whose “worldly affairs are in such a position as can enable them to do good to others without detriment to themselves.” Shortly after merging with the German Benevolent Society, the Hebrew Benevolent Society purchased a four-story building on West Twenty-Ninth Street. The cornerstone for the Jewish Orphan Home was laid on July 29, 1862, with great ceremony. U.S. Representative Roscoe Conkling declared that the “greatest and guiltiest rebellion [Civil War] that the world has ever seen” was “filling the land with orphans,” and Reverend Isaacs praised this “labor of love,” inspired by “principles of humanity” and by the aid of the city and state. In 1864, with the asylum open, the Jewish Messenger argued that it should accept no orphans of illegitimate birth or doubtful Jewish parentage. Should an applicant “born in sin” share “equal rights with those whose parents have lived a life of purity?” “Certainly not.” Though this may seem “harsh and unfeeling,” the institution must “do justice”

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to poor Jewish children. There is no evidence that the institution adopted this policy, but the argument indicates that some Jews sought to use their communal institutions to enforce religious norms.53

■ Jewish Women in Antebellum New York While most Jews did not join national reform movements, Ernestine Rose did. Born Ernestine Potowski, the only child of a devout Polish rabbi, she rebelled against his authority and escaped an arranged marriage by fleeing to England. There, under the influence of utopian socialist Robert Owen, she renounced organized religion and embraced the movement for legal and social equality of the sexes. After marrying William Rose, a non-Jewish Owenite, in a civil ceremony, she and her new spouse immigrated to New York, where William worked as a watchmaker and engraver, enabling Ernestine to launch her career as a free thinker, abolitionist, and spokesperson for women’s rights. A spellbinding orator, Rose declared that “whenever human rights are claimed for man, moral consistency points to the equal rights of women.” Never a figure in the New York Jewish community, she seldom mentioned her background. However, in 1852, at the third convention for women’s rights, introduced as an Israelite, she contended that as the daughter of a “down trodden and persecuted people called the Jews,” she understood the need for equal rights on a personal level. In 1864, she entered into a debate with a progressive yet antiSemitic Boston editor, defending the Jewish people as sober and industrious citizens, even if they unfortunately believed in God (but not in a Trinity). Her most recent biographer attributes her debating skills and quick intellect to her Jewish upbringing. She was the most significant Jew in the antebellum national reform movements.54 Aside from Rose, few if any Jewish females participated in the women’s rights movement, a cause that sought a world in which women claimed equality within nineteenth-century standards. The Jewish community was conscious of the Seneca Falls convention of 1848 and its manifesto that “the history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman, having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her.” The Asmonean, for example, printed a parody of the proclamation from the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin that maintained that it was time for the women of the nation to “break off the chains which Fashion has thrown among them” and to assume dress that “the laws of nature and a

The Jewish Messenger ran these ads in 1865. That so many piano companies were willing to appeal to the Jewish community is a sign of the growing wealth and embourgeoisement of the Jewish population, and the demands for the refinement that a musical education afforded a middle-class woman of the nineteenth century. It also indicates greater aspirations to fitting into New York ‘s cosmopolitan society, often to the detriment of Jewish religious commitment. ( Jewish Messenger, 28 July 1865)

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regard for their health” require, including “the privilege to dress in frocks and trowsers, — a right most inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.”55 The majority of essays in Jewish newspapers, written by men, rejected Seneca Falls, echoing nineteenth-century middle-class norms that women did not belong in the marketplace or the public square, but belonged in the home, at the center of domestic life. An 1850 article by “B.H.A.” titled “On the Necessity of the Religious Instruction of Females” affirmed the importance of education for women, but only to strengthen feminine qualities, notably “mildness, tenderness, softness and sincerity,” reflected in “pleasing bashfulness, silent grace and tenderness of feeling.” In response to a claim in the New York press that only Christianity would “ultimately redeem her sex from an unjust bondage to ignorance and human will,” a female contributor responded that Jewish women accomplished many acts of benevolence. An essay titled “Woman” praised females as God’s creation whose strength resided in her dependence. In comparison to men’s “individuality,” women’s ambition was for a “union with man.” Women’s innate gullibility and trust endangered them if not under a man’s protection.56 Orthodox commentator “Here and There” was an exception. He regretted that the world was “slow to admit that women were intellectually and morally the equal of man.” A woman possessed the ability to “comprehend the most abstruse sciences.” Her “delicate touch” made her a “skilled practitioner of the crafts.” Yet men thwarted her any time “she contemplates supporting herself.” The solution was not for women to dress as men or to enter politics but for mothers to cease training their daughters for “parlor distinction” and for women to cease placing marriage as the “acme of their ambitions.” A number were already succeeding in new “duties and occupations.”57 Were women “beyond the synagogue”? While a significant number of women found religious consolation within the city’s sanctuaries, and others secured the opportunity to join congregational societies, the majority of New York’s female Jewish population received a secular education and found religious training and participation peripheral to their lives. Too, middle-class Jewish women responded to the appeal of the arts, evidenced by pages of advertisements for pianos in Jewish newspapers and women’s attendance at concerts, dramas, and operas. They accepted invitations to literary-society festivities and Purim balls. Though few affiliated with the women’s rights movement, many participated in New York society, far from the synagogue gallery.

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■ Arts and Entertainment Jewish intellectual enterprise, once restricted to the synagogue, found new outlets in the arts. In 1836, a Jewish musical prodigy, Daniel Schlesinger, arrived in New York from Germany. Playing “at the home of a German patriarch,” he won over his audience with “musical eloquence, poetry, and genius.” He could perform the classical repertory or “clothe Yankee Doodle in music.” Schlesinger studied American folk music, from the national anthem to “African melodies.” Alas, with a public “in whom even Beethoven’s name could not have then awaked a glow,” he found no receptive audience. He tried teaching, at one time instructing three pupils in his dreary lodgings. An attempt to present “a series of Chamber-Concerts,” failed, though before his untimely death in 1838, he gave successful recitals. He was the forerunner of many more successful Jewish artists.58 A decade after Schlesinger’s death, Jews numbered among the promoters and patrons of the arts. Nowhere was this more evident than in the Italian Opera Company under the direction of Max Maretzek. Born in Moravia, Maretzek, a Jewish violinist, came to America as conductor at the Astor Opera House. In 1848, he formed his own Italian Opera Company, heavily patronized by fellow Jews. Many artists were also Jewish. He achieved success: in 1850, the New York Herald reported that five-year subscribers to the opera expressed “entire and unqualified approbation of his conduct as manager of the Astor Place Opera House” and recommended re-leasing the building to Maretzek. That December, the Asmonean described the “Gala Night” opening the season. Noted soprano Teresa Parodi enchanted the reviewer with an “astonishing vocalization and performance in Lucretia and Norma.” The following fall, however, the tone changed. The paper criticized the house for charging European prices for inferior performances; a tenor could not hit the “high notes”; a soprano sang Norma in an “incomplete, slovenly and inefficient” manner. Could the “petted and spoilt Maretzek,” a critic wondered, preserve the enterprise “from absolute and total failure?” Given “the many sacrifices which have been made to establish an Italian Opera in New York,” how could the management fall into the hands of “chareletans and humbugs?” By next February, the director had returned to good graces: “the promptitude with which Max Maretzek has adopted our advice and reduced the price of admission to Fifty cents” again produced “crowded audiences.”59

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The Asmonean, declaring that in “no city in the world” was dancing as popular as in New York, reported the opening of a school run by Israelite Henry Wells and his sister. Wells had lived in Paris and studied at the Royal Academy. The paper also recognized a visual Jewish artist, D. Davidson of Stanton Street, who was preparing an exhibition for the Crystal Palace that “he hopes will reflect credit on the Jews.” He designed ten “Scriptural Pieces — five engravings, and five in writings replete with ornament.” The larger pictures depicted the Feast of Tabernacles and the Ten Commandments and the “sacred Menora or Chandelier.”60 Jews avidly attended the theater. The New York Times reported that the dress circle of the City Theater was filled “with men and women, handsomely dressed and of genteel manners, including a large sprinkling of Jews.” The Asmonean reported regularly on theatrical events. One week it noted that Barnum’s Museum was presenting plays that were “more intensely effective representations of real life . . . than any other establishments in the city.” It announced performances of the German National Theater, the “first permanent German Theater in this city.” That Mr. C. P. Farret, “one of the most prominent leaders” of the 1848 Revolution, stood at its helm, the paper said, gave it “further claim on us.” In addition, Niblo’s Garden was “crowded” at every performance, while the popularity of Fellow’s Minstrels — an entertainment parodying blacks, with whites wearing blackface and imitating black dialects — “continued unabated.” Though New York owed much to “her Hebrew Citizens” for “enterprise in the advancement of the trade, commerce and amusements of this metropolis,” nothing surpassed the new theater of Jewish producer Harry Eyttinge, which cost $250,000. The playhouse sported a stage fifty-five feet deep and a hundred feet wide, seats for more than four thousand playgoers, fresco paintings, and twenty-five chandeliers. A one-price system of fifty cents gave entrance “to all parts of the house.” Productions of Camille, Phedre, and Adrienne Lecouvreur filled the parquette and amphitheater, while the upper circles, where the affluent congregated, contained a “numerous and highly intelligent audience.” During the “financial revulsion of 1857,” opera halls yet held “supremacy over the people,” while music publishers continued to “multiply their productions.”61 The Jewish Messenger also kept readers abreast of cultural events. Performances of Rigoletto and La Traviata in 1859 were “splendid successes.” Pointing to productions of the operas La Juive and Nebuchadnezzar, it stated, “citizens of New York at the present moment, owe their principal sources of amusement

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to Israelite and Jewish subjects.” Jews tended to “monopolize the management [and] the talent” of New York opera and were among “the most critical and sensible spectators” of “current dramatic productions.”62 What was the source of the strong Jewish interest in the arts? The intellectual energy that went into religious life and study, so predominant in European Jewish culture, perhaps found a secular outlet in a secular society in the arts, a world in which perplexing questions could be posed and difficult solutions offered to profound dilemmas. As important, participation in the arts offered the middling and newly affluent Jewish community an opportunity to mix with the Christian population on equal terms. Social acceptance in the broader community could be attained through patronage of the arts. In addition, Jews of the middling classes embraced ever more lavish festive occasions. Dinners of literary and benevolent societies included music and dancing. The most notable events were balls in celebration of Chanukah and especially Purim. In 1860, Myer S. Isaacs, the twenty-one-year-old son of the editor of the Jewish Messenger, Reverend Samuel Isaacs, founded the Purim Association. Its annual Purim Ball quickly became the social event of the year, despite the ongoing Civil War. The demand for invitations was intense; nobody of means wanted to be left off the list. More and more tickets were printed, as upward of three thousand fashionable Jews attended. Perhaps the 1863 ball was the most sumptuous. The Seventh Regiment band, with sixty-five musicians, played dance numbers, including quadrilles, waltzes, polkas, and a Virginia reel. Lavish costumes included “many elaborate marchionesses and duchesses with hair powdered en regle,” Queen Margaret of Valois dressed in “crimson velvet bordered with ermine” mingling with both a “Grecian maiden in white” and Andalusian flower girls. Italian and Hungarian peasants, Little Red Riding Hood, Joan of Arc, and Old Mother Goose wandered in, joining the Queen of the Night, Joseph in his coat of many colors, Marie Stuart, and the “Hot Corn Girl and Tambourine Girl.” Adopting Christians’ New Year’s Day tradition, fashionable Jewish homes were open for visits on Purim. The Purim Ball marked the end of the “ball season,” a season that encompassed synagogue and benevolent-society affairs, “sociables of a more private and exclusive character,” as well as public lectures and concerts. Listing the new events of the coming fall season, the Messenger noted, “our people were intent to turn from the horrible realities of war to the gay and festive, the charitable and intellectual.”63 By the end of the 1850s, more and more of New York Jewry, including immi-

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grants, had advanced in economic and social standing. As the city moved uptown, so did they, purchasing brownstones north of Union Square. What was the meaning of this movement? Did Jews want to dissociate from their brethren and disappear within New York society? Perhaps this solution appealed to the quarter of the community that intermarried. Affluent financier and Rothschild agent August Belmont, for example, claiming that his “liberal views on religion” kept him distant from the “requirements of the Jewish Talmud” and that Jews in America were “too disagreeable,” married in an Episcopal church and, though he never converted, moved solely within the Christian community. But most Jews still wanted to associate with other Israelites as they also sought entry into mainstream New York. On the one hand, in the formation of B’nai B’rith, the founding of Jews’ Hospital, and the inception of ninety-three different organizations ranging from small burial societies to the Hebrew and German Benevolent Societies, Jews determined to bond with each other, often divided by nationality. On the other hand, as we shall see, Jewish families welcomed the public school, the institution that offered the quickest mode of acceptance for immigrant children into a larger urban community. In their immersion in the arts, as in business, Jews chose to join Christian New Yorkers without distinction as they sat side by side at the Astor Opera House, the Academy of Music, and the Broadway Theater. Jewish identity and Jewish integration both remained appealing goals as Jewish life increasingly centered beyond the synagogue.64 There is a republican theme to the New York Jews’ propensity to participate in so many ways beyond the synagogue. Alexis de Tocqueville in his famed classic, Democracy in America, notes that one of the most important forms of American democracy in the Jacksonian era was the propensity for Americans to exercise their democratic spirit by forming voluntary associations in every nook and cranny of the United States, thus participating in the life of the republic. As we have seen, the Jews of New York City took on this American democratic pathway with great zeal, forming many societies. And within these societies, they expressed the increasingly aggressive patriotism, the sense of manifest destiny that often characterized the republican spirit after the election of Andrew Jackson in 1828. As Jews had participated in and incorporated the republican spirit of the American Revolution, so too the much larger population of the 1830s, ’40s, and ’50s, bolstered by tens of thousands of immigrants, took on the new democratic values, enterprise, and sense of destiny that characterized the growing nation.65

Representative of the elegant synagogues built in the 1840s and 1850s is the Rodeph Shalom sanctuary of a congregation of German Jews. Built in the Round or Romanesque Style, its stylish chandelier, lofty ceilings, and grand design represented a new visibility for the Jewish community of New York and a sign of their worldly success. (Rachel Wischnitzer, Synagogue Architecture in the United States: History and Interpretation [Philadelphia, 1955]; courtesy Jewish Publication Society)

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Division, Display, Devotion, and Defense: The Synagogue in Antebellum New York

On the eve of Shavuot 1850, Anshe Chesed consecrated its new synagogue on Norfolk Street between Houston and Stanton Streets, a Gothic sanctuary seating twelve hundred. In the presence of the mayor and members of the Common Council, the elders paraded the congregation’s Torahs around the new sanctuary and through the aisles. The procession passed by twelve young men and women, the latter clad in white dresses with blue sashes. New York’s prominent spiritual leaders delivered sermons in German and English. A year later, in a modest ceremony, Bene Israel, a congregation of Dutch Jews, consecrated a small sanctuary on Pearl Street, with only Reverend Raphall in attendance. The rapid growth of the Jewish population created a remarkably diverse religious community.1

■ Synagogue Growth and Division While a great deal of Jewish communal and personal life took place beyond the synagogues in the antebellum era, these venerable institutions remained viable and ever more visible, even if their significance and their role in Jewish life were far more limited than in the colonial and early republican eras. Jewish newcomers from Germany, Poland, and other European nations stimulated the rise of new synagogues. From 1730 to 1824, a single congregation served the Jewish community; Ashkenazim and Sephardim coexisted without great difficulty. The founding of B’nai Jeshurun in 1824, however, signaled the growing importance of nationality and immigrant standing. Four years later, German, Dutch, and Polish Jews split from B’nai Jeshurun to form Anshe Chesed. In 1837, Polish Jews, defecting from B’nai Jeshurun and Anshe

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Chesed, founded Shaaray Zedek. In 1839 and again in 1842, factions of German Jews left Anshe Chesed to form Shaaray Hashamayim and Rodeph Shalom. The Polish synagogue Shaaray Zedek fell victim to division in 1845, leading to the establishment of Beth Israel. In 1844, a number of the original founders of B’nai Jeshurun, dissatisfied with their congregation, founded Shaaray Tefilah, a congregation composed largely of English- and American-born members. In 1845, members of a German “cultus society,” an informal religious/literary discussion society, established Temple Emanu-El, the city’s first Reform synagogue. Polish, Russian, French, and Dutch Jews formed their own synagogues. In thirty-five years, the number of congregations grew from one to twentyseven, or nearly one per year.2 Divisions occurred for a number of reasons. An admission fee and the refusal of B’nai Jeshurun to admit a wife who had converted to Judaism initiated the exodus of the founders of Shaaray Zedek in 1837. The B’nai Jeshurun schism of 1844, which ended in civil court, resulted from a contested Board of Trustees election. Prior to the court case, internal disputes divided the synagogue. Its hazan, Samuel Isaacs, demanded greater religious observance, even to the point of denying nonobservers membership. He gave sermons in English to a predominantly German audience. The congregation experienced additional problems with its shochet, with intermarriage, and with disruptive members. Finally, increasing resentment arose against new immigrant members who had the potential to make a faction a majority.3 The disputed Board of Trustees election in B’nai Jeshurun was so controversial that the congregation hired four policemen to oversee the proceedings. When the winners prevailed by two votes, supporters of the losing candidates claimed that legitimate members were denied the right to vote. The testimony of Morland Micholl, former president of the Board of Trustees, spelled out the central contention. The synagogue, he testified, had to protect its assets, worth over $25,000. Recent years had brought New Yorkers to the congregation who were “utterly unknown to the people among whom they came.” The elders tried numerous remedies to “exclude those who were calculated . . . to disturb . . . the peace and welfare of [the] congregation,” including rules differentiating seat holders from electors, increasing the residency requirement for membership from six months to three years, imposing an admission fee up to $250, and requiring applicants to win the assent of two-thirds of the members. Why? To protect “places of public worship” from “ignorant immigrants” who

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Consecrated in 1834, the new home of Shearith Israel was lavishly decorated with five gas chandeliers, Brussels carpet, and a masterfully fashioned ark, whose interior was lined with crimson red silk and whose exterior was covered with red brocade drapery. It seated 174 men and 204 women. (Courtesy Congregation Shearith Israel)

could become the “tools of ambition” of members who did not hold the good of the synagogue foremost in mind. Resolution of the conflict came with the exodus of leading figures of B’nai Jeshurun, including Hazan Isaacs, to form Shaaray Tefilah, assisted by a payment of $5,000. Antagonism against immigrants, added to internal dissension, led to both court and secession.4 Another telling schism took place at Beth HaMidrash, a congregation begun by twelve Russian Jews who rented a garret on Bayard Street for eight dollars a month. Russians were not welcomed by their Polish counterparts.

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Consecrated in 1850 on Norfolk Street, the magnificent home of Anshe Chesed, one of the city’s first and largest German congregations, seated one thousand and represented the neo-Gothic architectural style that was popular throughout the country. (Rachel Wischnitzer, Synagogue Architecture in the United States: History and Interpretation [Philadelphia, 1955]; courtesy Jewish Publication Society)

Congregation Shaaray Zedek forbade any new Russian members after 1844. As the congregation grew, it moved to a store front on Canal Street and then to the upper story of a building on Pearl Street. It was “the only institution in the country at the time where religious studies were pursued according to traditional East-European pattern[s].” In 1855, the congregation divided over the hiring of a shochet. While Galician rabbis approved the appointment, the synagogue’s leader, Rabbi Ash, did not, and the shochet’s supporters left to form a minyan on Bayard Street. Rabbi Ash’s contingent, Beth HaMidrash, bought a Welsh Chapel on Allen Street with a bequest from philanthropist Sampson Simson. Soon Ash and his parnas grew incompatible. This dispute ended in court, with Parnas Joshua Rothstein prevailing. With $300 from Beth HaMidrash, Ash’s followers formed another congregation, Beth HaMidrash HaGadol, renting a floor on Forsyth Street, near Grand Street. In 1861, the Forsyth synagogue split. After a dispute over an open window during High Holy Day services, a number of members left with Rabbi Ash to form a Hasidic “Stuebel” on Delancey Street. They purchased their own synagogue on Ludlow Street

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in 1872. These synagogues of Russian Jews again demonstrate the divisive nature of the antebellum Jewish community and its tendency to factionalize over internal disputes, ethnicity, personality, and ideology. Cash payments notably eased the friction of synagogues that split after bruising internal struggles.5

■ Grandeur The growth of new synagogues also reflected a new, larger, and rapidly growing Jewish community, no longer centered on a single congregation but, even with the internal divisions, more self-assured and visible. The splendor of synagogues built between 1830 and 1867 testifies to a new assertiveness. Shearith Israel, the city’s first synagogue and still home to many of its notable Jewish citizens such as Mordecai M. Noah and Harmon Hendricks, finally left Mill Street in 1834 for a sanctuary on Crosby Street near Broome and Spring Streets. Clergy from Trinity Church, the Dutch Reformed Church, St. Patrick’s Cathedral, and the Unitarian Church attended the consecration. Like many other institutions built at that time, Shearith Israel chose a Greek Revival style in honor of the Greek Revolution. The synagogue seated 174 men, while its women’s gallery, supported by fluted columns of the “Greek ionic order” held 204 seats. The new structure had a basement chapel and five gas-powered chandeliers. The New York Times described the ark, enclosed by “a pedimented structure on Corinthian columns and pilasters,” as “one of the most exquisite specimens of workmanship and architecture we have ever seen.” Shearith Israel used this site for only twenty-two years. In 1859, the congregation moved to West Nineteenth Street and Fifth Avenue and sold the Crosby Street synagogue for use as a minstrel hall. The new building, 50 percent larger and costing nearly $100,000, was constructed in a seventeenth-century Baroque style and became known for its octagonal dome supported by Corinthian columns. It was the tallest building above Fourteenth Street.6 Synagogues that began in Five Points and other working-class neighborhoods also moved uptown to more fashionable neighborhoods, to be replaced by new and smaller congregations. In 1850, B’nai Jeshurun sold its Elm Street home to the New Haven Railroad and moved to a fashionable neoGothic building on Greene Street near Houston. Spending the princely sum of $50,000, the congregation prayed under a fifty-six-foot-high dome featuring windows with ornamented paintings. Columns and buttresses supported a paneled sanctuary. At the same time, Anshe Chesed moved to a large Gothic-

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style synagogue seating twelve hundred (seven hundred men and five hundred women), with enclosed pews, stucco walls, stained-glass windows, and a controversial rendering of the Ten Commandments in glass rather than in tablets.7 Temple Emanu-El’s growth astonished observers. Its founders rented a room in 1845 on Clinton Street. In 1847, the city’s first Reform congregation purchased a church building on Chrystie Street for $12,000. Seven years later, the congregation transformed a Baptist church on Twelfth Street between Third and Fourth Avenues into a neo-Gothic sanctuary. Fifteen years later, the synagogue erected a towering Moorish Revival structure on Fifth Avenue and Forty-Third Street at a cost of $650,000. Attracting the support of many successful German immigrants, it became one of the most influential congregations in the city. The lavish synagogues constructed in the 1850s were located in the fashionable center of Manhattan Island, just below Union Square, a much different neighborhood from the immigrant streets of Kleindeutschland that housed the smaller congregations. Beginning in 1859, synagogues moved beyond Fourteenth Street, into neighborhoods not distinctively Jewish, where members of these affluent institutions lived.8 An educated prospective immigrant who resided in New York from 1853 to 1854 before returning to Germany wrote that the average Jewish sanctuary cost over $12,000, while only the Unitarian and Dutch Reform Christian congregations spent over $10,000. He also remarked that the synagogue “building exteriors collectively resemble Christian churches,” with golden letters over the entrance. This observer believed that “synagogue building” represented “the Jews’ adaptation to American morality or immorality.” Regardless of morals, the elegant synagogues symbolized the Jewish community’s rise in wealth and social standing, marking it as a worthy peer of proper Christian society.9 Growth in population and affluence within the Jewish community allowed larger congregations to bring to New York men who were well versed in Jewish learning, both biblical and Talmudic, and in secular studies, men who could match architectural elegance with knowledge of Jewish thought. Their arrival transformed New York into the intellectual center of American Judaism. The most prominent orthodox leaders were Samuel Meyer Isaacs of Shaaray Tefilah, Morris Raphall of B’nai Jeshurun, and Max Lilienthal of Anshe Chesed. Isaacs, son of a Dutch merchant, moved to London in 1814 at age ten. Following a stint as principal of a Jewish day school, he came to America in 1839 to become hazan/rabbi at B’nai Jeshurun but left to lead Shaaray Tefilah, where

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he remained thirty-three years, also serving as editor of the Jewish Messenger. Raphall, born in Sweden and educated in Scandinavia and Germany, settled in England in 1825 at age twenty-seven; there he edited the Hebrew Review and Magazine of Rabbinical Literature and translated the Mishnah into English. A gifted speaker never reluctant to enter political debate or to defend Jewish rights, he served as spiritual leader and headmaster of the Birmingham Hebrew Congregation and was one of England’s most prominent Jewish spokesmen. Dissatisfied with the low cultural level and aspirations of British Jewry and the Birmingham congregation’s inability to pay him a worthy compensation, in 1849 he accepted an invitation to come to B’nai Jeshurun for the substantial salary of $2,000. His arrival represented a major event for the city’s Jewry. As New York’s most prominent Jewish clergyman, he spoke at every significant occasion in the Jewish community and at synagogues throughout the country. The first rabbi invited to address Congress, he published lectures titled “The Poetry of the Hebrews” and “Post-Biblical History of the Jews.” Unlike earlier hazans, Raphall and Isaacs gave sermons on holidays and other special occasions. This added gravity to the services and attracted the attention of Christian audiences.10 Max Lilienthal, who attained both ordination from a traditional yeshiva and a doctorate from the University of Munich, was selected at age twenty-five by the Russian government to modernize the Jewish school system in Russia. The opposition of traditional Jews and his inability to win Russian Jewry full citizenship rights convinced him of the futility of this mission. In 1844, not quite thirty, he moved to New York and became, simultaneously, rabbi of three separate German congregations, most notably Anshe Chesed. Although respected for his learning and experience, Lilienthal encountered difficulties with the duties required by the boards of trustees and resigned in 1850. Shearith Israel, though the oldest synagogue in the city, did not hire a learned leader until 1855, when it appointed Dr. Arnold Fischel, a Dutch scholar living in England, to work with its hazan, J. J. Lyons. A less effective speaker, Fischel was respected but not as influential as Isaacs and Raphall and Lilienthal. Lyons, a noted archivist, continued to represent Shearith Israel on charitable organizations and at synagogue consecrations.11 The emerging Reform movement had its strongest advocates living in and near New York, adding to the city’s wealth of highly educated Jewish religious leaders. Max Lilienthal, while running his boarding school, moved into the

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Reform camp. Rabbi Leo Merzbacher arrived in New York in 1830 from Bavaria, where he received a traditional yeshiva education followed by study at the University of Erlangen. Like Lilienthal, when he arrived in New York, he was a traditional rabbi, taking positions at the German synagogues Rodeph Shalom and Anshe Chesed. His increasingly Reform outlook led him to join Temple Emanu-El as its first rabbi in 1845, and he remained there until his premature death in 1856. Merzbacher’s successor, Samuel Adler, the son of an Orthodox rabbi, studied at a yeshiva and at the universities of Bonn and Giessen. Unlike Lilienthal, he served as a Reform rabbi in Germany, introducing mixed seating, abolition of the second day of festival observance, and changes to the liturgy. He emigrated in 1857 both to advance his family and to escape state supervision of religious institutions. His brother was imprisoned during the Revolution of 1848; Samuel sympathized with its ideals.12 In 1846, Isaac Mayer Wise arrived in New York from Bohemia. The son of a very poor family, Wise received his Jewish education from his father, a teacher, and from yeshiva and secular university studies in Prague. He, too, served as a rabbi in Bohemia before coming to America. Although he took a pulpit in Albany, he remained an integral part of the New York scene, where he lectured, examined students, spoke to literary societies, and edited the literary section of the Asmonean. He quickly assumed the helm of the Reform movement in America.13 Rabbinical leadership in nineteenth-century New York was a new phenomenon. Yet despite rabbis’ superior knowledge of Jewish religion and Jewish history, they deferred to boards of trustees, who remained by law governing bodies of the congregations, and zealously guarded their prerogatives. Each considered its rabbi an employee, along with the shochet and shamash, even though rabbis often represented the Jewish community to the Christian world. The boards did not want any employee, including its prominent leaders who joined the distinguished clergy of the city, speaking about controversial subjects, jeopardizing Jewish standing in the community. The boards also maintained discipline in the synagogue, fining members who spoke out of turn or insulted or threatened the authority of the parnas, the president of the board.14

■ The Synagogue at Work Synagogues continued to play a role in the lives of Israelites. Julius Bien, a leader of B’nai B’rith, recalled that “it became a social necessity for a man of

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family to join a congregation,” though the meaning of membership was in question. The High Holy Days remained solemn events for the Jewish community. Peddlers returned home. Jews filled synagogues; many “temporary places for worship” were “fitted up.” Jewish retailers, unwilling to give up Saturdays for business, closed on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. For observant Jews, synagogues remained critical, monitoring kashrut and providing the means and necessities for Jewish rituals. Boards of trustees continued to spend hours ensuring that certified kosher meat and matzos were available. They worked hard to maintain cemeteries, as city ordinances required burial grounds to be moved outside city limits, often creating conflict with Jewish law. With the arrival of educated Jewish leaders, a few synagogues became focal points for sophisticated religious discussion. The elegant sanctuaries also provided their members considerable prestige.15 Synagogues served as the site for life-cycle ceremonies from the bris (circumcision) of a newborn baby boy to bar mitzvah, marriage, and death. Wedding ceremonies for family members of small congregations often occurred at home, while the more prominent used the major synagogues. These were often large festive affairs, with merrymaking following the nuptials under the canopy. Processions through the city, particularly for notables, often preceded funerals, a Jewish tradition dating to the colonial era. In 1851, when Mordecai M. Noah died, a “dense crowd” thronged the streets near his home on Broadway between Bleecker and Houston. Doctors, authors, merchants, editors, and artisans walked behind the hearse to the cemetery on Twenty-First Street, along with members of benevolent and literary societies, B’nai B’rith, and synagogue representatives. The ceremony was held outdoors to accommodate the throng.16 Synagogue decorum continued to bedevil the trustees, as they sought to emulate the dignity of Protestant services. In 1854, Shearith Israel’s board received a memorial from members complaining of the rapid reading of prayers that no one could understand, of absurd and meaningless motions of the body, of long services, and of the absence of lectures to rekindle piety. An anonymous contributor to the Asmonean, “W,” wondered why the “liberal and philosophic” spirit of the synagogue had vanished. He urged members dissatisfied with the stubborn conservatism of the Board of Trustees, which branded dissenters as infidels, to “be of good courage” and to “fear not those who walk among us as living mummies.” Change will come, and “truth will triumph.”

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In response, the trustees posted signs in “conspicuous” places in the sanctuary stating that “in case of impropriety of conduct or too much conversation the parties offending would be removed . . . by the Shamash upon the order of the Parnas.” Shearith Israel was not alone. In 1844, Anshe Chesed banned conversation during services and proposed fines for anyone who read prayers aloud or chanted with the choir. B’nai Jeshurun’s board removed Barrow Cohen, Shearith Israel’s former nemesis, from his office as secretary for calling a member a “damned liar.” (He first denied the charge, then apologized and was reinstated.)17 In antebellum New York, the growing Jewish population of single men and women mingled freely with the non-Jewish population. Not surprisingly, intermarriage increased, as did requests for conversion. The exact proportion of Jews who intermarried is unattainable but is estimated at one-quarter. Until the 1830s, synagogues adopted a moderate approach, allowing the Jewish member of an intermarriage to retain his or her seat, and even to be an elector. After the 1830s, this attitude changed. In 1835 and 1847, Shearith Israel’s trustees ruled that no seat could be held by anyone “married contrary to [its] Religious Laws” and prepared a responsum equating intermarriage with idolatry. Consequently, any man participating in an illegal marriage had to be expelled from the congregation. Other synagogues followed suit. In 1852, the Asmonean reported that B’nai Jeshurun barred a man who was allegedly married by a Baptist minister. Marriages performed outside of synagogues challenged synagogue authority. In 1850, Reverend Samuel Isaacs termed Rabbi Henry Goldberg a “criminal” deserving “punishment” for divorcing and marrying Jews contrary to Jewish law.18 The synagogues’ hostility to intermarriage reflected a communal attitude. Bavarian Christian immigrant Franz Schano wrote a telling letter to his in-laws in 1853 about his sister-in-law, Babett, who became pregnant by a young Jewish man. The father of the child-to-be refused to marry Babett, stating that he had not promised marriage and that “he was Jewish and wouldn’t abandon his faith and didn’t want to hurt his family.” He ultimately agreed to pay Babett $100 to settle his responsibility. The point of this story is as much the strong ties binding Jewish families and community as the youth’s unfortunate behavior.19 Nor were congregations willing to convert prospective spouses. In 1835, Shearith Israel turned down two requests for conversion. Denouncing a charlatan rabbi in the Jewish Messenger, Reverend Isaacs asserted, “we want no

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proselytes.” Experience demonstrated that “changing the outer garb fails in altering the inner feeling.” Admitting converts would only “tarnish the bright banner” of their “blessed religion.” Ten years later, he charged congregation Rodeph Shalom with allowing the marriage of a proselyte converted outside of Jewish law. (Rodeph Shalom denied the act.) “What do we want of converts?” he asked, as “such neophytes” were “seldom heard of again.” Since Jewish law allowed conversion, the Messenger advocated an intensive investigation prior to any ceremony to “preserve the purity of Israel” from the stain of “commixture or admixture.” The “purity of Israel” emerged as a significant issue in the mid-nineteenth century, perhaps enhanced by the heated contemporary controversies over slavery and race. Did the Bible not demand purity among the Hebrews?20 While Isaacs represented the norm, there were dissenters. Writing in the Asmonean, “A Friend of Truth” argued that “Jews may accept of proselytes”; they were received from the earliest days of Jewish history: for “our religion is for the world, . . . not for us alone.” Indeed, “the more friends Judah acquires, the more its benevolent and simple doctrines penetrate the walls of prejudice.” Isaacs’s views were “extreme, untenable and unJudaic.” Proselytes should know that, if synagogues refused them entrance, the “bone and sinews of the Jews will gladly admit them.” The Reform movement accepted converts. In 1859, Rabbi Samuel Adler of Temple Emanu-El converted a Christian woman in an English ceremony — to the consternation of the Orthodox.21

■ The Synagogues and Jewish Education in Antebellum New York The education of Jewish children, traditionally a synagogue responsibility, fell solidly into the hands of the public school system in the mid-nineteenth century, though not without competition from the city’s congregations. By the 1840s, the Public School Society dominated education, opening branches throughout New York. Despite its Protestant-tinged curriculum, most Jewish parents sent their children to these schools. Shearith Israel and B’nai Jeshurun, reluctant to cede their role in educating Jewish youth, joined seven Catholic schools in 1840 in an unsuccessful petition for public aid. These efforts instead persuaded the state to require that its money be used exclusively for secular education and to institute a public board of education. Unlike Catholics, Jews gradually came to see the public schools as an opportunity for free education and admission to the economic and social opportunities of the republic.22

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Despite reorganizations, a Protestant outlook remained in the curriculum. In 1843, Jewish residents complained to public school trustees of the Fourth Ward, a district in the Lower East Side with a large Jewish population, that a number of books in use were either anti-Jewish or promoted Christianity. One book, for example, Conversations by reformer Dorothy Dix, declared that “the gospel was first sent to them [the Jews], but they, with the exception of a few disciples, rejected its precepts and ignominiously crucified their Savior,” and a popular speller lamented that a Jew would not “give a shekel to a starving shepherd.” The Board of Education rejected the complaint on the grounds that “Jews have not . . . and cannot have the same privileges as those who embrace the Christian religion.” Providing free education did not “give them the right of changing or interfering with [Christians’] own religious institutions.” The New Testament was part of the national culture during the Second Great Awakening in the early to mid-nineteenth century. The Jewish community continued to resist this influence and, under pressure, the board allowed local schools to control Bible readings. By the mid-1850s, the state legislature and Board of Education moved toward “tolerance and local option.” If the Bible was read, no commentary was permitted. This made the public schools in the wards where most Jews dwelt more acceptable.23 Attempting to counter the popularity of public education, in the 1850s, a number of congregations, following the example of Anshe Chesed, which began the first parochial synagogue school in 1845, established Jewish day schools offering secular courses taught by non-Jews and a Jewish curriculum taught by Jewish instructors. Eight synagogues and as many as 850 Jewish children, perhaps 10 percent of the Israelite school-age population, participated. In 1853, Shaaray Zedek, seeking to educate children “in the tenets of their holy and Venerable Religion” and in the “elements of moral and social truths” and to “enable them to claim an equal right, and uphold a due rank among their American fellow citizens,” began a school whose Judaic curriculum included Hebrew reading, writing, and translation; the codes of the Shulchan Aruch; and the Torah with commentaries. English education incorporated reading, writing, arithmetic, grammar, geography, science, history, and bookkeeping; girls received instruction in needle work and drawing. Each day opened and closed with a Hebrew prayer.24 The most celebrated school, the B’nai Jeshurun Educational Institute, opened its own building with great fanfare in 1854, with a floor each for the

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primary school, the school for older boys, and advanced classes for young ladies. The congregation’s leader, Morris Raphall, predicted that, with proper education, a Jew “in a few years” might occupy the “Presidential Chair of the United States.” At the school’s dedication, Jewish leaders declared education the “pole-star of the Jews throughout their long history,” allowing them to preserve “enlightenment through centuries of barbarism.” Soon New York’s schools would compare to the academies in Babylon. The school’s public examinations were a source of pride. Drs. Max Lilienthal and Isaac Mayer Wise officiated in 1854 as children from six to twelve responded in Hebrew, German, and English.25 The institute lasted only two years, a year less than Shaaray Zedek, each school closing because of financial losses. (Anshe Chesed’s school closed in 1857.) Too few parents were willing or able to pay the tuition. The demise of parochial schools caused “great confusion” in the Orthodox Jewish community. The decline in Hebrew education meant that fewer boys read the haftorah portion at their bar mitzvah services. The Messenger foresaw peril for the Jewish community. Editor Isaacs noted that while Jewish children trained to become good citizens and industrious workers, their education as Jews was deplorable. Parents would be held “responsible at the Bar of unerring Justice” for this sin. The city had “splendid synagogues” but scarcely a nursery or “proper school house.” Learning to read but not understand Hebrew, Jewish children lacked “a chart and compass to guide them through the rough storms of life, [and they are] compelled to grope their way in mental darkness.” Moreover, the public schools threatened the “perpetuity of Israel.” Would children not inevitably hear Christian doctrine? How many young Israelites would feel the “blush of shame” when they heard their religion denigrated and their ancestors vilified by schoolmates? They were too young to defend their faith. “J.C.” admonished parents that these “Christian schools” taught religion in every subject, including the sciences.26 The failure of the synagogue academies meant that Jews voted with their feet for the public schools. The Asmonean likely represented popular sentiment when it editorialized that the city’s schools were “unrivalled .  .  . for the amount and quality of instruction” they afforded to their pupils. There was “no degradation” in placing Jewish children in these schools, no “sting of charity.” The public system strengthened Judaism in the city: “entwining more closely the social ties which connect us with our fellow citizens, and

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fully carrying out that fraternization of which American liberty and equality are the basics.” Improvements, of course, were warranted. One correspondent reported a petition to have Hebrew taught with Latin and Greek. Another complained that Protestants chose Bible selections “indiscriminately”; rather, “the Public Schools should be held perfectly free from religious or political taint.” Editor Lyon lobbied for a public supplementary education system for Jewish education.27 What could be done for Jewish education? As a first step, the Messenger urged each congregation to open a Sunday school “for the improvement of the young.” This solution proved as popular in New York as in Philadelphia, where Rebecca Gratz first introduced it. In 1861, five synagogues were open on Sunday for instruction — one with 250 students. As opposed to public schools, “Robinson Crusoe [was] abandoned for the catechism, negro melodies for the inspiring Hebrew hymns, and tops and marbles for the instruction books.” Without Sunday schools, Jewish children “would have remained totally ignorant of their God and His wondrous doings!”28 One morning a week was, of course, insufficient. In the 1860s, the day school movement, responding to the threat of missionaries, struggled to initiate a Jewish public school. In 1865, Free School No. 1 opened with the moral support of the mayor and a donation of furniture by the Board of Education. Jewish spokesmen praised the city for demonstrating the “liberality of our American institutions,” which understood that the Jewish faith “requires a distinct course of training,” and praised the Jewish community for providing poor Jewish children the “spiritual food” and “religious comfort” that their parents could not afford. However, without public fiscal support beyond the donation of tables and chairs, no network of Jewish free schools could survive. Public schools continued to be vehicles of education of New York’s Jewish children.29 In 1850, Dr. Lilienthal, unwilling to put up with the arrogance and demands of boards of trustees, shifted his energies back to education, opening the Hebrew Commercial and Classical Boarding School on Tenth Street. Some of the city’s prominent Jews sent their children there, including Mordecai M. Noah. Lilienthal taught religion, Hebrew grammar, and translation, and additional instructors gave lessons in history, geography, arithmetic, and bookkeeping and, for an extra fee, music, dancing, and drawing. Influenced by Johann Pestalozzi, a Swiss educator who advocated parental love rather than harsh

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discipline in the classroom, Lilienthal sought to create a family of teachers and students. He reasoned that in America, where Jewish children lacked a yeshiva background, instruction must proceed from a simple to an enriched catechism expressing the immortality of the soul and the unity of God. As a young Jew, “the child is trained to become a good man,” as his faith leads him to become a tolerant and benevolent citizen. Christianity must be taught with respect, enabling these youths to live happily with their neighbors. Lilienthal stressed the importance of mentors; a student “becomes good with a teacher who is true and sincere.” The school closed when Lilienthal moved to Cincinnati in 1855.30 The Free Academy (to become the City College of New York in 1866) attracted a number of Jewish scholars. The Asmonean proudly noted its progress and curriculum in 1851, though the Messenger criticized its policy of holding classes on Jewish holidays as harmful to Jewish students who missed classes on these days. But where were Jewish institutions of higher learning? Both the Messenger and Asmonean called for the establishment of seminaries to train Jewish educators and clergy. The Messenger published an ad for a Hebrew high school under Reverend Isaacs, with English, mathematical, and classical departments, but there is no evidence that the school succeeded. Sampson Simson left funds in his will for a Jewish college, but it did not materialize. Despite pleas for higher education, the community did not respond.31 The New York City public schools became legendary institutions of Americanization for immigrants of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These institutions did much the same for German Jewish immigrants of the 1840s and 1850s, as well as for the native born. That most Jews preferred these schools to parochial synagogue schools stemmed in part from their lower cost, but also from a desire that their children integrate into American life.

■ Women and the Synagogue Nineteenth-century American Christianity underwent a period of “feminization” as women became the mainstay of church congregations, the most reliable attendees at Sabbath services, the most conscientious members of committees, and the most pious element of the membership. Was there any parallel movement in New York’s Jewish congregations? While Jewish women hardly achieved the same place in Jewish religious practice that Christian women attained, since many received little religious education and preferred the secular pursuits that the city offered the Jewish community, evidence exists of female

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In 1852, Reverend Morris Raphall of B’nai Jeshurun published his Rachama exercises (devotional prayers) to meet the special spiritual needs of women who could not follow or attend regular services. It was an attempt by the Orthodox community to respond to the needs of women in the metropolitan world of New York. (Asmonean, 24 April 1852)

influence. The new synagogues all constructed large women’s galleries. Indeed, Shearith Israel’s 1834 Crosby Street sanctuary contained thirty more seats for women than for men. Moreover, women maintained female benevolent societies in every large synagogue, contributing to poor relief, and were members of burial societies. There is all too little testimony of the nature of female religiosity. One observer, however, an anonymous visitor from Germany who lived in New York in 1853 and wrote disparagingly of the city’s synagogues, declared that the “spirituality” of Jewish women “overcomes the American environment” and that “pious women . . . are often the moving force behind congregations.” If his perception has credence, the influence of women, especially their presence at services, was significant.32 One female correspondent addressed the issue of women’s religiosity in the Jewish Messenger, condemning the deportment of the sexes in synagogue and the lack of Jewish religiosity in educated young women. Another young lady, “Une Enfante Terrible,” complained that men came to synagogue only on holidays and Sabbaths, when women were certain to be in attendance. She scorned young men in “faultless neck ties” who “sauntered” into the sanctuary when the service was three-fourths over to ogle women instead of reading prayers. Responding to “Enfante,” “An Observer” blamed the ladies for encouraging the attention given them; “Enfante,” revealing an awareness of the women’s rights movement, asked to see even “one solitary man who will give up his right to dictate and rule, to follow the example of one of [her] sex.” The “presence of a few score” men would be more effective in filling the “now-vacant seats” in the galleries than lectures were. She found it interesting that when holidays fell on Sundays, and more men were present, “all the ladies attend.”

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“A Lady” told “Observer” that if he attended Sabbath services, he would see “the gallery full of [her] sex,” while the men’s section was “a very poor show.” These contradictory exchanges show more concern with who is to blame for laxity in attendance than with piety. However, they also hint that women were spiritual mainstays at some congregations.33 Orthodox men’s response regarding the place of women was strictly paternal. One correspondent wrote that unlike men, “the female mind is inspired by the quiet of domestic life”; as a consequence, “the chief honor of a female is religion.” She must, therefore, have a good religious education to bring up her children correctly. “The Voice of Jacob,” after detailing the heroic roles of Ruth, Hannah, Miriam, and Judith in Jewish history, and while dismissing the writings of the ancient rabbis as vestiges of a segregated world, reasoned that women should be educated, just not in the “subtleties of theology,” which might induce them away “from their proper duties.”34 The apotheosis of this view came in a book of devotions for women by New York’s leading Jewish spiritual leader, Morris Raphall. His introduction noted that women lived “at all times” in the “charmed and charming circle of domestic duty and domestic bliss, of which as wife and as mother, she is the presiding and guardian genius.” With little religious education, traditional prayer had limited appeal for women. In the spirit of the techinoth (private devotions) of the mediaeval era, it was appropriate to write special prayers for women. These included “Reflections of a Bride” before marriage, with the bride-to-be asking for “understanding, intelligence, strength and ability” in order to “manage [the husband’s] household in a manner becoming an affectionate and faithful wife.” She prayed that she not indulge in “vain and absurd pretensions” that would take from her husband “the hard earned fruits of his industry” and that she “meekly rest content with [the] humble lot” that God chose for her, whether it be joy or sadness. Raphall advised a wife entrapped in an unhappy marriage to understand that the “chastisement” of the unfortunate union was the rightful punishment of God. He instructed her to pray: “Teach me to subdue my stubborn disposition that I may be able to meet [my husband’s] censures with meekness, his reproofs with submission, his ill-temper with kindness.” A good wife was a good wife forever.35 With the decline of the synagogue’s ability to educate the young, “Here and There,” an occasional columnist for the Jewish Messenger, expressed concern with the level of female education, declaring that Jewish girls had “every

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opportunity of the acquisition of a liberal education” and yet were woefully ignorant of “their faith.” They witnessed their parents’ nonobservance of Jewish law and followed that path, “unmindful of the danger ahead.” Parents who sent their daughters to fashionable schools yet provided no religious instruction failed as mothers and fathers. More was expected from the “Women of Israel.” They must become aware of their hallowed traditions and concern themselves with the “jewel” as well as the “casket.”36

■ Anti-Semitism at Home and Abroad While congregations guarded their autonomy, synagogues united to protest outrageous foreign acts of anti-Semitism. When in 1840 a Damascene Jew was accused of a ritual murder, thousands gathered in anger. Leading members of congregations sent letters to the president of the United States and received a positive response. The largest outcry arose over the Mortara case in 1858, in which a Jewish child was torn from his home in Italy under Catholic law because his nursemaid secretly baptized him at age six. Synagogues led and hosted protest gatherings. Delegates of twelve synagogues met at the home of Reverend Raphall to plan protests, including a mass meeting of over three thousand Jewish citizens at Mozart Hall. Following speeches by politicians and Jewish leaders, the assembly adopted a resolution stating that the “kidnapping” recalled the “dark ages.” President James Buchanan declined to intervene in the affairs of another sovereign country, perhaps concerned about alienating the Catholic Democratic vote. He did, however, personally answer the letter of Benjamin Hart, president of B’nai Jeshurun.37 The Mortara affair instigated an effort to found an American Jewish union. There were multiple obstacles. The vast distances between American synagogues in the United States, significant differences and enmities among nationalities, and hostility between Reform and Orthodox congregations posed barriers. The Jewish Messenger pleaded for a national board of Jewish congregations to enable Jews to have a greater influence in national affairs. Editor Isaacs preferred a chief rabbi to enforce common standards among synagogues but, knowing that to be impossible, strove for a loose political union. He contended that there were many republics (congregations) but no federal union. After the Mortara affair, representatives of eleven Orthodox New York congregations and twelve congregations from cities ranging from New Orleans

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to St. Louis met in New York. John Hart of Shaaray Tefilah, Isaac’s synagogue, chaired the meeting. In 1859, the Board of Delegates was established with headquarters in New York. It pledged no interference in party politics or internal affairs of congregations, though this did not prevent Reform congregations from boycotting, along with Shearith Israel, which never felt comfortable with Ashkenazi congregations. In 1861, the board led the quest for Jewish army chaplains and, in 1863, expressed the community’s shock over General Ulysses S. Grant’s expulsion of Jews from his War Department.38 Local anti-Semitism prior to 1830 surfaced mostly when Jews entered elective politics, notably during Mordecai M. Noah’s run for sheriff in 1824. That occurred when Jews, composing less than 0.5 percent of the city’s population, were barely noticeable. With a population nearing 5 percent of city residents, merchants gaining financial standing, areas of the city clearly recognizable as Jewish neighborhoods, and elegant synagogues appearing as noticeable markers of a Jewish presence, anti-Jewish sentiment became far more common. With visibility, the impression of Jews in the press worsened.39 Some newspapers and magazines commonly pictured Jews as parvenus rapaciously climbing the economic ladder as they flaunted material success and opulence. Journalists singled out Jewish proprietors of stores on Chatham Street for shame and ridicule as pinchpennies. A Pen-and-Ink Panorama of New York City mused that “the old red men scalped their enemies, the Chatham clo’ men skin theirs.” Even the New York Times, a paper favorably inclined to the Jewish community, reported stories confirming a Jewish propensity for dishonest commerce. In 1855, it reported on a customer being maltreated by a Chatham Street merchant by being “abusively ejected into the street,” conduct that is “hourly repeated by those people at every clothing store.” Their behavior to “respectable young females” was “highly offensive.” Another story recounted how “aggrieved parties” took revenge on Jewish clothes vendors for “being taken in and done for.” A third notice told of the plight of poor sewing women exploited “by the Chatham St. Jews” (as well as by wealthy Christian store owners). Jews working in the stock market also suffered as common targets. A Week in Wall Street described underhanded traders named “Solomon Single-Eye” and “Jacob Broker” and “King Saul,” out for “a pound of flesh.” By 1860, the term Jew one down had entered the American lexicon, nowhere more so than in New York.40

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Politics continued to be a common source of anti-Semitism, as more Jews attained elective and appointive office. The most important political figure remained Mordecai M. Noah, until his death in 1851. Active in Democratic and conservative Whig politics, an editor of major newspapers, and a judge, Noah was an outspoken politician who maintained a strong Jewish identity. James Gordon Bennett, a Scotch immigrant, former seminarian, and editor of the anti-Semitic New York Herald, continuously attacked Noah. In one issue, he doubted whether “Mordecai M. Noah and his better half, with all the fat feathers, and false jewelry she could muster, the first from the sausage stalls of Washington market, the latter from the old clo’ shops of Chatham row, could have made a better show.”41 The 1850s witnessed a revival of evangelicalism and, with it, religiously motivated attacks on the Jewish community. Evangelical Harvey P. Peet, president of the New York Institution for the Deaf and Dumb, wrote a pamphlet, Scripture Lessons for the Young, that vividly pictured Jews calling for Jesus’s death as they “lead him to the cross” and “reviled him.” Ever after, “Jews hated Christians and persecuted them.” For their sins, they have been “scattered among all nations.” The Episcopal Churchman raged against “blaspheming Jews,” the “infuriate infidel,” the “malicious, bigoted hypocrites.” During the Mortara affair, the New York Tablet, a Catholic paper, charged that Catholics had always treated Jews well, but, alas, Jews, “with the[ir] acquisitive instinct,” have “turned the indulgence of the Pontiffs to the best account and have in many instances made fortunes by it.” The Herald, commenting on a prayer by a Jewish rabbi before Congress, predicted that soon “we shall have a pawnshop in the basement” of the House of Representatives. On Yom Kippur 1850, a crowd of mostly Irish immigrants broke into a Jewish home in Brooklyn, believing its inhabitants had killed a Christian girl for a Jewish feast.42 Educated men also harbored anti-Semitic feelings. Charles King, future president of Columbia College, declared Jews “deficient” in patriotism. Harper’s Magazine, a weekly catering to the middle class, stated that Jews’ “future in this country, as in Europe, is a problem which is well deserving of sober thought.” Lawyer and civic figure George Templeton Strong observed that if, during a theater performance, a member of the audience yelled out “Farmer’s Loan and Trust Co.,” these words would have “an appalling effect on the hooknosed and black-whiskered congregation.” Additionally, he remarked, Jews’

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form of worship was “utterly unlike that of any Christian culture I have ever witnessed.” A Walt Whitman prose sketch described “dirty looking German Jews,” and a Herman Melville short story about Manhattan depicted “a Jew with hospitable speeches, cozening some fainting stranger into ambuscade, there to burk him.”43 Although the city’s two Jewish weeklies were not official organs of the synagogue, they became the principal vehicles refuting these charges of antiSemitism. The Asmonean, edited by Robert Lyon, a former merchant and also a member at Shaaray Tefilah and the voice of the emerging Reform movement, and the Orthodox Jewish Messenger, edited by the Reverend Samuel Isaacs of Shaaray Tefilah, while focusing on synagogue notices, community news, sermons, and articles about Jewish history and thought, promptly responded to the anti-Semitic charges, particularly those in the mainstream press. When the Herald used the Damascus affair as an excuse for publishing an article on the “mysteries of the Talmud” that alleged Jewish blood-libel murder plots, the Asmonean accused editor Bennett of “catering to the morbid appetites of ignorant and prejudiced immigrants” by singling Jews out as criminals. The Asmonean refuted an article in the Journal of Commerce that claimed that Jews were as identifiable in public as the African-American population because of their separate dwellings and behavior. It accused an attorney of anti-Semitism for stating in a trial that “he would not believe a Jew under oath where money is concerned.” (The attorney, Chauncey Stouffer, felt compelled to write an apology, stating that he was speaking under “excitement” and that he numbered “among the Israelites of th[e] city” some of his “best and most steadfast friends.”) Editor Lyon confronted a New York state senator for accusing German Jews of adulterating the liquor they sold; excoriated a book published in Germany that wrote of a girl being killed in New York on Yom Kippur; and lobbied successfully for Mayor Fernando Wood to investigate police conduct relating to a fire in which the Jewish proprietor of a clothing store was charged with murder for the death of his family. Many tales that disparaged Jews were challenged without timidity.44 The Jewish Messenger registered particular sensitivity to another form of anti-Semitism, at least in the eyes of the Jewish community: aggressive Protestant missionaries who attempted to convert Jews. Isaac Mayer Wise recalled in his Reminiscences that in 1849 the Presbyterian General Assembly issued a

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manifesto demanding that Jews enter the Presbyterian Church. This aroused both Presbyterian missionaries and those of other Protestant sects, so that “the whole country swarmed with conversion-apostles and the conversion of the Jews was lauded in all pulpits as highly praiseworthy.” The New York Times published numerous reports of the meetings of the American Society for Meliorating the Condition of the Jews. These missionaries expressed ambivalent attitudes toward the Jewish community, praising their industriousness while yet terming them “infidel Jews.” Missionaries sought to provide “an open door of the entrance of the gospel into thousands of Jewish families,” particularly as they believed that half the Jews in America never let it be known that they were Jewish. Another report stated that missionaries preached to Jews “in the highways, in their dwellings, in their synagogues, and in Christian churches.” The Asmonean reported that missionaries tended to visit hospitals and dispensaries seeking out Jewish patients, assuring them that they could not be saved unless they converted. Spiritual leaders and Jewish newspapers constantly condemned these attacks on their community.45 The demands and opportunities of the expanding American democracy sharply limited the role of the synagogue. It was no longer the center of Jewish existence. However, to a considerable degree, it carved out a niche compatible with an expanding American and Jewish population living in a sophisticated, cosmopolitan, democratic environment. New synagogues met the needs of the different immigrant nationalities. The growth of costly ornate synagogues and the hiring of prominent spiritual leaders provided an important means for the more affluent Jews to display their integration and success in the American republic. Adapting to the public school, as representative an institution as any of the dominance of a maturing republican ethos, they lowered their expectations to a subsidiary pedagogical role. They continued to maintain a venue for important life-cycle events and for the High Holy Day services, which, if they were less important in providing spiritual content, remained a coalescing communal forum. Indeed, the synagogue’s most important role was as a unifying force within the powerful secular and Christian allures of Manhattan society. The synagogue, allied with Jewish newspapers, remained the most important defense against a growing anti-Semitism, the product of resentment of Jews’ greater and more visible role in New York society. What the synagogue largely failed to do, however, was to offer a religious path that

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would appeal to both native-born and immigrant Jews who sought spiritual guidance relevant to a modern society, a society that was in part the product of the European and American Enlightenments. Ideas espoused in the sanctuary often lacked appeal to those who frequented the lodges, literary societies, and theaters.

The weekly Asmonean, New York’s first lasting English-language newspaper intended for the Jewish community, began publishing in 1849 and continued until editor Robert Lyon’s sudden death in 1858. Named for the grandfather of Mattathias, head of the Maccabean family of priests, it saw itself as a vehicle for Jewish renewal and became the voice of the emerging Jewish Reform movement. The phrase about the threefold knot refers to the three divisions of Jews — Kohens, Levites, and Israelis — and represents a plea for Jewish unity. (Asmonean, 23 November 1849)

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The Challenge of Reform

In the summer of 1846, Isaac Mayer Wise, the future leader of American Reform Jewry, only a few weeks in New York after a harrowing sixty-threeday voyage, was in despair. His attempt to teach English had failed, and he had but a few dollars to his name. Fellow Jews advised him to become a peddler. Instead he decided to take one more chance and called at the home of Rabbi Max Lilienthal on Eldridge Street. Their meeting changed the course of American Judaism. Lilienthal welcomed Wise and started him on a momentous career. This meeting of like minds who envisioned radical changes to the practice of Judaism made New York the scene of a momentous contest in American Jewish history.1

■ The Synagogue in Crisis While architecturally graceful and opulent sanctuaries announced the growing standing of the city’s Jews, congregations played a diminished spiritual role among the Jewish population. Threadbare attendance at weekly and daily services presaged serious problems. Antebellum New York was not colonial or even republican New York. Its Jewish community was far more diverse and becoming increasingly secular. Moreover, Jews, like the city they lived in, focused on the world of the entrepreneur. How relevant could a synagogue be in such a booming capitalist society? Visitors’ reports reveal problems facing synagogues in antebellum New York. Lydia Child, a favorably inclined liberal Christian reformer from Boston, attended Rosh Hashanah observances at Shearith Israel in 1841. She found the services “a vanishing resemblance to reality; the magic lantern of the past.” Men, she reported, wore “fringed silk mantles, bordered with blue stripes” and

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“dreary” modern European hats. The black silk robes of the hazan reminded her of an Episcopal priest. The hazan led the service, but in fact the chanting consisted of “monotonous ups and downs of the voice, which, when the whole congregation joined in it, sounded like the continuous roars of the sea.” The “ceremonies were in a cold mechanical style,” less earnest and less pious than those at a Catholic church. The use of only Hebrew made the prayers “a series of unintelligible sounds.” In other words, services continued as they had for generations, led by a hazan, with each member praying at his or her own pace. Child, of course, understood no Hebrew, but that was also true of much of the Jewish community. Isaac Mayer Wise declared that the “majority of Israelites” did not understand Hebrew prayers, resulting in a “want of devotion” at services. Decorum was lacking “because the worshippers do not know what they say.”2 In 1873, Wise reminisced about the state of the synagogues in New York upon his arrival from Bohemia in 1846. Shearith Israel’s ritual, he recalled, was “antiquated and tedious.” “Crass ignorance” ruled B’nai Jeshurun, as the shamash laughed when Wise asked for a copy of the Mishnah, basic books of Jewish law. He found only ignorance at Polish synagogue Shaaray Zedek, and the German congregations, including Anshe Chesed, were as “ill-behaved as in Germany.” The hazan at Anshe Chesed “trilled like a nightingale and leaped out like a hooked fish.” Wise could not endure the “intolerable sing-song” of the service. An anonymous German visitor who lived in New York from 1853 to 1854 also criticized Shearith Israel, where, he observed, the presidents sat on “thrones.” At the service, the congregation went through the rituals, but “little of the inner self is involved. Spanish self-complacency and American custom combine to smother the seed of life.” Great attention was given to ritual detail, while “all else is neglected.” Hazan Lyons, “after gurgling out his trill . . . looks around for applause, especially from the women.” All congregations were “unkind and un-Jewish” to strangers. A group of “well-dressed, respectable and earnest German Jews” were “brutally kicked out” of a Sukkoth celebration of a non-German congregation. It was not that New York did not contain pious Jews, but “piety is not expressed in congregational life.”3 By the 1850s, most Jews in New York City did not belong to a synagogue. So that congregations could supplement their income, they allowed Jews to purchase High Holy Day seats without becoming members. The actual number of dues-paying members is unknown. Based on population estimates compared with the number of congregations in the city, it would have taken an average of

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eight hundred members per synagogue just to reach a 50 percent membership. Many were small; thus, it is likely that no more than a quarter of the population paid membership dues. Congregations had traditionally overseen and even enforced community adherence to Jewish ritual observance. This prerogative ended. European Jewish leaders referred to nineteenth-century America as a “terepha” (unkosher) land. Attempts by synagogues to enforce adherence failed. At B’nai Jeshurun, Samuel Isaacs unsuccessfully sought to exclude the nonobservant from membership. The first trustees of Anshe Chesed decreed that Sabbath violators would be denied seats; this rule went unmentioned after 1840, though officers had to conform to Jewish law (a hazan was suspended for eating with his head uncovered). Shaaray Zedek’s bylaw that no member could be “elected to office if he keeps open his Shop on Sabbath” soon became obsolete. Isaac Leeser, Philadelphia editor of the Occident, wrote that censure of individuals for an offense against spiritual authority had long been abandoned. He doubted “whether a single Hasid could be found in this country.”4 Violation of the Sabbath, the cornerstone of Judaism, caused congregational leaders great anxiety and concern. Reverend Samuel Isaacs lamented that “in the days of yore” Sabbath transgressors were “publicly stoned”; today they are given “first honors in the synagogue.” The Jewish Messenger bemoaned that despite attractive sanctuaries “dedicated to the service of the most High, . . . a melancholy view of empty seats is present on every Sabbath.” A correspondent anguished over the “woefully empty benches” of a rainy Saturday. In 1844, Hazan Lyons of Shearith Israel wrote his board that congregants at Sabbath and holiday services often had to wait a quarter of an hour for a minyan of ten men, after which they were compelled to “omit an important portion of the Service.” A few years later, Isaac Mayer Wise reported that if he and two strangers had not attended Shearith Israel one Friday eve, “there would have been no minyan” to hear the “benumbed forms of the Middle Ages, . . . the beautiful canons of the age of William the Conqueror.”5 Jews not only did not attend Sabbath services, but they openly violated its strictures by working on the day of rest. Refuting an article in the New York Herald that Jews were adopting Sundays as their Sabbath so they could work on Saturday, the Messenger argued that these charges arose from “neglect of religious duties.” Were Israelites not aware that “they must be laughed at for supposing their religion unknown because they do business on Sabbath?”

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According to Jewish law, women were required to immerse themselves in a ritual bath following their menstrual cycle. However, only 1 percent did so, which points to the decline in ritual observance. A few synagogues, such as B’nai Jeshurun on Greene Street, built mikvehs and advertised for their use. (Asmonean, 9 July 1853)

“Professor B.” asked “if Chatham Street is not a crying abuse, a stain, a foul spot upon the New York Israelites,” lowering them in “general esteem.” It was distressing that energetic Jewish merchants who achieved “mercantile success” would “willfully and publicly violate the Sabbath.” Reverend Isaacs asked “every Jewish merchant, importer, tradesman or mechanic, every attorney and counselor” to follow the example of Jewish communities in Paris, London, and Frankfort and “make up his mind resolutely to do no work whatever on Sabbath.” On “streets abounding with Israelite merchants,” Jews should “meet as brethren to discuss the best means for doing their duty as Israelites.”6 New York’s Jews regularly neglected dietary laws. One correspondent declared, “at the present day, parents, with few exceptions, especially when away from home, with their family, regard the said law as obsolete and unfit for our time.” Yet these very laws were responsible for the “adamantine wall of separation” that kept Israelites a separate people, “turning back attempts” to “amalgamate” with them. As America’s first ordained rabbi, Abraham Rice of Baltimore, lamented, “most of the Jews eat forbidden food and profane the Sabbath openly and nobody pays any attention.”7 Few women observed the commandments mandating that a married woman

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immerse herself in a ritual bath (mikveh) after her period of menstruation, a ritual that allowed her to resume sexual relations with her spouse. Only a few synagogues maintained mikvaot. Hyman Grinstein calculates that only two hundred women out of twenty thousand used the mikveh regularly. While no sermons have come to light faulting women for failing to undergo purification, an 1853 advertisement by “Mrs. Noot” to the “wives and mothers of Israel” praised the features of B’nai Jeshurun’s mikveh, “fitted up with every attention to their comfort, and in strict accordance with the requirements of the Law.” She reminded Jewish women of the “indispensable religious duty incumbent on them.” Another ad coaxed potential bathers by describing a mikveh “refinished in a style of beauty, convenience and elegance.” These ads made little headway, as Jewish women in New York declined to observe this ritual.8 The lack of spirituality in Jewish youth troubled observers. Covering an 1852 confirmation ceremony at Anshe Chesed, the Asmonean observed that students had to be aware of “the violent contradiction between the actualities of life and the doctrines of religious instruction.” The Messenger declared that it could not “commit to paper a tithe” of what it had “seen and heard.” Young men and women, like their parents, openly violated Jewish law. In the holy sanctuary, they arranged dinner parties at the Maison Doree, a restaurant where “forbidden viands” were served in an “inviting style.” (The Messenger counseled that even in this “enlightened age,” the “safe” path for youth was to follow the teachings of the “sages of Israel.”) Young Israelites “publicly derided” the “holy Sabbath.” “Why,” the Messenger questioned, “must Friday evening be selected for visits to places of amusement” and “Saturday afternoons to the dancing master, or . . . their piano-forte instructors?” In 1863 and 1864, both the Jewish Clerks Aid Society’s anniversary and a Purim Ball took place on Friday night. In all, things were “growing worse and worse” as “a fearful laxity” prevailed. How many “liberally educated young men” were “faithful adherents of Judaism?” Where were the potential Maccabees who would rally to their faith “under severe trials and . . . temptations?”9 Aware that the desire to win acceptance in American society encouraged the decline of observance, the Messenger argued that failure to follow Jewish law actually harmed a Jew’s chances of gaining recognition. In 1862, it wondered how Israelites could “seek the approbation of their fellow citizens,” who could not but witness “the many seats vacant in [their] shrines.” When Christians saw religious disregard, when they viewed Jews wholly “engrossed in

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commercial pursuits or devoted to trifling amusements,” should they not believe that “Israel has very much degenerated?” It was appalling that an Israelite elected to public office, once in position, forgets “that he is an Israelite in faith, besides being an American socially and politically.” Jews maintained fealty to their faith and nationality only when they were “observing the laws and statutes given to [them] for observance, and for transmission to posterity.” Standing in the Christian world would come from genuine religious practice.10 Immigration “foreshadowed a secularization of faith” in which an “idyllic America” became the “kingdom of God on earth.” Modern Judaic philosopher Abraham Joshua Heschel observed that the least pious Jews were those willing to risk fleeing to America. Immigrants were most interested in adapting to their new country and making a better living. Many used the openness of the United States to Americanize, discarding customs that either hindered them in the marketplace or separated them from other Americans. Native-born Jews as well began to drift away from religious practice in the early republic, drawn by the attractions and wealth of American society, a trend that continued in the antebellum era. It was difficult both to make it in America and to follow traditional Jewish rites. As a result, except on High Holy Days, the synagogues, despite their elegance, stood nearly deserted, their authority greatly diminished.11

■ The Challenge of Reform The rise of Reform Judaism constituted the most important religious development in the antebellum era for American Jewry. It triggered a fierce contest of ideas between proponents of orthodoxy and reform. As Jeffersonians and Hamiltonians had contended over the legacy of the American Revolution, so leaders of Orthodoxy and Reform struggled for their vision to become the future of Judaism in the American republic. The movement to reform the Jewish religion in both its outward ceremonies and rituals and in its core religious doctrines divided the community, ultimately leaving the Orthodox a minority among American Jews affiliated with congregations. The battle for the hearts and minds of the American Jews that began in Charleston in the 1820s reached new dimensions in New York in the late 1840s and early 1850s, as accomplished scholars took on the Orthodox establishment.12 Reform Judaism took root in Germany in the late eighteenth century with the work of Moses Mendelssohn, an Orthodox philosopher who sought to reconcile German philosophy and Judaism and to make Judaism acceptable to

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Temple Emanu-El, the city’s only Reform congregation, grew rapidly. Its first sanctuary lasted only seven years. In 1854, the membership purchased a large Baptist church on Twelfth Street, which they transformed into a neoGothic sanctuary. It became one of the most influential synagogues in the city, home to many wealthy Jewish German immigrants. (Rachel Wischnitzer, Synagogue Architecture in the United States: History and Interpretation [Philadelphia, 1955]; courtesy Jewish Publication Society)

Jews living in an enlightened world. In the generation following Mendelssohn, reformers began with his ideas but went much further. Hostile to mystical trends in Judaism, they forged a new Science of Judaism (Wissenschaft des Judentums) to study the history of Judaism and origins of the Bible with the scientific tools of archeology and philology. Reformers intended to maintain Judaism as a living religion by integrating it with the philosophical ideas of Kant and Hegel. Leaders included Abraham Geiger and Samuel Holdheim. The former, an influential scholar and rabbi, understood Judaism as a historical, evolving religion, much different in the nineteenth century than in the ninth. He accepted rituals, provided they were not “devoid of spirit,” and advocated a Hebrew service that could be understood in a contemporary framework. Holdheim, more radical than Geiger, rejected the Talmud, adopting the belief that the Bible, including the Torah, was the “human reflection of divine illumination.” Reformers established a temple in Hamburg in the early nineteenth century with an organ, a reduced barrier between men and women, weekly sermons, and a liturgy that included traditional themes but excluded

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Isaac Mayer Wise arrived in New York in 1846 at the age of twentyseven and soon became one of the leaders of Reform Judaism in America. Though his pulpit was in Albany, Wise was literary editor of the Asmonean, in which he argued for Reform, and regularly traveled to New York to lecture, to examine students, and to speak to literary societies. He was an integral part of the city’s Jewish community until his move to Cincinnati in 1854. (Courtesy American Jewish Archives)

prayers seeking the rebuilding of the Temple in Jerusalem and greatly reduced pleas for a return to Zion. New York’s Reform leaders, Max Lilienthal, Isaac Mayer Wise, Leo Merzbacher, and Samuel Adler, emerged from the German Reform movement.13 The city’s first Reform congregation, as we have seen, grew from a small 1830s discussion society of knowledgeable German immigrants into Temple Emanu-El. The founders sought alterations in worship that would allow Jews to “occupy a position of greater respect among [their] fellow-citizens,” services that blended devotion to the divine with fidelity to the new age. Initial modifications were limited: men sat in the front, women in the rear; men still wore hats and prayer shawls. The congregation retained the traditional order of service but reduced the number of prayers and introduced new vocal music enhanced by a choir, together with weekly sermons. The next decade, moving to a new synagogue, the congregation adopted radical changes. It ended the separate seating of men and women and the requirement that a bar mitzvah youth read the weekly Torah potion. Services proceeded with the accompaniment of an organ and without the chanting of the hazan. Emanu-El no longer celebrated the second day of festivals. Prayer shawls were abandoned, and, by 1859, hats were no longer required. Lay leaders wanted to totally abolish the practice of covering one’s head during prayer, but yielded to more traditional

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members until 1864, when, with the concurrence of Rabbi Adler, it became mandatory. In 1855, Rabbi Merzbacher completed a prayer book, Seder Tefilah, modified by Rabbi Adler, which influenced Reform synagogues throughout the country. The rabbis incorporated German hymns and eliminated mention of restoration to Zion, resumption of sacrifices, the concept of a chosen people, the coming of a personal messiah, and resurrection of the dead.14 The tradition of lay control held sway at Emanu-El. While Merzbacher and Adler exerted influence, the temple’s trustees, including some of the city’s most prosperous German immigrants, the “merchant princes,” took the helm. For example, Dr. Merzbacher, while willing to abandon Talmudic traditions and ceremonies, sought to preserve Mosaic institutions, distinguishing between biblical commandments and rabbinic laws. The Cultus (ritual) Committee made no distinction. Merzbacher could conduct no marriage ceremony without the board’s permission. When a member, after instructions to dispense with “the wearing of the Tallis in the Temple,” responded unsatisfactorily, the board declared that the dissenting member could “according to his request have the Amount paid on his Pews returned.” Concerned with decorum, the board cautioned congregational officers not to appear “in a Condition of Dress unsuitable to his office.” They conferred with like-minded synagogues, invited leading Reform figures to lecture, and recruited talented, highly educated leaders. Under this spirited management, Emanu-El grew rapidly both in numbers and wealth.15 The Reform movement, with Temple Emanu-El as its base, took on the Orthodox establishment in a debate that reverberated in the streets, the pulpits, and the Jewish press. The top figures in the Reform movement, Lilienthal and Wise, assisted by Merzbacher and, after 1858, Adler, gained a significant platform in 1851 when Robert Lyon, editor of the Asmonean, New York’s only Jewish weekly, decided that Wise was “the man of the future of American Judaism” and appointed him the literary editor of the paper’s “theological and philosophical department.” Wise opened the Asmonean to articles by himself, Lilienthal, Merzbacher, and supportive anonymous correspondents, who detailed Reform’s ideology and ambitions to the public.16 Reform thinking rested on the primacy of science and reason. Reformers based their creed on the wedding of science and Judaism, arguing that Judaism must stand the test of modern investigation. This included thought and rituals. In 1849, Max Lilienthal defined the role of science for Judaism in a

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speech to the society Friends of the Light (Verein der Lichtfreunde), an organization of intellectually oriented German immigrants. We cannot greet this epoch of Jewish science with anything but joy and exultation. . . . Science is aware of its mission, to teach and preach Judaism to the world and to offer it to her purified. . . . Thus scientific enlightenment must clear away the disagreement, must becalm doubt and fear, must reconcile the hearts of Israel in the worship of the One Lord, must banish indifferentism and fanaticism alike and make Israel reconciled in love and peace, the herald of peace for the world.

Lilienthal wrote that “truth has not to shun the torch of investigation; scientific research will but remove superstitions and the darkness of erroneous views, and put religion still more in the halo of its heavenly light.” It would be better to have no religion than one “that cannot stand the trial before the forum of science, knowledge and common sense.” For the “wheels of human progress” will not halt; “life and science and truth will soon give the answer,” and that answer “will but endear our pure and divine religion to every Jewish heart.” Echoing Lilienthal, “Ben-Yehuda” declared in the Asmonean that modern man needed “natural philosophy, mathematics, history and philosophy of history” to comprehend the Bible. An advocate of Reform must “serve God in a pure and holy manner” and, like the prophets, return Judaism to “its original purity.” Free from “prejudice, superstition and fear, he must take the world as it is.”17 Concurring, Isaac Mayer Wise wrote that “all Post Scriptural Scriptures are exposed to a sound and scientific criticism.” Other creeds relied on faith and only faith, while Judaism depended on scientific and philosophical grounds; its doctrines were so strong a creed that “even the most rigid application of philosophical criticism could only endear it to a thinking and reflective mind.” Reason, he argued, “like the doctrine of the Jews, is of divine origin, and science is the result of reason.” In 1853, Wise regretted that no person was “yet among the mortals” who could translate the Bible into English “upon the solid fundaments of the results of modern criticism.” Yet Wise was confident of the future because “the spirit of progress and reform, a proper acknowledgement of the just demands of the age and a desire for the living word of God, advances in spite of all the opposition of literate charlatan and bigoted ciphers.” Reason would triumph since “liberty, enlightenment, progress and reform are sisters that go side by side.” Progressive Judaism must prevail.18 Reform argued that Judaism evolved over the centuries. Where did the

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After an unsuccessful attempt to reform Russia’s system of education for its Jewish population, Max Lilienthal, a brilliant German-educated rabbi, emigrated to America in 1845 at age thirty; there he was rabbi for three German congregations. He left that position in 1850 to become headmaster of a greatly admired private school for Jewish girls and boys. He developed a strong friendship with Isaac Mayer Wise and turned from Orthodoxy to Reform, becoming, with Wise, one of its leading spokesmen. This image is from his younger days in New York. He moved to Cincinnati in 1855. (Courtesy American Jewish Archives)

Talmud, the jewel in the crown of modern Orthodoxy, fit in Jewish history? Samuel Adler claimed that the Talmud mirrored a distant past, a past containing wisdom but also ceremonies and commandments that were lifeless in the modern era. Jews “of conviction” must work to free their “pure religion” from the “alloy” that the “dark age of the Past . . . mingled with it.” Max Lilienthal declared that the Talmud had less and less meaning for the modern Jew because it contained minhagim (customs) derived from cultures of nations with whom Jews lived in the Diaspora. The esteemed codification of Jewish law, the Shulchan Aruch, derived in part from Persian and Chaldean practices; Slavonic and Russian traditions could also be found in Jewish ritual. How could minhagim originating from ancient non-Hebraic societies be binding? Science demonstrated that the Bible was and that rabbinic law (Talmud) was not divine in its creation. Consequently, Lilienthal argued, “our creed will only then shine with the eternal light of its Heavenly truth, when all these foreign elements will be removed, and we again will stand upon the solid rock of the Mosaic law!!” Only when “every humbug and every defect,” the “unfounded conglomeration” of earlier eras, was expunged, would Israelites resolve the “contradiction between life and religion” and “feel proud of their Jewish name.” Though it might take some time, ultimately all Jews would come around to this truth.19

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Isaac Mayer Wise went even further than Lilienthal, questioning aspects of Mosaic law. In an essay in Israel’s Herold, a German-language newspaper that appeared briefly under the editorship of Isidor Busch, a refugee from the failed Revolution of 1848, Wise declared that “Mosaicism has prescribed a ceremonial law which touches on all the conditions of life and consecrates and sanctifies them,” moving humanity closer to God. Yet in the present era, “must we still consider this ceremonialism as an essential part of Judaism after it has lost all value and significance? No, we must not.” Ceremonies assisting Jews’ journey toward “moral perfection, loving the Eternal God, and walking in His way” should be preserved; those with no modern meaning “belong to the past, to hoary antiquity, to the dead, not to the living present.”20 Reform leaders’ historical understanding of Judaism allowed a discerning Israelite to find the original meaning of Judaic faith, cleansed of foreign, outmoded ritual, and encouraged an awareness of the stages of Jewish history from the biblical to the modern era. Ultimately history revealed that “Judaism has the mission to bring its divine principles and ideas to the world at large.” A new stage of Jewish history was dawning. Since the mid-eighteenth century, as “evidence of progress” became unmistakable and “reason” triumphed over “authority,” the only question was whether “the Jew was to remain solitary and separated from the rest of humanity,” as Talmudists desired, or “whether he was to mingle with the rest of the world and become a respected portion of the social order.”21 Advocates of Reform were not freethinking atheists or agnostics. Rather, in their framework of belief, God, though not the “imagined deity of the vulgar,” was the “Creator, Preserver and Governor of the Universe.” God was the “first cause,” whose “greatness consisted in his Wisdom, Justice and Goodness.” He created the universe and “governs it by permanent laws.” (These laws are not the laws of the Sabbath or of kashrut but the laws of science, such as the law of gravity.) Man, too, was created “in the quality of his maker.” The study of history revealed evidence of divine providence and God’s grand plan.22 Reform paid considerable attention to the nature of the immortal soul. Stressing the importance of this concept, Lilienthal made it and the unity of God central to the catechism for young children. Wise explained that the soul was immortal, temporarily housed inside the body, to be freed upon death. (If there was any eternal punishment — he sharply condemned the concept of hell and brimstone — it was the soul’s inability to rectify errors made when still within the corporeal structure.) As the body decayed, the spirit continued

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to grow, and death in no way affected its eternal existence. One “of the energies” of the human soul, a central characteristic, was humanity’s innate desire to be moral, “to do what is good and right.” As a consequence, man differed from other forms of life because “he is the unhappiest of beings if he gratifies all his passions,” including the “almost invincible desire to make money.” The existence of the “soul” indicated that science did not provide answers to all questions and that divine will was present in the Torah and in the ongoing universe. However, reformers’ understanding of religion centered on the investigations of scientists and historians and the corresponding recognition that Judaism was an evolving faith.23 What were the consequences of the rise of reformist thought? One was the harsh condemnation of many Jewish rituals. Wise ridiculed the requirement that a man cease shaving for thirty days after the death of a mother or father, the eleven months of mourning, and the mindless repetition of prayers. What was the source of these customs? Were they from the Hasidim, who “are most all ignorant in Jewish literature,” or from Kabbalists, who allegedly had “intercourse with the angels?” Kabbalist doctrine derived from Zoroastrian and Brahmin religion, creeds that included idol worship. Judaism too often fell into superstitious sectarianism, proposing the existence of Satan and espousing ascetic practices, such as numerous fast days and hours spent seated on the floor on Tisha B’Av (anniversary of the destruction of the Temples). Those who practiced these rites “never comprehended the spirit of Judaism.”24 Dietary laws, a bastion of Orthodoxy, came under attack. Lilienthal noted that some Jews transgressed out of “the harsh exigencies of life” and others from personal conviction. “Maccabee,” a contributor to the Asmonean, argued that the laws stemmed from the “casuistry of the Talmudic rabbis, and later encoded with many other onerous duties in the gendarmerie of the Shulchan Aruch.” No Jew should undergo a “species of martyrdom” to maintain an antiquated custom. Not everyone “can pay his cook five thousand francs a year like Rothschild” to maintain a kosher kitchen. It was lamentable “what subterfuges the poor Israelite frequently allows himself to practice, in order to obviate the oppressive and ruinous observance of what is and what is not Kasher,” and that a kosher table remained the “diploma of a good Jew.” The times demanded reform. “Where are the Isaiahs of our day?”25 Deserted sanctuaries offered evidence of the impact of outdated customs and superstitious ritual. Many contributors to the Asmonean described the

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state of affairs. “Remy” lamented “synagogues without preachers, Divine worship without devotion or instruction, ministers without learning, but full of arrogance and fanaticism, Sabbaths without rest,” and congregations with no peace. “Rational Conduct” condemned practices such as blowing the shofar seventy-two times during High Holy Days, “insufferable repetitions of prayers,” and “shaking the willows with an energy and violence, as meaningless as it is ridiculous.” The “boisterous and rapid chanting by the congregation” produced a “general effect . . . [of] confusion; one standing, another sitting down, one walking in, anther running out.” This “disrespectful attitude” would not be tolerated by an earthly “Sovereign,” much less by “the Almighty monarch of countless worlds.” “A Jew” mocked prayers offered at “horse race speed,” the recitation of six or seven Kaddishes, a service that nine-tenths of the congregation could not comprehend, and a sanctuary “disfigured” by the placement of the reader’s platform in the center of the synagogue, requiring the hazan to keep his back to the congregation. “I.S.H.” found a service he attended appalling. A child led the liturgy. No one listened to the prayers. At the end of prayers, the few remaining left “like a small lot of Mexican cattle in a stampede.” Lilienthal concluded that these practices produced materialism and an indifference to spiritual ideals, while Wise termed the Orthodox sanctuary nothing but an “ancient opera house,” the result of remaining “deaf to an enlightened age,” of refusing to hear “the voice of reason.”26 In contrast to disorderly and historically obsolete Orthodoxy, advocates of Reform in the Asmonean happily described Temple Emanu-El. “S” portrayed “attractive and soul-elevating” services. Congregants offered no Chaldean prayers unsuitable for an enlightened age. A lecture by Dr. Merzbacher replaced “Sing-song” recitation and the selling of mitzvot (the honor of being called to the Torah). “A Member of the Temple” declared that Emanu-El elevated “the ritual in [the] Temple to a state befitting intelligent and reasonable beings . . . [by] clean[ing] the wheat from the chaff.” Nor did it censure members who rode to services; if a man could not ride to synagogue, he would “ride to his place of business and devote his Sabbath to Mammon instead of God.” Members of Emanu-El worked with a “zeal and unanimity” seldom found in Jewish congregations. They did not found their synagogue because of an internal quarrel. United from the beginning, their principles were “consonant with the dictates of reason . . . and in harmony with the spirit of Revelation,” their rituals “free from previous practices.”27

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Another important impact of reform involved rethinking the position of women in Jewish religious practice. Emanu-El’s decision to end segregated seating, a move that contradicted longstanding tradition, represented an important step toward female equality. When the congregation moved to a new sanctuary in 1854, a redesigned church, the congregation decided to maintain the existing family pews, allowing husbands and wives to sit together. EmanuEl had already added mixed choirs for regular services in 1847. This too contradicted the tradition that prohibited women’s voices in worship. Emanu-El replaced the bar mitzvah service, which made “no impression on the boy,” with a new confirmation ceremony. On a “profound Jewish holiday, boys and girls enter to the accompaniment of a choir, are examined by the minister and publicly declare their commitment to Judaism.” Confirmation received Jews’ “sons and daughters into the same covenant,” unlike the bar mitzvah ritual, which was exclusively for males.28 Gender egalitarianism reflected, in part, Emanu-El’s desire to emulate the dignity and decorum of Protestant churches. Jewish women’s fate was entwined with the Jewish community’s quest for respectability in the Christian world. To the Protestant world, the women’s gallery appeared heathenish, resembling a harem. But this was only one consideration. Its significance went beyond emulation of Protestant society. Reform ideology reinforced the antebellum movement for women’s rights, for political, social, and economic equality. Rabbi Merzbacher declared that “the ladies of our day claim more liberty and equal rights even, and will not submit to the restrictions of former time and return into the ghettos of the Synagogues of old.” Isaac Mayer Wise termed a traditional morning prayer in which a man thanked God that he was not created a woman “an insolence.” Was it not “a rudeness of the meanest kind, that a female is considered as nobody in respect to person?” Judaism had dispensed with many “oriental notions”; it needed to go further.29 Defending mixed seating, Wise asserted that when a man sat with his wife and children, “decorum and devotion” and attendance improved. In an exchange with Reverend Henry Henry of Shaaray Zedek, who argued that “canon law did not permit women and men to sit together,” Merzbacher contended that Jewish law did not require separation of the sexes and that Talmudic sages would also have condemned much of the clothing worn by the Orthodox. Traditional synagogues, “where gentlemen are seated below the amphitreal seats of the females in the gallery above,” with each sex gazing at

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each other, were not conducive “to decorum and devotion.” Harmony and decorum emerged when “on the side of every gentleman” sat “the guardian angel of his choice, . . . with the members of his family.”30 In the early 1850s, New York became the center of American Reform Judaism. Its leading intellectuals, Lilienthal, Merzbacher, and Wise, lived there or close by. The movement had a voice in the influential Asmonean and a friendly audience among the German-immigrant community. New York housed the nation’s foremost Reform synagogue, a congregation supported by the city’s wealthiest Jews and other dedicated congregants. It boldly advocated an outlook that saw Judaism as a great religion, firmly in harmony with reason, science, and history. Reform’s adopted mission was to free Judaism from antiquated ceremonies that drove Jews from their faith, replacing them with a creed and practices compatible with an enlightened era. Orthodoxy, it contended, could not appeal to an American Jew encountering the opportunities of a democratic, largely tolerant society in which the government played no role in religion.

■ The Orthodox Response Learned spiritual leaders Samuel Isaacs, Morris Raphall, and Arnold Fischell gave traditional Judaism the intellectual strength to respond forcefully to the emergence of Reform Judaism. While their stance differed little from Gershom Seixas’s theology, there was an important distinction. Seixas’s task was to integrate republicanism and Judaism, while the cause of the rabbis of the 1850s was to defend Orthodoxy against the “rationalists.” As there was no competing doctrine for Seixas, he cannot be said to have been Orthodox. Orthodoxy could only exist when there was an opposing standpoint. Consequently these men were New York’s first Orthodox spiritual leaders. They spoke out in their synagogues, in the Asmonean — whose pages remained open to Orthodox spokesmen — and, after 1857, most prominently in the Orthodox-leaning Jewish Messenger. The shepherds of the city’s major Orthodox congregations rejected the major tenet of the reformers, that Orthodox Judaism was irrational, even superstitious. Dr. Raphall, an ardent follower of Moses Mendelssohn’s belief in the Haskalah, or Jewish enlightenment — a doctrine that allowed Jews to participate in modern society but strictly within a traditional framework — declared it “the happy privilege of the Israelite that his faith is in union with his reason.” Dr. Fischel’s inaugural sermon argued that Jews possessed in one hand,

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Hazan at Shaaray Tefilah, the city’s leading English congregation, Samuel Isaacs founded the weekly Jewish Messenger in 1858. It became the voice of Orthodoxy, relentlessly attacking the Reform movement and beseeching the community to maintain Jewish ritual and tradition. (Courtesy American Jewish Archives)

their faith, and in the other, “the sword of truth and reason.” One Asmonean contributor wrote that a Jew could never be a “true convert to another faith” because “there is not a single doctrine inculcated in holy writ that requires of the Jew that he should compromise his reason.” Another issue featured Mendelssohn’s writings on the “designs of God.” Mordecai M. Noah declared, “we have no mysteries, no revelation which are not natural and reasonable.” As Judaism held no irrational doctrines such as the Trinity, it had no conflict with reason. Judaism was a logical, consistent religion. However, as Samuel Isaacs’s son Myer preached, though “nature alone would suffice to convince us that there is a God . . . preparing the world as a habitation for man,” in and of itself “reason” was insufficient. Thus, God provided revelation to instruct humanity “what He would require of us as creatures obedient to His word, dependent upon Him for our existence.” Unlike the advocates of reform, Orthodox assertion of reason did not include scientific investigation of Jewish sacred texts or the use of history, archeology, and philology.31 To the Reform contention that many laws and customs were alien encrustations deserving of excision, the Orthodox responded that the ceremonies were neither outdated nor superstitious. Many of the laws of the Sabbath and the

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table predated Abraham and Moses; they were part of the “law of nature.” Reverend Raphall used the near sacrifice of Isaac to illustrate that in the modern world God spoke to humanity not directly, as he did to Abraham, but through “the law of life and truth everlasting,” including the daily commandments. Dr. Fischel implored congregants to cling to “venerable customs and distinctions” handed down from “the most remote ages by the most pious and most zealous Israelites.” The Jewish Messenger repeatedly urged observance. There was no excuse, “even in a modern world,” for violation of the Sabbath, the “palladium of religion.” If Jews were to be in harmony with God’s laws and maintain their separate identity in a land where “many sought to mingle the blood of Jew and non-Jew,” they needed dietary laws. They remained as relevant in the nineteenth century as in the age of King David. Moreover, the oral law (Mishnah) and the teachings of the Talmud were as binding as laws of the Torah.32 The issue of resurrection ignited an unusual direct confrontation between Reform and Orthodoxy. In early 1850 in Charleston, South Carolina, where Wise was interviewing for a position and Raphall was lecturing, the two met privately. Wise spurned Raphall’s entreaty to reject Reform as it “had no future in America,” replying, “doctor, we will see in twenty years what will be left of orthodoxy in America.” At a public debate a few days later, when, by Wise’s account, Raphall was faring badly, Raphall abruptly turned to Wise and asked, “Do you believe in the personal Messiah? Do you believe in bodily resurrection?” When Wise answered, “No,” in a “loud and decisive voice,” Raphall “angrily rushed from the hall.” Neither Wise nor other leading Reform figures denied the immortality of the soul, but for them it was a benevolent, abstract concept. To the contrary, the Orthodox argued that bodily resurrection was so vital a principle that “the Jew who persistently denies this doctrine, forfeits all claim to future bliss and is doomed to perdition.” In 1850, Reverend Isaacs, responding to a “charge” that in Judaism resurrection only became “general currency” with the rise of Christianity, declared, “the Resurrection of the Dead not an article of Judaism! As well may it be urged, that the Immortality of the Soul is not a dogma.”33 Reform adamantly rejected the threat of divine punishment; the Orthodox did not. Reverend Isaacs declared that a Jew who worked on the Sabbath will “not even have one day of rest” while alive and, when his end approaches, will “not rest easy” on his “death bed.” At New Year’s 1860, he asked “nominal Israelite[s]” who appeared in synagogue but once a year seeking repentance to

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question whether they were “conducting [themselves] . . . as to be entitled to life beyond the grave.” He also warned those who disregarded dietary laws that they hazarded “their chances beyond the grave.” Israelites who, “in the greatest confidence,” trampled on God’s law would find that “the most imminent danger” lurked in their “every step.”34 Reform found the restoration of the Jews to the Holy Land problematic; Orthodoxy did not. During the Civil War, Myer Isaacs argued that while a Jew was as patriotic as any American, “love for Palestine yet burns in his breasts, .  .  . the blood of the Maccabees flows through his veins.” In a Thanksgiving sermon, Reverend Raphall proclaimed that Jews, though in their “temporary sanctuary,” were as patriotic as any citizen. The same “revelation” that gave them hope of return to their homeland “commands” them to “promote the land in which [they] dwell.”35 Mordecai M. Noah remained the most outspoken Jew on restoration. In 1845, he gave a widely reported discourse to an audience that included prominent Christians. The man who once proposed an upstate New York island as a refuge for world Jewry again placed restoration forefront, but this time in Palestine. No longer under the spell of Jeffersonian millenarianism, Noah linked a Jewish homeland in the Middle East with the coming of the messiah. It was in the interest of Christians to see Jews return to Zion. Though Jews in tolerant countries, such as America, would not return, a homeland would be a boon to oppressed Jews throughout the world. A distant age did not interest Noah, nor did he believe that God alone would usher in a Jewish restoration. Given the weakness of the Ottoman Empire, Jews needed to seize the moment for action.36 At benevolent-society anniversaries, leaders of both Orthodoxy and Reform mixed, agreeing on the centrality of charity, the danger of “mammon worship,” and the need to celebrate the rising glory of America and the freedom it provided Jewish citizens. Raphall, Isaacs, and Fischel attended the funeral of Rabbi Merzbacher of Emanu-El in 1856. Otherwise, Orthodox leaders sharply challenged their rebellious brethren. Raphall declared that he was not “hostile to reform.” But the reform he wanted would raise people to the “standard of a heaven born religion” rather than lower them to the “base level of the people’s convenience.” Most reformers focused on polishing and trimming rather than “improving the mind and purifying the heart.” He desired a welleducated community that recognized that Israelites had duties to perform “in

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Obedience to God’s holy law.” Chosen by God, these “religious trusts” distinguished Jews from “the rest of [their] fellow citizens.” As Reverend Isaacs stated on the eve of Passover 1860, “The Supreme brought us from Egypt to be our God, and we were to be His People.”37 Raphall’s mild tone was exceptional. For the most part, the Orthodox response was contemptuous and angry. Raphall himself vented such ire when he walked out on Wise in Charleston. For the Orthodox, Reform was a toxic cancer in the community. Its proponents, the Messenger charged, “stripped Judaism of its most pleasing features.” They would extinguish the life they thought they were saving. Far worse than Karaites, who believed ceremonies were an adjunct to religion, reformers aimed to “destroy all that is sanctified by age, uproot not the weed that they say surround the Judaic Tree, but the very ground in which it has stood implanted thousands of years.” The commandments were a “test of a man’s religious consistency”; no one possessed the license to ignore or amend them. Should Judaism alter its sacred customs and laws, it would lose its “distinctive character, its historical worth.” As a result, “we should have no God to adore.” On the eve of Succoth 1858, the Messenger, lamenting that “an enemy has arisen in our midst,” pleaded with Jews to “hold obeyance” to the faith’s holy rituals.38 Unthinkable as it was, Orthodox opponents spelled out the consequences should the proponents of Reform succeed in their quest to “ruthlessly destroy” the “noblest fabrics which have stood for centuries the buffeting of the storm.” The “spirit of innovation,” the abrogation of the laws and rituals of Judaism, would eliminate “the basis of [Jews’] hallowed creed.” What few ceremonies reformers retained would be discarded by their children. The synagogue would lie in ruins, while Jewish homes became settings for “the unhappiness of domestic life.” The ideology of those creating “din and tumult in the camp of Israel” led directly to “infidelity and deism.” Its goal was the “destruction of all and every religion.” A reformer’s true creed would read, “I do not believe that there is a god; I consider all and every religion, all and every religious ceremony, a perfect humbug.” Egotism motivated “all and every reform.”39 Reform Jews who did not succumb to atheism would fall prey to Christianity, the Orthodox charged. Look at the “new temples.” An organ played, but “the worshipper is mute.” Within the choir were “Christian voices [who] sing of a Unity, who believe in a Trinity.” This “church service,” this “farce” at Temple Emanu-El, “failed to improve the Israelite.” The move to mixed seating, a

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flagrant violation of sacred Jewish law, a sacrilege, merely imitated Christian practices. “Lara,” a contributor to the Jewish Messenger, claimed that reformers embraced mixed seating to imitate Protestant modes, making them appear superior to the “mass of Jews.” It said to Christian neighbors, “do not despise me as a Jew, I am not one of them. I am a reformed Jew, I wish to come as near you as I can. I will, therefore, eat with you. . . . I will marry your daughter” and attend “a church in imitation of your church and a service as near as I can like yours.” Thankfully, “the novelty fails to attract.” Most Jews remained “true to their synagogue,” rejecting mixed seating, mixed choirs, and organs. Perhaps the prodigal sons would rejoin the “vast majority of Israel.”40 Reform enjoyed only a brief heyday in nineteenth-century New York City. The Asmonean ceased publication in 1858, after editor Lyon’s sudden death. Lilienthal and Wise moved to Cincinnati in the mid-1850s, and Rabbi Merzbacher died in 1856. Temple Emanu-El remained, with Samuel Adler, its gifted leader, constructing an outlook centering on the concept that God’s words were conveyed by the prophets to the people in the form of morality. The synagogue was to mediate between the prophets and Israel. He foresaw Judaism’s perception of God becoming a common treasure of humankind. Supported by prominent Jewish New Yorkers, Emanu-El, which built the largest synagogue in the world in 1868, remained a significant presence in New York.41 Despite Adler’s brilliance, Reform lacked a voice in the press and attracted the allegiance of a minority of affiliated New York Jews in the 1850s and 1860s. The argument moved elsewhere. Within a generation, New York’s Orthodox Jews were joined by hundreds of thousands of like-minded immigrants from Poland and Russia. While Gotham remained the heart of American Orthodoxy, antebellum New York was a seedbed of the American Reform movement and the location of a contest that forever changed American Judaism. Reform Judaism, based on the European Enlightenment, found a home in America’s new republic, founded on an American Enlightenment that incorporated many European ideals. Reform soon became the Jewish denomination that was far and away most attractive to America’s Jews because it was in harmony with the republican spirit at the center of their quest for full acceptance and full participation in American life. It was fitting, then, that the initial debate over its values and principles took place in New York, home to a quarter of the nation’s Jewish population and the center of Jewish intellectual life in the United States.

A Columbia-educated attorney and poet, Leopold Newman joined New York’s Thirty-First Regiment and fought at the battles of Bull Run and Antietam. Rising to lieutenant colonel, he was hit by grapeshot in the leg and taken to Washington, D.C., where he died while surgeons amputated his leg. President Lincoln visited him at bedside and promoted him to brigadier general. (Courtesy New York State Military Museum)

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Politics, Race, and the Civil War

In September 1863, in the midst of a bloody war, with hundreds of thousands already dead and wounded and hundreds of thousands to follow in the next year at a half, the New York Times published its annual report of the Rosh Hashanah celebration. After explaining the meaning of the holiday and its rituals, the Times remarked, “The present anniversary is, according to the Jewish calendar, the five thousand six hundred and twenty fourth since the creation of the world, and owing to the rapid changes going on in Jewish society, and the many removals and deaths occasioned among them in this country, by the existing war, will be observed with peculiar formality and impressiveness.” This was an insightful observation. The Civil War fundamentally altered New York’s Jewish community, both its internal understanding of American society and its relationship with the Christian world.1

■ New York Politics before the Civil War Antebellum New York politics, volatile and passionate in the 1850s, reached its tensest moments in the years prior to the Civil War. The city was a stronghold of the Democratic Party. Its earlier and still most popular champion, Andrew Jackson, drew a crowd of over one hundred thousand when he visited New York in 1833; Democrats were prosouthern, standing for laissez-faire economics, states’ rights, free immigration, noninterference with slavery, and hostility to reform movements. Democrats recruited their strongest supporters from the working classes, particularly the immigrant working classes, German and Irish immigrants, and merchants whose major economic ties were in the South. The party freely used municipal patronage to cement its base.2

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Until the mid 1850s, the Democrats’ major opponents were the Whigs, supporters of a strong central government, federally sponsored internal improvements, a national banking system, and tariff support for manufacturing. Whigs feared immigration and, as supporters of “order, morals and religion,” welcomed reform. Bankers and merchants not entwined with the South generally backed Whigs. The Whigs also garnered the votes of middling master craftsmen and, during depressions, of a working class seeking government aid. Democrats won most elections in the city, except for a few mayoralty races lost due to infighting and recession.3 In the mid-1850s, Republicans replaced Whigs as the second major political party. With a platform opposing the extension of slavery in the territories, they drew the adherence of the city’s small antislavery contingent, including William Cullen Bryant and the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher, along with a number of merchants, including those hoping for a transcontinental railroad. Republicanism never became a popular movement in New York, alienating the white working class with its probusiness, antislavery, and anti-immigrant outlook. In the 1856 presidential election, Republicans garnered only a fourth of the vote in New York, and in a three-way mayoral race in 1859 that elected prosouthern candidate Fernando Wood, the Republican challenger collected only 27 percent of the vote.4 Strong economic bonds between New York and the South strengthened Democrats and weakened Republicans. The garment industry, the city’s largest business and the trade in which most Jews worked, by 1860 produced 40 percent of the nation’s attire; it supplied clothing to southern whites and slaves. The city’s economy centered on cotton, the nation’s most valuable product. New York merchants controlled its trade and held “a virtual stranglehold on regularly scheduled ships shuttling between northern, southern and European ports.” A city merchant’s words to an abolitionist illustrate the importance of this trade: “Slavery is a great evil, a great wrong,” he admitted. “But a great portion of the property of the Southerners is invested under its sanction; and the business of the North .  .  . has become adjusted to it. There are millions upon millions of dollars due from Southerners to the merchants and mechanics alone, the payment of which would be jeopardized by any rupture between the North and the South.” “We cannot afford, sir,” he concluded, “to let you and your associates endeavor to overthrow slavery. It is not a matter of principles

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with us. It is a matter of business necessity.” Debow’s Review, a respected periodical, commented that without slavery, ships would rot in New York’s harbor, grass would grow on Wall Street, and New York would be remembered as were Babylon and Rome. The Evening Post declared that “the City of New York belongs as much to the South as to the North.” Antiabolitionists broke up meetings of abolitionists; looted the home of merchant Lewis Tappan, a prominent foe of slavery; and threw rocks at black churches and stores owned by abolitionists.5 Republicans had strength in upstate New York, electing governors and legislative majorities in the statehouse. Tension between New York City and Albany exacerbated the fraud, coercion, and bullying common to the electoral politics of 1850s. In 1857, New York City had two police forces, one backed by Democratic mayor Fernando Wood and one backed by the Republican state legislature. This, predictably, led to violence and near chaos in the streets.6 What were the prewar political allegiances of the city’s Jewish community? The Whig Party attracted affluent Israelites. All seven Jews included in journalist Moses Beach’s list of the wealthiest New Yorkers in 1845 were Whigs. Otherwise, ever since the age of Jefferson, New York’s Jews voted predominantly for Democrats within a solidly Democratic city. The most prominent municipal Jewish officeholders were Democrats. The patriotic spirit and unconditional support of the nation’s manifest destiny, prominently displayed at Jewish fraternal celebrations, fit well with Democratic politics. But even if there were a considerable number of Jewish Whigs in New York, there were fewer Republicans. Why were Jews hostile to the Republicans? The key issue was slavery’s threat to the union.7

■ Slavery and New York’s Jewish Leaders Slavery dominated politics in the antebellum era, reaching a fever pitch in the 1850s. That decade witnessed the Compromise of 1850, which resolved the issue of slavery in territory wrested from Mexico in part by implementing a stronger Fugitive Slave Act; the Kansas Nebraska Act of 1854, which replaced the Missouri Compromise of 1820 (no slavery north of the 36˚ 30˝ parallel) with popular sovereignty, a referendum determining a state’s position on slavery; the Dred Scott decision (1857), which by ruling that blacks were not citizens permitted slavery in all territories; and John Brown’s failed abolitionist

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guerrilla raid in 1859 on the Harper’s Ferry federal armory that resulted in seven deaths and Brown’s execution. The war of words between northern supporters of the South and abolitionists became alarmingly heated. The most prominent Jewish leaders in New York, reflecting the city’s strong southern attachments, were antiabolitionist and, to varying degrees, proslavery. Emmanuel Hart, like many Democratic politicos, worked his way up from captain of a volunteer fire brigade to ward leader to head of the Central Committee of Tammany Hall, the Democratic Party’s political organization. Hart won election first to the Common Council and then to Congress, becoming in 1850 the first New York City Jew to sit in Washington. An active member of Shearith Israel, Hart was a leader of the conservative “hunker” wing of the Democrats, a faction that was strongly opposed to any agitation on the slave question and that threw its influence, whenever possible, in support of the interests of the slaveholding states.8 Mordecai M. Noah was, to the Christian world, the “most important Jew in America.” The Jeffersonian playwright, former American consul at Tunis, sheriff and surveyor of New York, and editor of the National Advocate and the New York Evening Star became one of the North’s foremost southern sympathizers, declaring, “I was always a friend of the south.” His southern sympathies reached their height during his period as editor of the Evening Star from 1833 to 1840. That daily, “one of the most influential papers in the country,” encouraged New Yorkers, particularly merchants, to develop close ties with southerners. Though once critical of slavery, Noah reversed course after the Missouri Compromise, declaring slavery to be a common good. Blacks were “anatomically and mentally inferior a race to the whites, and incapable, therefore, of ever reaching the same point of civilization, or have their energies roused to as high a degree of enterprise and productive industry.” They could only be content in servile positions. A field slave found happiness in his cottage, wife, children, and patch of “corn and potatoes,” while the house servant, blessed with a “kind master,” relished his fine clothing.9 Noah feared blacks. Nat Turner’s Revolt in 1831, a rebellion led by a literate, messianic Virginia slave that killed fifty-five whites, horrified him. For three months, the Evening Star’s editorial page daily detailed the atrocities of an 1839 slave revolt in Santo Domingo. Emancipation would jeopardize the safety of the country. Noah supported the notorious “gag rule” forbidding the House of Representatives from debating slavery. He supported a move to make

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publication of antislavery literature a punishable offense. While serving as a judge, he ordered the grand jury to indict any member of the American AntiSlavery Convention, meeting in New York in 1842, who advocated “a project embracing a dissolution of our happy form of government.” Noah saw abolitionists as dangerous men. They strained relations between merchants and southern traders. At war with America, they jeopardized the Union.10 Robert Lyon, editor of the Asmonean, also edited the New York Mercantile Journal, a paper that carried “great influence over the minds of many commercial men.” His newspapers reached both a local and a national audience. Lyon was a Jewish religious progressive, opening the pages of the Asmonean to advocates of Reform Judaism and appointing Isaac Mayer Wise its literary editor. Lyon opposed the Know-Nothing Party, an anti-immigrant political movement — a cause that briefly attracted Mordecai M. Noah — seeing its nativism as a threat to the Jewish community.11 Lyon was also a staunch Democrat. Though he did not endorse candidates in 1852, noting that Jewish allegiance divided between Whigs and Democrats, in 1856, with the opposition now the Republicans, Lyon endorsed Democrats James Buchanan for president and Fernando Wood for governor, both known as friends of the South. The Asmonean, defending its stand, declared that it placed these names at the top of the masthead with “impartiality.” For Lyons, impartiality meant that he made the endorsement after consulting “the wishes and desires of the majority of [the paper’s] supporters.” The “Hebrews of America” could never support the candidacy of Know-Nothing Millard Fillmore or Republican John C. Fremont, “whose chief aid will be from the bigoted and persecuting New England states.” The paper made this endorsement because the election was “of such vital importance to the future of the Union.” As Jews had always been “Democrats, and as Buchananites are ‘democrats of the right stamp,’ ” Israelites belonged in their ranks. Buchanan’s policies were “progressionist” and Israelites were “progressionists,” despising “papacy and priestcraft.” Given Lyon’s detailed knowledge of the Jewish commercial world, his political leanings likely reflected those of the Jewish business community. (The mercantile community as a whole, formerly known for Whig loyalty, favored Democrat Buchanan in 1856, fearing that a Republican victory would harm its southern trade.)12 Lyon despised abolitionists as much as Noah did. In 1850, he published a speech by Senator Lewis Cass of Michigan that warned of the “fearful

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consequences” of emancipating three and a half million slaves “living in the midst of another and superior caste.” The following year, he warned Americans of the “foul Fiend which stalks among us”: “Abolitionist traitors.” These included British radicals, “Frederick Douglass, the nigger,” and a “heterogeneous stew of fanatics and imposters,” all of whom clamored to grant the “sons of Africa” the suffrage that “our fathers fought and died for.” A “more wild and a more preposterous idea never yet entered the brain of man.” Behold Jamaica, its plantations a “wilderness” following emancipation. Or Haiti, sixty years after its slave revolt, “hastening to total irremediable ruin.” The issue before the nation was “the relative value of civilization and barbarism.” Lyon urged Americans to “resolve this day to put down abolitionism in whatever shape or form it may present itself . . . and to crush out for once and forever the attempt to plunder our Southern citizens of their property.”13 After a hostile, nearly violent reception forced English abolitionist George Thompson to flee America, Lyon wrote that this was a “lesson to that class of bigots, who sent him here to promote disunion, and to rail at the institutions of our country.” If Thompson used his energies to observe his homeland, he would have noticed that the factory workers there endured “far more misery than any suffered by [America’s] so called slaves.”14 The Asmonean supported enforcement of the controversial Fugitive Slave Act, which required police to turn over an alleged fugitive solely on the affidavit of a master, denying the fugitive the right to speak in court. The bill was now “the law of the land.” In 1851, physician Sigismund Waterman contended that the Union was at the heart of the controversy over this measure. If the “bond of the states” came apart, commerce would fall into a state of paralysis. Centuries of “gloom, despair and servitude” would replace the “happiness and bliss of the present and the past.” For Jews the Bible decided the question: “Thou shalt return the slave to his owner.” Slavery was part of God’s wisdom, as He revealed “the natural law of the superior and the inferior.” Jews, once slaves in Egypt, could “appreciate the sorrow of the man of servitude — but there are many conditions of things, we cannot alter nor change.” While they might purchase a slave’s release, they could not endanger “national and even international peace by gaining his freedom through violence.” Jews owed their renewed sense of “manhood” and comfortable position to America; they must “stand by the constitution, now and forever.”15 Joining Hart, Noah, and Lyon as leading Jewish, prosouthern, and pro-

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Morris Raphall, spiritual leader at B’nai Jeshurun, was the city’s most eminent Jewish leader. In January 1861, he gave a sermon declaring that the Bible condoned slavery and declaring that it was incorrect to accuse the South of wrongdoing. The speech was very widely circulated in the North and the South. He supported the Union during the war, but never saw the conflict as a great moral cause. (Courtesy American Jewish Archives)

slavery leaders was Reverend Morris Raphall of B’nai Jeshurun, New York’s most prominent spiritual leader. In January 1861, with southern states seceding and the Union in peril, Raphall delivered a sermon on the Bible and slavery in his synagogue. While no “friend to slavery in the abstract” and still less “to the practical working of slavery,” his personal feelings were, he declared, irrelevant. Invoking the biblical story of Noah and his son Ham, he concluded that, aside from family ties, slavery was the oldest form of social relationship. For viewing his father’s nakedness, Ham and his descendants, the black race, were cursed to become slaves. At Sinai, God condoned slavery in his commandment that an owner give Sabbath rest to “thy male slave and thy female slave.” The Bible, Raphall explained, differentiated between Hebrew slaves, who were in bondage for limited terms and were to be treated as any other Hebrew, and non-Hebrew slaves and their progeny, who were to remain slaves during the lives of their master, his children, and his children’s children. Hebrew slaves bore no relation to southern slavery; heathen slaves did. Hebraic law permitted masters to chastise these slaves, short of murder or disfigurement, and required that a slave who fled from Dan to Beersheba must be returned, as must

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the slave absconding from South Carolina to New York. The law forbidding Hebrews from returning an escaped slave to his or her master applied only to slaves escaping from foreign lands.16 Responding to the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher’s contention that the Bible opposed slavery, Raphall proclaimed, “How dare you, in the face and sanction and protection afforded to slave property in the Ten Commandments — how dare you denounce slaveholding as a sin?” What right “do you have to insult and exasperate thousands of God-fearing, law-abiding citizens,” placing a citizen of the South on the level of a murderer? While Raphall cautioned southerners that slaves must be protected from lustful advances, hunger, and overwork, he emphatically concluded that the Bible sanctioned slave property.17 Raphall’s speech created a sensation. Two weeks later, he repeated it at the New-York Historical Society before members of the Democratic Party and the pro-South American Society for Promotion of National Unity. Also attending were supporters of reconciliation favorable to southern demands, including prominent banker August Belmont, and distinguished Jews from Richmond, Montgomery, and New Orleans. Artist/inventor Samuel B. Morse served as chair. At the meeting’s conclusion, merchant Hiram Ketcham collected funds to publish and disseminate Raphall’s words. Southern sympathizers distributed the sermon throughout the country. Dr. Bernard Ilowy of Baltimore, a rabbi respected for his knowledge of biblical law, supported Raphall. Three New York newspapers published the text in full, and the Times printed lengthy excerpts. The Richmond Daily Dispatch termed Raphall’s talk “the most powerful arguments delivered,” and Rabbi Simon Tuska of Mobile declared his reasoning “the most forceful arguments in justification of the slavery of the African race.”18 In 1856, a straw poll of “twenty-five of the prominent clergy” in New York revealed that twenty-three of them backed Fremont, the Republican candidate for president. (The other two backed Fillmore, the Know-Nothing candidate; none backed Democrat Buchanan.) If Reverend Raphall’s (or Lyon’s and Noah’s) remarks are exemplary, these political sympathies did not extend to Jewish spiritual or secular leaders.19

■ Jews and Antislavery Raphall’s sermon did not go unanswered. Jewish Reform leader David Einhorn of Baltimore published a lengthy refutation. Isaac Mayer Wise, while

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opposed to Republicans and abolition, criticized Raphall’s literal interpretation of the Bible. Reverend Leeser of Philadelphia found fault in his argument that the black race descended from Ham. The most important response, however, came from Michael Heilprin, a Jewish, Polish-Hungarian, revolutionary refugee. A deeply learned man, well read in biblical criticism, he had already revealed his political preferences by speaking at an antislavery Democratic rally in Philadelphia.20 Responding in the abolitionist-leaning New York Tribune, Heilprin regretted that Raphall’s “sacrilegious” arguments had not disappeared among the “scum.” He condemned the moral sense of slavery’s defenders as “depraved” and the minds of their “mammon-worshiping followers” as debauched. Fearing that Raphall’s speech might convince the ignorant that the Hebrew Bible condoned slavery, he savagely attacked Raphall’s reasoning — citing the German Jewish scholars that influenced the Reform movement. Heilprin, in effect, also attacked the literalist, ahistorical approach of Orthodox leaders to Jewish texts. Heilprin argued that Raphall misunderstood the biblical word for “servant.” The word Raphall translated as “slave” also denoted court officers and royal ambassadors. He ridiculed the absurdity of invoking the story of Noah and his son: “Noah, awakening from his drunkenness, curses, in punishment of an insult, a son of the offender, and a race is to be ‘doomed for all times’! Doomed by whom, ‘preacher in Israel’? By the God whom you teach our people to worship, the God of Mercy, whom our lawgiver proclaims to extend his rewards to the thousandth generation.” Heilprin contended that Ham’s descendants included the Babylonians, Philistines, and Egyptians. He contemptuously dismissed Raphall’s contention that Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob had slaves; they were “peaceable unwarlike nomadic patriarchs” wandering through hostile lands. Those who allied with the patriarchs were “voluntary followers.” Raphall’s interpretation led to divine approval of bigamy, polygamy, and “traffic in Semitic flesh.” Finally, Raphall ignored Moses’s most important words to the Israelites: “Forget not that ye have been slaves in Egypt.” Catering to southern admirers, he cruelly misinterpreted the Bible.21 Reverend Samuel Isaacs, the esteemed editor of the Jewish Messenger, knew Professor Calvin Stowe, husband of Harriet Beecher Stowe, and supported Republican Fremont in 1856. He did not, however, allow politics into the Messenger until war was declared. The paper breathed not a word of the momentous events of 1860 and early 1861. When the election of 1860 concluded,

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Isaacs inserted a short notice that “the election of abraham lincoln as President of the United States . . . having been decided on Tuesday, quiet once again reigns and the “ ‘long agony’ is over.” Nothing more. He refused to print essays on Raphall’s controversial sermon other than urging Jews to refrain from using the Bible either to defend or to attack slavery. Isaacs’s resolve to keep politics out of the Messenger faltered on occasion because of his practice of reporting the sermons of major religious figures, including an address by Hazan Lyons of Shearith Israel critical of the American tendency to rely on the voice of the people rather than the voice of God, implying that Lincoln’s election should not be allowed to overrule the Bible’s acceptance of slavery; and a sermon by Reverend Raphall similar to the notorious talk he delivered a few weeks later. An ardent foe of Reform Judaism, Isaacs did not publish the antislavery remarks of Dr. Samuel Adler of Temple Emanu-El. Raphall’s views were representative of Orthodox rabbis. A historian of Jewish abolitionism concluded that “there were no Orthodox Jews in the antislavery movement.” However, as Isaacs’s largely silent stance reveals, there were exceptions.22 While a distinct minority, New York Jewish Republicans numbered in the thousands and included important members of the party. Temple Emanu-El, the only Reform congregation among the city’s twenty-seven synagogues, attracted the allegiance of prosperous merchants Joseph and James Seligman and attorney Abram J. Dittenhoefer, the son of a prominent merchant who abandoned the Democratic Party at nineteen because of its stance on slavery. Dittenhoefer served as an elector for Lincoln in 1860, as did German immigrant and supporter of the 1848 Revolution, attorney Sigismund Kaufman. Assistant Attorney General Philip Joachimsen, whose vigorous prosecutions made him a “terror” to illegal slave traders, many of whom operated out of New York, was a member of Shearith Israel. Reform Judaism’s willingness to reinterpret the Mosaic code likely attracted Israelites of liberal political temperament, though, as Joachimsen’s membership reveals, Republicans also joined other congregations. Some affiliated with secular organizations. The National Cyclopaedia of American Biography lists Kaufman as founder and first president of the Turnverein, a German fraternal society.23 New York’s most outspoken Jewish abolitionist, Ernestine Rose, advocated immediate emancipation. During the war, she urged the adoption of radical measures that Lincoln was yet unwilling to take. When the Emancipation

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Proclamation was issued in 1863, she called the document “a mockery” because it only freed “slaves we cannot reach.” Disregarding the delicate politics that maintained the loyalty of Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri, she demanded, “First free the slaves that are under the flag of the Union. If that flag is the symbol of freedom, let it wave over free men only. The slaves must be freed in the Border States.” Rose, a friend of abolitionists William Lloyd Garrison and Frederick Douglass, invoked her birth as the daughter of a “down trodden and persecuted people” to strengthen her appeal on the part of the oppressed, even though she did not identify as a member of the Jewish community.24

■ Where Did New York Jews Stand? Did the forty thousand Jews in New York, a pro-South Democratic city with a minority of Republicans, harbor similar stands on slavery and abolition as their conservative leaders? The American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society report of 1853 noted that the “Jews of the United States have never taken any steps whatever with regard to the Slavery question. As citizens, they deem it their policy ‘to have everyone choose whichever side he may deem best to promote his own interests and the welfare of his country.’ ” The society found this both puzzling and lamentable, as Jews were frequently “the objects of so much mean prejudice and unrighteous oppression.” The society’s observations were correct. Most Jews avoided the subject. The Jewish Messenger’s refusal to insert a single political article as the country fell apart in 1860 and 1861, despite the editor’s Republican leanings, exemplified this timid approach. For years, the Jewish community did its best to make political participation legitimate for Jews, but only as individuals. Many yet worried that Jewish voting blocs would ignite Christian fears of Jews, leading to European-style antiSemitism, even persecution. Were Israelites to advocate causes particular to their society, they would create obstacles to their aspirations to fit fully into Christian society. Jews observed the problems that the Irish created with their forceful entry into politics, including the rise of the Know-Nothings, a strong nativist party. When Reverend Raphall delivered his controversial proslavery speech, his board of trustees did not reprimand him over his position on slavery but only objected to “the impropriety of intermeddling with politics”: “we firmly believe such a course to be entirely inconsistent with the Jewish clerical character, calculated to be of serious injury to the Jews in general and to

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our congregation in particular.” Jews, including their leaders, should not enter politics as a class other than to oppose exceptional incidents of Jewish persecution, such as the Mortara case.25 However, the refusal of the board of B’nai Jeshurun, whose members constituted leading members of the city’s Jewish community, to specifically condemn Raphall’s spirited defense of slavery speaks volumes. The political silence of editor Isaacs was to give no platform to a position unpopular in New York. Other leaders of New York Jewry, however, who represented the majority opinion in Gotham, were willing to violate the Jewish tradition of political noninvolvement (as Jews) and in a loud public voice defend the Democratic Party, the South, and slavery. The American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society’s statement was incorrect if applied to New York’s Jewish leadership cadre. The problem was not that they were silent but that they took a strong position at odds with that organization. The question of whether or not the rank and file of the city’s Jewish population followed the lead of Raphall, Hart, Lyon, and Noah can be estimated by examining election returns. In 1860, Lincoln commanded but 35 percent of the city’s vote. German-immigrant wards where most Jews lived voted two to one against Lincoln. Jews, whose record of voting Democratic began under the leadership of Thomas Jefferson, an opponent of slavery, for the most part continued that tradition into the 1850s, when that party stood full square for the continuation and spread of American slavery.26 The reminiscences of Abram J. Dittenhoefer give powerful testimony to the strength and loyalty of the Jewish community to the Democratic Party. Dittenhoefer recalled that when he was a young law student, his father advised him to become a Democrat. Any hope for public office as a Republican “would be impossible in the City of New York.” Dittenhoefer recollected, “One can hardly appreciate to-day what it meant to me, a young man beginning his career in New York, to ally myself with the Republican Party. By doing so, not only did I cast aside all apparent hope of public preferment, but I also subjected myself to obloquy from and ostracism by acquaintances, my clients, and even members of my own family.” The proslavery stance of prominent Jewish leaders reflected mainstream Jewish political leanings.27 By following the lead of Hart, Noah, Lyon, and especially Raphall, New York’s Jews, other than adherents to the incipient Reform movement, rejected any parallel between southern slavery and their ancient Egyptian captivity. Annual Passover messages in the Jewish press never equated the two. In March

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1861, on the eve of war, the Messenger’s Passover remarks celebrated “the perpetual commemoration by His chosen people of their deliverance from Egyptian bondage,” with no mention of American slavery. Ancestral Jews and black slaves lived in two utterly different worlds — this despite the observation from a German visitor that “female slaves” regularly attended synagogue services. By “slaves,” he meant household servants who, he believed, were once in bondage and who, upon receiving their freedom, “chose to remain with their now endeared masters and assumed their religion.” They prayed with “true devotion” but also with “the Black’s characteristic exaggerations.” The Messenger omitted any comment about emancipation when it went into effect in January 1863.28 By 1860, many of New York’s Jews had achieved solid middle-class standing in the empire city, as owners of small shops, garment manufacturers, importers, and professionals. The merchants, wholesalers, retailers, and even garment workers of the city considered the southern trade their lifeblood. Southern planters and merchants owed New York firms $200 million in 1860; war would wipe out that debt. Early in 1861, the businessmen of New York desperately sought compromise, sending delegations to Washington in hopes of preventing secession. One of the New York delegations included former congressman Emmanuel Hart. On 29 January 1860, a special train arrived at the capital bearing the city’s leading merchants with a petition of forty thousand businessmen stating that the “perpetuity of the union” was far more important than a controversy over territories. Many of the signatories would have been Jewish entrepreneurs facing loss of trade and the panic of bankruptcy if the Union dissolved. Horace Greeley’s Tribune disparagingly commented that “rich Jews and other money lenders,” together with “great dry goods and other commercial houses,” feared Lincoln and supported his opponents. Indeed, after Lincoln’s election, New York endured a severe, if short-term, depression. The New York Herald reported that in December 1860 ten thousand men were out of work. Bankruptcies doubled. Dry-goods and clothing businesses, the prominent Jewish mercantile occupations, especially suffered.29 In addition, Jews in midcentury New York sought acceptance into American society. Raphall’s many patriotic sermons and toasts were not inconsistent with his opinion on slavery. Unpopular positions did not win friends, one of the reasons, as noted, that Jews disdained ethnic politics. Undoubtedly the pervasive racism in the North penetrated the Jewish community. Finally,

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the collapse of the Union imperiled political as well as financial security. The United States Constitution provided protections for Jews that were found in few other places in the world. What would happen to that safeguard if the Constitution collapsed with the Union? For most of the Jewish community, these were persuasive arguments.

■ The War Begins In April 1861, Confederate forces turned their cannon on ships sent by President Lincoln to resupply Fort Sumter, the Union’s last southern outpost. The heavy Confederate cannonade transformed sentiment in New York overnight. The news, New Yorker Walt Whitman declared, “ran through the land, as if by electric nerves.” Even in the financial heart of the city, Wall Street, business ceased as men rushed into barrooms, hotels, and public squares to hear the dreaded news. Patriotic fervor gripped the city. American flags flew over every department store and town house, even from the spire of Trinity Church, while Broadway was “almost hidden in a cloud of flaggery.” Thousands of young men enthusiastically enlisted in the Union cause. This zeal is nowhere better reflected than in the lead editorial in the Jewish Messenger, “Stand by the Flag.” Isaacs, unchained from his apolitical vows, wrote an exuberant call to arms, declaring that the Messenger wanted to join with the “hearty and spontaneous shout ascending from the entire American people, to stand by the stars and stripes!” Can our former brethren be permitted to tear apart a union that was “reared by the noble patriots of the revolution?” The time for forbearance had passed. Isaacs praised young Jewish volunteers willing to risk their lives in “the cause of law and order.” He wished them a speedy return, but if they were to fall, “what death can be so glorious than that of the patriot?”30 Like the stores, churches, and townhomes, nearly every synagogue in New York flew the Stars and Stripes above its sanctuary. Inside, sermons reflected the patriotic spirit. Most notably, Reverend Raphall’s defense of the South gave way to a passionate commitment to the Union as he proclaimed that Jews would uphold the flag “at the peril of life and limb.” Not born in America and not “to the manor born,” Jews knew the “difference between elsewhere and here.” Having lived in prosperity, he said, “we flinch not from our hour of peril.” Raphall blamed the “foul stimulants of selfish, ambitious leaders” who misled ordinary southern citizens. Northerners were under deadly attack by their brothers. In response, “hundreds of thousands of conservative men of the North, the East

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and the West take up arms.” While slaveholding was not a wrong, he said, “we do find in the Bible abundant warrant for denouncing rebellion as a sin before God.” Raphall warned southerners that their struggle was fruitless. Outnumbered and overpowered, they would be remembered as Benedict Arnolds for flying the “black flag of treason.” Praising the “brave defenders of the union,” he beseeched “the Lord of Hosts to bless their righteous efforts.”31 New York in the spring of 1861 was a harrowing place. The economy sank quickly as southern deposits disappeared. While the war economy would soon revive many businesses, life remained turbulent. One non-Jewish immigrant, Alexander Dupré, wrote, “New York looks like an army camp. There are armed men everywhere, everyone carries a revolver, and we’re living in an absolute torrent of commotion.” Tens of thousands of soldiers marched through the city on their way to war, many never to return. Another German immigrant, Julius Wesslau, lamented, “Most of [the men] are in what you know as the militia, and you can well imagine what it’s like when out of 800 – 1,000 riflemen only half are left, the effect that has on their families and the city.”32

■ Service, Rights, and Recognition The Civil War presented occasions for New York Jewry to lead American Jews in patriotic service, which in turn brought both rights and recognition. Foremost was combat duty. Young Jewish New Yorkers responded to the martial spirit of spring 1861, serving with distinction. Simon Wolf lists 1,996 known Jewish soldiers from New York State, the vast majority of whom came from New York City. This was more than twice as many as the next state, as the city housed a quarter of the nation’s Jewish population. Stories of courage, dedication, and sacrifice abounded. Charles Breslauer fell at Bull Run in 1861, early in the war, as Union forces overconfidently attempted to take Richmond. Isidor Cohen died at Gettysburg in 1863 as the Union held off Robert E. Lee’s invasion of the North, and Lieutenant Joseph Abrahams was killed during the battle at Cold Harbor in 1864 when General Grant ordered a frontal assault on Lee’s forces, resulting in calamitously heavy casualties. Native-born Leopold Newman, a Columbia-educated attorney who wrote poetry and short stories, joined New York’s Thirty-First Regiment, one of the Union’s most courageous outfits, and fought in battles from Bull Run to Antietam. Rising to lieutenant colonel, Newman was at home when the War Department asked him to return to duty, even though he had completed his term of service. While leading

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a charge at Fredericksburg, grapeshot hit his leg. He was taken to Washington, D.C., where he died shortly after surgeons amputated his limb. Before his death, President Lincoln visited him at bedside and promoted him to brigadier general. Edwin Wertheimer, advancing at Manassas and at Chancellorsville, safeguarded New York State’s flag in the face of a “murderous” cross fire. Badly wounded, he passed on the banner to a fellow officer. In one New York Jewish family, five members served in the army; in another, a father fought with his three sons; and in a third, three brothers enlisted.33 In each issue, the Messenger published the names of Jewish officers joining the army. It printed sketches of the war by a Jewish soldier stationed in Washington who described thousands of soldiers and massive equipment, wagons in motion everywhere. He depicted an optimistic portrait of General McClellan’s preparation of a well-disciplined army and of the calmness of Lincoln amid the storm. The young soldier trusted that the war would purify the nation, completing the work of the Revolution. He also chronicled Jews’ prominent role in the army, how they kept the Sabbath, and how one soldier both fasted and fought on Yom Kippur. Though some soldiers feared becoming the subjects of venomous taunts, he reported no anti-Semitic slurs. In the summer of 1862, a letter from a volunteer noted a large number of Jewish New Yorkers in the field in Mississippi. These soldiers sensed that they were participating in a momentous historic event. They also complained of loneliness and the boredom of soldiering, as the days passed slowly far from home. New York’s Jews fought and died alongside their Christian brethren. They were equal cohorts in the effort to preserve the Union.34 Congress in August 1861 approved legislation that required all military chaplains to be “of some Christian Denomination,” rejecting an amendment to exclude that proviso. Jewish protest began when Rabbi Arnold Fischel of Shearith Israel, responding to a request by a Jewish officer in a Philadelphia regiment, petitioned to be made a chaplain. Secretary of War Simon Cameron declined the request, asserting that but for the proviso, the application would have been given “favorable consideration.”35 The Board of Delegates, the organization begun by Reverend Isaacs in 1859 to unite American congregations, appointed Fischel its unofficial chaplain in Washington, D.C., with the duty of visiting hospitals, “supervising the spiritual welfare of our . . . co-religionists,” and lobbying for a change in the law. Despite hundreds of people waiting to see the president, Fischell gained access and

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received a warm welcome. He presented Lincoln a memorial declaring that the “oppressive” chaplaincy law, an act of “prejudicial discrimination,” violated the Constitution. A few days later, the president agreed to seek a change. Despite protests from a few Christian denominations, to which many other Christian citizens responded with letters supporting the board, a new bill passed in March 1862 that reinterpreted the phrase “Christian denomination” to mean “religious denomination.”36 Following passage, the Board of Delegates failed to raise the funds needed to support Fischel’s mission, forcing him to retire from the field after comforting wounded Jewish soldiers and accompanying the army into Virginia. In 1862, Rabbi Joseph Frankel of Philadelphia, a Bavarian immigrant, became the first Jewish chaplain in the American military, as American Israelites gained greater recognition as a significant segment of the American people.37 The Civil War mobilized New York’s Jewish women. They met in synagogues to make army provisions, worked in hospitals, and participated in sanitary fairs, large expositions that sold wares, donating the proceeds to the Union cause. Many synagogues organized women’s auxiliaries. With Jewish assistance, an 1864 fair raised a million dollars. These fairs combined Jewish and Christian women, another instance of the war integrating the Jewish community into greater New York society, including women, who in the nineteenth century often remained apart from the marketplace and public square.38 A milestone patriotic act of the Jewish community was the transformation of part of Jews’ Hospital into a military hospital. As noted, the hospital. founded in 1855 after years of planning and disappointment, was the community’s most important collective act. It stood as a monument to the Jewish community’s commitment to its members’ welfare and to the Jewish population’s increasingly prominent position in the city. By 1862, the hospital had admitted 117 soldiers and covered their expenses. For the first time, it also appointed leaders of the Jewish Reform movement to its board, an act likely initiated by the receipt of significant bequests from Temple Emanu-El. A visitor noted that most soldiers came from New England, and that their loneliness was eased by the “considerate attentions of visitors of the fair sex,” as Jewish women regularly comforted patients. The hospital allowed Israelites a prominent forum to “manifest their sympathy for a noble cause.” During the draft riots of 1863, the hospital, located in the midst of the turmoil on Twenty-Eighth Street, admitted victims of the violence. In 1864, the hospital’s board voted to accept fifty

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more Union soldiers. One of its staff physicians, Dr. Israel Moses, resigned in 1861 to serve in the army, where he remained as a lieutenant colonel to the end of the conflict. After the war, the hospital remained open to the public, changing its name to Mount Sinai.39 Finance was another major contribution to the war effort. New York Jews played a significant role in funding the war, none more important than the efforts of Joseph Seligman, a German immigrant who moved to the city in 1846. With his brothers, he rose from country peddler to the helm of New York’s most prominent Jewish enterprise. A strong Union supporter, he was elected vice president of a mass Union rally the day of the firing on Fort Sumter. His brother William spoke at a similar meeting in September 1864. When war was declared, the Seligmans won a contract to outfit New York’s Seventh Regiment. They also helped gather financial backing for a government whose finances were at risk following the withdrawal of southern deposits. During the war, Joseph established a foothold in Washington, D.C., obtaining additional contracts to supply uniforms to the army. When promised Treasury funds seemed in doubt, he despaired that he might have “no alternative but the suspension of [their] house, which will drag down 10 other houses, and throw 400 operatives out of employ.” Fortunately, he received nearly $1.5 million by July 1862. That summer, he traveled to Germany to sell bonds for the war effort; there, joined by brothers Isaac and Henry, he sold up to $200 million of securities. The war facilitated the Seligman family’s transition from a manufacturing to a banking firm, which began operating in 1862. Joseph was also one of the few Jews (along with his brother) who were asked to join the prestigious Union Club, formed in 1863 to allow conservative businessmen to support the Republicans and to play a greater role in New York’s politics. Both the invitation to the Union Club and his highly visible efforts for the Union were noteworthy steps toward Jewish integration into New York society at its highest levels.40 Cotton traders Emanuel and Mayer Lehman, two of the South’s leading cotton merchants and the founders of Lehman Brothers, commenced business in New York in 1858, opening a branch of their operations in the city that was the center of cotton exchange. The war stranded brother Emanuel in the city, where he sold cotton that Mayer dispatched and that slipped though the Union blockade. During the conflict, Emanuel traveled to London, where he acted as an agent for the purchase of Confederate bonds.41

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■ The Rise of Anti-Semitism The Civil War triggered “the worst period of anti-Semitism in the United Sates to date.” The most significant incident, a national event that electrified New York’s Jewish community, was the notorious General Orders No. 11, “the most sweeping anti-Jewish regulation in all of American history.” On 17 December 1862, General Ulysses S. Grant, terming the Jews “a class violating every regulation of trade established by the Treasury Department,” commanded their immediate expulsion from his military department, an area encompassing northern Mississippi and parts of Kentucky and Tennessee. Once a Jewish emissary informed Lincoln of the act, he moved immediately to have it rescinded; the orders were revoked on 4 January 1863. But it was too late; the orders had already created fear and rage among Jews throughout the nation, especially in New York. Upon hearing of the edict, the Messenger angrily asked, “why single out as the especial objects of his wrath, the Israelites residing within his lines? Why inflict upon a general body a penalty due to individual offenders?” There was no reason to sully “the Jewish name” because of the misdeeds of a few. Unless the order was revoked, there was no telling “to what enormities it may lead.” The next issue gave telling evidence of the edict’s impact. Observing the “exceedingly bitter” mood within the community, the Messenger implored fellow Israelites not to turn their anger into sympathy for politicians whose objects were “very, very far from the Jewish heart” or to give credence to the “wild, insincere suggestion that ‘Government in Washington is bigoted, intolerant and unfriendly to Jews.’ ” Grant’s order created disaffection in a community never comfortable with the Republican Party, especially when support was faltering in the face of a seemingly endless war.42 The New York Times reported that when a “committee of Jews” in the city “took it upon themselves” to applaud Lincoln for “annulling the odious order,” the “bulk” of the city’s Israelites rebuked the committee, declaring that “they have no thanks for an act of simple and imperative justice — but grounds for deep and just complaint against the Government.” Grant should have been summarily dismissed. The Times declared that even on “selfish” grounds, the order ought not to have been issued, given the high political positions Jews held in Europe and the power of the Rothschilds “to raise or destroy the credit of any nation.” But issues more fundamental were at stake. Men “cannot be punished as a class, without gross violence to our free institutions.” The rights of American

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Jews were “as sacred under the Constitution as those of any other sect, class or race.” The Times article, along with the Messenger’s warnings, reveals the rage and discord that Grant’s order created within the Jewish community.43 The charges in Grant’s order were repeated in other dispatches from scenes of war. The South unleashed the first shots at Fort Sumter, the New York World proclaimed, because there was likely an “unrevealed southern Rothschild” backing its decision. One sailor reported that his boat was “as covered with German Jews as a dead carcase with carrion crows.” A report from Tennessee claimed that “certain parties in Huntsville were unpatriotic enough to sell their cotton to the Jews who swarmed here from the North.” A post from Mississippi noted an order by Colonel Dubois that “all cotton speculators, Jews and other vagrants” who lacked permission to be in the area must leave within twenty-four hours. General Benjamin Butler, in command of troops in New York City in 1864, engaged in a dialogue with the Messenger over his use of the word “Jew” when he referred to individuals. Butler replied that he identified Jews as a nationality “though possessing no country.” He described what they were known for: The closeness with which they cling together, the aid which they afford each other, on all proper, and sometimes improper occasions, the fact that all of them pursue substantially the same employment, so far as I have known them — that of traders, merchants and bankers — the very general obedience to the prohibition against marriage with Gentiles, their faith, which looks forward to the time when they are to be gathered together in the former land of their nation — all serve to show a closer the [tie] of kindred and nation among the Hebrews and a greater homogeneity than belongs to any other nation.

Butler did not consider himself biased, but his characterizations of clannishness and vocation and his subtle questioning of patriotism were common antiSemitic claims.44 The charge that Jews were crooked expanded to include a lack of patriotism, as Israelites were depicted as cowards, a people who remained far from the battlefield while profiting from shoddy war production, even to the extent of fabricating unsafe goods. A doggerel published in Vanity Fair, one example of many slanders in the newspapers and magazines, pictured a visitor wandering through the stalls in Chatham, where “Sholomonsh” and his fellow vendors sell tawdry merchandise with “smiles obsequious”:

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Viewed, as I have, the swindle-stitched disgrace Of uniforms daubed with sordid lace, With cheap tag-rags disguised, and paltry loops, Served out by mean contractors to our troops;45

The gold exchange, whose trade volume far exceeded that of the stock exchange, fluctuated wildly depending on the war’s progress. As men of wealth often put their money in gold when they believed the Union cause was going badly, it came under harsh critical attack. Perhaps because the most prominent gold trader was the Jewish firm of Hallgarten and Herzfeldt, and because of traditional associations of Jews and gold trading and moneylending, newspapers held Jews responsible for market gyrations. Horace Greeley’s Tribune titled an angry editorial “Hebrews and Gold.” Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper reported that Jews “cut a miserable figure as they rushed to and fro, foaming at the mouth, cursing with impotent rage Old Abe and Secretary [of the Treasury Salmon] Chase, who had brought this ruin on the house of their fathers.” Three New York newspapers blamed Jewish traders for the volatility of the market: “those hook-nosed wretches speculate on disasters.” A visitor wandering to a corner near the Gold Exchange would only observe “descendants of Shylock.”46 Harper’s and the Herald charged that all Jews were copperheads (southern supporters). August Belmont, the “the Jew banker of New York,” who came to Gotham as a representative of the Rothschilds, was held in special contempt. The New York Herald “spoke as though all the Jewish bankers in the world, with Belmont in the lead, were joined together for support of the confederacy.” (Belmont, who married a Christian in an Episcopalian church, supported the Union but also urged peace talks with the South and supported Democratic candidates against the Republicans.) Again and again, this wealthy banker with a strong German accent, a man who never associated himself with the Jewish community, was singled out for ridicule. So too was his employer, as a speaker at Cooper Union declared that “there is not a people or government in Christendom in which the paws, or fangs, or claws of the Rothschilds are not plunged to the very heart of the treasury.” Other allegations included accusations that a disloyal non-Jew was “a tool of the Hebrew race,” that Jews favored the draft, and that Jews set Columbia, South Carolina, on fire. The anguish of a long bloody war, combined with a rapidly growing and ever more visible

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Jewish community, a community that included more and more men of wealth and prominence, exacerbated and heightened anti-Semitism and its challenge to New York’s Jews, who had largely enjoyed acceptance and approbation from their Christian neighbors.47

■ The Draft Riots and the Election of 1864 As the war dragged on, with increasing casualties and no sign of victory, support in New York for the Union cause diminished. The city was the headquarters of the Peace Democrats, who favored making accommodation with the South and ending the war quickly. Democrat Horatio Seymour gained the governor’s seat in the fall of 1862, an election in which Seymour ran on an antiLincoln platform. Democrats carried every ward in the city and elected all six of their congressional candidates. In 1863, New Yorkers chose for mayor German American C. Godfrey Gunther, who ran as a reformer but was a member of a Democratic faction that supported the “supremacy of the white race.” He received strong support from Kleindeutschland, home to many German Jews. There is no evidence of how Jews voted, but they were likely even less sympathetic to Republicans after General Grant’s edict.48 On a national Fast Day in May 1863, the Messenger noted that attendance at the synagogues had declined considerably from previous such occasions and that “it was very evident that less respect was manifested for the recommendation of the Executive,” likely a reference to the Emancipation Proclamation. Reverend Raphall’s sermon that day reflects disaffection. He preached that the conflict, the result of “demagogues, fanatics and a party Press” of both North and South, had mired the United States “in the third year of a destructive but needless sectional war which has armed brother against brother and consigned hundreds of thousands to an untimely grave.” While Raphall found “consolation” that the “cause of the union is the worthiest in the field,” he did not mention slavery or the Emancipation Proclamation or discuss any larger meaning to the conflict. His unconditional patriotic enthusiasm of April 1861 disappeared. His words conveyed the disillusionment prevalent in the city, including within the Jewish community. The lavish Purim balls and numerous other “sociables” and the festive Saturday afternoon strolls down “Judenstrasse” (Broadway from Canal to Union Square) gave evidence of the community’s attempt to escape the realities of war.49 In July 1863, any citizen unlucky enough to be walking the streets of the

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metropolis heard the crack of rifles and witnessed buildings ablaze, as the worst urban riot in America to that day erupted. Enraged over a lottery draft of men aged twenty to thirty-five, Irish and German workingmen took to the streets. Resentment flamed against blacks, blamed as the cause of the war and already the object of Irish hostility, and against the wealthy, who could buy out of the draft with a payment of $300. For three days, gangs stalked the streets; they blocked avenues and alleys with barricades. Crowds attacked German garment stores, including stores owned by Jews on Grand Street, as well as Horace Greely’s Tribune, a pro-Union newspaper, and houses in wealthy neighborhoods. Mobs lynched blacks in the streets and set fire to the Colored Orphan Asylum. The official count listed 118 dead, though many more may have perished. The riot ended when Secretary of War Edwin Stanton ordered soldiers from Gettysburg to the city. Jewish General William S. Meyer received a personal note of thanks from President Lincoln for his service during the uprising. Joseph Seligman, a likely target of the rioters, condemned Governor Seymour’s attempt to stop the draft, along with the “Copperheadism of the once ‘Democratic’ party.” These Democrats gave “Jeff Davis their moral support and another straw of hope.”50 The Jewish Messenger declined to report details of the riot. Instead, it asked, “how many Jews were among the thousands [who] rose determined to commit every act repugnant to humanity?” The answer: “not one.” Not that poor Israelites could afford $300. They could not. The draft weighed as heavily on them as on men of other faiths. But Jews “love the land in which they dwell, and obey the governing powers.” In religion, they pray to one God, but in politics, “they obey the law of the country.” When the conscript lottery resumed in August, the Messenger, noting the names of Israelites chosen, expressed confidence that those with no disability or substitute payment would “shoulder a musket,” consoled in the reflection that “their country called and they must obey.” The draft, it reported, made soldiers of peacefully inclined coreligionists, including spiritual leaders of a wealthy uptown and an east side immigrant synagogue.51 Prior to the election of 1864, newspapers reported that a delegation of New York City Jews visited Lincoln, assuring him that, with only a few exceptions, Israelites would give him their votes. In response, Myer Isaacs, coeditor of the Messenger, wrote Lincoln explaining that there was no “Jewish vote.” Rather, there were “a large number of faithful Union supporters” among prominent

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Jews, but there were also “supporters of the opposition.” Israelites were not, as a body, “distinctly Union or Democratic.” Isaacs did report that at a recent mass meeting of the German Union Society, the chair of the Executive Committee, two principal speakers, and others on the platform were Jews. But Lincoln carried only 33 percent of the city’s vote, despite the fall of Atlanta, which foretold a speedy end of the war. The Messenger — noting that on the Union side, Abram Dittenhoefer was a candidate as an elector for Lincoln, while on the Democratic side, Jacob Seebacher was Democratic nominee for assembly — reiterated Isaacs’s contention that there was no such thing as “Jewish politics”; Israelites individually followed their conscience. Copperhead accusations to the contrary, the paper remained staunchly behind the Union. It expressed confidence that “an overwhelming majority of Israelites in the States,” in their personal choices, shared these sentiments. But what about New York City?52 How did New York’s Jews vote? By 1864, nearly all major Jewish industrialists and merchants had turned to the Union side. After a difficult initial year, these men of commerce prospered. The Hendricks’s copper manufactory, founded by Harmon Hendricks, one of the city’s wealthiest Jews, operated at full capacity during the conflict, and garment manufacturers supplied the army’s seemingly endless needs. The city poured hundreds of millions of dollars into the war effort, much of it raised in and through the city. Republicans and industrialists formed a common economic bond. Joseph Seligman stated that if the Republicans won in 1864, he “would be in favor of investing in manufacturing as in that case the tariff would hardly be lowered in five years.” However, the working classes, especially independent craftspeople and unskilled laborers, did not prosper as did the bourgeoisie. While wages increased markedly, inflation eroded living standards. The price of coal tripled, sugar doubled, and flour rose by a third. The working-class vote created a sizable Democratic majority.53 Did the large Jewish German working and middle class join other German workers in voting Democratic, or did they support Lincoln? Kleindeutschland strongly supported white supremacist Godfrey Gunther for mayor and would have been sympathetic to the German Democratic Club’s contention that the “Republican war, inflation, taxes, and draft had had harsh economic consequences” for the middling classes. Future Democratic candidate Horatio Seymour wrote in 1861 that the Germans were the “true conservatives of the Democratic Party.” While German immigrants were friendlier to the Union

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The German born and educated rabbi at Temple Emanu-El, Rabbi Samuel Adler, was the leader of the Reform movement in New York after Rabbi Wise and Rabbi Lilienthal departed and Rabbi Leo Merzbacher died. A strong Lincoln supporter, he saw slavery as the root of the war and its eradication as the great accomplishment of the conflict. (Courtesy American Jewish Archives)

cause than were the Irish, the German wards in Kleindeutschland gave Lincoln’s opponent, General McClellan, 69 percent of its votes in 1864. German Jews tended to mingle freely and identify with non-Jewish Germans; indeed, as “they were bound together in an organic unity that lasted for generations,” it is unlikely that their vote differed significantly from fellow immigrants. Isaacs was correct: Israelites voted on both sides. But was there a strong proportion one way or the other? Because Jews did not live in enclaves separate from nonJews, it is impossible to precisely determine their votes. But since they did not disassociate themselves from their German neighbors, it is probable that they voted in a similar pattern. If so, there was a similarly strong Jewish vote against Lincoln.54

■ The Death of Lincoln The assassination of Abraham Lincoln on April 14, 1865, shocked an entire nation. News of the President’s death reached New York on the Sabbath; synagogues quickly filled to capacity, the exterior of each draped in black. At Shaaray Tefilah, Reverend Isaacs spoke of an “appalling calamity” at a moment when the nation was jubilant with news of “peace and reunion.” In the Messenger, he wrote that this “kind good hearted man, the steadfast, conscientious President,” would rank second only to George Washington in the nation’s history. At Shearith Israel, with the lectern, pillars, and gallery covered in black, a special Sephardic prayer for the dead was recited, the first time that prayer

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was recited for a non-Jew. At Temple Emanu-El, the entire congregation stood and recited the Kaddish, the traditional prayer for the dead. Rabbi Adler was so overcome with grief that he could not speak, though a few weeks later he compared Lincoln to Moses, both emancipators of slaves. Learning from nature allowed Lincoln to “fully extirpate slavery,” restoring “the land of the free to true freedom,” rendering the Union safe, and convincing the world of the stability of republican government.55 When Lincoln’s body arrived by train in New York, it was taken to city hall to lie in state. Fifteen hundred members of B’nai B’rith, bearing a chain with three links and the banners of the various lodges, marched in the Fourth Division of the funeral pageant. After the funeral train resumed its journey, a massive ceremony convened at Union Square. From Shearith Israel, members of six synagogues and Jewish aid societies paraded to the gathering. Reverend Raphall and five other Jewish leaders sat on the speakers’ platform. Speaking for the Jewish community, Reverend Isaacs prayed that God would both remove Lincoln’s soul “to the spot reserved for martyred saints” and “soothe our pains and calm our griefs.”56 German immigrant Marie Wesslau described the scene in New York after Lincoln’s assassination: “It was terribly sad to walk through the streets with all the flags on the public buildings at half-mast and almost all the buildings draped in black and white with all sorts of inspirational inscriptions. . . . I don’t believe the death of any monarch has ever been as deeply mourned as Pres. Linkol.” A city that had rejected his leadership by a two to one margin but six months earlier was now in the deepest sorrow at his death. The profound reaction to the martyrdom of Abraham Lincoln provided the spark that ensured that the Civil War would be a transformational moment for the city’s Jewish community. The elements for that transformation were already in place. The willingness of near two thousand New York soldiers to serve with non-Jewish comrades, joining the ranks of officers and infantrymen offering to sacrifice their lives for their country, fused a bond between Jews and the rest of the American population, notwithstanding the outbursts of anti-Semitism. The conversion of Jews’ Hospital, the community’s most treasured accomplishment and previously reserved exclusively for Jews, to Mount Sinai, open to the needs of the entire city, signaled common citizenship. Yet, in the summer of 1864, nine months before Lincoln’s death, with the war grinding on, with casualties mounting by the tens of thousands, with Lincoln’s reelection in doubt,

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and with increasing war weariness and disaffection in the city, the patriotic energy so visible in the Jewish community in the early days of the conflict might have evaporated into the hazy Manhattan air. In 1863 and 1864, the Messenger often ignored the war completely.57 Moreover, even if most New York Jews supported the war, they offered starkly different interpretations of its meaning. As we have seen, Reverend Raphall, whose son lost his hand in battle in 1863, considered the conflict a “needless sectional war” brought on by “demagogues.” He also criticized Lincoln’s withdrawal of civil liberties, his willingness to suspend habeas corpus. The conflict was a war of self-defense for “national honor and safety.” Rabbi Samuel Adler of Temple Emanu-El took a different view. His Thanksgiving Day sermon compared the nation to a sick patient. Does a physician treat symptoms with temporary remedies or “discover the root of our national malady, and having found it, tear it from the body?” That root was found: “its name is Slavery. Remove that thoroughly, and the fever will lose its power, its nourishment, and this unholy rebellion be crushed beyond all possibility of resuscitation.” Jews had a duty to advocate “the eternal immutable principles of liberty and the inalienable right of man.”58 Early in 1864, it was unclear whether Raphall’s or Adler’s views of the war’s meaning would prevail within the city’s Jewish community. Beginning in the fall, events moved quickly. The surrender of Atlanta, Lincoln’s reelection, his inauguration, and, forty days later, his assassination galvanized the nation, including the city’s Jewish community. Intense patriotism and profound, nearly unendurable sorrow gave Adler’s words of radical change a prophetic ring, of a more fitting result of the conflict than the mere restoration of the Union that Raphall advocated. The sacrifices of the battlefield seemed not just necessary but heroic. The achievements of the Union soldiers, resulting in emancipation, loomed as historic, as did the conversion of Jews’ Hospital to Mount Sinai. Jews rejoiced in these accomplishments and tearfully mourned Lincoln’s death. While the Civil War’s outcome was unclear to the end, it ultimately ensured that the sense of national unity and pride, the growing fusion of the Jews into American life, and an expanding Jewish American sense of national destiny were to become permanent. Lincoln’s power to forge a common identity can be heard at the conclusion of an article written forty years later by Myer Isaacs, son of editor Samuel Isaacs, at that date an officer of the American Jewish Historical Society:

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This paper will be read on the 12th of February, the birthday of Lincoln. Profane hands, even now, touch the ark which holds sacred the memory of the beloved and martyred President. We of the Jewish Historical Society reverently place our tribute of gratitude by the side of the myriad chaplets in honor of the American who was too great to be sectarian, whose motto was “Malice towards none — charity for all,” “doing the right as God gave him to see the right,” whose idea of atonement was the Jewish inspiration, “let the oppressed go free.”59

In the 1850s, New York’s Jewish leaders Hart, Noah, Lyon, and Raphall openly supported the southern cause, disdained the black race, and despised the Republican Party. Now the shepherds of the Jewish community uniformly mourned Lincoln and championed the “great emancipator.” It may have taken a long, dreadful war and the death of a beloved president, but in 1865 Jews began to join Dr. Adler in articulating a common bond between their Egyptian bondage and the plight of African-American slaves. The Civil War was a transformative moment in the Jewish community’s embrace of American democracy and Jews’ confidence that they had an increasingly secure place in the growing republic. The shift from Democrat August Belmont to Republican financier Joseph Seligman as the city and the nation’s most prominent Jew is but one sign of the beginning of this transition. As the 1904 quotation from Meyer Isaacs indicates, two generations later, Jews were well on their way toward a commitment to and a leadership role in the advocacy of civil liberties and civil rights.60

Conclusion

Early in this book, I noted that it would have been inconceivable for one of the twenty-three poor Jewish immigrants from Recife living in the lonely community of New Amsterdam in 1654 to envision that this company outpost would ultimately grow to a city of eight million and a Jewish population of over two million. It would have been equally difficult for them to foresee that the city would number over eight hundred thousand in 1860, including a Jewish population of over forty thousand. Their home in Amsterdam, the most hospitable city in Europe for Jews at the time, numbered only a few thousand Jewish inhabitants. The growth and changes in New York over the two centuries between their landing and the Civil War were remarkable in nurturing both a major Jewish population and a significant center of Jewish culture in the United States. These changes came step by step over the 211 years after those first Jews arrived at the dreary, distant settlement of the Dutch West India Company. The first decade under Dutch rule, from 1654 to 1664, saw individual Jewish traders striving to gain political and economic rights with personal perseverance and help from their Amsterdam compatriots. They created a legacy that endured through the next two centuries and beyond. The long English colonial era transformed the city into the most hospitable municipality for Jews in the entire world. The small Jewish population of thirty to forty families constructed the first synagogue in North America, Shearith Israel, living as a synagogue community in the tradition of London and Amsterdam. Shearith Israel remained the city’s only Jewish house of worship for nearly a century. Jewish leaders became merchants of standing in a city devoted to commerce,

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and the Jewish community enjoyed widespread acceptance, participating in New York’s financial and, to a limited degree, civic and political life. During the years of the early republic, the city’s Jewish community embraced the wave of republican enthusiasm, moving from a synagogue community toward fuller integration in the life of the city, including the marketplace, social organizations, and the fierce partisan politics of the 1790s. The antebellum decades witnessed a massive influx of German and other European Jews, causing the Jewish population to increase from five hundred to forty thousand in just thirty-five years. The new population triggered an explosion of new synagogues, some elegant to display the prominence and wealth of leading Jewish citizens, some small to serve the needs of poor immigrants. The Jewish community acquired far more visibility in the city, building a hospital and an orphanage, becoming a force in the Democratic Party, publishing two weekly newspapers, and serving as a forum for debates between advocates of Reform and Orthodoxy. New York entered the international arena as one of the centers of world Jewry. Following the Civil War, the United States experienced far-reaching economic growth. Major industries in steel, copper, oil, and agricultural equipment, along with the growth of mass-produced consumer goods and the establishment of an advanced banking system, produced vast fortunes and the emergence of financiers and industrialists more renowned than the president of the United States, such as John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, and J. P. Morgan. In this world of advanced capitalist development, the ideas and ideals of the American Revolution began to recede into a distant past. Social Darwinism, monopoly capital, and labor-management conflict dominated American society. For the Jews of New York City, the decades following the Civil War also were a time of momentous changes. Men who had immigrated before the war rose to occupy eminent financial and social positions. The Seligman, Lehman, Schiff, Loeb, and Warburg families built elegant mansions on Fifth Avenue and accumulated vast fortunes. Moreover, in the Gilded Age the city added not tens of thousands of new Jewish immigrants, as in the antebellum era, but hundreds of thousands of new arrivals, largely from eastern Europe. This new population, together with the pre – Civil War generation, transformed New York City Jews into the largest Jewish community in the world. With their

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growing prominence, New York’s Jews aspired to a leadership role in national and even international Jewish affairs. This large, powerful population owed much to their predecessors. The sense of citizenship, the experience of equality and integration into the American republic, remained an enduring legacy. It empowered Jews to extend their efforts to secure decent living and working conditions. Similarly, the struggles of the emergent Jewish working class and the entrepreneurial ambitions of the growing Jewish bourgeoisie in the antebellum era embedded enduring traditions of economic and social responsibility for fellow Jews. Though the days of British rule, the struggles of 1776 and the early republic, and the turbulent years leading to the conflict between the states undoubtedly seemed remote to Jews living in the modern twentieth-century metropolis, without the Jewish achievement of those years, without the growth of a significant, entrepreneurially and politically integrated population to greet the waves of new immigrants, American Jewish history and New York’s Jewish history could have taken a far different path. Indeed, in looking back two to three centuries, it is easy to underestimate the truly revolutionary change in which the small community of Jews in New York City participated. For millennia, they had been out of the mainstream political loop. The middle ages and early modern era in Europe saw Jews subject to expulsions, pogroms, and ghettoization. Even in areas where violence was not common, Jews suffered onerous legal discrimination, determining who they could or could not marry, where they could live, and what occupations they might or might not pursue. The life of a Jew was aimed at survival within a hostile world, and Jews directed their energies inward, with men focusing on study of sacred texts and women devoting themselves to nurturing families. While the situation in Holland was far better than in most areas, Jews still lived in an isolated community under their synagogue and community leaders. Thus, it is difficult for the modern citizen of a nation that has long honored human rights and democracy, particularly in the past sixty years, to comprehend what a stark difference the Jewish families of New York encountered. The British by the eighteenth century were so concerned with empire and mercantilism that, despite whatever anti-Semitic beliefs they yet harbored, they lifted all restrictions on Jews in order to ensure tranquility and to maximize

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profits in trade from their precious colony. Jews could not vote in England; they could in New York. Nor was this an oversight. The Naturalization Act of 1740 specifically exempted colonial Jews from the Test Act that permitted only Anglicans the franchise or office in Britain. The small Jewish community of New York flourished under this new freedom. Gradually it emerged from its closed synagogue society, whose protections and insularity were no longer needed. However, the bonds of community remained vital to most Jewish residents, still far outnumbered by Christians. By the time of the American Revolution, the Jewish community of New York had so much become a part of the economic, cultural, and even political life of the seaport that its leading members became active revolutionaries. They signed petitions and declarations based on the ideas of such English philosophers as John Locke, a man whose relevance to Jewish communities when he was alive in the seventeenth century would have been unthinkable. Moreover, they put their lives on the line, leaving their synagogues and their homes for an uncertain future based on ideals that had not had a place in Jewish history since the Romans put down the Judean rebellion in the first century. A revolution occurred in Jewish history, not just in American history, when New York’s Jewish community incorporated words of the American Enlightenment, inserting phrases from both the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution into their synagogue’s post-Revolutionary charter. That the leading Jew in New York, Solomon Simson, became the vice president of the Democratic Society, the Jeffersonian organization that continued to support the French Revolution even as it became more and more radical, marked an extraordinary transformation in Jewish society, as did the efforts of the leading spiritual leader, Gershom Mendes Seixas, to integrate republican thought with rabbinic Judaism. The influx of German immigrants in the antebellum era enhanced this heritage, particularly through the growth of communal organizations such as B’nai B’rith and the emergence of German revolutionaries at the heart of the movement to Reform Judaism. New York’s revolutionary heritage added strength as Jews learned to respect and use freedom of speech and freedom of the press. The Civil War, a watershed event in American history, so, too, marked a climactic moment in the history of New York’s Jewish community. It fulfilled the republican vision of political and economic integration into American society. Jews served and died on the battlefield, attended to wounded soldiers, sewed

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uniforms for and opened their hospital to soldiers, and mourned the death of their president with as much depth as the Christian population. Never had American citizenship felt more compatible with Jewish identity. While the Civil War secured the Jewish community a priceless republican heritage that the generation of the 1860s and earlier generations of New York Jewry passed on to the hundreds of thousands of Jews who landed at Ellis Island, it must be remembered that this treasured legacy came with a price. The unprecedented social, economic, political, and cultural possibilities that the American republic offered New York Jewry also challenged the abilities of the community to become an active part of the new society while yet retaining a cohesive identity. Some members found this impossible and broke away. Some managed to hold on to traditional beliefs and ritual within the bounds of American liberty, while still others sought to form a middle ground between the Judaism of the old world and one that would be in harmony with American democracy. These issues of integration remained as critical dilemmas for future generations of Jewish New Yorkers, individually and collectively, as they confronted (and continue to confront) the complex, promising, and often troubling challenges of American liberty.

Jeff Gutterman, “View of Congregation Shearith Israel Cemetery, New York,” photograph, 2011. (Courtesy of the artist)

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An Introduction to the Visual and Material Culture of New York City Jews, 1654 – 1865 DIANA

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Jews have long been referred to as the “People of the Book,” signifying the importance of ongoing study and interpretation of the Torah. For scholars of both Jewish history and American history, the written word is also central, with such documents as letters, cemetery records, and membership records of burial societies, synagogues, and labor unions constituting their primary sources. This visual essay offers a different approach. It explores the beliefs, values, attitudes, and assumptions of early New York Jewish history through an examination of visual and material culture, illuminating what we can learn about this period from man-made artifacts of the time.1 The positioning of figures in a portrait, adaptations of objects from the surrounding culture for new uses, or even what is not included by a painter in a composition all provide insights and clues into the social dynamics, the crafting of identity, the portrayal of class status, and the nature of gender relationships in colonial America. In the coming pages, we will trace the creation of a new dual identity of “American Jew” during the colonial and republican eras, using visual means to consider the various cultures and histories that produced this syncretic identity in New York, from the legacy of oppression and torture in Spain and Portugal to the cultural traditions of Amsterdam to the emerging religious freedoms of the New World. In Chatham Square, today part of New York City’s Chinatown, the SpanishPortuguese Cemetery built by Congregation Shearith Israel in 1682 stands

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as New York’s oldest cemetery, although it was the second to be built. Raised above street level, protected from vandals and tourists by its padlocked metal fence, this historic cemetery is exposed to weather and pollution eroding its stones, rendering many epitaphs illegible, and roughly pitting their surfaces. Though it is open only by appointment, a viewer can start a visual dialogue with the gravestones by observing how they are oriented (whether vertical or horizontal), their size, and their design or shape, when standing outside its gates. Toward the left of center stands a two-foot-tall obelisk placed upon a fourfoot-tall stone base that makes it the tallest monument in the cemetery. The presence of an obelisk is unusual for a Jewish cemetery because it is not a traditional funerary Jewish form. Colonial American Jews appropriated the obelisk from Protestant cemeteries; the form originated in ancient Egypt, where it was associated with eternal life and light. Here, the obelisk’s singular shape and height broadcasts the deceased’s importance to the greater community. Even from a vantage point outside of the gates, it can be assumed that the obelisk honors a man, rather than a woman, since women were kept out of the upper spheres of society where power was brokered and obtained. Indeed, the gravestone’s inscriptions herald Reverend Gershom Mendes Seixas, the most prestigious religious official of Congregation Shearith Israel in the first hundred years. Seixas’s duties equaled those of ordained rabbis, although he did not possess that title. In addition to serving as the congregation’s hazan, Seixas supervised kashrut and officiated at all life-cycle events. The rest of the tombstones conform to one of two orientations: either vertical slab stones favored by the Ashkenazim or horizontal, flat ledger stones on the ground in the manner of the Sephardim. The tombstones are inscribed with texts that include biblical quotes, loving epitaphs, names, and birth and death dates, written in Ladino, Hebrew, and Dutch, among other languages, acknowledging the differing heritages of New York Jews. Objects have their own lifetime. While tombstones are generally made to endure, everyday objects as well as the artistic creations of immigrants, slaves, women, and the working class are often lost or overlooked, their possessions or creations used up or discarded rather than collected and preserved. Flyers advertising Purim balls and copies of the newspaper the Asmonean (1848 – 1859) printed on pulpy newsprint were mass-produced for a contemporary audience rather than published with an eye toward posterity. Yet close examination of these historical objects and images that have survived enables us to

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engage directly with Jews’ participation in colonial history and in the making of the nation and its culture. The geographical starting point for the history of New York City Jewish life might be considered Recife, Brazil, where Dutch Jews lived until 1654, when Portugal seized power and they were exiled. The visual and material culture known to the Jews at Recife traveled with them to “Niew Amsterdam,” if only in their minds and impressions. It had its origins even further back in time in fifteenth- to seventeenth-century Spain, Portugal, and Holland. The Jewish refugees who departed in haste from Recife to Dutch New Amsterdam, once settled, wove together, as if plaiting strands of a braid, their Jewish needs and traditions with elements of this Dutch, Spanish, and Portuguese heritage, thus producing in the colonial and republican eras a new syncretic identity, that of “American Jew.” The bird’s-eye view topographical map of the Americas on page 264 was a ceremonial document conceived as a bold pronouncement of political power over overseas land claims, rather than as a navigational guide for exploration to the Americas. Diego Gutierrez, a Spanish cartographer, collaborated with Hieronymus Cock, a celebrated engraver from Antwerp, to delineate Spain’s claim on the American continent.2 Originally the work’s large format required the map to be printed on six separate sheets of paper that later were joined together. The map’s scale equaled the oversized ambitions of the Spanish monarchs. From the fifteenth century onward, the Catholic Church supported those European rulers who laid claim to distant territories without regard to the land rights and cultures of indigenous peoples, with the provision that Catholicism become the religion of the Americas.3 This attitude parallels how the Church and the monarchy treated the Sephardim, or Spanish and Portuguese Jews. Phillip II, King of Spain (1556 – 1598), and his half sister, Margarita de Parma, Regent of the Netherlands (1559 – 1562), commissioned major works of art and architecture such as this, affirming their imperial power and dominion over the world, its peoples, and nature. In similar fashion, as we will see in the next engraving, Spanish and Portuguese artists produced with confidence art celebrating their control over the lives and the deaths of Jews. The anonymous artist who engraved the scene of sadistic torture and public execution of Jews on page 265 created a work of social celebration rather than social criticism. We do not know if the represented scene took place in the sixteenth, seventeenth, or eighteenth century. Those who might see the finished

The 1562 Map of America, Hieronymus Cock (Flemish engraver) and Diego Gutierrez (Spanish cartographer), engraving, created 1562, Antwerp. (Courtesy Lessing J. Rosenwald Collection, Geography and Map Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC)

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Burning of Spanish Jews and Others in Portugal, eighteenth-century engraving. (Courtesy General Research Division, New York Public Library, Tilden Foundations, New York)

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print would easily imagine themselves among the large crowd of witnesses, including clerics holding crucifixes aloft, gathered to celebrate as Sephardic Portuguese Jews were being burnt alive at the stake as heretics. It is not known if the artist directly witnessed this event or if he re-created it later based on oral and written accounts. We can learn much about the culture in which this work was produced by examining how this piece of art was positioned for its viewers. The engraving’s fine attention to detail and artistry, and its large size, made it difficult to reproduce and circulate, indicating that it was not created as a warning to Jews. Rather, the Spanish-Portuguese Catholics depicted here who witness the torture would likely be the same people who viewed the image as one upholding their own actions, social status, and ideological beliefs. This artwork helps us to viscerally grasp the cultural milieu from which the earliest Jews of New York had escaped and illuminates the kinds of cultural memories that fed into their struggles for religious freedom and their crafting of their new colonial Jewish identities in first New Amsterdam and then New York. In contrast to the previous image, the Spanish master Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes (1746 – 1828) wanted his audience to empathize with, rather than demonize, the condemned man, a Jew, who stands in the foreground of the drawing shown on the facing page. Goya held the distinguished position of personal painter to the king of Spain until the Peninsular War propelled him to create horrific images of war’s brutality as well as caustic satirical and social commentary, for which he lost favor with the monarchy.4 Goya painted this piece during the reign of Ferdinand VII (1808 – 1833), who had reinstituted the Inquisition and targeted Goya for his politically charged artwork. Here, the subject of a martyred Jew provided a vehicle for Goya to express his own persecution, as well as that of the Jews of Spain. Shrewdly, Goya turned to centuries of European representations of Christ as the physical prototype for the condemned Jewish man, calculating that Catholics in Spain might empathize with the fate of Jesus. The Jew looks downward in apparent acceptance of his fate. Subtle sepia tones, loosely applied with expressive brushstrokes, convey a sense of quiet and solitude. While the two figures to the man’s left and right (one seemingly in clerical robes) are painted with dark brownish tones, the Jew wears white to symbolize his virtue and innocence, a color-coded statement on good versus evil. Since the Middle Ages, Christian artists had maintained a specific iconography to depict “others,” most importantly religious outsiders. Facial carica-

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Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes, Por linage de ebros (For Being of Jewish Ancestry Condemned by the Inquisition), 1814 – 1824, a brush drawing in brown ink wash. (British Museum, Cabinet of Prints and Drawings; © The Trustees of the British Museum, London, England)

ture and physical disfigurement were typically used to represent the Jews’ perceived spiritual “abomination.”5 On the depicted Jew’s head is a coroza, the distinctive conical hat that Jews and criminals were mandated to wear.6 Goya pointedly titled his work to question the validity of the man’s crime, that of being of Jewish heritage. He portrays the church and state as despicable and not the innocent Jew.

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Rembrandt van Rijn (1606 – 1669), Portrait of Menasseh ben Israel (?), 1663, etching on paper, Rijksprententkkabinet. (Courtesy Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, Holland)

Whereas Goya, who claimed Rembrandt as an artistic inspiration, lived in Catholic Spain, the seventeenth-century artist Rembrandt van Rijn thrived in the Dutch Republic, a Calvinist Protestant mercantile culture where artists worked for the free market rather than solely by commission. During the “Golden Age” of Dutch art, Rembrandt etched a portrait of a Dutch Jewish man, believed by many people to be the Sephardic Rabbi Menasseh ben Israel of Amsterdam. Rembrandt’s engraving stands apart from previous representations of Jews by European artists.7 His detailed etching, with its tight hatch markings, presents a Jewish man who represents himself, a man of physical and mental agency, rather than a social outcast, a type, or a condemned figure. Bearing a calm demeanor, Menasseh looks directly out from the oval frame but does not react or perform a role. The sense of solidity in Menasseh’s comportment differs from Goya’s image of an anonymous Jew, a condemned man who merits pity but lacks individuality. The seventeenth-century Spanish Jews who settled in Amsterdam found a rare climate of acceptance and tolerance that they had not previously experienced. Many conversos (Jews who had been converted), such as Menasseh ben Israel, reclaimed their Jewish identity. Rembrandt’s less prejudicial images emerged from the contemporary Dutch Republic’s interest in the powers of direct observation, an increased interest in peoples of foreign cultures, and a more tolerant attitude toward Jews. The desire for truthfulness over caricature

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also speaks to Rembrandt’s precisionist and artistic skills. Such artistic skills of observation and naturalism masked deeper desires of Protestant Amsterdam to redeem Jews and convert them to Christianity. Contemporary Dutch Calvinists perceived Jews through the lens of Protestant philosemitism, a “historical phenomenon entirely distinct from modern secular conceptions of religious tolerance,”8 art historian Michael Zell has proposed. Yet Rembrandt’s vision anticipated the possibility of Jewish dignity, which would come to characterize early New York Jews. Sephardic Jews fascinated seventeenth-century Dutch Calvinists. Painter Emanuel de Witte evinced this open curiosity by painting three separate

Emanuel de Witte, Interior of the Portuguese Synagogue, Amsterdam, c. 1675, oil on canvas. (Courtesy Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, Holland)

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images of Amsterdam’s Sephardic synagogue, the Esnoga.9 De Witte composed his painting as if a curtain had just lifted on a stage set, with viewers of the service in the foreground, their backs to us. These figures serve as our double, placing us among the Gentile visitors who have come to enjoy the lively, exotic Jews as they worship. Such sites as the Esnoga became a tourists’ destination for travelers to Amsterdam, many of whom sought out all three of the city’s synagogues to visit. Sephardic Jews, proud of their aesthetic sensibilities, welcomed Christian visitors into their world as a way to promote the community. It was centuries before Jews who settled in New York were able to construct a building of equal grandeur.10 While de Witte painted the Esnoga for non-Jewish patrons, this portrait of revered Rabbi Isaac Aboab da Fonseca, the first rabbi in the Americas, was created and paid for by the Jewish community. The art of portrait painting became popular in the Dutch Republic, with merchants, civic groups, and guilds commissioning large-scale, multifigured group portraits, and betrothed couples sitting for marriage portraits. Sephardic Jews in Amsterdam sought

Aeronaut Nagtegaal, Portrait of Isaac Aboab da Fonseca, 1685, engraving and mezzotint on paper. (Courtesy John Carter Brown Library, Brown University, Providence, RI)

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to celebrate and retain images of their revered rabbis, around whom a cult of personality arose. In 1641, Fonseca, shown here with the preferred squared-off beard of Sephardic men, versus the bushy, more “Abrahamic” beards of the Ashkenazim, accepted the request of Jews in Recife, Brazil, to become their rabbi. Born a converso in Portugal, Fonseca was a mystic who sought wisdom from the Kabbalah rather than the Torah. The artist etched this portrait of Fonseca upon his return to Holland. Through consideration of Fonseca’s portrait, his travels, and his biography, we can track the history and influence of Sephardic culture from Portugal to Amsterdam to Brazil and, finally, to New Amsterdam. When Portugal seized control of Recife, Brazil, from the Dutch, the Sephardim who lived there fled into exile. In 1654, a small group of men, women, and children, twenty-three in all, journeyed by boat to yet another new home. These early Jewish refugees began the process of building the foundations of the city that was to become home to the largest number of Jews globally: New York. They were also creating rudiments of two new identities, American Jew and New York Jew. The Dutch governed New Amsterdam and commissioned the map on the following page, showing the city in 1660, a few years after the Recife Jews had arrived. In 1916, John Wolcott Adams and I. N. Phelps Stokes re-created — or what they called “redrafted” — the original 1660 topographical map. They chronicle Lower Manhattan, where the Jewish refugees established their Spanish and Portuguese Cemetery and, soon after, their first synagogue. Designed according to an organic plan in evidence today, the area includes streets and property lines arranged along lines of major topographical features. Streets also align with such man-made elements as wharves, used for trade across the Atlantic. Rather than focus solely on land, the original cartographers, and later Adams and Stokes, rendered the city surrounded by waterways liberally dotted with ships flying masts. By emphasizing the masses of land in relation to the surrounding bodies of water, the map pictorially explains how the growth of New Amsterdam as a port city enabled Jews to arrive, to establish themselves in mercantile trades, and to continue working with businesses in Holland.

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John Wolcott Adams and I. N. Phelps Stokes, Redraft of Castello (1916) Plan, New Amsterdam in 1660. (Maps Collection, the New-York Historical Society, New York)

The New Yorker David Grim was a youngster during the early 1740s, the period captured in his 1813 map. Grim claimed his rendering, completed when he was seventy-six, to be “a perfect and correct recollection” of the city in its and his own youth. Grim drafted the detailed map for his own “amusement, with the intent that it be on a future day presented to the New-York Historical Society.”11 The map measures a bit less than two feet square, and its once vivid colors have long faded. Grim highlighted monuments to imperial, cultural, provincial, and municipal authority, such as Trinity Church and City Hall. Grim’s numbered places “trace the city’s ethnic diversity: he listed not only the Anglican Trinity Church but also two Dutch churches, Presbyterian, French, Baptist, and Lutheran churches, a Quaker meetinghouse, and even a Jewish synagogue,” ranging in style and scale.12 His work offers a graphic representation of the range of religions and cultures in New York, including American Jews.

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Grim also re-created a city “marked by slavery.” Two landmarks represent the site where African slaves were burnt and lynched, a frightening vision to the then four-year-old Grimm, who later asserted, “I have a perfect idea of seeing the Negroes chained to a stake, and there burned to death.”13 His description echoes the anonymous eighteenth-century engraving Burning of Spanish Jews and Others in Portugal (p. 265) and testifies to the prevalence of slavery in New York. The interwoven histories of American Jews and peoples of African descent later became a constant subject in New York’s visual and social histories.

David Grim, A Plan of the City and Environs of New York as They Were in the Years 1742, 1743 or 1744, 1813, pen, ink, and watercolor. (Collection of the New-York Historical Society, New York)

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Left: Portrait of Moses Levy, attributed to Gerardus Duyckinck, c. 1735, oil on canvas. (Courtesy Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR; photography by Dwight Primiano) Right: Portrait of Franks Children with Lamb, attributed to Gerardus Duyckinck, c. 1735, oil on canvas. (Courtesy Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR; photography by Dwight Primiano)

A Dutch merchant-class tradition proliferated in New Amsterdam, with sitting for a portrait an accepted means to mark one’s achievement of wealth and status. England also maintained a rich tradition of portraiture, although reserved for the upper echelons of society. Portraits became the most popular form of pictorial expression in colonial America. Moses Levy and his son-inlaw Jacob Franks were the most prominent Jewish Anglo-German merchants who settled in New York in the early eighteenth century.14 Levy and, in the next painting, his family chose to avoid any identifiable Jewish elements in their portraits. Levy wanted the paintings to establish his class position. Indeed, nothing within the paintings distinguishes Levy or his family from their socially prominent Christian neighbors. Painters worked from pattern books containing prints of stock poses, settings, and props derived from portraits of

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European aristocrats and royalty. The Franks-Levy Family Portrait Collection comprises six individual canvases, the most extensive surviving program of colonial American portraiture.15 In the first painting, Levy gestures out through a window to ships sailing nearby to indicate his merchant status and connections to trade and economic growth. His children in the second portrait are represented to convey their adherence to social mores and appropriate gender roles. The son is shown standing, his arm akimbo so that his elbow overlaps with a window view, or the world beyond a domestic interior. Demurely, his sister sits at his side, sheltered within the home, holding a rose in her uplifted hand and a lamb close to her side. Both the cultivated flower and tamed young animal are symbols frequently included in Protestant and Catholic European paintings to broadcast young girls’ virtues, chastity, and impeccable upbringing. In the portrait of Moses Levy’s young daughter, the delicately held blossoms in her hand indicate her youthful purity. It was widely believed that young girls’ hands were best kept busy with appropriate activities such as making quilts and stitching samplers. The sampler on the following page was made by the hand of young Rebecca Hendricks. Using silk thread on linen, Hendricks stitched Jewish designs and text into a Christian European form, uniting Judaica with Americana on her linen swatch. Young girls and adult women began to embroider fine needlework beginning in the Middle Ages and, by the sixteenth century, learned their stitches, alphabet, and lessons from set pattern books. Each measured stitch was also a lesson in patience and accuracy. Jewish women adopted embroidery in approximately 1650.16 Samplers, the most common embroidered works of art and craft, are a literal sampling of different stitches through which women could display their virtuosity with a needle. They were also instructive of social mores, texts, and Bible verses.17 Texts for colonial-era samplers were usually culled from biblical phrases and aphorisms. Hendricks selected a passage that reflects her dual identity as a colonial girl of breeding and a young Jew. She stitched into cloth verses 1 – 14 of the 78th Psalm, with the phrase “He commanded our fathers that they should make them known to their children; That they might [not] forget the words of God but keep his commandments” (Ps. 78: 5, 7).18 The rise of feminist art history in the 1970s, led by Linda Nochlin, a Jewish New Yorker, stimulated scholars to take seriously embroidery and handicrafts by women as works of art.

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Rebecca Hendricks, Sampler of the 78th Psalm, linen with cotton thread, late eighteenth century. (Courtesy American Jewish Historical Society, New York, NY, and Newton Centre, MA)

Artist Susan C. Dessel’s work recuperates the names and identities of Jewish women who were denied access to the historical record of New York and of their culture. Her sculptural installation Still-Lives acknowledges the six women who were among the twenty-three who sailed from Recife, Brazil, to New Amsterdam in 1654 and who formed the nucleus of Jewish community. Dessel established in her research that colonial society relegated Jewish women and children to a lesser realm than men, an inequality that extended to mortuary rituals and tombstones in Chatham Square. Most epitaphs reduced the whole of a woman’s life and her identity to her relationship to men, either as the “daughter of . . .” or “wife of . . .” While a woman’s first name was not recorded for posterity, her husband’s or her father’s full name was inscribed on

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her stone.19 In addition to combing cemetery records and studying the burial histories of the Chatham Street Cemetery, Dessel pored over letters that these and other colonial Jewish women wrote and received. In these personal writings, the women express concern for their health and that of their families, an awareness of aging and beauty, and worry about decaying and fragile teeth. The women’s worries and words inspired Dessel to carve a toothbrush from a cow’s femur with horsehair bristles and to inscribe each one with a particular woman’s name. Each toothbrush bearing names and birth/death dates symbolizes “the women’s struggles to take care of the home and the family and to hold on to a sense of self while caring for others’ wants and needs.”20 Dessel’s work exemplifies how we can continue to explore and examine historical objects, events, and people and their relevance to our current ideas of what constitutes New York City Jewish culture. In lieu of new headstones, Dessel’s individualized toothbrushes commemorate these women and their daughters by acknowledging their private concerns and desires while using a contemporary artistic form to bring the women into the present day.

Still-Lives: An Exhibit of Works by Susan C. Dessel, 2009, mixed-media installation, cow bone, horsehair, and hide hair glue. (Courtesy of the artist)

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Prayers for Shabbat, Rosh-Hashanah, and Kippur, 1765 – 1766, translated from the Hebrew by Isaac Pinto. (A. S. W. Rosenback Rare Book Collection; courtesy American Jewish Historical Society, New York, NY, and Newton Centre, MA)

When the first Jews arrived in New Amsterdam, the Dutch West India Company ordered Peter Stuyvesant, the last Dutch director of the colony of New Netherland, to permit Jews freedom of religious practice.21 Just over one hundred years later, Jews were openly practicing their religion in New York without restraint. This prayer book was published in 1765 – 1766 (5526). Isaac Pinto recognized that the majority of Jews did not know Hebrew and so translated the traditional text into English. The liturgy and order of the prayers follow Sephardic custom. This prayer book (or siddur) is believed to have first been published anonymously, probably to avoid raising the ire of

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traditionalists, who often looked askance at liturgical translations. Such translations of traditional texts were often designed with women in mind; given women’s limited role in communal Jewish ritual and worship, they were not fluent in Hebrew, if they knew the language at all. Just as immigrants and refugees refashioned themselves upon arrival in New York, so too did the Gomez family’s ornate mustard pot find a new identity and function. It was transformed from a fancy condiment holder in England to a prized Jewish ritual object — an etrog holder. The result is a uniquely American syncretic object that demonstrates the adaptability of the Gomez family.22 A high-style pot, most definitely a luxury item, made of silver, its body rests upon three cabriole feet and is topped off with a hinged lid. The front displays the family’s monogram. Silver was a rare commodity in New York, and Jewish ritual objects available in Europe were not accessible in the New World. For these reasons, the Gomez family transformed their mustard pot into an etrog holder for the festival of Sukkoth. The holder stayed within the family for six generations and symbolizes the early American Jewish experience, a blending of Jewish and European — here, British — traditions, styles, and functions, refashioned on American soil.

Unknown maker, etrog holder of the Louis (?) Gomez family of New York, late eighteenth century, silver and cobalt blue glass; engraved on front, “E/ BG/R/MG,” and on back, “C/ BG.” (Courtesy American Jewish Historical Society, New York, NY, and Newton Centre, MA)

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Myer Myers (1723 – 1795), circumcision clip, c. 1765 – 1776, silver. (Courtesy Jewish Museum, New York / Art Resource, New York)

If we consider the Gomez’s etrog holder as an act of transformation, then this silver circumcision clip made by Myer Myers reflects cultural continuity. “The most ancient sign of Jewish identity within the Jewish community is the circumcision of its males,” writes historian Ellen Smith, “as commanded to Abraham by the Lord in Genesis.”23 Very few ritual objects have survived from the colonial and republican eras, which makes Myers’s circumcision shield quite rare. This shield belonged to the Seixas family circumcision set, one of two extant sets. On the front of the flat shield, Myers stamped his mark. Silver, a prized and prestigious craft material, was also used as currency at the time, and so silversmiths simultaneously played both the roles of banker and artisan. Myers patterned the shield’s curved form on the shape of an inverted lyre, which was the style from at least seventeenth-century Europe. This shield demonstrates that Jewish rituals and European artistic styles survived the transatlantic voyage to the colonies. While Myers is heralded as one of America’s premier Jewish artisans, this moniker actually limits his influence and expertise. A contemporary of Paul Revere, Myers was, in fact, one of America’s foremost silversmiths. In order to stay financially solvent, Myers did not limit his art to Jewish ritual objects.

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Myer Myers was born in 1723 just a block away from congregation Shearith Israel, for which he later made this pair of Torah finials. Given the centrality and sacredness of the Torah in Jewish life, Jews have for centuries used ornaments to honor and beautify the Torah scroll. Myers created three pairs of Torah finials for congregations in Newport, New York (Shearith Israel), and Philadelphia. An inscription on one shaft here reads, “Newport,” which suggests that the sets were mixed up at some point — probably during the Revolutionary period, when sacred objects were transferred from New York and Newport to Philadelphia for safekeeping — since the pair now in Newport also bears this inscription on only one shaft. The artistry of the finials conforms to designs typical of Jewish — specifically Sephardic — ritual objects and originated in sacred texts, making these objects rich with symbolism. The gilded bells’ chime when the Torah is removed from and returned to the ark is meant to mimic gold bells that once adorned the robe of the high priest. Pomegranates, not indigenous to New York, are intended to recall a biblical verse referring to the brass pillars’ capitals with pomegranates that stood on the Temple porch in Jerusalem.24 Myers brought these antique symbols and meanings to colonial American Jews.

Myer Myers (1723 – 1795), two Torah finials, 1765 – 1776, silver. (Photograph by Joanne Savio, in Marc D. Angel, Remnant of Israel: A Portrait of America’s First Jewish Congregation, Shearith Israel [New York, 2004]; courtesy Congregation Shearith Israel, New York)

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Anonymous, The Mill Street Synagogue, undated, print on paper. (Courtesy American Jewish Historical Society, New York, NY, and Newton Centre, MA)

During the Dutch period, Jews were required to build their homes close to each other on one side of New Amsterdam, where a de facto Jewish neighborhood emerged. With the British conquest of the city, Jews were free to move but decided to remain centralized around Mill Street. Congregation Shearith Israel began there.25 This undated print depicts the congregation’s first synagogue, which was built by a Gentile mason, Stanley Holmes. At thirty-five square feet, this unassuming structure, consecrated in 1730, stood on a lot approximately 40 by 102 feet on a narrow street often called “Jews’ Alley.” Shearith Israel was New York’s only Jewish congregation until 1825. Despite its modest size, the synagogue contained within all the necessary accoutrements of a Jewish house of worship, including a balcony with seating for women. In addition, the rear garden allowed for the construction of a booth for the festival of Sukkoth. This small cottagelike structure vastly differs from the more elaborate synagogues built in Amsterdam, and nothing about the exterior distinguishes it as a house of worship. New York’s Jewish community in the 1730s lacked the population, wealth, and social prestige to build a synagogue approaching the grandeur of the Esnoga in Amsterdam. Instead, in terms of architectural style and scale, the members of Shearith Israel had to start anew. Modernization and relocation required a continuous shifting of artistic styles, so that this Dutch-style house became Jewish by its use. The serene setting of the print, complete with white picket fence and abundant greenery, evidences a familiarity with English landscape art.26

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Historian Jonathan Sarna writes, “In colonial America, the presence of a Torah scroll served as a defining symbol of Jewish communal life and culture, of Jewish law and love.”27 This scroll, damaged by British soldiers during the American Revolution, comes down to us as a witness to and survivor of the war. That the soldiers were British implies that the synagogue members were British loyalists. In appreciation, the British did not use the synagogue for military purposes, and the British did severely punish the two soldiers who had damaged the scrolls. That the Torah was not buried once it returned to the congregation, as is the custom when a scroll is desecrated, suggests that it was considered to be of value as a historical object. Someone made a choice to give preference to historical interests over religious obligation.

Torah scroll desecrated by two British soldiers during the Revolution. (Photograph by Joanne Savio, in Marc D. Angel, Remnant of Israel: A Portrait of America’s First Jewish Congregation, Shearith Israel [New York, 2004]; courtesy Congregation Shearith Israel, New York)

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Marriage contract of Rachel Franks and Haym Solomon, 1777. (Courtesy American Jewish Historical Society, New York, NY, and Newton Centre, MA)

This ketubah, or Jewish marriage contract, marked the union of Rachel Franks and Haym Salomon on Sunday, July 6, 1777, in New York, then occupied by the British. The groom, a Polish immigrant and a successful businessman and patriot, later provided critical financial backing to the American Revolution. Franks, daughter of a Jewish tailor, was fifteen years old at the time of the wedding, twenty-one years younger than her husband, but such a difference in age was not particularly uncommon at the time. The wedding ceremony was held at congregation Shearith Israel and officiated by Abraham I. Abrahams.28 Jewish marriage contracts may be illustrated; however, this example is rather simple. The only decoration is an arch, which imitates frontispieces common in eighteenth-century books. Classical Greek and Roman designs greatly influenced all areas of American architecture and design from the nation’s beginnings, and this influence filtered into religious artwork. The neoclassical arch situates this ketubah within this era.29

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Mourning jewelry crafted in the neoclassical style was a popular object in the late eighteenth century and the nineteenth century, “a token and a totem,” writes Erin E. Eisenbarth, which brought the face and memories of a deceased loved one to mind while also functioning as a sign of the owner’s own mortality.30 Only wealthy elites could afford to commission jewelry, proof of their status and attention to style. New York was, and remains, a center of the jewelry industry. This exquisitely rendered, detailed mourning pendent typifies bereavement jewelry common to wealthy Christian families, but it is atypical because this piece was commissioned by Jews.

Unidentified artist, memorial pendant for Solomon and Joseph Hays, 1801, hair, gold, pearls, and pigment. (Yale University Art Gallery, promised bequest of Davida Tenenbaum Deutsch and Alvin Deutsch, L.L.B., 1958, in honor of Kathleen Luhrs)

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Jacob Hays had this double memorial locket crafted for his wife to mark the deaths of their two sons, Solomon and Joseph, in 1798 and 1801, respectively.31 The unknown artisan’s signature skill, displayed here, was his intricate handling of human hair (from the two sons), beads, pearls, and wire. A lock of Solomon’s blond hair forms the weeping willow at left, mirrored by Joseph’s brown hair on the right. The craftsman dissolved the boys’ hair to paint the left and right portions of the scene, which lends “a golden earthen tone to the background.”32 Chopped and cut blond hair fills the landscape below the memorials, and on the reverse, the two brothers’ locks were plaited together, uniting the pair for eternity. Jacob Hays and his wife, along with other wealthy Jews, influenced by their Christian neighbors but without renouncing their Jewishness or abandoning Jewish mourning practices, commissioned bereavement jewelry as a statement of their private grief. The arrival of slaves in New Amsterdam in 1626 predated the arrival of the Jews from Recife and provided forced labor for the colony. During parts of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, New York was home to the largest urban slave population in North America.33 While the story of slavery is often cast as a southern experience, New York was a slave state until 1827. New York Jews did not differ from their Christian neighbors who also owned slaves. Jacob Levy Jr. was a prominent figure among New York Jews, connected by marriage to the Seixas family and a member of congregation Shearith Israel. He was also a slave owner. In 1814, George Roper, a slave, appealed to Levy, his owner, for his freedom, which Levy promised to him in three years’ time. It appears that Levy was influenced by the New York Society for the Promoting of Manumission of Slaves. Perhaps he was inspired by the pending 1827 deadline to the Gradual Emancipation Act of 1790 to hasten the freeing of his other slaves: Mary Mundy, Samuel Spures, Edwin Jackson, Elizabeth Jackson, and James Jackson.34 His manumission records, housed within the Manumission Society’s holdings, suggests his involvement with abolition. Jewish men who acquired slaves, manumitted them, or chose not to own slaves on moral grounds demonstrated that their communal tenure in America had involved them in one of the fundamental issues of our nation’s founding — that of slavery.

Certificate of manumission, New York Society for Manumission, New York, 1817. (Collection of the New-York Historical Society, New York)

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As more Jews came to America and rose in social prestige, they were less able to control how, where, and why they were represented. The greater New York Jews’ ascent into social and political circles, the more public and oftentimes crude was the public attack. Technological innovations enabled mass printing and distribution of newspapers and broadsides. On the facing page is a parody of a public notice about an attack on Mordecai Manuel Noah, “of no. 57 Franklin Street.” Noah, an important early nineteenth-century journalist and playwright, served as editor of the National Advocate and later as publisher of the New York Enquirer and the New York Evening Star. He was U.S. consul to the Kingdom of Tunis, although he was later recalled because of his religion. Noah’s activism as a political journalist and a Jew made him the first American Jew to achieve real prominence. In this parody, a large, hook-nosed Noah is being attacked by the puny Elijah J. Roberts, a non-Jewish former business associate with whom Noah had had a falling out. The two men stand on the steps of the Park Theater, and a small playbill on the wall reads, The Jew 1 act of the hypocrite End with the farce of the liar

This parody suggests that with public success came hostility and blatant anti-Jewish sentiment. The image of the unusually tall, looming Jew reappeared in cartoons throughout the nineteenth century. Such stereotypical images exaggerating the bodies and faces of Jews originated in the Middle Ages and bypass the naturalism of Rembrandt and Goya. These exaggerated representations of Jews illustrate persistent accusations that Jews held disproportionate amounts of power and social influence. Common picturesque cityscapes of early New York paint over many of the harsh realities of urban life: streets filled with sewage and animal carcasses, the filth and disease rampant in overcrowded shacks and substandard housing, and the noises and odors that permeated street life. Diseases such as cholera and tuberculosis spread rapidly under such conditions and were often blamed on the latest immigrant group to arrive in the city. These deadly illnesses hit people of all social classes and standing, although the poor were much more vulnerable than others. To address the spread of the disease, and also to plead for protection, congregation Shearith Israel wrote a prayer specifically to

Satire: Mordecai Manuel Noah, June 20, 1828, woodcut with letter-press broadside. (Courtesy Broadside Collection, Library of Congress, Washington, DC)

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Prayer for cholera. (Courtesy of the American Jewish Historical Society, New York, NY, and Newton Centre, MA)

protect congregants from the illness, showing the adaptability of tradition to new surroundings and new challenges. Even without reading the contents of the Haggadah on the facing page or handling it, consider the many facts that this “quintessential Jewish prayer book for the home” helps to establish. The Haggadah exists because there was a sizable observant Jewish population in 1837 New York.35 The printer wrote out his name, Solomon Jackson, and profession on the cover page, indicating that Jews had expanded into traditionally Gentile businesses and occupations such as printing; it is likely that by necessity their clientele was not limited to

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Jews and that they produced works other than strictly ritual volumes. Notice that Jackson described the Haggadah as the “First American Edition.” By labeling it as the first, Jackson announces with confidence that subsequent editions will be needed in the coming years. There was a market for Jewish ritual texts in New York. Finally, the cover provides insight into the makeup of New York’s Jewish population at the time. The forty-three-leaf book was published both in the original Hebrew and in English, which suggests that New York’s Jews were by and large English speakers. The Haggadah conforms to both the “customs of the German and Spanish Jews,” as is written on the cover. These words acknowledge the different linguistic and cultural strains of American Jews. Although the origins of American Jewry began with Sephardic culture, even before the 1820s, Ashkenazi, or German, Jews outnumbered the Sephardim.

Solomon Jackson, The First American Haggadah, 1837. (Hebraic Section, gift Leiner Temerlin, augmented by a grant from Madison Council, Library of Congress, Washington, DC)

“The Jewish Passover of 1858,” Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, April 10, 1858. (Courtesy Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC)

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Illustrated newspapers such as Frank Leslie’s enabled their readers to be armchair voyeurs and anthropologists examining different cultures and peoples, such as New York Jews, from their parlors without having to interact with actual Jews. Founded in 1855, Frank Leslie’s targeted a rather broad and inclusive “middle” readership, mostly Christians of various denominations who, like the visitors to the Esnoga in Amsterdam painted by Emanuel de Witte, were intrigued by Jews and their culture, which seemed exotic in contrast to their own.36 These images of matzo production on New York’s Chatham Street illustrated a two-page spread titled “The Jewish Passover of 1858.” The figures depicted conform to standard racial stereotypes, and the article describes Jews as having “low stature, shining black eyes, crisp inky hair, hooked noses, stooping shoulders and eager movements.” The author also asserts that despite Jews’ “loose morals” and dishonesty, all are meticulous in their observance of the Passover rituals. Nevertheless, the article concludes with a backhanded compliment that as a whole, the city’s Jews are “quiet, law-abiding good citizens, . . . among the very best of the adopted citizens of America.” It is notable that a mainstream national newspaper would choose to run a relatively long (the paper was sixteen pages in all), heavily illustrated feature about a minority population. One might also wonder how the journalist went about getting his information, as there are numerous errors, such as the suggestion that beef and fish are forbidden foods on Passover. Frank Leslie’s typical readership was not poor immigrant Jews. The length of the 1858 illustrated article simultaneously demonstrates a growing awareness and interest in Jewish neighbors by Gentile New Yorkers while also propagating attitudes perceiving exoticism and the need to interpret the mores of new Americans. Slavery divided New Yorkers. In Abraham Lincoln’s senatorial campaign of 1858, he drew on the biblical metaphor of “a house divided” to describe the national split on slavery and abolition. While congregation B’nai Jeshurun’s Rabbi Morris J. Raphall opposed slavery as an individual, in his famous 1861 sermon, he insists that according to a literal interpretation of Scripture, slavery was sanctioned by the Torah.37 Despite his personal views, the fame of his speech and stance led him to be called “The Pro-Slavery Rabbi.” In response, Rabbi David Einhorn of Baltimore responded directly to Raphall’s sermon with his own antislavery sermon and publication.

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Left: Morris J. Raphall (1798 – 1868), “Bible View of Slavery: A Discourse, Delivered at the Jewish Synagogue, B’nai Jeshurun, New York, on the Day of the National Fast, January 4, 1861” (New York: Rudd and Carleton, 1861). (Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Washington, DC) Right: The Reverend David Einhorn, D.D., “The Bible View of Slavery” (New York: Thalmessinger, Cahn & Benedicks, printers, 1861), translated from the February 1861 issue of the Sinai, a Jewish monthly periodical published in Baltimore. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Washington, DC)

This public altercation between rabbis reveals tensions within the Jewish community, proving that there was more than one way to live as an American Jew. It also shows the degree to which Jews were sufficiently comfortable in America to take on this most decisive of national issues. The advent of photography in 1839 democratized portraiture and selfrepresentation. Daguerreotypes captured the likenesses of a wider variety of Americans in terms of class, occupation, ethnicity, and religion than was possible with painted portraiture, which remained largely confined to social elites. Studio portraits soon became tied to life-cycle events, such as for newly married Jewish couples. These two men, both soldiers during the Civil

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War, possibly brothers, were Jewish New Yorkers who wanted to mark their social status and patriotism. The two men differentiate themselves from each other through each one’s choice of dress, hand gestures, and body position. The man at left stands almost in silhouette, his hands limp by his side, with a large-brimmed, nondescript hat on his head. He has turned away from the camera, allowing us to observe him free from his eyes meeting ours. Since people arranged for daguerreotypes in order to preserve their likeness, this sideways stance, which obscures the man’s identity, is a rather unusual pose. In contrast, the second man, possibly his brother, stands tall and frontal, his hand in his many-buttoned coat, drawing attention to his uniform. He looks directly at us with pride. What might explain the vastly different poses? It has been suggested that the man at left was a pious Jew who chose not to wear his uniform and would not look into the photographer’s camera because of discomfort since the making of a portrait is the making of an image. The man at right, facing proudly forward in his Union uniform, promotes his identity as an American soldier. This photograph depicts this Jewish man as a soldier, with all the brawn and masculinity that accompanies military service. How apt, too, for possible brothers to symbolize the Civil War itself, which pitted brother against brother.38

Possibly brothers, an Orthodox Jew and a U.S. Navy engineer pose in New York City during the Civil War, daguerreotype, New York. (Courtesy Robert Marcus)

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Solomon Carvalho (1815 – 1895), Abraham Lincoln and Diogenes, 1865, oil on canvas, 44 × 34 in. (Courtesy Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA; gift of John J. and Celia Mack, Maurice and Rose Turner, Justin G. and Gertrude Turner)

Born in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1815, artist, explorer, and photographer Solomon Nunes Carvalho was of Spanish-Portuguese Jewish descent. During 1853 – 1854, he traveled as a photographer with the expedition of explorer John C. Fremont through western territories searching for a possible railroad route to the Pacific Ocean. A few years later, by the early 1860s, Carvalho had settled in New York. True to his birthplace, he supported the South during the ensuing Civil War. His skills as a painter gained him entry to New

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York’s prestigious and exclusive National Academy of Design, where he exhibited his oils.39 Despite being a supporter of the Confederacy, he was also simultaneously a great admirer of President Abraham Lincoln, to the point of hero worship. Soon after the assasination of the president in 1865, Carvalho painted this highly unusual posthumous pictorial representation, one of four known allegorical portraits. Carvalho divided his composition so that Lincoln is seated indoors, holding in his hand a scroll that bears words from his second inaugural address. A large swag curtain lifts up at the right, where the Capitol building, symbolizing the Union, is depicted. Behind Lincoln is a statue of President George Washington, draped in a toga as if a Roman leader; no known statue corresponds to this detail. The curtains’ red tassle leads the viewer’s eye outdoors, where Carvhalo has painted the figure of Diogenes, who, having found his honest man, stands in amazement, his lantern broken on the ground. Carvhalo held high ambitions for his work and envisioned it hanging prominently in Washington, D.C. Instead, it was lost and fell into obscurity until 1952. It is because it is the only known painting by a Jew of Lincoln of that time, rather than its dubious artistic merit, which has brought the work back into public view. Spanning almost three hundred years, the objects and images offered for consideration in this visual essay serve as passports to the journey of becoming New York Jews. This journey has not been just temporal. Rather, these objects call our attention to a cultural journey in which Jews and Jewish objects have interacted with other cultures, with new materials with which to make art and ritual objects, and with an unfamiliar urban environment in which to establish their new home. While Jews participated publicly in political debates, such as those concerning slavery and the Civil War, through embrodiery or portraits we can gain entry into the domestic and private world of Jews in America. In James Baldwin’s searing memoir The Fire Next Time, the writer states what might seem obvious: that “African American” was a new identity brought about by slavery, and there is no equal to the African American identity in the world and in the African diaspora. His observations are pertinent to American Jews. The formation of New York Jewish identity was not established with the arrival of Recife refugees in New Amsterdam. Rather, the process of identity formation continues to evolve. Tombstones, topographical maps, and Torah finials all serve to shape and announce what it meant historically to be a Jew in New York, as well as what it means today.

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AJA AJAJ AJH AJHS AJHSQ Asm JM MBOT PAJHS

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American Jewish Archives American Jewish Archives Journal American Jewish History American Jewish Historical Society American Jewish Historical Society Quarterly Asmonean Jewish Messenger Minutes of the Board of Trustees (Shearith Israel) Publications of the American Jewish Historical Society

NOTES TO THE FOREWORD

1. Milton Lehman, “Veterans Pour into New York to Find That Its Hospitality Far Exceeds Their Dreams,” New York Times, 8 July 1945, 51. 2. Ira Rosenwaike, Population History of New York City (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1972), 98, 101. 3. Robert A. M. Stern, Thomas Mellins, and David Fishman, New York 1960: Architecture and Urbanism between the Second World War and the Bicentennial (New York: Monacelli, 1995), 10, 13 – 19, 27 – 28. 4. Moses Rischin, The Promised City: New York’s Jews, 1870 – 1914 (1962; repr., Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977), 294. 5. “Levi Strauss,” Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levi_Strauss (accessed July 13, 2011). 6. Rischin, “Preface to the Paperback Edition,” in The Promised City, vii. 7. Ibid. “City of Ambition” refers to the 1910 photograph by Alfred Stieglitz taken approaching Lower Manhattan from New York Harbor. 8. In this and the following pages, the text draws on the three volumes of City of Promises: A History of the Jews of New York (New York: NYU Press, 2012).

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1. Edwin G. Burrows and Michael Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 (New York, 1999), ch. 1; Reginald Bolton, Indians of Long Ago in the City of New York (New York, 1934). 2. On the expulsion of the Jews from Spain, see Salo W. Baron, A Social and Religious History of the Jews, 2nd rev. ed., 18 vols. (New York, 1952 – 1985), 10:167 – 219; Daniel M. Swetschinski, Reluctant Cosmopolitans: The Portuguese Jews of Seventeenth-Century Amsterdam (London, 2000), 54 – 56.

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3. Baron, Social and Religious History, vol. 10, ch. 44. 4. Ibid., vol. 10, ch. 45; Miriam Bodian, Hebrews of the Portuguese Nation: Conversos and Community in Early Modern Amsterdam (Bloomington, IN, 1997), 6 – 17; Jonathan Israel, European Jewry in the Age of Mercantilism, 1550 – 1750, 2nd ed. (Oxford, UK, 1989), ch. 1. 5. Swetschinski, Reluctant Cosmopolitans, 57 – 64; Bodian, Hebrews of the Portuguese Nation, 25 – 28; Eli Faber, A Time for Planting: The First Migration, 1654 – 1820 (Baltimore, 1992), 7. The merger of Spain and Portugal in 1580 allowed Portuguese conversos to settle in the Spanish American colonies, where they became an important factor in colonial trade. The movement of conversos to the Americas was increased by the Inquisition, which persecuted more than five thousand former Jews in the 1620s and 1630s as Marranos, or secret Jews. By the late sixteenth century, as many as six thousand Portuguese Jewish converts were in Spanish America. Until the nineteenth century, there were far more Jews in the Caribbean than on the North American mainland. Jewish expansion in the Americas is well covered in Paolo Bernardini and Norman Fiering, eds., The Jews and the Expansion of Europe to the West, 1450 – 1800 (New York, 2001). 6. The most definitive account of the birth of the republic is Jonathan Israel, The Dutch Republic: Its Rise, Greatness, and Fall, 1477 – 1806 (Oxford, UK, 1995). 7. Ibid., chs. 11 – 15; Israel, European Jewry in the Age of Mercantilism, 2 – 3, ch. 2. Simon Schama, An Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age (New York, 1987); Burrows and Wallace, Gotham, 14 – 17. 8. Jonathan Israel, “The Jews of Dutch America,” in Bernardini and Fiering, The Jews and the Expansion of Europe to the West, 339; and James Homer Williams, “An Atlantic Perspective on the Jewish Struggle for Rights and Opportunities in Brazil, New Netherland and New York,” in ibid., 374 – 376; Swetschinski, Reluctant Cosmopolitans, 91 – 92, 115 – 130, 167 – 224; Bodian, Hebrews of the Portuguese Nations, chs. 2 – 5. 9. Swetschinski, Reluctant Cosmopolitans, 102 – 130; Israel, “The Jews in Dutch America,” 335 – 339. Leo Hershkowitz, “By Chance or Choice: Jews in New Amsterdam 1654,” AJAJ 57 (2005): 5, 8, notes that Jews constituted 4 percent of major investors in 1656 and increased to 6.5 percent by 1656. 10. Swetschinski, Reluctant Cosmopolitans, 109 – 119; Israel, The Dutch Republic, 325 – 327; Israel, “The Jews of Dutch America,” 340. 11. Swetschinski, Reluctant Cosmopolitans, 114 – 119; Israel, “The Jews of Dutch America,” 341 – 342; Williams, “An Atlantic Perspective,” 375 – 378; Hershkowitz, “By Chance or Choice,” 3. 12. Arnold Wiznitzer, Jews in Colonial Brazil (New York, 1960), esp. ch. 6. 13. Burrows and Wallace, Gotham, ch. 2. For the economic background and motives of the West India Company, see Oliver A. Rink, Holland on the Hudson: An Economic and Social History of Dutch New York (Ithaca, NY, 1986), chs. 1 – 3. Russell Shorto, The Island at the Center of the World (New York, 2004), is the most recent narrative history; see chs. 1 – 2. 14. Burrows and Wallace, Gotham, 29 – 40; Shorto, The Island at the Center of the World, ch. 6.

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15. Burrows and Wallace, Gotham, ch. 4; Henry Kessler and Eugene Rachlis, Peter Stuyvesant and His New York (New York, 1959), ch. 3. 16. David Franco Mendes, quoted in Samuel Oppenheim, “The Early History of the Jews in New York, 1654 – 1664: Some New Matter on the Subject,” PAJHS 18 (1909): 80; Oppenheim’s version is on 37 – 51; Arnold Wiznitzer’s revision is “The Exodus from Brazil and Arrival in New Amsterdam of the Jewish Pilgrim Fathers, 1654,” PAJHS 44 (1954 – 1955): 93 – 94. Jacob R. Marcus, The Colonial American Jew, 1492 – 1776, 3 vols. (Detroit, 1970), 1:210. Hershkowitz believes the ship may or may not have been in Cuba. Hershkowitz, “By Chance or Choice,” 1 – 3. 17. Samuel Oppenheim, “More about Jacob Barsimon, the First Jewish Settler in New York,” PAJHS 29 (1925): 39 – 49. The importance of Barsimon’s mission to the elders of Amsterdam may be found in their decision to send a two-man mission. The second emissary, however, left the ship in London. Hershkowitz, “By Chance or Choice,” 4 (quote). 18. Bernard Fernow, Records of New Amsterdam, quoted in Oppenheim, “The Early History of the Jews,” 9, 67; Leo Hershkowitz, “New Amsterdam’s Twenty-Three Jews — Myth or Reality?,” in Shalom Goldman, ed., Hebrew and the Bible in America: The First Two Centuries (Hanover, NH, 1993), 172; Hershkowitz, “By Chance or Choice,” 1 – 2. 19. Bernard Fernow, Records of New Amsterdam, quoted in Oppenheim, “The Early History of the Jews,” 68 – 69, 71 – 72; Marcus, The Colonial American Jew, 1:217; David de Sola Pool and Tamar de Sola Pool, An Old Faith in a New World: Portrait of Shearith Israel, 1654 – 1954 (New York, 1955), 9 – 12. In a letter from Reverend Megapolensis to the classis in New Amsterdam, the dominie argued that though “it would have been proper that these had been supported by their own nation,” instead the colony had had to support them to the sum of “several hundred guilders.” Oppenheim, “The Early History of the Jews,” 72. It is unclear how much property emigrants were permitted to take from Brazil and to what extent the twenty-three were victims of sharp practices by de la Motthe. Given that the dominie and townspeople had to help and that the twenty-three were forced to appeal to their coreligionists in Amsterdam, it is likely that they did not have the means to pay off their debt, despite protestation to the contrary. The newly arrived merchants did not feel it to be their responsibility. Hershkowitz, “By Chance or Choice,” 2. 20. Hershkowitz, “New Amsterdam’s Twenty-Three Jews,” 172. 21. Marcus, The Colonial American Jew, 1:217; Peter Stuyvesant to Amsterdam Chamber of the West India Company, 22 September 1654, and approval of the burgomasters on 1 March 1655, in Oppenheim “The Early History of the Jews,” 4 – 5; Hershkowitz, “By Chance or Choice,” 2 – 3; Frederic Cople Jaher, A Scapegoat in the Wilderness: The Origins and Rise of Anti-Semitism in America (Cambridge, MA, 1994), 89 – 91. When head of the Dutch colony in Curaçao, Stuyvesant attempted to prevent the entry of Jewish immigrants. On continuing prejudice toward Jews, see Marcus, The Colonial American Jew, 1:228 – 230. 22. “Request of the Parnassim of Amsterdam to the Mayors of Amsterdam in Behalf of the Jews of New Netherland,” in I. S. Emmanuel, “New Light on Early American Jewry,” AJAJ 7 (1955): 17, 53 – 54.

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23. “Petition of Jewish Merchants of Amsterdam to Directors of the West India Company,” in Oppenheim, “The Early History of the Jews,” 9 – 11; Marcus, The Colonial American Jew, 1:218 – 219. 24. Reply of the directors of the West India Company to Peter Stuyvesant, 26 April 1655, in Morris Schappes, ed., A Documentary History of the Jews of the United States, 1654 – 1875 (New York, 1971), 4 – 5; Oppenheim, “The Early History of the Jews,” 8; Hershkowitz, “New Amsterdam’s Twenty-Three Jews,” 172 – 179; Williams, “An Atlantic Perspective,” 378. 25. Marcus, The Colonial American Jew, 1:236, 239 – 40; Oppenheim, “More about Jacob Barsimon,” 47; Hershkowitz, “New Amsterdam’s Twenty-Three Jews,” 176. 26. Classis of Amsterdam to Consistory in New Netherland, 26 May 1656; Rev. John Megapolensis to Classis of Amsterdam, 18 March 1665; and Peter Stuyvesant to board of directors of the West India Company, 26 May 1655 and 6 June 1656, all in Oppenheim, “The Early History of the Jews,” 20, 21, 72 – 73; William Pencak, Jews and Gentiles in Early America, 1654 – 1800 (Ann Arbor, MI, 2005), 29 – 32; Paul Finkelman, “ ‘A Land That Needs People for Its Increase’: How the Jews Won the Right to Remain in New Netherland,” in Pamela S. Nadell, Jonathan D. Sarna, and Lance J. Sussman, eds., New Essays in American Jewish History (Cincinnati, 2010), 19 – 44. 27. Letter from directors of the West India Company, 13 March 1656, in Oppenheim, “The Early History of the Jews,” 21; Peter Stuyvesant to directors of the West India Company, 14 June 1656, in Schappes, A Documentary History, 11-12. 28. Emmanuel, “New Light on Early American Jewry,” 56; Oppenheim, “The Early History of the Jews,” 7, 19, 24, 32, 61; Marcus, The Colonial American Jew, 1:233; Jonathan D. Sarna, “Colonial Judaism,” in David Barquist, Myer Myers: Jewish Silversmith in Colonial New York (New Haven, CT, 2001), 12; “Naphtali Phillips,” PAJHS 21 (1913): 183 – 184; David de Sola Pool, Portraits Etched in Stone: Early Jewish Settlers, 1682 – 1831 (New York, 1952), 7 – 8. 29. Marcus, The Colonial American Jew, 3:1226, 1418n. 3. 30. Resolution to exempt Jews from military service, 28 August 1665; and petition of Jacob Barsimon and Asser Levy regarding guard duty, 5 November 1655, in Oppenheim, “The Early History of the Jews,” 24 – 25. Marcus sees the assessments not as discrimination but as signs that the wealthy Jews had brought considerable capital to New Netherland (The Colonial American Jew, 1:238). 31. Petition of Abraham de Lucena, Salvador D’Andrada, and Jacob Cohen, regarding right to trade, 29 November 1655; petition of Salvador D’Andrada to purchase home, 17 December 1655; response to petition, 15 January 1656, all in Oppenheim, “The Early History of the Jews,” 24, 25, 27, 29, 31 – 32, and “Naphtali Phillips,” 177, 179, 182. 32. Petition to director general and council of New Netherland regarding the right to trade and purchase real estate, by Abraham de Lucena, Jacob Cohen Henriques, Salvador D’Andrada, Joseph D’Acosta, and David Ferera, with response by P. Stuyvesant, Nicasius DeSille, and LaMontagne, 14 March 1656; and West India Company to director of New Netherland, 14 June 1656, all in Oppenheim, “The Early History of the Jews,” 31 – 34; Marcus, The Colonial American Jew, 1:226.

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33. Petition of Asser Levy to be admitted to burgher standing, 11 April 1656; and petition regarding denial of Asser Levy’s petition by Salvador D’Andrada, Jacob Cohen Henriques, Abraham DeLucena, and Joseph D’Acosta, 20 April 1657, both in Oppenheim, “The Early History of the Jews,” 35 – 36; Max J. Kohler, “Civil Status of the Jews in Colonial New York,” PAJHS 6 (1898): 88 – 89; Hershkowitz, “Amsterdam’s Twenty-Three Jews,” 178 – 179. 34. Marcus, The Colonial American Jew, 1:234 – 240; Stephen Fortune, Merchants and Jews: The Struggle for British West Indian Commerce, 1650 – 1750 (Gainesville, FL, 1984), 141. 35. Fortune, Merchants and Jews, 230, 234 – 237; Hershkowitz, “New Amsterdam’s Twenty-Three Jews,” 176 – 178; Max J. Kohler, “Jewish Activity in American Colonial Commerce,” PAJHS 10 (1902): 59; Max J. Kohler, “Phases of Jewish Life in New York before 1800,” PAJHS 2 (1894): 80; Oppenheim, “The Early History of the Jews,” 16, 52 – 57, 81 – 86; Faber, A Time for Planting, 33. 36. Marcus, The Colonial American Jew, 1:239. 37. Leo Hershkowitz, “Asser Levy and the Inventories of Early New York Jews, “ AJH 80 (1990): 21 – 39; Hershkowitz, “New Amsterdam’s Twenty-Three Jews,” 171 – 175, 179 – 181; Malcolm H. Stern, “Asser Levy — A New Look at Our Jewish Founding Father,” AJAJ 26 (1974): 66 – 70; Simon W. Rosendale, “An Early Ownership of Real Estate in Albany New York, by a Jewish Trader,” PAJHS 3 (1895): 61 – 71; Leon Huhner, “Asser Levy: A Noted Jewish Burgher of New Amsterdam” PAJHS 8 (1900): 9 – 22. 38. Noah L. Gelfand, “A Transatlantic Approach to Understanding the Formation of Jewish Community in New Netherland and New York,” New York History 89 (2008): 375 – 396. Gelfand notes that Levy, an Ashkenazi not involved in Sephardic Atlantic trade patterns, more easily adapted to the patterns of New Amsterdam. Samuel Oppenheim argued that the promise of the new colony of Western Guiana drew the Jewish inhabitants from the city. This is unlikely. Oppenheim, “The Early History of the Jews,” 21; Emmanuel, “New Light on Early American Jewry,” 17, 56. The Torah was sent to the Jewish community of Amersfort, near Utrecht. Marcus, The Colonial American Jew, 1:244 – 245.

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NOTES TO CHAPTER 2

1. Jacob R. Marcus, The Colonial American Jew, 1492 – 1776, 3 vols. (Detroit, 1970), 1:258 – 275, 282 – 290; Jonathan D. Sarna, “Port Jews in the Atlantic: Further Thoughts,” Jewish History 20 (2006): 213 – 216. 2. Edwin Burrows and Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 (New York, 1999), 78 – 79; Max J. Kohler, “The Civil Status of the Jew in Colonial New York,” PAJHS 6 (1898): 89, 93, 94. 3. Kohler, “The Civil Status of the Jew,” 96; Simon W. Rosendale, “An Act Allowing Naturalization of Jews in the Colonies,” PAJHS 1 (1893): 93 – 98; Menasseh Vaxer, “Naturalization Roll of Jews of New York (1740 – 1759),” PAJHS 37 (1947): 369 – 389; Leo Hershkowitz, “Some Aspects of the New York Merchant Jewish Community, 1654 – 1820,” AJHSQ 66 (1976 – 1977): 13 – 18; Eli Faber, A Time for Planting: The First Migration, 1654 – 1820 (Baltimore, 1992), 101; Holly Snyder, “Rights and Redemption: The Negotiation of Jewish Status in British Atlantic Port Towns, 1740 – 1831,” Jewish History 20 (2006): 152 – 155.

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4. Three of the most important works on New York’s colonial history are Michael Kammen, Colonial New York: A History (New York, 1975); Patricia U. Bonomi, New York: A Factious People (New York, 1971); and Alan Tully: Forming American Politics: Ideals, Interests, and Institutions in Colonial New York and Pennsylvania (Baltimore, 1994). 5. The population of the colony of New York, only 9,000 at the British conquest in 1664, grew to about 20,000 in 1700, 75,000 in 1750, and to 160,000 by 1770. Kammen, Colonial New York, 91, 145, 179, 279; James T. Gilchrist, ed., The Growth of the Seaport Cities, 1790 – 1825 (Charlottesville, VA, 1967), 28. Burrows and Wallace, Gotham, 87; Faber, A Time for Planting, 34; Hershkowitz, “Some Aspects of the New York Merchant Jewish Community,” 10 – 11, 19 – 20; Max J. Kohler, “Phases of Jewish Life in New York before 1800,” PAJHS 3 (1895): 85. 6. Todd M. Endelman, The Jews of Britain, 1656 to 2000 (Berkeley, CA, 2002), chs. 1 – 3, esp. 23 – 24, 31 – 38, 41; Todd M. Endelman, The Jews of Georgian England, 1714 – 1830: Tradition and Change in a Liberal Society (Philadelphia, 1979); Todd M. Endelman, Radical Assimilation in English Jewish History, 1656 – 1945 (Bloomington, IN, 1990), chs. 1 – 2. 7. Faber, A Time for Planting, 28. 8. Leo Hershkowitz, “Original Inventories of Early New York Jews (1682 – 1763),” AJH 88 (2002): 297 – 315, 316 – 322; William Pencak, Jews and Gentiles in Early America, 1654 – 1800 (Ann Arbor, MI, 2005), 34; Samuel Oppenheim, “Benjamin Franks, Merchant, and Captain Kidd, Pirate,” PAJHS 31 (1928): 229 – 235. Other early Sephardic merchants include the synagogue’s second hazan, Abraham de Lucena, who requested special exemptions from the governor as a “Minister of the Jewish Nation” and died with British debtors owing him £800; Isaac Rodriguez Marques, who had sixteen separate imports from the islands to New York in 1704 – 1705 alone; and Isaac Pinheiro, who also lived in Madrid, Amsterdam, London, and Martinique and Nevis. In the case of Lucena, it is clear that mercantile duties were as important, measured by time and effort, as being the spiritual leader of the congregation. David de Sola Pool, Portraits Etched in Stone: Early Jewish Settlers, 1682 – 1831 (New York, 1952), 456 – 459. 9. Pool, Portraits Etched in Stone, 218 – 223; Max J. Kohler, “Jewish Activity in American Colonial Commerce,” PAJHS 10 (1902): 60; Kohler, “Phases of Jewish Life before 1800,” 79 – 80. 10. Pool, Portraits Etched in Stone, 197 – 201; for other early commercial enterprises, see Kohler, “Jewish Activity in American Colonial Commerce,” 58 – 66. 11. Pool, Portraits Etched in Stone, 461; Michael Ben-Jacob, “Nathan Simson: A Biographical Sketch of a Colonial Jewish Merchant,” AJAJ 51 (1990): 16 – 17. 12. Leon Huhner, “Daniel Gomez, a Pioneer Merchant of Early New York,” PAJHS 41 (1951 – 1952): 107, 109, 112. On the myriad partnerships of Jewish merchants, see Marcus, The Colonial American Jew, 2:592 – 597. 13. Huhner, “Daniel Gomez,” 113 – 123. 14. Hershkowitz, “Aspects of the New York Merchant Jewish Community,” 28; Faber, A Time for Planting, 25. On marital interrelations, see Marcus, The Colonial American Jew, 2:600 – 603. 15. Letter of Jacob Franks to Naphtali Franks, November 22, 1743, in Leo Hershkowitz

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and Isidore Meyer, eds., The Lee Max Friedman Collection of American Jewish Correspondence: Letters of the Franks Family (Waltham, MA, 1968), 123 – 128. Also on business, see letter of David Franks to Naphtali Franks, 14 March 1743, in ibid., 112 – 113. 16. Jacob R. Marcus, ed., American Jewry: Documents, Eighteenth Century (Cincinnati, 1959), 320 – 321, 374 – 380; Marcus, The Colonial American Jew, 2:584, 712 – 718; Jacob R. Marcus, Early American Jewry (Philadelphia, 1951), 65. Franks become embroiled in collecting payment after charges of fraud were leveled at Oglethorpe. It was not only the Franks and Gomez families who benefited from imperial warfare. An ad from a lesser merchant in the New-York Mercury during the French and Indian War indicates the depth to which many Jewish merchants penetrated British commercial military supply: “To be sold, by Hayman Levy, in Bayard Street, Camp Equipages of all Sorts, Best Soldiers English Shoes, White and Brown thread Soldiers Hose, Best Soldiers Shirts, Regimental Shoes, Knee and Stock Buckles, Hair Cockades, Scarlet Broad Cloths, [and other items that made up the] pomp and circumstances of glorious war.” Kohler, “Phases of Jewish Life before 1800,” 85. For other mercantile activities, see Marcus, American Jewry, ch. 4; and Marcus, Early American Jewry, chs. 3 – 4. Franks also outfitted a number of privateers. 17. For Franks’s residence, see Hershkowitz and Meyer, Letters of the Franks Family, 118n. 6. All the letters refer to political, financial, and international issues as well as family matters. Pencak, Jews and Gentiles, 41; Edith Gelles, ed., The Letters of Abigaill Levy Franks, 1733 – 1748 (New Haven, CT, 2004), xxv. 18. Ben-Jacob, “Nathan Simson,” 23 – 26; Noah L. Gelfand, “A Transatlantic Approach to Understanding the Formation of Jewish Community in New Netherland and New York,” New York History 89 (2008): 395 – 396. 19. Ben-Jacob, “Nathan Simson,” 21 – 26; Wilm Kloster, “The Jews in Suriname and Curaçao,” in Paolo Bernardini and Norman Fiering, eds., The Jews and the Expansion of Europe to the West, 1450 – 1800 (New York, 2001), 353 – 368. Marcus, The Colonial American Jew, 2:614 – 652, 769 – 779, gives a detailed analysis of the business world of the eighteenthcentury Jewish merchant. 20. Marcus, The Colonial American Jew, 2:653 – 696. 21. Hershkowitz, “Some Aspects of the Merchant Community,” 10 – 11, 19 – 20, 25 – 27; Marcus, Colonial American Jew, 2:636; New-York Gazette, 26 October 1761. 22. Hershkowitz, “Some Aspects of the Merchant Community,” 22 – 24; Marcus, The Colonial American Jew, 2:542 – 545, 779 – 783. For an example in which merchants used a noted attorney, James Alexander, to defend a prize, see Lee M. Friedman, “A Great Colonial Case and a Great Colonial Lawyer,” PAJHS 42 (1952 – 1953): 71 – 81. 23. David Barquist, Myer Myers: Jewish Silversmith in Colonial New York (New Haven, CT, 2001), 25 – 34, 42 – 44; Leo Hershkowitz, “Powdered Tin and Rose Petals: Myer Myers, Goldsmith and Peter Middleton, Physician,” AJH 71 (1982): 462 – 467; Marcus, The Colonial American Jew, 2:539. Myers’s first wife died after twelve years of marriage and four children. Two years later, he married her cousin Joyce Mears, who gave birth to eight more children and lived until 1824. 24. Barquist, Myer Myers, 35 – 40, 47 – 62.

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25. Ibid., 45 – 47. 26. Ibid., 61, 152 – 162; Guido Schoenberger, “The Ritual Silver Made by Myer Myers,” PAJHS 43 (1953): 1 – 12. 27. Marcus, The Colonial American Jew, 2:535 – 540; Rivington’s New-York Gazetteer, 24 June 1773; New-York Gazette and the Weekly Mercury, 24 December 1770; New-York Mercury, 9 October 1758, 15 November 1762; New-York Gazette, 14 November 1748, all in Oppenheim Collection, AJHS. 28. Pool and Pool, An Old Faith, 473; Rivington’s New-York Gazetteer, 19 January 1775; Marcus, The Colonial American Jew, 2:545 – 547; Leon Huhner, “Jews in the Legal and Medical Professions Prior to 1800,” PAJHS 22 (1914): 116; New-York Gazette, 7 September 1761; “Manuscripts: Items Relating to Congregation Shearith Israel, New York,” PAJHS 27 (1920): 19. 29. Marcus, American Jewry, 14 – 17, 100; Marcus, The Colonial American Jew, 2:820 – 821, 826 – 828; “Advertisement, 1729,” in Morris Schappes, ed., A Documentary History of the Jews of the United States, 1654 – 1875 (New York, 1971), 20 – 22. Hershkowitz states that Jews ranked just above the Gentile population in tax assessments. Hershkowitz, “Aspects of the Merchant Community,” 10. 30. “Unwritten History: Reminiscences of N. Taylor Phillips,” AJAJ 6 (1954): 82. 31. Burrows and Wallace, Gotham, 126 – 129, 375; Graham Russell Hodges, Root and Branch: African Americans in New York and East Jersey, 1613 – 1863 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1999), 272 – 275. 32. Eli Faber, Jews, Slaves, and the Slave Trade: Setting the Record Straight (New York, 1999), 132; Leo Hershkowitz, ed., Wills of Early New York Jews, 1704 – 1799 (New York, 1967), 15, 21 – 23, 135, 129; Hershkowitz, “Powdered Tin and Rose Petals,” 463. 33. Hershkowitz, Wills of Early New York Jews, 60, 136; Pool, Portraits Etched in Stone, 477. 34. New York represented a minor part of the Atlantic slave trade, which was centered in the Caribbean. Faber, Jews, Slaves, and the Slave Trade, 132 – 135; Leo Hershkowitz, “Anatomy of a Slave Voyage, New York, 1721,” de Halve Maen 76 (2003): 45 – 51; Ben-Jacob, “Nathan Simson,” 26 – 30; Hodges, Root and Branch, 98; James G. Lydon, “New York and the Slave Trade, 1700 – 1714,” William and Mary Quarterly 35 (1978): 375 – 394; Hershkowitz, Wills of Early New York Jews, 79n. 1, 158n. 1; Pool, Portraits Etched in Stone, 468 – 469; David Brian Davis, “The Slave Trade and the Jews,” New York Review of Books, 22 December 1994. 35. Burrows and Wallace, Gotham, 98; Jill Lepore, New York Burning: Liberty, Slavery, and Conspiracy in Eighteenth-Century Manhattan (New York, 2005), 166, 226, 189, 226, 250, 252, 254, 258; Hodges, Root and Branch, 91 – 98; “Miscellaneous Items Relating to Jews in New York,” PAJHS 27 (1920): 380 – 382. Cohen died shortly after the trial, at which time he willed Hereford to his wife. He was a prosperous merchant and shopkeeper, a parnas of the synagogue, and a major figure in the Jewish community. Hershkowitz, Wills of Early New York Jews, 65. Testimony at the 1741 trial is from Daniel Horsmanden, The New York Conspiracy; or, A Negro Plot, with the Journal of the Proceedings against the Conspirators, at New York, in the Years 1741 – 42, 4th ed. (New York, 1810).

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1. David de Sola Pool, Portraits Etched in Stone: Early Jewish Settlers, 1682 – 1831 (New York, 1952), 195 – 197. 2. Leo Hershkowitz, “The Mill Street Synagogue Reconsidered,” AJHSQ 53 (1963 – 1964): 404 – 414; “Unwritten History: Reminiscences of N. Taylor Phillips,” AJAJ 6 (1954): 78; Albion Morris Dyer, “Site of the First Synagogue of the Congregation Shearith Israel, of New York,” PAJHS 8 (1900): 25; Jacob R. Marcus, “The Oldest Known Synagogue Record Book in North America,” in Studies in American Jewish History (Cincinnati, 1969), 44 – 53. 3. David de Sola Pool and Tamar de Sola Pool, An Old Faith in the New World: Portrait of Shearith Israel, 1654 – 1954 (New York, 1955), 40 – 45; Jacob R. Marcus, The Colonial American Jew, 1492 – 1776, 3 vols. (Detroit, 1970), 2:890 – 1892; Doris Groshen Daniels, “Colonial Jewry: Religion, Domestic and Social Relations,” AJHSQ 66 (1976 – 1977): 381 – 382. There was of course, at this point, no rabbi (“rabby”). Nor would there be one for a hundred years. The sand that covered the floor, similar to the synagogue in Barbados, may have symbolized the sand the Israelites crossed on their journey from Egypt to Palestine, or it may have been a remnant from the medieval era, when sand covered unheated public buildings for hygiene. Marcus, The Colonial American Jew, 2:890 – 892. Miscellaneous letters on fund raising can be found in “Manuscripts: Items Relating to Congregation Shearith Israel, New York,” PAJHS 27 (1920): 1 – 5. This includes a request from the hazan in Curaçao that “the asquenazum or Germans” who were “more in number” than the Sephardim in New York not be permitted “any More Votes nor Authority than they have had hitherto.” The congregation ignored this request. 4. Jonathan D. Sarna, American Judaism: A History (New Haven, CT, 2004), 12 – 14; Jonathan D. Sarna, “Colonial Judaism,” in David Barquist, Myer Myers: Jewish Silversmith in Colonial New York (New Haven, CT, 2001), 12 – 16; Sheldon Godfrey and Judith Godfrey, “The King vs. Gomez et al.: Opening the Prosecutor’s File over 200 Years Later,” American Jewish History 77 (1991): 401 – 406; Leo Hershkowitz, ed., Wills of Early New York Jews, 1704 – 1799 (New York, 1967), xxix, 52, 67, 70, 80, 88, 125, 130, 140; Pool and Pool, An Old Faith, 92. 5. “The Earliest Extant Minutes of the Spanish and Portuguese Congregation Shearith Israel in New York, 1728 – 1786,” PAJHS 21 (1913): 4; Pool and Pool, An Old Faith, 259, 286 – 287; Jacob R. Marcus, The Handsome Young Priest in a Black Gown: The Personal World of Gershom Seixas (Cincinnati, 1970), 4. Deference implies voluntary deferral to the more learned, more educated, and more wealthy in the community. 6. Eli Faber, A Time for Planting: The First Migration, 1654 – 1820 (Baltimore, 1992), 55 – 56; Pool and Pool, An Old Faith, 264 – 267, 502; Marcus, The Colonial American Jew, 2:906 – 911. 7. Faber, A Time for Planting, 58 – 66; “The Earliest Extant Minutes,” 3 (15 September 1728), 53 (9 September 1746), 62 – 63 (22 October 1748). 8. “The Earliest Extant Minutes,” 75 (7 December 1755); see also 39 (3 March 1736). A letter seeking a “Single: modest: Sober” person as teacher was sent to Jamaica, noting

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that the salary was forty pounds in addition to the tuition from parents who could pay. “Manuscripts: Items Relating to Congregation Shearith Israel,” 17 – 18 (15 December 1760); Faber, A Time for Planting, 71; Leo Hershkowitz and Isidore S. Meyer, The Lee Max Friedman Collection of American Jewish Correspondence: Letters of the Franks Family, 1733 – 1748 (Waltham, MA, 1968), 4n. 9 (7 May 1733), 13nn. 8 – 9 (7 October 1733); Edith Gelles, ed., The Letters of Abigaill Levy Franks, 1733 – 1748 (New Haven, CT, 2004), xxi – xxii; Pool and Pool, An Old Faith, 211 – 214. Jacob Kabakoff, “The Use of Hebrew by American Jews during the Colonial Period,” in Shalom Goldman, ed., Hebrew and the Bible in America: The First Two Centuries (Hanover, NH, 1993), 19; Marcus, The Colonial American Jew, vol. 3, ch. 68. 9. “The Earliest Extant Minutes,” 3 (27 May 1729), 29 (11 September 1730), 74 (18 September 1755), 76 (7 July 1756), 84 (30 January 1760); “From the 2nd Volume of Minute Books of the Congn: Shearith Israel in New York,” PAJHS 21 (1913): 92 (17 November 1765); Faber, A Time for Planting, 71 – 72; Pool and Pool, An Old Faith, 341 – 347. 10. “Unwritten History,” 96 – 97; Daniels, “Colonial Jewry,” 399 – 400; Frank Zimmerman, “A Letter and Memorandum on Ritual Circumcision, 1772,” PAJHS 42 (1952 – 1953): 71 – 80. 11. Hershkowitz and Meyer, Letters of the Franks Family, 87 (21 June 1741); Peter Kalm, Travels in North America: The English Version of 1790, 2 vols. (New York, 1964), 1:631; William Pencak, Jews and Gentiles in Early America, 1654 – 1800 (Ann Arbor, MI, 2005), 52. 12. “The Earliest Extant Minutes,” 79 – 80 (28 March 1758), 70 – 72 (13 September 1752); see also 68 – 70 (October 1747, 10 April 1752); “Second Volume of Minute Book,” 32 – 33 (23, 24 December 1771). Throughout the minutes, there is discussion of the appointment and pay of the shochet and bodeck. Hazan of Curaçao to Shearith Israel, 1753, in “Manuscripts: Items Relating to Congregation Shearith Israel,” 6 – 7. See also letter from Kingston, Jamaica, 1758, expressing concern over kashrut because Shearith Israel was temporarily without a hazan. Ibid., 10 – 11. 13. “The Earliest Extant Minutes,” 77 – 78 (14 September 1757), 78 – 79 (28 March 1758); Daniels, “Colonial Jewry,” 400. 14. Kalm, Travels in North America, 1:130; Hershkowitz and Meyer, Letters of the Franks Family, 7 – 8 (9 July 1733). 15. “The Earliest Extant Minutes,” 39 (7 August 1737), 55 – 56 (16 April 1747); Marcus, The Colonial American Jew, 2:912 – 916. In accord with the hierarchical structure of society, dues at Shearith Israel were assessed according to wealth and standing, as were seats. (Unlike its sister London synagogue, Bevis Marks, it did not have a sales tax, and its annual income in 1732 was £180. compared to the London synagogue’s income of £6,742.) 16. “The Earliest Extant Minutes,” 68 – 69 (10 April 1752). 17. Ibid., 2 (15 September 1728), 16 (27 September 1731). 18. Ibid., 53 – 54 (1 December 1746); Pencak, Jews and Gentiles, 48, 53. 19. “The Earliest Extant Minutes,” 59 (9 October 1747), 61 – 62 (22 October 1748); Hershkowitz, Wills of Early New York Jews, 118. 20. “The Earliest Extant Minutes,” 74 (10 October 1755); Godfrey and Godfrey, “The King vs. Gomez et al.,” 40.

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21. Godfrey and Godfrey, “The King vs. Gomez et al.,” 41 – 42; Holly Snyder, “Queens of the Household: The Jewish Women of British America, 1700 – 1800,” in Pamela S. Nadell and Jonathan D. Sarna, eds., Women and American Judaism: Historical Perspectives (Hanover, NH, 2001), 17. 22. “The Earliest Extant Minutes,” 84 (30 January 1760). 23. Ibid., 83 – 84 (24 June 1760); “From the 2nd Volume of Minute Books,” 83, 84, 87 (17 July 1760, 6 and 10 August 1760, 11 September 1763); Pencak, Jews and Gentiles, 54 – 55; Snyder, “Queens of the Household,” 116 – 117. 24. Hershkowitz, Wills of Early New York Jews, 1, 15, 33, 65; Pool and Pool, An Old Faith, 161; Marcus, The Colonial American Jew, 2:949 – 950. That the original Chatham Street cemetery was named “Beth Haim” could possibly indicate that some sense of resurrection lived in 1728, when the new cemetery was bought. For details on the cemetery, see Pool, Portraits Etched in Stone, chs. 1 – 8. 25. Gomez quote is from Holly Snyder, “ ‘Under the Shado of Your Wings’: Religiosity in the Mental World of an Eighteenth-Century Jewish Merchant,” Early American Studies 8 (2010): 584; Marcus, The Colonial American Jew, 2:947; Hershkowitz, Wills of Early New York Jews, 75; Jacob R. Marcus, ed., American Jewry: Documents, Eighteenth Century (Cincinnati, 1959), 14 – 17. 26. “Manuscripts: Items Relating to Congregation Shearith Israel,” 11 – 15; Herman P. Salomon, “Joseph Jeshurun Pinto (1729 – 1782): A Dutch Hazan in Colonial New York,” Studia Rosenthalia (1979): 18 – 20. Shortly after Pinto arrived, he was evidently asked to resign over a transgression not mentioned in the minutes. He wrote the elders, “I searched my inmost soul and examined my actions from my earliest childhood,” studied biblical and Talmudic texts, fasted, and sought repentance. Pleading that he had crossed “the dangerous seas,” he now feared becoming a “Wanderer and fugitive upon the earth.” He offered to carry out his duties until Rosh Hashanah (two months): “without any pay to see whether I do my duty.” The congregation accepted the offer, and Pinto became Shearith Israel’s first learned religious leader. The congregation’s decision shows an increased appreciation for religious sophistication. 27. Salomon, “Joseph Jeshurun Pinto,” 20 – 28; Pool and Pool, An Old Faith, 88. 28. Joseph Jeshurun Pinto, The Form of Prayer Which Was Performed at the Jews Synagogue in the City of New-York on Thursday October 23, 1760 (New York, 1760) 1, 4. 29. Prayers for Shabbath, Rosh-Hashanah and Kippur  .  .  .  , trans. Isaac Pinto (New York, 1766), iii – iv, 1 – 29. The “Barchu” is the opening invocation; the “Ahavat Olam,” is a prayer of God’s grace and love; the “Shema,” central to Jewish prayer, is an affirmation of the oneness of the deity; the “Kedusha” is a statement of the holiness of God and the Sabbath; the “Kaddish” is a prayer of adoration that is part of the service and also said in remembrance of those who have died. A portion of the Torah, the first five books of the Old Testament, is read during each service, accompanied by traditional sung prayers. “Musaph” refers to an additional service performed on the Sabbath and holidays. The Hebrew literacy of New York’s Jews is a subject of dispute. There is agreement that many knew enough to follow prayers, but whether there was any true ability to comprehend except by a few is open to question. Marcus details a few colonial New Yorkers with collections

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of Hebrew books and discusses Isaac Pinto’s work. Pinto was eulogized at his death by a New York newspaper as “an historian and philosopher.” Marcus, The Colonial American Jew, 2:568 – 569, 968 – 970, 973; 3:1075 – 1077. See also Pool, Portraits Etched in Stone, 260 – 262; Nathan M. Kaganoff, “Hebrew and Liturgical Exercises in the Colonial Period,” in Goldman, Hebrew and the Bible in America, 184 – 190; and Jacob Kabakoff, “The Use of Hebrew,” in ibid., 191 – 197. 30. Kalm, Travels in North America, 1:130; Lee M. Friedman, “Dr. Hamilton Visits Shearith Israel,” AJHSQ 40 (1950): 183 – 184. 31. Hershkowitz and Meyer, Letters of the Franks Family, 66 (17 October 1739), 76 (6 July 1740). 32. Ibid., 57 – 58 (5 June 1737). 33. Ibid., 78 (31 August 1740), 9 (9 July 1733), 87 (21 June 1741); Leo Hershkowitz, “Another Abigaill Franks Letter and a Genealogical Note,” AJHSQ 59 (1969 – 1970): 224. 34. Hershkowitz and Meyer, Letters of the Franks Family, xv – xvi, 139, 141 – 142 (30 October 1748), 60, 62 (20 November 1738), 5 (7 May 1733), 15 (16 October 1733); Gelles, The Letters of Abigaill Levy Franks, xxxi. 35. Hershkowitz and Meyer, Letters of the Franks Family, 118n. 5, 17 – 20 (16 December 1733), 23 – 27 (9 June 1734), 4 (7 May 1733); Marcus, The Colonial American Jew, 3:1150 – 1151. One political event Abigaill hardly comments on is the Negro Plot of 1741, though a slave of her husband’s was implicated. She notes the “somewath Mellancholly” news, but her letters show no fear. Hershkowitz and Meyer, Letters of the Franks Family, 87 – 88 (21 June 1741). The court party refers to English politics and the party favoring monarchical power, in this case, the governor’s authority; the country party favored an enhanced role of Parliament, in the case of the colony, the Assembly. 36. Hershkowitz and Meyer, Letters of the Franks Family, 60 (5 June 1737), 66 – 67 (17 October 1739), 76 (3 August 1740), 100 (20 December 1741). 37. Ibid., 76 (3 August 1740), 142 (30 October 1748). 38. Ibid., 7 (9 July 1733), 40 (15 June 1735), 108 (5 December 1742). 39. Ibid., 110 (5 December 1742). 40. Ibid., 110 (5 December 1742), 116 (7 June 1743). 41. Ibid., 109 – 110 (5 December 1742), 116 – 121 (7 June 1743); letter of Jacob Franks, in ibid., 124 – 125 (22 November 1743). Phila and Oliver lived outside town in the Delancey country seat in Greenwich Village and then in Bloomingdale prior to the Revolution. Ibid., 116 – 117n. 4; Pencak discusses Oliver’s proclivity to violence, including a tavern brawl in which he nearly murdered a physician. Pencak, Jews and Gentiles, 46. 42. Hershkowitz and Meyer, Letters of the Franks Family, 131 (25 November 1745); N. Taylor Phillips, “The Levy and Seixas Families of Newport and New York,” PAJHS 2 (1894): 197. Abigaill’s daughter Richa left for London in 1772 after her father’s death in 1769, seeking, perhaps, a Christian spouse. Pencak, Jews and Gentiles, 47. Samuel Oppenheim describes Richa’s departure in “The Chapters of Isaac the Scribe, a Bibliographical Rarity, New York, 1772,” PAJHS 22 (1914): 39 – 41. Her fate is unknown. 43. Gelles, The Letters of Abigaill Levy Franks, xl; N. Taylor Philips comments that David Franks, “being so constantly in the society of Christians, was never particularly

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faithful in the discharge his religious duties, and such cares rested lightly on him.” The same, Philips states, applied to sister Phila. Philips, “The Levy and Seixas Families,” 197. 44. Hershkowitz and Meyer, Letters of the Franks Family, 100 (20 December 1741); Mary Beth Norton, Liberty’s Daughters: The Revolutionary Experience of American Women, 1750 – 1800 (Ithaca, NY, 1980), part 1; Marcus, The Colonial American Jew, 2:561 – 563; Pool and Pool, An Old Faith, 493; Daniels, “Colonial Jewry,” 403; Snyder, “Queens of the Household,” 24. 45. Leo Hershkowitz, “Original Inventories of Early New York Jews (1682 – 1763),” AJH 88 (2002): 293 – 296; Hershkowitz, Wills of Early New York Jews, 11 – 14, 79; Marcus, The Colonial American Jew, 2:538; Snyder, “Queens of the Household,” 18. 46. “Unwritten History,” 87, 88, 92; Snyder, “Queens of the Household,” 24 – 25. 47. Daniels, “Colonial Jewry,” 403; Hershkowitz, Wills of Early New York Jews, 12, 51, 81. Pool and Pool, An Old Faith, 44. The sixty-five seats were adequate for weekly services but not for High Holy Day services. Sarna, American Judaism, 47; Karla Goldman, Beyond the Synagogue Gallery: Finding a Place for Women in American Judaism (Cambridge, MA, 2000), 37 – 45, 59. The women of the congregation also contributed “White decorations” for the Torah scrolls and a “Curtain” for the ark for High Holy Days, which the congregation celebrated with a special blessing. 48. Snyder, “Queens of the Household,” 22 – 23. 49. Ibid., 23 – 24. 50. Pencak, Jews and Gentiles, 48; Robert Cohen, “Jewish Demography in the Eighteenth Century: A Study of London, the West Indies and Early America” (Ph.D. diss., Brandeis University, 1976), chs. 5 – 6; on intermarriage, see ibid., 112; Daniels, “Colonial Jewry,” 389 – 392; Snyder, “Queens of the Household,” 26 – 27. 51. Cohen, “Jewish Demography,” 392; Marcus, The Colonial American Jew, 3:1232; Marcus, American Jewry, 187 – 188; “Manuscripts: Items Relating to Congregation Shearith Israel,” 27. 52. Marcus, The Colonial American Jew, 3:1188 – 1190; Leo Hershkowitz, “Some Aspects of the New York Merchant Jewish Community, 1654 – 1820,” AJHSQ 66 (1976 – 1977): 13; Marc D. Angel, Remnant of Israel: A Portrait of America’s First Jewish Congregation (New York, 2004), 33; Pinto, The Form of Prayer, 1, 4. Pencak, in Jews and Gentiles, 45, sees the election to the lower offices as a sign of discrimination. However, constables were exempt from militia service and jury duty, and the willingness of a number to run and serve may indicate that they did not see the office as dishonorable. 53. Hershkowitz, “Original Inventories,” 297, 299; Hershkowitz, “Some Aspects of the New York Merchant Jewish Community,” 20; Leon Huhner, “Daniel Gomez, a Pioneer Merchant of Early New York,” PAJHS 41 (1951 – 1952): 120. In the New-York Journal of 8 May 1749, the Coentjes Club declined to congratulate a Jewish neighbor who had lately moved to “Fudge Corner” because he had the habit of paying too much rent and raising the rent for the neighborhood. He was addressed as “An Israelite of the Tribe of Juda.” 54. Marcus, The Colonial American Jew, 3:1127 – 1131; “Disgraceful Acts of a Mob at a Jewish Funeral in New York, 1743,” PAJHS 31 (1928): 240 – 241 (from the New York Weekly Journal, 16 May 1745); Pencak, Jews and Gentiles, 49 – 50.

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55. Max J. Kohler, “Civil Status of the Jew in Colonial New York,” PAJHS 6 (1898): 99; Pencak, Jews and Gentiles, 41 – 44, 55. Jews continued to participate in municipal elections. By the Revolution, they were again voting in Assembly elections. Whether there was a hiatus in their privileges at that level or how long it lasted is yet undetermined. 56. Pencak, Jews and Gentiles, 41; Samuel Oppenheim, “The Jews and Masonry in the United Sates before 1810,” PAJHS 19 (1910): 1 – 16; Kalm, Travels in North America, 1:129; Pool, Portraits Etched in Stone, 209; New-York Gazette, 5 November 1750; Marcus, The Colonial American Jew, 3:1214.

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1. “Items Relating to Gershom M. Seixas,” PAJHS 27 (1920): 128; Thomas Kessner, “Gershom Mendes Seixas: His Religious ‘Calling,’ Outlook and Competence,” AJHSQ 58 (1968 – 1969): 453; Jacob R. Marcus, United States Jewry, 1776 – 1985, 4 vols. (Detroit, 1989), 1:289; Gershom Seixas, A Religious Discourse Delivered . . . November 26, 1789 (New York, 1789), 6. 2. For population figures, see Edwin Burrows and Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 (New York, 1999), 194. The literature on the Revolution in New York City and Colony is vast. A recent work is Joseph Tiedemann, Reluctant Revolutionaries: New York City and the Road to Independence, 1763 – 1776 (Ithaca, NY, 1997). Books by Edward Countryman and Gary Nash are among the most influential: Edward Countryman, A People in Revolution: The American Revolution and Political Society in New York, 1760 – 1790 (Baltimore, 1981); Gary Nash, The Urban Crucible: Social Change, Political Consciousness, and the Origin of the American Revolution (Cambridge, MA, 1979). Gotham gives an excellent summary. For an introduction to the historiography of the Revolution in New York City, see Clifton Hood, “Prudent Rebels: New York City and the American Revolution,” Reviews in American History 25 (1997): 537 – 544. 3. Burrows and Wallace, Gotham, chs. 13 – 14. 4. Ibid., ch. 14; “Some New York Jewish Patriots,” PAJHS 26 (1918): 237 – 238; Eli Faber, A Time for Planting: The First Migration, 1654 – 1820 (Baltimore, 1992), 102; Jacob R. Marcus, The Colonial American Jew, 1492 – 1776, 3 vols. (Detroit, 1970), 2:1264; New-York Gazette, 1 October 1770, 23 July 1770, Oppenheim Collection, AJHS. 5. New-York Gazette, 30 July 1770; New-York Journal, 9 August 1770, both in Oppenheim Collection, AJHS. 6. New-York Mercury, 21 May 1764, 14 January 1765; New-York Gazette, 15 April 1770, 28 June 1770, 9 July 1770, 7 January 1771; New-York Journal, 14 – 28 March 1771, all in Oppenheim Collection, AJHS. 7. New-York Gazette, 18 November 1771, 6 September 1773; New-York Journal, 29 June 1773, all in Oppenheim Collection, AJHS; David de Sola Pool, Portraits Etched in Stone: Early Jewish Settlers, 1682 – 1831 (New York, 1952), 349 – 350. 8. “From the 2nd Volume of Minute Books of Congn: Shearith Israel in New York,” PAJHS 21 (1913): 12 (28 June 1767), 17 – 18 (21 March 1768), 24 (8 September 1771), 28 (15 December 1771), 34 (4 October 1772), 55 (29 March 1775), 56 – 57 (2 April 1775).

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9. Hidden minutes of Shearith Israel, as quoted in William Pencak, Jews and Gentiles in Early America, 1654 – 1800 (Ann Arbor, MI, 2005), 56 – 59. That Josephson and Hays publicly used words that could reinforce traditional anti-Semitic libels that accused Jews of ritual murder and, more commonly, of conniving to cheat unwitting consumers reveals the intensity of disputes in pre-Revolutionary years. 10. Ibid., 60 – 62. Josephson was reinstated when his fine was paid by Isaac Moses. 11. Ibid., 58. 12. On the Battle of New York, see David Hackett Fischer, Washington’s Crossing (New York, 2005); and David McCullough, 1776 (New York, 2005). On the politics of New York, see Tiedemann, Reluctant Revolutionaries; and Burrows and Wallace, Gotham; as well as Bernard Mason, The Road to Independence: The Revolutionary Movement in New York (Lexington, KY, 1966); and Richard M. Ketchum, Divided Loyalties: How the American Revolution Came to New York (New York, 2002). 13. N. Taylor Philips, “Family History of David Mendez Machado,” PAJHS 2 (1894): 55 – 56. 14. Samuel Oppenheim, “Letter of Jonas Phillips, July 28, 1776, Mentioning the American Revolution,” PAJHS 25 (1917): 128 – 130. The letter never made it to Europe but was intercepted by the British fleet. 15. Letter of Oliver Delancey to Moses Franks, 4 January 1775, Franks Collection, AJHS; on David Franks, see Edwin Wolf 2nd and Maxwell Whiteman, The History of the Jews of Philadelphia from Colonial Times to the Age of Jackson (Philadelphia, 1956), 47, 86 – 91, 181 – 182. 16. N. Taylor Phillips, “The Levy and Seixas Families of Newport and New York,” PAJHS 4 (1896): 206. Pool, Portraits Etched in Stone, 350 – 351. Jacob Marcus argues that while Seixas was “a whole-hearted Whig,” there is “no evidence whatsoever to substantiate the legend of patriotic leadership.” He was one of the many who joined the American cause. Jacob R. Marcus, The Handsome Young Priest in the Black Gown: The Personal World of Gershom Seixas (Cincinnati, 1970), 15. 17. “Unwritten History: Reminiscences of N. Taylor Phillips,” AJAJ 6 (1954): 84 – 85. 18. Marcus, The Colonial American Jew, 3:1257 – 1261, 1280 – 1282. 19. Jay, quoted in Pencak, Jews and Gentiles, 68 – 69; Frederic Cople Jaher, A Scapegoat in the Wilderness: The Origins and Rise of Anti-Semitism in America (Cambridge, MA, 1994), 121. 20. Burrows and Wallace, Gotham, 242 – 256; Stephen Birmingham, The Grandees: America’s Sephardic Elite (New York, 1971), 175. 21. “Address of Loyalty to the Conquerors,” in Morris Schappes, ed., A Documentary History of the Jews of the United States, 1654 – 1875 (New York, 1971), 50 – 52; Samuel Rezneck, Unrecognized Patriots: The Jews in the American Revolution (Westport, CT, 1975), 142. 22. David de Sola Pool and Tamar de Sola Pool, An Old Faith in a New World: Portrait of Shearith Israel, 1654 – 1954 (New York, 1955), 46, 169 – 170; Rezneck, Unrecognized Patriots, 143. 23. New-York Gazette, 4 August 1777, 22 September 1777, 12 January 1778, 15 June 1778;

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Royal Gazette, 13 January 1779, 2 June 1779, 5 December 1781, 7 August 1782, all in Oppenheim Collection, AJHS. 24. New-York Gazette, 6 January 1777, 12 January 1778, 4 May 1778, 16 and 23 November 1778, 12 April 1779, 17 May 1779, 25 October 1779; Royal Gazette, 9 May 1781, all in Oppenheim Collection, AJHS. 25. Abram Vossen Goodman, “A German Mercenary Observes American Jews during the Revolution,” AJHSQ 59 (1969 – 1970): 227. 26. Cecil Roth, “A Jewish Voice of Peace in the War of American Independence: The Life and Writings of Abraham Wagg, 1719 – 1803,” PAJHS 31 (1928): 33 – 74; Pencak, Jews and Gentiles, 63 – 64. 27. Jacob Marcus, ed., “Jews and the American Revolution: A Bicentennial Documentary,” AJAJ 27 (1975): 141 – 144, 194 – 198; Birmingham, The Grandees, 175 – 176. 28. Marcus, ed., “Jews and the American Revolution,” 189 – 190. 29. Petition of New York Officers to the Committee of Safety for the Province of New York, 21 September 1775, in Franks Papers, AJHS; “Miscellaneous Items Relating to Jews in New York,” PAJHS 27 (1920): 392. 30. Marcus, ed., “Jews and the American Revolution,” 23, 56 – 62. On Eleazar Levy, see Herbert Friedenwald, “Memorials Presented to the Continental Congress,” PAJHS 2 (1894): 124 – 125. For a complete list, see Pool and Pool, An Old Faith, 329 – 330. 31. Rezneck, Unrecognized Patriots, 35 – 36, 183 – 184, 208 – 209; petition of Isaac Franks for a revolutionary pension, 6 April 1818, in Franks Papers, AJHS. 32. Leon Huhner, “Jews Interested in Privateering in America during the Eighteenth Century,” PAJHS 23 (1915): 163 – 164. 33. Rezneck, Unrecognized Patriots, 70; “Items Relating to the Moses and Levy Families, New York,” PAJHS 27 (1920): 331 – 335; Max J. Kohler, “Phases of Jewish Life before 1800,” PAJHS 3 (1895): 83; Pool, Portraits Etched in Stone, 384 – 387. 34. “Prayer for Peace during the American Revolution with a Note of Rev. Gershom Seixas to Mr. Isaac Moses,” in “Items Relating to Gershom M. Seixas,” PAJHS 27 (1920): 126 – 127. 35. Wolf and Whiteman, The History of the Jews of Philadelphia, ch. 7. 36. Ibid., 146 – 152; Pencak, Jews and Gentiles, 21 – 230; Memorial of Rabbi Gershom Seixas and others to Council of Censors, December 1783, in Marcus, ed., “Jews and the American Revolution,” 214 – 216. Pennsylvania had a long strain of anti-Semitism which may have caused many of New York’s Jews to leave Philadelphia after the war. The Test Act was in part the work of the Lutheran senior minister Henry Muhlenberg, who accused the Jews of both atheism and declaring that the Christian messiah was an “imposter.” 37. Herbert Friedenwald, “A Letter of Jonas Phillips to the Federal Convention,” PAJHS 2 (1894): 107 – 109. 38. Burrows and Wallace, Gotham, ch. 17. 39. New-York Packet, 20 November 1783, 1 January 1784, 10 and 27 May 1784, 6 December 1784, 5 January 1785, 16 December 1788; Loudon’s New-York Packet, 8 July 1784, 23 August 1784, 27 September 1784, 20 June 1785, 22 May 1786, 17 August 1786, 26 December

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1787; New-York Journal, 3 May 1787, New-York City Directory (New York, 1786) (item for 24 November 1786), all in Oppenheim Collection, AJHS. 40. Burrows and Wallace, Gotham, 279, 280; New-York Packet, 5 August 1785, 22 May 1786, 24 November 1786, 16 December 1788, and New-York Journal, 3 May 1787, all in Oppenheim Collection, AJHS; Marcus, United States Jewry, 1:142. 41. Burrows and Wallace, Gotham, ch. 19; New-York Packet, 5 August 1788. 42. Pencak, Jews and Gentiles, 66 – 69. (When it came to Sunday laws, however, the legislature did not make an exemption for the Jews.) “From the 2nd Volume of Minute Books,” 45 (9 December 1783); Pool and Pool, An Old Faith, 250, 320. Benjamin Jacobs married Elizabeth anyway, but she deserted him two years later, claiming cruel treatment by her husband; “Manuscripts: Items Relating to Congregation Shearith Israel, New York,” PAJHS 27 (1920): 33 – 34. 43. “Manuscripts: Items Relating to Congregation Shearith Israel,” 35 – 37. 44. Letter of Gershom Seixas to Shearith Israel, 21 December 1783, in Marcus, ed., “Jews and the American Revolution,” 217 – 219; Pool, Portraits Etched in Stone, 353 – 354. 45. Tension between the New York and Philadelphia congregations flared for a moment, but then Philadelphia accepted as its hazan New York’s Jacob Raphael Cohen. “Items Relating to Gershom M. Seixas,” 130 – 131; Marcus, The Handsome Young Priest, 12. 46. A discussion of New York’s religious incorporation law may be found in Hyman B. Grinstein, The Rise of the Jewish Community of New York, 1654 – 1860 (Philadelphia, 1945), 45 – 46; Isaac Jerushalmi, “Cultures, Practices, and Ideals of a New York Sephardic Congregation as Reflected in the Minutes of Shearith Israel, 1784 – 1789,” unpublished paper, AJA, 1 – 4; Pool and Pool, An Old Faith, 260 – 262; letter of Gershom Seixas to Board of Trustees of Shearith Israel, 22 September 1785, Seixas Papers, AJHS. 47. “From the 2nd Volume of Minute Books,” 163 – 164 (31 May 1786), 164 – 165, (27 June 1786), 165 – 167, 167 – 168, 168 – 169 (3, 16, 25 July 1786), 169 – 171 (28 August 1786); Pool, Portraits Etched in Stone, 94 – 101; Pool and Pool, An Old Faith, 352 – 253; Grinstein, The Rise of the Jewish Community, 70, 74. The elders’ proposed conditions were that funds collected must also go toward the synagogue’s expenses. The trustees did allow, after initial refusal, the society to repair and maintain the congregation’s hearse. MBOT, 1786, Box 23, Oppenheim Collection, AJHS. (Minutes from the Board of Trustees for the 1780s are at the AJHS; minutes from the 1790s through the 1860s are on microfilm at the AJA.) 48. Seixas actually accepted £140 and responsibility for firewood. Pool, Portraits Etched in Stone, 355 – 356; MBOT, 8 August 1784, 19 August 1787, Box 23, Oppenheim Collection, AJHS; Petition of Rev. G. Seixas to Electors of Congregation Shearith Israel, in “Items Relating to Gershom M. Seixas,” 134 – 135. Seixas was requesting a greater salary. 49. Jerushalmi, “Cultures, Practices, and Ideals,” 6 – 8; MBOT, 35, 46 – 47 (26 August 1785), 1786, Box 23, Oppenheim Collection, AJHS; letter of Gershom Seixas to Board of Trustees regarding seats, Seixas Papers, AJHS; Pool and Pool, An Old Faith, 272 – 273; Pencak, Jews and Gentiles, 72. The board also dealt with Manuel Myers, who put a lock on his seat to stop Lion Hart from using it. MBOT, 26 August 1785, 7 Av 1786, Box 23, Oppenheim Collection, AJHS.

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50. For recent interpretations, see Jonathan D. Sarna, American Judaism: A History (New Haven, CT, 2004), ch. 2; Jonathan D. Sarna, “The Impact of the American Revolution on American Jews,” in Jonathan D. Sarna, ed., The American Jewish Experience (New York, 1986), 20 – 30; Faber, A Time for Planting, 106; Marcus, United States Jewry, 1:76 – 84.

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1. The poor also lived in small communities just north of the city, such as Bowery village, soon swallowed by the expanding metropolis. Edwin Burrows and Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 (New York, 1999), 372, 387 – 391; David T. Gilchrist, ed., The Growth of the Seaport Cities, 1790 – 1825 (Charlottesville, VA, 1967), 40; Hyman B. Grinstein, The Rise of the Jewish Community of New York, 1654 – 1860 (Philadelphia, 1945), 469. 2. The most recent survey of the early national era is Gordon Wood, Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789 – 1815 (New York, 2009). For New York City, see Burrows and Wallace, Gotham, chs. 20 – 27. The references in Gotham cover nearly all the published literature to 1999. 3. Burrows and Wallace, Gotham, ch. 22; Howard B. Rock, Artisans of the New Republic: The Tradesmen of New York City in the Age of Jefferson (New York, 1979), ch. 6. 4. Jacob R. Marcus, United States Jewry, 1776 – 1985, 4 vols. (Detroit, 1989), 1:211 – 212; Jerome C. Rosenthal, “A Study of Jewish Businessmen in New York City as Reflected in the City Directories, 1776 – 1830,” unpublished paper, AJA, 1977; see also Ira Rosenwaike, “The Jewish Population of the United States as Estimated from the Census of 1820,” AJHSQ 53 (1963 – 1964): 131 – 135; Ira Rosenwaike “An Estimate and Analysis of the Jewish Population of the United States in 1790,” AJHS 50 (1961): 23 – 47; Ira Rosenwaike, On the Edge of Greatness: A Portrait of the American Jew in the Early National Period (Cincinnati, 1985), 95 – 96. Rosenwaike finds a similar propensity to mercantile trades in 1830 but breaks them into sixteen categories including pawnbrokers and clothiers. There are nineteen merchants and six clothiers and pawnbrokers. No other category, such as broker or dry-goods proprietor or grocer, has more than three (out of a total of fifty-nine) in the mercantile trades. 5. Mark Bortman, “Paul Revere and Son and Their Jewish Correspondents,” PAJHS 43 (1953): 198 – 234; Marcus, United States Jewry, 1:190 – 191; Robert Martello, Midnight Rides, Industrial Dawn: Paul Revere and the Growth of American Industrialism (Baltimore, 2010), 261 – 262; Rita Susswein Gottesman, The Arts and Crafts in New York, 1800 – 1804 (New York, 1965), 237; Stephen Birmingham, The Grandees: America’s Sephardic Elite (New York, 1971), 191 – 199. 6. Marcus, United States Jewry, 1:181 – 182, 199, 358 – 359, 560, 642; David de Sola Pool, Portraits Etched in Stone: Early Jewish Settlers, 1682 – 1831 (New York, 1952), 282 – 285, 384 – 392, 414 – 418; Edmund Clarence Stedman, ed., The New York Stock Exchange, vol. 1 (New York, 1905), 24; Gustavus Hart, “A Biographical Account of Ephraim Hart and His Son, Dr. Joel Hart, of New York,” PAJHS 4 (1896): 215 – 219; Samuel Sokobin, “The SimsonHirsch Letter to the Chinese Jews, 1795,” PAJHS 49 (1959 – 1960): 39; Grinstein, The Rise of the Jewish Community, 416 – 419.

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7. On Jacques Ruden, see Pool, Portraits Etched in Stone, 302 – 305; and Ralph Bennett, “The Jews Who Built City Hall,” unpublished paper, courtesy of Leo Hershkowitz. Also see Marcus, United States Jewry, vol. 1, chs. 4 – 5. 8. Rosenthal, “A Study of Jewish Businessmen”; Pool, Portraits Etched in Stone, 333; David de Sola Pool and Tamar de Sola Pool, An Old Faith in a New World: Portrait of Shearith Israel, 1654 – 1954 (New York, 1955), 483; Marcus, United States Jewry, 1:186. In 1824, Rebecca Gomez, immigrant cousin of the Gomez family from Barbados, apprenticed her son as a jeweler. 9. Gottesman, The Arts and Crafts, 108, 117, 125, 380. 10. Marcus, United States Jewry, 1:191 – 196; Gottesman, The Arts and Crafts, 307 – 308. Judah’s ads appeared in the American Citizen and the New-York Gazette. 11. Theodore Cohen, “Walter Jonas Judah and New York’s 1798 Yellow Fever Epidemic,” AJAJ 48 (1996): 23 – 34. 12. Shane White, Somewhat More Independent: The End of Slavery in New York City, 1770 – 1810 (Athens, GA, 1991); Malcolm M. Stern, “Some Additions and Corrections to Rosenwaike’s ‘An Estimate and Analysis of the Jewish Population of the United States in 1790,’ ” AJHSQ 53 (1963 – 1964): 385; “Manumitting Slaves, 1806 – 1809,” and “A Slave Promised Freedom,” in Morris J. Schappes, ed., A Documentary History of the Jews of the United States, 1654 – 1875 (New York, 1971), 118 – 121, 134; Rosenwaike, “The Jewish Population,” 131 – 139; Pool and Pool, An Old Faith, 483. 13. MBOT, 24 November 1805, 9 December 1806, 7 February 1807, 1 November 1807, 24 December 1807, 13 March 1813, 12 July 1819. (All minutes after 1790 are on microfilm at the AJA.) On the Panic of 1819, see Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815 – 1848 (New York, 2007), 142 – 144. 14. Pool, Portraits Etched in Stone, 336, 396; “Items Relating to the Gomez Family, New York,” PAJHS 27 (1920): 303; Marcus United States Jewry, 1:203 – 208. 15. Sachem referred to a leader of the Tammany Society, at first a fraternal and then a Jeffersonian society. It was based on Indian lore and thus used the term sachem for its top officeholders. “Miscellaneous Items Relating to Jews in New York,” PAJHS 27 (1920): 396 – 400. 16. Ibid., 394 – 398; Marcus, United States Jewry, 1:426 – 429, Grinstein, The Rise of the Jews of New York, 103; Hart, “A Biographical Account of Ephraim Hart,” 215 – 219. 17. On the history of Freemasonry, see Steven C. Bullock, Revolutionary Brotherhood: Freemasonry and the Transformation of the American Social Order, 1730 – 1840 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1996). Samuel Oppenheim, “The Jews and Masonry in the United States before 1810,” PAJHS 19 (1910): 1 – 16; Edmund R. Sadowski, “A Jewish Masonic Prayer,” PAJHS 48 (1958 – 1959): 134 – 135; “Burying the Dead,” in Schappes, A Documentary History, 112. 18. Burrows and Wallace, Gotham, ch. 21; the literature on the HamiltonianJeffersonian debate is enormous. A good starting point would be Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick, The Age of Federalism: The Early American Republic, 1788 – 1800 (New York, 1995); and Sean Wilentz, The Rise of American Democracy: The Crisis of the New Order, 1787 – 1815 (New York, 2007). 19. Morris U. Schappes, “Anti-Semitism and Reaction, 1795 – 1800,” PAJHS 38 (1948 –

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1949): 145; William Pencak, Jews and Gentiles in Early America, 1654 – 1800 (Ann Arbor, MI, 2005), 74. Simson, Judah, Gomez, and Seixas, as well as Isaac Levy, were original founders of the Tammany Society, a club that became the center of the DemocraticRepublican Party. Noah Jackson and Mordecai Myers were later leaders of Tammany. Lawrence H. Fuchs, The Political Behavior of American Jews (Glencoe, IL, 1956) 26 – 28. 20. Gershom Seixas, A Discourse Delivered .  .  . the Ninth of May, 1798 (New York, 1798), 6, 14 – 15; Gershom Seixas, 1799 sermon, 28 – 29, Lyons Collection, AJHS; Gershom Seixas, 1803 sermon, 19 – 20, Lyons Collection, AJHS; Schappes, “Anti-Semitism and Reaction,” 122 – 126. 21. Schappes, Documentary History, 84 – 89; Marcus, United States Jewry, 1:579; Jacob R. Marcus, ed., American Jewry: Documents, Eighteenth Century (Cincinnati, 1959), 309; Pencak, Jews and Gentiles, 77. 22. Jacob R. Marcus, Memoirs of American Jews, 1775 – 1865, 2 vols. (Philadelphia, 1955), 1:52 – 61; Marcus, United States Jewry, 1:95 – 97; “Miscellaneous Items,” 397 – 398. 23. Jonathan D. Sarna, Jacksonian Jew: The Two Worlds of Mordecai Noah (New York, 1981), 1 – 13. 24. Ibid., ch. 3, esp. 35 – 44. 25. Mordecai M. Noah, Oration before the Tammany Society . . . (New York, 1817), 5, 7, 22, 24; Mordecai M. Noah, Address Delivered before the General Society of Mechanics and Tradesmen . . . (New York, 1822), 11, 13. 26. Sarna, Jacksonian Jew, 48 – 49; “Noah’s Preface to ‘The Grecian Captive,’ ” in Joseph L. Blau and Salo W. Baron, eds., The Jews of the United States 1790 – 1840: A Documentary History, 3 vols. (New York, 1963), 2:415; Mordecai M. Noah, She Who Would Be a Soldier (New York, 1819), 8, 23, 31, 40, 43, 58, 73. Noah also comments on American-Indian relations. In his play, the Indian is asked by the Americans to live in peace with his neighbors: “let concord reign among us.” He accepts if the general can “guard their wigwams from destruction” and “soften their prejudices and remove their jealousies.” Then “the red man is your friend.” Michael Schuldiner, “The Historical Drama of Mordecai Noah’s She Who Would Be a Soldier,” in Michael Schuldiner and Daniel J. Kleinfeld, eds., The Selected Writings of Mordecai Noah (Westport, CT, 1999), 11 – 24. For a close reading of this play that sees it as an exploration of Jewish/American identity, see Craig Kleinman, “Pigging the Nation: Staging the Jew in M. M. Noah’s She Would Be a Soldier,” ATQ 3 (1996): 201 – 219; for more background on Jews and theater in this era, see Heather S. Nathans, Early American Theater from the Revolution to Thomas Jefferson: Into the Hands of the People (Cambridge, UK, 2003). 27. Sarna, Jacksonian Jew, 51 – 53; Mordecai M. Noah, Essays of Howard, on Domestic Economy (New York, 1820), reprinted in Schuldiner and Kleinfeld, Selected Writings, 79 – 81, 84 – 86, 92 – 94. 28. Noah, Essays of Howard, 87 – 89, 101 – 104. 29. Mordecai M. Noah, Discourse Delivered at the Consecration of the Synagogue K. K. Shearith Israel . . . (New York, 1818), 7, 18, 19, 24 – 25. 30. Ibid., 31 – 32; Sarna, Jacksonian Jew, 140 – 143. 31. Noah, Discourse Delivered, 20 – 23; Lewis Abraham, “Correspondence between

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Washington and Jewish Citizens,” PAJHS 3 (1895): 90 – 91. Madison also replied that he observed “with pleasure” that Noah’s “sect” shared the “common blessings afforded by our Government and laws.” Ibid., 92. Jefferson himself had mixed attitudes toward the Jews. He championed the rights of Jews but also attacked the Old Testament theology that preached ideas of God that were “degrading and injurious” and termed their ethics “often irreconcilable with the sound dictates of reason & morality.” Frederic Cople Jaher, A Scapegoat in the Wilderness: The Origins and Rise of Anti-Semitism in America (Cambridge, MA, 1994), 130. This dualism is found also among Hamilton, Lydia Child, and other prominent figures. Jonathan D. Sarna, “The ‘Mythical Jew’ and the ‘Jew Next Door’ in Nineteenth-Century America,” in David A. Gebner, ed., Anti-Semitism in American History (Urbana, IL, 1986), 59 – 61. 32. Jacob R. Marcus, “The Modern Religion of Moses Hart,” in Studies in American Jewish History: Studies and Addresses by Jacob R. Marcus (Cincinnati, 1969), 121 – 154; Marcus United States Jewry, 1:620 – 622. 33. Sarna, Jacksonian Jew, 62, 63, 138; Noah, Discourse Delivered, 19, 27. For a background on other attempts at settlement, see Bernard D. Weinryb, “Noah’s Ararat Jewish State in Its Historical Setting,” in Abraham J. Karp, ed., The Jewish Experience in America, 5 vols. (New York, 1969), 2:136 – 157. 34. Sarna, Jacksonian Jew, 64 – 65. 35. Ibid., 66; “Noah’s Proclamation to the Jews,” in Blau and Baron, The Jews of the United States, 3:894 – 897; Eran Shalev, “ ‘Revive, Renew and Reestablish’: Mordecai Noah’s Ararat and the Limits of Biblical Imagination in the Early Republic,” AJAJ 62 (2010): 5 – 7. 36. “Noah’s Proclamation to the Jews,” 3:897 – 900. 37. “Editorial from Commercial Advertiser, New York, October 16, 1822,” in Schappes, Documentary History, 157 – 160; “Mordecai M. Noah: A Letter to Him, Dated 1822, from Eduard Gans and Leopold Zunz, Relating to the Emigration of German Jews to America,” PAJHS 20 (1911): 147 – 148; Sarna, Jacksonian Jew, 64. 38. Sarna, Jacksonian Jew, 72 – 74; “Unfavorable American Reaction,” in Blau and Baron, The Jews of the United States, 3:902. For a Zionist perspective, see Robert Gordis, “Mordecai M. Noah: A Centenary Evaluation,” PAJHS 41 (1951 – 1952): 1 – 27. 39. Rejoinders in the Daily Advertiser condemned Rivington’s words as “one of the most impudent performances” of any era and censured his “invidious and personal remarks .  .  . not only on an individual, but also upon a numerous class of citizens who are certainly, at least, more sincere in their attachments to the interests of America than yourself.” Schappes, “Anti-Semitism and Reaction,” 119; Pencak, Jews and Gentiles, 73 – 79; Alfred F. Young, The Democratic-Republicans of New York: The Origins, 1763 – 1797 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1967) 185; David Hackett Fischer, The Revolution of American Conservatism: The Federalist Party in the Era of Jeffersonian Democracy (New York, 1965) 164. 40. Sarna, Jacksonian Jew, 45 – 46; Jaher, A Scapegoat in the Wilderness, 137. 41. Marcus, United States Jewry, 1:495, 525, 539, 556. In a study of Jewish characters in plays presented in America — and most were seen New York — Edward Coleman, while noting that one play included the character Shadrach Boaz, “the most repugnant stage Jew of the century,” states that most Jews were presented in a favorable light. None of the

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Jewish American playwrights introduced Jewish characters. Edward D. Coleman, “Plays of Jewish Interest on the American Stage, 1752 – 1821,” PAJHS 33 (1934): 171 – 197; Jaher, A Scapegoat in the Wilderness, 128. 42. “From Frey’s ‘Narrative,’ ” in Blau and Baron, The Jews of the United States, 3:715 – 722; Marcus, United States Jewry, 1:543 – 548. 43. “Address to the Board by Mr. [Bernard] Jadownicky,” in Blau and Baron, The Jews of the United States, 3:726 – 732. 44. “Jewish Opposition to Missionary Activity, 1820,” in ibid., 3:758 – 773. On missionary societies, see Jonathan D. Sarna, “American Christian Opposition to the Jews, 1816 – 1900,” Journal of Ecumenical Studies 23 (Spring 1986): 225 – 238; and Jonathan D. Sarna, “The American Jewish Response to Nineteenth Century Christian Missionaries,” Journal of American History 68 (1981): 35 – 51.

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1. Jacob R. Marcus, American Jewry: Documents, Eighteenth Century (Cincinnati, 1959), 154 – 156. 2. Ibid., 149 – 150. 3. Ibid., 151 – 154, 157 – 158, 163 – 166. 4. Ibid., 161 – 163, 165 – 166. Marcus notes that the distinction in the constitution between yehidim and other Jews likely referred to Jewish members of Shearith Israel and nonmembers who were “members in potentia.” See also Jonathan D. Sarna, American Judaism: A History (New Haven, CT, 2004), 43; Eli Faber, A Time for Planting: The First Migration, 1654 – 1820 (Baltimore, 1992), 118 – 119, 123. 5. Lewis Abraham, “Correspondence between Washington and Jewish Citizens,” PAJHS 3 (1895): 93 – 95. 6. Jacob R. Marcus, United States Jewry, 1776 – 1985, 4 vols. (Detroit, 1989), 1:240. Hannah Adams quotes Hazan Seixas that there were seventy to eighty subscribers out of fifty families plus some unmarried. “From Hannah Adams’s ‘History of the Jews,’ ” in Joseph L. Blau and Salo W. Baron, ed., The Jews of the United States, 1790 – 1840: A Documentary History, 3 vols. (New York, 1963), 1:91; MBOT, 28 May 1815, 27 July 1817, AJA. 7. Marcus, United States Jewry, 1:256, 598; MBOT, 27 March 1814, AJA; “The Younger Haym Solomon on Religious Laxity, 1825,” in Blau and Baron, The Jews of the United States, 2:546 – 548. 8. MBOT, 18 May 1806, 1 November 1807, 27 October 1812, 15 February 1813, 13 March 1813, 11 July 1813, 7 May 1815, AJA. 9. MBOT, March 1812, 21 July 1812, 12 August 1812, 5 July 1814, 14 August 1814, 13 April 1815, 17 November 1819, AJA. Clerk Gomez was granted “a certificate” due in twelve months; the congregation could do no better. In 1813, a trustee voted against an increase in the shamash’s wages (still fifty dollars) because “the finances of the Congregation [was] such that they [did] not admit” salary increases. 10. David de Sola Pool and Tamar de Sola Pool, An Old Faith in A New World: Portrait of Shearith Israel, 1654 – 1954 (New York, 1955), 352 – 357, 358, 361 – 362; Hyman B. Grinstein, The Rise of the Jewish Community of New York, 1654 – 1860 (Philadelphia, 1945), 144 – 146.

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“Miscellaneous Items Relating to the Jews of North America,” PAJHS 27 (1920): 226 – 227; “From the Notebooks of Rev. J. J. Lyons, Transcribed from Various Sources, Relating to Congregation Shearith Israel,” PAJHS 27 (1920): 252 – 255. 11. Hendrik Hartog, Public Property and Private Power: The Corporation of the City of New York in American Law, 1730 – 1870 (Ithaca, NY, 1983); Edwin Burrows and Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 (New York, 1999), 419 – 422. 12. Bye Laws of the Congregation of Shearith Israel as Ratified on the 24 June 1805, Lyons Collection, AJHS. Most of this constitution is reprinted in “Constitution of Shearith Israel, 1805,” in Blau and Baron, The Jews of the United States, 2:518 – 521. 13. MBOT, 21 July 1805, 11 January 1807, 8 May 1814, 16 January 1824, AJA. The board had its own rules of procedure, including a requirement of personal notification of every trustee at least six hours before a meeting, a $2.50 fine for speaking out of turn, and a $10 fine for leaving the meeting without permission. With regard to finances, only in the 1820s did the synagogue regain fiscal health. For example, the expenses for salaries in 1814, a dark war year, were $1,350. In 1824, a year of growth and prosperity, they were $8,427. The board never disciplined Hazan Seixas, but he had limited influence with them. 14. Sarna, American Judaism, 47; MBOT, 8 March 1818, 5 April 1818, AJA. 15. MBOT, 23 February 1809, 6 September 1820, 26 October 1825, AJA; see also MBOT, 10 July 1825, AJA, for a petition by congregants against changes to the service. The minutes of 26 October 1825 are reprinted in “On Wearing the Tallith, 1825,” in Blau and Baron, The Jews of the United States, 2:533 – 534. 16. Lee M. Friedman, “An Early Reference to the Jews,” PAJHS 24 (1917): 131. 17. MBOT, 25 August 1816, 27 July 1817, 23 November 1817, 28 December 1817, 8 March 1818, AJA. 18. MBOT, 18 October 1817, AJA; Pool and Pool, An Old Faith, 48 – 51. A proposal in 1815 to establish a branch of the synagogue in Greenwich Village was defeated. 19. MBOT, 12 October 1806, 6 October 1807, 16 April 1809, 22 October 1809, AJA. 20. MBOT, 15 July 1813, 25 April 1818, 2 October 1820, 4 February 1821, 1 August 1823, AJA. 21. MBOT, 15 October 1811, 19 and 20 November 1811, 30 August 1812, 11 July 1813, 3 October 1824, AJA. 22. “Manuscripts: Items Relating to Congregation Shearith Israel, New York,” PAJHS 27 (1920): 90 – 91; MBOT, 14 July 1814, 12, 13, and 23 April 1815, AJA. 23. Samuel Oppenheim, “A Question of Kosher Meat Supply in 1813 with a Sketch of Earlier Conditions,” PAJHS 25 (1917): 31 – 50; MBOT, 7 February and 20 November 1805, AJA. 24. MBOT, 12 December 1812, AJA; Oppenheim, “A Question of Kosher Meat,” 48 – 52. 25. Oppenheim, “A Question of Kosher Meat,” 38 – 42; MBOT, 10 January 1813, AJA. 26. MBOT, 14 February 1813, AJA; Oppenheim, “A Question of Kosher Meat,” 52 – 55. 27. Oppenheim, “A Question of Kosher Meat,” 54 – 60; MBOT, 4 and 14 February 1813, AJA. 28. On republicanism and monopolies, see Howard B. Rock, Artisans of the New Republic: The Tradesmen of New York in the Early Republic (New York, 1979), ch. 7.

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29. Jacob I. Hartstein, “The Polonies Talmud Torah of New York,” in Abraham J. Karp, ed., The Jewish Experience in America, 5 vols. (New York, 1969), 2:45 – 63. “Manuscripts: Items Relating to Congregation Shearith Israel,” 52 – 56, 82 – 83; MBOT, 6 June 1809, 3 March 1812, AJA. Seixas signed a contract in 1793 to instruct students in secular and Judaic subjects, on Sundays from ten to one and weekday afternoons, for a salary of £135. Seixas stepped down after a few years. On New York education, see Carl Kaestle, Evolution of an Urban School System: New York City, 1750 – 1850 (Cambridge, MA, 1973). 30. “Talmud Torah, 1808,” and “State Aid to Parochial Schools,” in Morris Schappes, ed., A Documentary History of the Jews of the United States, 1654 – 1875 (New York, 1971), 113 – 114, 126 – 127; Hartstein, “The Polonies Talmud Torah,” 52 – 59; MBOT, 15 and 20 July 1814, 28 December 1817, 4 February 1821, 5 March 1821, 9 September 1821, 2 December 1821, 2 March 1822, 30 June 1822, AJA. (In 1822, the synagogue rented a room for a school to Mr. Rivero as a private concern.) Pool and Pool, An Old Faith, 214 – 221; Grinstein, The Rise of the Jewish Community, 228 – 238. 31. “Manuscripts: Items Relating to Congregation Shearith Israel,” 93 – 98. The school received small payments of from fifteen to fifty dollars into the 1820s. 32. MBOT, 8 August 1823, AJA. The petition was referred to a committee. No report was issued. 33. MBOT, 1, 3, and 27 April 1825, AJA. 34. MBOT, 27 April 1825, 8 May 1825, 7 September 1825, AJA; “The Barow Cohen Case,” in Blau and Baron, The Jews of the United States, 2:537 – 539; Grinstein, The Rise of the Jewish Community, 39 – 42. Barrow Cohen’s letter was dated May 11 but was not included in the minutes until September. 35. “Division in the New York Community, 1825,” in Blau and Baron, The Jews of the United States, 2:540 – 541. 36. Ibid., 2:542 – 545; Grinstein, The Rise of the Jewish Community, 43 – 44. 37. Grinstein, The Rise of the Jewish Community, 45 – 47; MBOT, 27 June 1825, 10 and 31 July 1825, 6 September 1825 (at home of hazan), AJA. 38. MBOT, 19 and 26 October 1825, AJA; Grinstein, The Rise of the Jewish Community, 48 – 49. The city’s Jewish population did not significantly increase until after 1825. The letter of separation is reprinted in Israel Goldstein, A Century of Judaism in New York: B’nai Jeshurun, 1825 – 1925 (New York, 1930), 52 – 53. 39. Goldstein, A Century of Judaism, 54 – 62. 40. Grinstein, The Rise of the Jewish Community, 44 – 45, 49; David de Sola Pool, Portraits Etched in Stone: Early Jewish Settlers, 1682 – 1831 (New York, 1952), 305. The hope that Shearith Israel would become the world’s largest congregation was made by its president, Jacques Ruden. 41. See Linda Kerber, Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America (Chapel Hill, NC, 1980). 42. Grinstein, The Rise of the Jewish Community, 246; Sarna, American Judaism, 47 – 51; Pool and Pool, An Old Faith, 361 – 363. 43. Grace Nathan to Sarah Kursheedt, 14 November 1814, 27 March 1817 (?), Nathan

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Family Papers, AJHS; David de Sola Pool, “Some Letters of Grace Nathan, 1814 – 1821,” PAJHS 37 (1947): 203 – 211. 44. Grace Nathan to Sarah Kursheedt, 7 December 1817, 27 March 1817, 4 June 1821, Nathan Family Papers, AJHS. Aunt Zipporah was daughter of Hayman Levy and widow of Benjamin Mendes Seixas. Pool, “Letters of Grace Nathan,” 210 – 211. 45. Grace Nathan to Sarah Kursheedt, 4 June 1821, Nathan Family Papers, AJHS. These women are part of the Seixas extended family. 46. Grace Nathan to Sarah Kursheedt, 5 June 1820, Nathan Family Papers, AJHS; Pool, “Letters of Grace Nathan,” 210 – 211. 47. Papers of Grace Nathan, AJHS. See also “Grace Nathan, the First of Her Clan, 1810 – 1827,” in Jacob Marcus, ed., The American Jewish Woman: A Documentary History, 2 vols. (New York, 1981), 1:72 – 74. 48. Marcus, United States Jewry, 1:349, 456, 583; Pool, Portraits Etched in Stone, 438 – 441. 49. On intermarriage, see Malcolm H. Stern, “Jewish Marriage and Intermarriage in the Federal Period (1776 – 1840),” AJAJ 19 (1967): 142 – 144. The rate was approximately 30 percent.

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1. As Seixas left only a handful of letters to his daughter late in life, along with scattered documents involving his service and half a dozen sermons, there is no full-scale biography. Two short studies exist. The first, an article by Thomas Kessner, depicts Seixas as deeply influenced by his roots in the Marrano community of Spain and Portugal. Kessner depicts a religious figure scrupulously observing Jewish law, a man of limited intellect who avoided controversy and preached obedience to government, freedom of the will, the importance of religious observance, and the ultimate restoration of the Jews to Palestine. Kessner maintains that Seixas’s closeness to the Christian community was likely the source of Christian doctrines in his sermons, such as original sin. Thomas Kessner, “Gershom Mendes Seixas: His Religious ‘Calling,’ Outlook and Competence,” AJHSQ 58 (1968 – 1969): 444 – 471. In the second study, Jacob Rader Marcus describes, in a seventypage biography, the reverend’s family life, garrulous personality, widespread reading, and interest in science. Marcus finds Seixas’s sermons lacking both organization and a coherent theology, a fault he attributes to his lack of seminary training. He could write Hebrew, but only with considerable errors. Marcus portrays a superb pastor, well versed in the Bible and codes, though rhetorically limited. Like Kessner, Marcus attributes great influence to the milieu in which Seixas lived, seeing him as a neo-Orthodox Jew influenced by deism, “torn between God and the Philosophers.” He concludes that Seixas believed in resurrection and the restoration of Jews, though he never probed the subtleties of these concepts. Jacob R. Marcus, The Handsome Young Priest in the Black Gown: The Personal World of Gershom Seixas (Cincinnati, 1970), quote on 22. See also the biographical entry in David de Sola Pool, Portraits Etched in Stone: Early Jewish Settlers, 1682 – 1831 (New York, 1952), 345 – 368. For Seixas’s personal home life, see David de Sola Pool, “Gershom Mendes Seixas’ Letters, 1813 – 1815, to His Daughter Sarah (Seixas) Kursheedt and

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Son-in-Law Israel Baer Kursheedt,” PAJHS 35 (1939): 189 – 193. See also Robert Franzin, “The Sermons of Gershom Mendes Seixas,” unpublished paper, AJA. 2. Gershom Seixas to Sarah Kursheedt, 27 March 1814, 11 July 1814, 24 November 1814, Seixas Papers, AJHS. 3. For a picture of the debate over republicanism at its height in the mid-1980s, see Lance Banning, “Liberal and Classical Ideas in the New American Republic,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd. series., 43 (1986): 3 – 19; and Joyce Appleby, “Republicanism in Old and New Concepts,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd. series, 43 (1986): 20 – 34. For the debate’s application to New York City, see Joyce Appleby, Capitalism and a New Social Order: The Republican Vision of the 1790s (New York, 1984); Howard B. Rock, Artisans of the New Republic: The Tradesmen of New York City in the Age of Jefferson (New York, 1979), chs. 1 – 5; Sean Wilentz, Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788 – 1850 (New York, 1984), chs. 1 – 2. 4. Silvio Bedini, Thomas Jefferson: Statesman of Science (New York, 1990); Paul Conkin, “Priestly and Jefferson, Unitarianism as a Religion for a New Revolutionary Age,” in Ronald Hoffman and Peter Albert, eds., Religion in a Revolutionary Age (Charlottesville, VA, 1994), 290 – 307; Paul Conkin, “The Religious Pilgrimage of Thomas Jefferson,” in Peter I. Onuf, ed., Jeffersonian Legacies (Charlottesville, VA, 1993), 19 – 49; Charles B. Sanford, The Religious Life of Thomas Jefferson (Charlottesville, VA, 1987); Charles B. Sanford, Thomas Jefferson and His Library (Hamden, CT, 1977), 115 – 153; Thomas Jefferson to Mordecai Noah, 28 May 1818, in Lewis Abraham, “Correspondence between Washington and Jewish Citizens” PAJHS 3 (1895): 93 – 94; Thomas Jefferson to Dr. Jacob De La Motta, 1 September 1820, in Morris U. Schappes, ed., A Documentary History of the Jews in the United States (New York, 1950), 57; Mark A. Noll, America’s God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (New York, 2001), 161, 206. 5. Marcus, The Handsome Young Priest, 34 – 35; William Pencak, Jews and Gentiles in Early America, 1654 – 1800 (Ann Arbor, MI, 2006), 77; Gordon Wood, Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789 – 1815 (New York, 2009), 199 – 200. Seixas was also familiar with English literature and was an admirer of both Shakespeare and Alexander Pope. 6. Gershom Seixas, A Religious Discourse Delivered . . . November 26, 1789 (New York, 1789), 9; Gershom Seixas, 1799 sermon, 4, 22, Lyons Collection, AJHS; Gershom Seixas, 1803 sermon, 3, 14, 16, 22, Lyons Collection, AJHS; Isidore E. Meyer, “The Hebrew Oration of Sampson Simson, 1800,” PAJHS 45 (1956 – 1957): 48. 7. Seixas, 1803 sermon, 6 – 7, 9, Lyons Collection, AJHS; Gershom Seixas, A Discourse Delivered . . . The Ninth of May, 1798 (New York, 1798), 21. 8. Gershom Seixas to Sarah Kursheedt, 23 January 1813, Seixas Papers, AJHS; Marcus, The Handsome Young Priest, 24 – 25; Seixas, 1803 sermon, 14, Lyons Collection, AJHS. 9. Meyer, “The Hebrew Oration,” 41 – 48; Kessner, “Gershom Mendes Seixas,” 463 – 464. 10. Seixas, A Religious Discourse, 13 – 14; Seixas, A Discourse Delivered, 23 – 24; Seixas, 1803 sermon, 7. 11. MBOT, 15 August 1812, 15 July 1813, 19 January 1814, AJA; Gershom Seixas to Sarah Kursheedt, 14 November 1814, in Kenneth Libo and Abigail Kursheedt Hoffman, The Seixas-Kursheedts and the Rise of Early American Jewry (New York, 2001), 41; Roger H.

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Brown, Republic in Peril: 1812 (New York, 1964); Gershom Seixas, 1814 sermon, 1 – 3, Library Manuscript Collection, AJHS. 12. Marcus, The Handsome Young Priest, 38 – 41. 13. Gershom Seixas, sermon, undated, Box 61b, Lyons Collection, AJHS. 14. Marcus, The Handsome Young Priest, 42; Seixas, A Religious Discourse, 9 – 10; Seixas, 1799 sermon, 2 – 3, 12, 22; Seixas, 1803 sermon, 6, Lyons Collection, AJHS. 15. Seixas, A Religious Discourse, 11 – 12, Seixas, A Discourse Delivered, 11 – 12; Seixas, 1799 sermon, 4 – 7, 23 – 24, Lyons Collection, AJHS; Marcus, The Handsome Young Priest, 53. 16. Seixas, 1799 sermon, 18 – 19, Lyons Collection, AJHS. 17. Seixas, A Discourse Delivered, 12; Seixas, 1799 sermon, 13, 14; Seixas, 1803 sermon, 3 – 4, Lyons Collection, AJHS. Seixas preached in a similar vein in 1799 when he stated, “what could be more consonant to the feelings of humanity, than the hopes of hereafter?” The continued prevalence of faith in resurrection and the world to come is found on the tombstone of Walter Jonas Judah, the young medical student who died treating victims of yellow fever in 1798. It reads, in part, “Declare him and his soul happy. May they prepare for him his canopy in Paradise. And there may he have refreshment of soul until the dead live again and the spirit renter into them.” Theodore Cohen, “Walter Jonas Judah and New York’s 1798 Yellow Fever Epidemic,” AJAJ 48 (1996): 31. 18. Seixas, A Religious Discourse, 10; Seixas, A Discourse Delivered, 10, 29; Seixas, 1799 sermon, 25 – 26; Seixas, 1803 sermon, 12, 13, Lyons Collection, AJHS; “Items Relating to Gershom M. Seixas,” PAJHS 27 (1920): 131. When Napoleon convened the Sanhedrin in 1807, Seixas thought a new age might be at hand. He asked the “God of Israel” to keep the French Jewish elders from “every possible evil” and to keep the “Emperor” under the influence of “divine grace.” Would the Sanhedrin bring about Jews’ “reestablishment if not as a nation in [their] former territory,” then as a “particular society” with the rights of all other societies? Was he giving up the hope of a return to Palestine? How was this different from the American situation? Kessner, “Gershom Mendes Seixas,” 469. Gershom Seixas to Sarah Kursheedt, 23 January 1814, 11 July 1814, Seixas Papers, AJHS. 19. Gershom Seixas to Sarah Kursheedt, 23 January 1814, Seixas Papers, AJHS; “Items Relating to Gershom M. Seixas,” PAJHS 27 (1920): 126 – 127, 131; Ruth Bloch, Visionary Republic: Millennial Themes in American Thought, 1756 – 1800 (New York, 1985), 103 – 104. 20. Conkin, “Priestley and Jefferson,” 292. 21. Noll, America’s God, 161, 206, 217, chs. 5, 6, 10, 11. See also Robert M. Calhoon, “The Evangelical Persuasion,” in Hoffman and Albert, Religion in a Revolutionary Age, 156 – 183. 22. Gershom Seixas to Sarah Kursheedt, 5 May 1814, Seixas Papers, AJHS; Pool, Portraits Etched in Stone, 373 – 375. 23. Jacob R. Marcus, United States Jewry, 1776 – 1985, 4 vols. (Detroit, 1989), 1:91; Myer Isaacs, “Sampson Simson,” PAJHS 19 (1910): 112, 116; Jonathan D. Sarna, Jacksonian Jew: The Two Worlds of Mordecai Noah (New York, 1981), 140. 24. Hyman B. Grinstein, “The American Synagogue and the Laxity of Observance, 1750 – 1850” (M.A. thesis, Columbia University, 1936), 30 – 46. 25. Josephson quoted in Jacob R. Marcus, ed., “Jews and the American Revolution: A Bicentennial Documentary,” AJAJ 27 (1975): 253 – 254; Marcus, United States Jewry,

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1:597 – 613 (quote on 613); Malcolm H. Stern, “Jewish Marriage and Intermarriage in the Federal Period (1776 – 1840),” AJAJ 19 (1967): 142 – 144.

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1. Naomi W. Cohen, Encounter with Emancipation: The German Jews in the United States, 1830 – 1914 (Philadelphia, 1984) 42; Hasia Diner, A Time for Gathering: The Second Migration (Baltimore, 1992), 138 – 141; Malcolm Stern, “Jewish Marriage and Intermarriage in the Federal Period (1776 – 1840),” AJAJ 19 (1967): 142 – 143. 2. Isaac Mayer Wise, Reminiscences (New York, 1901), 18. The source of information on antebellum New York in the following five paragraphs is Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 (New York, 1999), chs. 31 – 47. The figures on population growth and immigration may be found on pages 736 – 777. A classic book on the ascendance of New York City is Robert Albion, The Rise of New York Port, 1815 – 1860 (Boston, 1939). 3. The most recent and finest survey of the era is Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815 – 1848 (New York, 2009); see also Edwin Pessen, Riches, Classes, and Power before the Civil War (Boston, 1973). 4. Burrows and Wallace, Gotham, ch. 27. 5. Ibid., ch. 38. 6. Ibid., ch. 41; Frederic Cole Jaher, The Urban Establishment: Upper Strata in Boston, New York, Charleston, and Los Angeles (Urbana, IL, 1982), 202 – 208. 7. Burrows and Wallace, Gotham, 735 – 737; Diner, A Time for Gathering, 8 – 13, 24 – 36. 8. Stanley Nadel, Little Germany: Ethnicity, Religion, and Class in New York City, 1845 – 80 (Urbana, IL, 1990), ch. 2; New York Times, 14 March 1856. 9. Burrows and Wallace, Gotham, 748; Hyman B. Grinstein, The Rise of the Jewish Community of New York, 1654 – 1860 (Philadelphia, 1945), 469. Population figures for 1860 are tentative. Some estimates are as low as eighteen thousand. Jonathan D. Sarna, American Judaism: A History (New Haven, CT, 2004), 63. 10. Burrows and Wallace, Gotham, 745; Robert Ernst, Immigrant Life in New York City, 1825 – 1863 (New York, 1979), 46; Nadel, Little Germany, 99 – 103; Diner, A Time for Gathering, 91, ch. 3; Beverly Hyman, “New York Jewish Businessmen, 1831 – 1835,” unpublished manuscript, AJA; New York Times, 14 March 1856. For more detail on immigrant neighborhoods, see Annie Polland and Daniel Soyer, Emerging Metropolis: New York Jews in the Age of Immigration (New York, 2012), chs. 1 – 2. 11. Jacob R. Marcus, United States Jewry, 1776 – 1985, 4 vols. (Detroit, 1989), 2:225 – 226; Ernst, Immigrant Life in New York City, 85; Egal Feldman, “Jews in the Early Growth of the New York City Men’s Clothing Trade,” AJAJ 13 (1960): 5 – 6; Burrows and Wallace, Gotham, 742 – 743; Rudolph Glanz, “German Jews in New York City in the 19th Century,” in Studies in Judaica Americana (New York, 1970), 125 – 126. 12. Glanz, “German Jews in New York City,” 127 – 128; Feldman, “Jews in the Early Growth,” 3 – 7; Cohen, Encounter with Emancipation, 31; Wise, Reminiscences, 24. 13. Asm, 30 October 1857; Glanz, “German Jews in New York City,” 128 – 131; Feldman, “Jews in the Early Growth,” 7 – 14; Vincent Carosso, “A Financial Elite: New York’s

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German-Jewish Investment Bankers,” AJHSQ 66 (1977): 66 – 74; Stephen Birmingham, “Our Crowd”: The Great Jewish Families of New York (New York, 1967), chs. 2 – 9; The New York City Directory, 1856 – 57 (New York, 1857), available at www.ancestry.com. There were no Jews listed in the 1845 New York Sun’s list of property owners with more than $100,000 in real estate. Edmund Clarence Stedman, ed., The New York Stock Exchange, vol. 1 (New York, 1905), 106 – 108. Overall, by 1855, one-fourth of the city’s top ten thousand taxpayers were immigrants. Burrows and Wallace, Gotham, 739. 14. Stanley Nadel, “Jewish Race and German Soul in Nineteenth-Century America,” AJH 77 (1987): 6 – 26. 15. Cohen, Encounter with Emancipation, 39 – 63; Sefton D. Temkin, Isaac Mayer Wise: Shaping American Judaism (New York, 1992), 38. 16. Diner, A Time for Gathering, 102. 17. Edward E. Grusd, B’nai B’rith: The Story of a Covenant (New York, 1966), ch. 1; Deborah Dash Moore, B’nai B’rith and the Challenge of Ethnic Leadership (Albany, NY, 1981), 1 – 13; Diner, A Time for Gathering, 109 – 113; Grinstein, The Rise of the Jewish Community, 109 – 114. 18. Moore, B’nai B’rith, 13 – 23; Grusd, B’nai B’rith, 33 – 48; Julius Bien, “History of the Independent Order of B’nai B’rith,” Menorah (1886 – 1889): 123 – 125. 19. Asm, 11 June 1851, 4 July 1851. 20. Asm, 9 December 1852. 21. Grinstein, The Rise of the Jewish Community, 197 – 205; Bien, “History of the Independent Order,” 165, 325. 22. Asm, 6 and 24 May 1852, 19 July 1852, 12 November 1852, 24 December 1852, 11 February 1853. 23. New York Times, 28 October 1855. 24. Asm, 19 January 1854, 3 February 1854, 3 February 1855, 2 March 1855, 20 April 1855, 1 June 1855, 17 July 1857. 25. Asm, 23 February 1855, 16 May 1856. The society’s inauguration is detailed in the New York Times, 21 February 1855. Reverend Raphall there expressed concern that among Israelites “as a class there is not exhibited that zeal and love of literature there should be.” 26. JM, 11 March 1859, 20 May 1859, 10 September 1859, 21 June 1861, 3 September 1864. 27. Grinstein, The Rise of the Jewish Community, 145 – 147. 28. Asm, 26 November 1849. 29. Asm, 15 November 1850, 5 December 1851. 30. Asm, 15 November 1850, 5 December 1851, 23 April 1852, 26 November 1852, 3 December 1852, 11 November 1853, 22 September 1854, 29 November 1854. 31. Asm, 26 November 1852, 9 December 1852, 11 November 1853, 29 November 1854. 32. Asm, 19 January 1855, 2 March 1855, 14 and 28 December 1855, 19 January 1857, 2 March 1857, 13 November 1857, 14 and 28 December 1857, 8 January 1858. For elaborate circulars of concerts at Dodworth’s Academy and Niblo’s Saloon in February 1855, including arias, piano, harp, and violin pieces, see Lyons Collection, AJHS. 33. Asm, 1 November 1850, 19 November 1852, 10 November 1854. For more detail on

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the charitable functions of the organizations, especially the distribution of matzo at Passover, as well as specific conditions, see Polland and Soyer, Emerging Metropolis, ch. 2. 34. Asm, 18 and 25, January 1850, 15 November 1850, 10 October 1851, 28 January 1852, 31 December 1852. 35. Asm, 12 December 1856, 9 January 1857, 18 October 1850; JM, 18 April 1862, 14 November 1862, 12 December 1863. 36. Grinstein, The Rise of the Jewish Community, 115 – 130; HBS circular, 1842, Lyons Collection, AJHS. 37. Asm, 4, 11, 18, and 25 May 1855; “A Call to Establish a Hebrew Agricultural Society, 1855,” in Constitution of the American Hebrew Agricultural Association (New York, 1855), Lyons Collection, AJHS; Cohen, Encounter with Emancipation, 35 – 39. 38. Call for special meeting at Shearith Israel, 1847, Lyons Collection, AJHS; Cohen, Encounter with Emancipation, 67; Temkin, Isaac Mayer Wise, 39. 39. “A Physician on Philanthropy, 1830,” in Joseph L. Blau and Salo W. Baron, The Jews of the United States, 1790 – 1840: A Documentary History, 3 vols. (New York, 1963), 2:597 – 601. The society that Peixotto spoke to was small, with only eighteen members in 1855. Composed of Ashkenazi members of Shearith Israel, it disbursed over $1,100 in 1854 to “Jewish families, comprising helpless women and tender children, pleading at our doors for relief.” Circular, January 1855, Lyons Collection, AJHS; Grinstein, The Rise of the Jewish Community, 148 – 149. 40. Cohen, Encounter with Emancipation, 124. 41. Asm, 20 December 1850; Guido Kirsch, “Israel’s Herold: The First Jewish Weekly in New York,” Historia Judaica 2 (1940): 82. 42. Joseph Hirsh and Beck Doherty, The Mount Sinai Hospital of New York, 1852 – 1952 (New York, 1952), 4 – 13; Grinstein, The Rise of the Jewish Community, 155 – 157; Asm, 18 October 1850, 30 November 1850, 21 February 1851, 16 and 23 April 1851, 13 June 1851. 43. Asm, 16 January 1852. 44. Asm, 30 January 1852, 5 March 1852; “Constitution and By-Laws of the Jews’ Hospital of New York,” Mount Sinai Hospital Archives. 45. Asm, 25 November 1853; Hirsh and Doherty, The Mount Sinai Hospital, 18 – 23; New York Times, 29 November 1853, 28 January 1854. 46. Asm, 18 and 25 May 1855. 47. New York Times, 9 and 18 May 1855; Order of Service at the Inauguration of the Jews’ Hospital (New York, 1855), Mt. Sinai Hospital Archives; Grinstein, The Rise of the Jewish Community, 158. 48. Hirsh and Doherty, The Mount Sinai Hospital, 37 – 38; Asm, 18 and 26 January 1856. 49. Asm, 1, 8, and 15 February 1856, 11 April 1856, 27 June 1856, 11 July 1856. 50. Asm, 18 and 25 January, 12 March 1856; Annual Report of the Directors of the “Jews’ Hospital in New York” (New York, 1857); Asm, 6 December 1857, 16 January 1858. 51. JM, 19 November 1858, 25 February 1859, 22 March 1861. 52. Asm, 9 May 1856; Hirsh and Doherty, The Mount Sinai Hospital, 38 – 39. 53. JM, 3 April 1860, 3 October 1862, 29 July 1863, 12 February 1864. 54. Carol A. Kolmerton, The American Life of Ernestine A. Rose (Syracuse, NY, 1997),

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4 – 9, 68, 96, 240 – 242; “Speeches by Ernestine L. Rose at the Third National Woman’s Rights Convention, Syracuse, N.Y., September 8 – 19, 1852,” in Morris Schappes, ed., A Documentary History of the Jews in the United States, 1654 – 1875 (New York, 1950), 324 – 332. 55. Karla Goldman, Beyond the Synagogue Gallery: Finding a Place for Women in American Judaism (Cambridge, MA, 2000), ch. 3; Asm, 11 July 1851. 56. Asm, 2 November 1849, 7 December 1849, 8 and 22 February 1850, 7 March 1851, 19 March 1852. 57. JM, 3 March 1865. 58. “Obituary of Daniel Schlesinger, 1839,” in Blau and Baron, The Jews of the United States, 2:484 – 493. 59. Asm, 22 February 1850, 3 March 1850, 6 December 1850, 29 August 1851, 12 September 1851, 7 November 1851, 12 December 1851, 6 February 1851, 14 September 1855, 16 October 1857. For Maretzek’s views, see his autobiography regarding his time in New York, Crotchets and Quavers (New York, 1855). He is quite cynical in his view of the cultural level of New Yorkers. As to religion, he states, “I believe in God, and endeavor to do my duty without calling myself Roman Catholic, Episcopalian, member of the Greek Church, Lutheran or Presbyterian.” He states that before he turned eighteen, he had determined to shape his creed “to suit everybody.” He was to belong to “all tastes and creeds, political and spiritual, in a general way, but to none in particular.” Judaism, his born religion, is not mentioned. The Asmonean was proud of his Jewish origins, but Maretzek was not, and he never mentions it. He was clearly not an active or identifying member of the Jewish community. 60. Asm, 10 October 1851, 4 February 1853. 61. New York Times, 27 December 1858; Asm, 16 April 1851, 8 September 1854, 12 December 1854, 14 September 1855, 22 February 1856. 62. JM, 30 January 1857, 11 November 1859, 11 May 1860. See also JM, 2 February 1860, 7 and 28 November 1862. 63. JM, 3 March 1860, 20 March 1863, 24 and 31 October 1863; see also for description of other Purim and Chanukah balls, JM, 14 December 1860, 1 March 1861, 31 January 1862, 21 March 1862, 7 November 1862, 26 December 1862, 5 February 1864, 1 April 1864, 3, 17, and 24 March 1865; Philip Goodman “The Purim Association of the City of New York, 1862 – 1902,” PAJHS 40 (1950 – 1951): 134 – 144. 64. David Black, The King of Fifth Avenue: The Fortunes of August Belmont (New York, 1981), 35, 66 – 67, 76 – 77. The Jewish community repudiated Belmont, considering him an “outcast,” even though he made occasional donations to Jewish charities and to the Reform synagogue in Albany in support of Isaac Mayer Wise. 65. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, ed. Isaac Kramnick (New York, 2007), 452 – 455.

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1. Asm, 24 May 1850, 21 April 1851. 2. Hyman B. Grinstein, The Rise of the Jewish Community of New York, 1654 – 1860 (Philadelphia, 1945), 49 – 53, 472 – 478.

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3. Israel Goldstein, A Century of Judaism in New York: B’nai Jeshurun, 1825 – 1925 (New York, 1930), 81 – 90; Robert T. Swierenga, “Samuel Myers Isaacs: The Dutch Rabbi of New York,” AJAJ 54 (1992): 607 – 621; minutes of B’nai Jeshurun, 25 November 1827, 12 May 1828, 28 December 1828, 6 June 1830, 7 and 21 August 1836, Jewish Theological Seminary. 4. Leo Hershkowitz, “Those ‘Ignorant Immigrants’ and the B’nai Jeshurun Schism,” AJH 70 (1980): 168 – 179; Goldstein, A Century of Judaism, 93 – 94; minutes of B’nai Jeshurun, 16 June 1833, and note on inside cover, Jewish Theological Seminary; Leon A. Jick, The Americanization of the Synagogue, 1820 – 1870 (Hanover, NH, 1976), 26. Shearith Israel also instituted strict admission rules including a year of residency and a two-thirds vote of members. Shearith Israel circular, 7 August 1837, Lyons Collection, AJHS. 5. J.  D. Eisenstein, “The History of the First Russian-American Jewish Congregation,” PAJHS 9 (1901): 63 – 72; Alfred A. Greenbaum, “The Early ‘Russian’ Congregation in America in Its Ethnic and Religious Setting,” AJHSQ 62 (1972 – 1973): 162 – 169; Grinstein, The Rise of the Jewish Community, 172; “Appeal for the Support of the Beth Hamidrash by Rabbi Abraham Joseph Ash, New York, March, 1857,” in Morris Schappes, ed., Jews in the United States: A Documentary History (New York, 1950), 373 – 375. 6. Rachel Wischnitzer, Synagogue Architecture in the United States: History and Interpretation (Philadelphia, 1955), 33 – 37; David de Sola Pool and Tamar de Sola Pool, An Old Faith in a New World: Portrait of Shearith Israel, 1654 – 1954 (New York, 1955), 53 – 60. The 1834 sanctuary had eleven more seats for men, thirty more for women. 7. Wischnitzer, Synagogue Architecture, 52 – 55; Asm, 3 May 1850, 3 October 1851. 8. Myer Stern, The Rise and Progress of Reform Judaism: Temple Emanu-El of New York (New York, 1895), 13 – 38; Asm, 7 April 1854, 27 May 1857, 9 April 1858; Wischnitzer, Synagogue Architecture, 48 – 50, 72 – 76. 9. Gershom Greenberg, “A German-Jewish Immigrant’s Perception of America, 1853 – 54,” AJHSQ 67 (1977): 321 – 322. 10. In New York, the term for Jewish spiritual leaders varied. Rabbi was used, though often rabbis such as Isaacs and Raphall were not ordained in Europe by either a yeshiva or the state. In New York, there was a gradual transformation from hazan to reverend, both of which applied to Gershom Seixas and Samuel Isaacs. Hazan became obsolete, and Jewish spiritual leaders before the Civil War were referred to as “Reverend,” “Doctor,” and “Rabbi.” “Doctor” would apply to German spiritual leaders, as the German state required all Jewish clergy to have secular doctorates. Max Lilienthal and Samuel Adler were ordained in Germany. Goldstein, A Century of Judaism, 110 – 114, 119 – 124; Israel Finestein, Anglo-Jewry in Changing Times: Studies in Diversity, 1840 – 1914 (London, 1999), 168 – 195; Grinstein, The Rise of the Jewish Community, 91 – 92; Swierenga, “Samuel Myers Isaacs,” 607 – 615. 11. David Philipson, Max Lilienthal, American Rabbi: Life and Writings (New York, 1915), 46 – 59; Bruce L. Ruben, “Max Lilienthal and Isaac M. Wise: Architects of American Reform Judaism,” AJAJ 55 (2003): 1 – 29; Pool and Pool, An Old Faith, 190 – 191. On Lilienthal’s separation from his duties as a rabbi, see Grinstein, The Rise of the Jewish Community, 513 – 517. 12. Bernard N. Cohen, “Leo Merzbacher,” AJAJ 6 (1954): 21 – 24; Philipson, Max Lilien-

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thal, 46 – 59; Ruben, “Max Lilienthal and Isaac M. Wise”; Gershom Greenberg, “The Dimensions of Samuel Adler’s Religious View of the World,” Hebrew Union College Annual (1975): 377 – 412; Benny Kraut, From Reform Judaism to Ethical Culture: The Religious Evolution of Felix Adler (Cincinnati, 1979), ch. 1. 13. Sefton D. Temkin, Isaac Mayer Wise: Shaping American Judaism (New York, 1992), 1 – 30. 14. Naomi W. Cohen, What the Rabbis Said: The Public Discourse of NineteenthCentury Rabbis (New York, 2008), ch. 1. 15. Asm, 11 and 18 April 1853, 16 March 1855, 22 June 1855, 13 June 1856, 4 July 1856, 22 August 1856, 19 September 1856, 3 October 1856, 9 October 1859, 14 September 1860; Julius Bien, “History of the Independent Order of B’nai B’rith,” Menorah (1886 – 1889): 14 – 17. 16. Grinstein, The Rise of the Jewish Community, 180 – 184; Asm, 28 March 1851. 17. Asm, 13 January 1854, 3 February 1854, 13 March 1854, 16 March 1855, 22 June 1855; Goldstein, A Century of Judaism, 81 – 83; Karla Goldman, Beyond the Synagogue Gallery: Finding a Place for Women in Judaism (Cambridge, MA, 2000), 78 – 83; Jeffrey Gurock, “The Orthodox Synagogue,” in Jack Wertheimer, ed., The American Synagogue: A Sanctuary Transformed (New York, 1987), 37 – 47; Minutes of B’nai Jeshurun, 7 and 22 August 1836, Jewish Theological Seminary. 18. Grinstein, The Rise of the Jewish Community, 372 – 381; Asm, 8 November 1850, 16 July 1852; Pool, An Old Faith, 250 – 251; Goldstein, A Century of Judaism, 85; Shearith Israel Responsum, 1847, Lyons Collection, AJHS. 19. Walter D. Kamphoefner, Wolfgang Helbich, and Ulrike Sommer, eds., News from the Land of Freedom: German Immigrants Write Home (Ithaca, NY, 1988), 546 (Franz Schano, 26 January 1853). 20. Asm, 12 July 1850, 8 November 1850; JM, 7 and 21 November 1862, 21 December 1862. The Asmonean lobbied against a divorce bill in the state legislature: 12 July 1850, 1 and 15 November 1850. 21. Asm, 8 November 1850; Greenberg, “The Dimensions of Samuel Adler’s Religious View,” 382 – 383. 22. Stephen F. Brumberg, “The Education of Jewish, Protestant and Catholic Children in Mid-Nineteenth-Century New York City,” AJAJ 61 (2009): 11 – 41; Lloyd P. Gartner, “Temples of Liberty Unpolluted: American Jews and Public Schools, 1840 – 1975,” in Bertram Korn, ed., A Bicentennial Festschrift for Jacob Rader Marcus (New York, 1976), 157 – 173; Alexander M. Dushkin, Jewish Education in New York City (New York, 1918), 42 – 52. 23. Brumberg, “The Education of Jewish, Protestant and Catholic Children,” 22 – 34; Grinstein, The Rise of the Jewish Community, 231 – 244; Frederic Cople Jaher, A Scapegoat in the Wilderness: The Origins and Rise of Anti-Semitism in America (Cambridge, MA, 1994), 207 – 210. 24. Grinstein, The Rise of the Jewish Community, 247 – 259; Brumberg, “The Education of Jewish, Protestant and Catholic Children,” 31 – 33; Shaaray Zedek circular, 9 November 1853, Lyons Collection, AJHS; B’nai Jeshurun circular (with sponsors), March 1854, Lyons Collection, AJHS. Shearith Israel reopened its Polonies Talmud Torah in 1854 with two pages of detailed rules and curricular items.

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25. Asm, 2 December 1852, 7 January 1853, 6 and 13 January 1854, 31 March 1854. 26. Grinstein, The Rise of the Jewish Community, 243 – 246; JM, 31 July 1859, 22 January 1859, 15 June 1860. 27. Asm, 15 March 1850, 4 October 1850, 6 December 1850. 28. JM, 14 August 1857, 23 November 1860, 22 February 1861, 14 February 1862, 14 March 1862, 29 May 1863. 29. JM, 6 August 1862, 24 June 1865. 30. Morton J. Merowitz, “Max Lilienthal (1814 – 1882) — Jewish Educator in NineteenthCentury America,” Yivo Annual 15 (1954): 46 – 63; Asm, 2 May 1851, 16 April 1854, 15 September 1854. 31. Asmonean, 2 May 1851; JM, 6 May 1858, 19 October 1860, 29 May 1863. Simson left his money to the “Jewish Theological Seminary and Scientific Institute” to be built in Yonkers. The society was incorporated but never began to function. Circular, 1852, Lyons Collection, AJHS. Though there were no Jewish colleges, one reputable Jewish scholar lived in New York. Isaac Nordlinger was the first “scientifically trained Jewish scholar in the United States,” author of the “most scientific [Hebrew] grammar of that period, and perhaps of the century.” With a yeshiva and German university education and knowledge of Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, and Semitic languages, he taught as “Professor of Arabic and Other Oriental Languages” in an unsalaried position at New York University, at the New Haven Theological Seminary, and at the Union Theological Seminary before his untimely death at age thirty-two in 1842. James (born Joshua) Seixas, a son of Rabbi Seixas, was a Hebrew grammarian who traveled to New England, where, under the influence of Unitarianism, he converted to Christianity. He published Hebrew and Aramaic grammars and A Key to the Chaldee Language. Though he never secured the academic position he craved, he became a tutor to Mormon leader Joseph Smith. He ended his life in New York City, unconnected to the Jewish community. Shalom Goldman, “Isaac Nordlinger (1809 – 1842): ‘An Israelite in Whom There Was No Guile,’ ” American Jewish History (1991): 213 – 221; “Joshua/James Seixas (1802 – 1874): Jewish Apostasy and Christian Hebraism in Early Nineteenth-Century America,” Jewish History 7 (Spring 1993): 65 – 88; James Seixas to J. J. Lyons, n.d., Lyons Collection, AJHS. 32. Ann Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture (New York, 1955); Greenberg, “A German-Jewish Immigrant’s Perception of America,” 326, 328; Pool and Pool, An Old Faith, 361 – 367; Goldman, Beyond the Synagogue Gallery, ch. 2. 33. JM, 11 and 18 May 1860; Goldman, Beyond the Synagogue Gallery, 105. 34. Asm, 8 and 22 February 1850. 35. “Devotional Exercises for Women, 1852,” in Jacob R Marcus, The American Jewish Woman: A Documentary History, 2 vols. (New York, 1981), 1:178 – 182. 36. JM, 6 March 1863; see also Asm, 22 May 1857. 37. “American Jews and the Damascus Affair” and “The Mortara Case,” in Schappes, Documentary History, 210 – 215, 385 – 391; Asm, 7 February 1851; JM, 8 and 15 October 1858, 3, 10, and 17 December 1858; Bertram W. Korn, The American Reaction to the Mortara Case, 1858 – 1859 (Cincinnati, 1957), 39. 38. Asm, 8 November 1850, 23 March 1855, 24 April 1857, 1 May 1857, 19 June 1857; JM,

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1 January 1857, 9 September 1858, 21 October 1859, 4 and 11 November 1859, 18 December 1859, 10 February 1860, 1 June 1860, 21 September 1860, 22 February 1861, 21 August 1863, 24 June 1865; Grinstein, The Rise of the Jewish Community, 432 – 439; Allan Tarshish, “The Board of Delegates of American Israelites, 1859 – 1878,” PAJHS 49 (1959 – 1960): 16 – 36. In 1849, newly arrived Isaac Mayer Wise, together with Isaac Leeser, attempted to assemble a national conference to discuss the state of the American congregations. The meeting was never held; indifference and apathy prevailed. Bertram W. Korn, “American Jewish Life in 1849,” in Bertram W. Korn, ed., Eventful Years and Experiences: Studies in Nineteenth-Century American Jewish History (Cincinnati, 1954), 35 – 38. 39. Jaher, A Scapegoat in the Wilderness, 170, 186. See also Robert Rockaway and Arnon Gutfeld, “Demonic Images of the Jew in the Nineteenth Century United States,” AJH 89 (2001): 355 – 373. 40. Jaher, A Scapegoat in the Wilderness, 222, 237 – 238; New York Times, 25 July 1852, 4 April 1855, 27 May 1858. 41. Quoted in ibid., 186. 42. Ibid., 214 – 218. 43. Ibid., 220 – 231. 44. Asm, 12, 19, and 26 April 1850, 23 May 1851, 20 and 27 February 1852, 6 March 1852, 10 June 1853, 6 August 1853, 30 March 1855, 10 and 17 August 1855, 12 June 1857, 20 November 1857; JM, 27 July 1858, 30 March 1860, 23 April 1860, 18 June 1860, 13 November 1863, 5 December 1863. 45. Jaher, A Scapegoat in the Wilderness, 140 – 150; New York Times, 25 April 1853, 16 May 1854, 29 June 1855; Isaac Mayer Wise, Reminiscences (New York, 1901), 121 – 122; Asm, 9 November 1849, 26 October 1850, 26 August 1853, 8 December 1854, 10 July 1857; JM, 30 March 1860.

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1. Isaac Mayer Wise, Reminiscences (New York, 1901), 1 – 20; Bruce L. Ruben, “Max Lilienthal and Isaac Mayer Wise: Architects of American Reform Judaism,” AJAJ 55 (2003): 1 – 3. 2. Lee M. Friedman, “Mrs. Child’s Visit to a New York Synagogue in 1841,” PAJHS 38 (1948 – 1949): 177 – 178; Asm, 24 April 1852, 27 August 1852. 3. Wise, Reminiscences, 21 – 23; Gershom Greenberg, “A German-Jewish Immigrant’s Perception of America, 1853 – 54,” AJHSQ 67 (1977): 315 – 317, 327. The visitor had complimentary comments about the Dutch and English congregations, which “perceive the structures which enforce belief ” (324 – 325). 4. Hyman B. Grinstein, “The American Synagogue and the Laxity of Observance, 1750 – 1850” (M.A. thesis, Columbia University, 1936), 19 – 26, 31 – 38. 5. Grinstein, “The American Synagogue,” 19; JM, 13 August 1858, 1 June 1860; Asm, 9 December 1852; Hazan Lyons to Board of Trustees, 19 Sivan 1844, Lyons Collection, AJHS. 6. JM, 18 and 25 November 1859, 14 September 1860; Asm, 1 June 1854. 7. Grinstein, “The American Synagogue,” 26; JM, 10 June 1859, 10 September 1859, 6 April 1860, 18 May 1860.

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8. Karla Goldman, Beyond the Synagogue Gallery: Finding a Place for Women in American Judaism (Cambridge, MA, 2000), 68 – 75; Hyman B. Grinstein, The Rise of the Jewish Community of New York, 1654 – 1860 (Philadelphia, 1945), 297 – 298n. 29, 573. 9. Asm, 9 September 1850, 6 June 1852, 9 December 1852; JM, 9 October 1859, 20 January 1860, 30 January 1863, 7 February 1863, 13 May 1864; Jeremiah J. Berman, “The Trend in Jewish Religious Observance in Mid-Nineteenth-Century America,” PAJHS 37 (1947): 33 – 35. 10. JM, 1 June 1860, 14 December, 28 February 1862, 18 March 1862, 23 May 1862, 13 May 1864. 11. Naomi W. Cohen, Encounter with Emancipation: The German Jews in the United States, 1830 – 1914 (Philadelphia, 1984), 42; Jacob R. Marcus, United States Jewry, 1776 – 1985, 4 vols. (Detroit, 1989), 2:222 – 226; Grinstein, The Rise of the Jewish Community, 339 – 347; Berman, “The Trend in Jewish Religious Observance,” 33 – 42. 12. America’s first Reform synagogue, founded in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1825, was modeled more on American Unitarianism than on the German Reform movement. Jonathan D. Sarna, American Judaism: A History (New Haven, CT, 2004), 57 – 58, 84 – 87. 13. The most important history of Reform Judaism is Michael A. Meyer, Response to Modernity: A History of the Reform Movement in Judaism (New York, 1988), chs. 1 – 4. See also Michael A. Meyer, The Origins of the Modern Jew: Jewish Identity and European Culture in Germany, 1749 – 1824 (Detroit, 1967). 14. Grinstein, The Rise of the Jewish Community, 353 – 371; Myer Stern, The Rise and Progress of Reform Judaism: Temple Emanu-El of New York (New York, 1895), 13 – 24, 30 – 31, 38 – 40; Benny Kraut, From Reform Judaism to Ethical Culture: The Religious Evolution of Felix Adler (Cincinnati, 1979) 5. 15. Minutes of Temple Emanu-El, 4 June 1854, 3 September 1854, 1 October 1854, 7 January 1855, 1 July 1855, 12 August 1855, Temple Emanu-El Archives; Grinstein, The Rise of the Jewish Community, 501 – 507. 16. Wise, Reminiscences, 200 – 202; Sefton D. Temkin, Isaac Mayer Wise: Shaping American Judaism (New York, 1992), 86; Hyman B. Grinstein, “The ‘Asmonean’: The First Jewish Weekly in New York,” Journal of Jewish Bibliography 1 (1939): 67 – 70. 17. Guido Kirsch, “Israel’s Herold: The First Jewish Weekly in New York,” Historia Judaica 2 (1940): 77 – 78; Asm, 19 April 1850, 10 May 1850, 13 January 1854, 4 August 1854, 8 September 1854; Ruben, “Max Lilienthal and Isaac Mayer Wise,” 9 – 10, 14 – 16. 18. Asm, 19 April 1850, 8 October 1852, 22 July 1853, 3 February 1854. 19. Asm, 19 May 1854, 23 and 30 June 1854, 30 May 1856; Gershom Greenberg, “The Dimensions of Samuel Adler’s Religious View of the World,” Hebrew Union College Annual (1975): 395 – 402; Ruben, “Max Lilienthal and Isaac Mayer Wise,” 14. Another contributor to the Asmonean, “Liberality,” condemned the “complacency” of the Orthodox, wedded to the “dilapidated” tenets of rabbinic Judaism. Asm, 19 May 1854. 20. Kirsch, “Israel’s Herold,” 78 – 79. 21. Asm, 5 and 26 November 1852. 22. “Letter of Acceptance of the Rev. Dr. Wise to the Respected Society of Friends,” Occident 7, no. 5 (August 1849): 274 – 275; Asm, 1 October 1852.

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23. Asm, 16 June 1852, 10 and 17 September, 15 October 1852, 15 September 1854; “Future Reward and Punishment,” Occident 7, no. 2 (May 1849): 86 – 89. 24. Asm, 13 August 1852, 20 May 1853. 25. Asm, 30 May 1856, 21 August 1857; Ruben, “Max Lilienthal and Isaac Mayer Wise,” 12. 26. Asm, 11 July 1851, 26 August 1853, 8 September 1854, 23 February 1855, 2 March 1855; Ruben, “Max Lilienthal and Isaac Mayer Wise,” 16. 27. Asm, 5 and 12 April 1854, 24 October 1856, 18 September 1857. 28. Goldman, Beyond the Synagogue Gallery, 86 – 87; Asm, 24 March 1854. See also “Women and the Ceremony of Confirmation, 1854,” in Jacob R. Marcus, ed., The American Jewish Woman: A Documentary History, 2 vols. (New York, 1981), 1:186 – 189. Anshe Chesed introduced a mixed choir in 1849. Its hazan, Jonas Hecht, moved between the choir and the reader’s platform because he believed that the women’s voices should only be heard when he sang with them. When Hecht was dismissed, Anshe Chesed continued the mixed choir but otherwise retained Orthodox traditions. 29. Goldman, Beyond the Synagogue Gallery, 93 – 99. When Shearith Israel opened its Crosby Street synagogue in 1832, there were more seats in the ladies’ gallery than in the men’s section below. No other synagogue, however, had more seats for women than for men. Asm, 24 March 1854, 4 January 1856. 30. Asm, 24 March 1854, 4 January 1856; Grinstein, The Rise of the Jewish Community, 356; Jonathan D. Sarna, “The Debate over Mixed Seating in America,” in Jack Wertheimer, ed., The American Synagogue: A Sanctuary Transformed (New York, 1987), 363 – 371; Goldman, Beyond the Synagogue Gallery, 94 – 99; Ruben, “Max Lilienthal and Isaac Mayer Wise,” 15. 31. Asm, 22 February 1850, 21 March 1851, 3 October 1851, 26 September 1856; JM, 15 September 1863; Mordecai M. Noah, Address Delivered at the Hebrew Synagogue on Crosby Street, New-York, in Michael Schuldiner and Daniel J. Kleinfeld, eds., The Selected Writings of Mordecai Noah (Westport, CT, 1999), 156. On Raphall’s Mendelssohnian beliefs, see Israel Finestein, Anglo-Jewry in Changing Times: Studies in Diversity, 1840 – 1914 (London, 1999), 168 – 178. 32. Asm, 2 November 1849, 10 May 1850, 3 October 1851, 26 September 1856, 12 February 1857; JM, 13 March 1857, 12 February 1858, 6 May 1859, 10 June 1859, 1 June 1860. 33. Temkin, Isaac Mayer Wise, 62 – 65; Wise, Reminiscences, 145 – 149; Asm, 18 January 1850, 3 October 1851; JM, 13 March 1857, 26 August 1859. 34. JM, 6 April 1860, 18 May 1860, 14 September 1860, 28 February 1862. 35. Asm, 30 November 1849, 7 December 1849, 12 December 1850; JM, 23 March 1860, 15 September 1863. 36. Mordecai M. Noah Discourse on the Restoration of the Jews (New York, 1845), in Schuldiner and Kleinfeld, Selected Writings, 125 – 148; Noah, Address Delivered, in ibid., 149 – 159; Jonathan D. Sarna, Jacksonian Jew: The Two Worlds of Mordecai Noah (New York, 1981), 152 – 157. A second address at Crosby Street foresaw the progressive leaders of Christianity withdrawing from a belief in the divinity of Jesus, thus allowing even greater possibilities of cooperation between Jews and Christians. Ibid., 154. It is noteworthy that

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Noah could be involved in the intricacies of New York state politics while he advocated a restoration in his time. 37. For Raphall on charity, see Asm, 12 December 1850, 9 December 1852, 4 December 1857; JM, 14 January 1859, 9 September 1859. Raphall on reform: Asm, 7 January 1853; JM, 18 May 1860; Myer Stern, The Rise and Progress of Reform Judaism: Temple Emanu-El of New York (New York, 1895), 51. 38. JM, 24 September 1858, 11 November 1859, 9 October 1863. 39. JM, 5 and 19 June 1857, 6 November 1857, 10 and 24 September 1858, 11 November 1859, 20 July 1860, 20 October 1863; Asm, 12 May 1854. 40. JM, 5 and 19 June 1858, 10 and 24 September 1858, 6 November 1858, 11 November 1859, 11, 18, 25, and 20 July 1860, 20 October 1863; Asm, 22 December 1855, 4 and 11 January 1856. The anonymous 1853 visitor from Germany was critical of Emanu-El, describing its services as a “theater party.” The “crowding” was also “offensive,” as was the “ferocity” of synagogue officials who would let nobody leave before services ended, even to attend the bathroom. Greenberg, “A German-Jewish Immigrant’s Perception of America,” 323. 41. For an analysis of Adler’s theology, see Greenberg, “The Dimensions of Samuel Adler’s Religious View of the World,” 398 – 412.

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1. New York Times, 14 September 1863. 2. An excellent survey of New York antebellum politics and society is Edward K. Spann, The New Metropolis: New York City, 1840 – 1857 (New York, 1981). 3. Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 (New York, 1999), 621 – 625. 4. Ibid., 858 – 863. 5. Ibid., 664, 860; Philip Foner, Business and Slavery: The New York Merchants and the Irrepressible Conflict (Chapel Hill, NC, 1941), 4, 14; Sven Beckert, The Monied Metropolis: New York City and the Consolidation of the American Bourgeoisie, 1850 – 1896 (New York, 2001), 12; Ernest A. McKay, The Civil War and New York City (Syracuse, NY, 1990) 18. Clifton Hood’s forthcoming book, “In Pursuit of Privilege: New York City’s Upper Class and the Making of the City since 1753,” will have important work on the structure of the merchant class. 6. Burrows and Wallace, Gotham, 551 – 560, 838 – 841. 7. Asm, 16 July 1852; Jonathan D. Sarna, Jacksonian Jew: The Two Worlds of Mordecai Noah (New York, 1981), 101, 192. The seven wealthy Whigs cited were Emmanuel Michael, A. L. Gomez, David Hart, the Hendricks family, Rebecca & Bell Judah, and Captain Uriah Levy. “Miscellaneous Items Relating to the Jews in New York,” PAJHS 27 (1920): 406. Lawrence H. Fuchs, The Political Behavior of American Jews (Glencoe, IL, 1956), 26 – 30; Ira Forman, “The Politics of Minority Consciousness,” in L. Sandy Maisel, ed., Jews in American Politics (New York, 2001), 141 – 147. 8. Gustavus Myers, The History of Tammany Hall (New York, 1901), 166 – 167; Fuchs, The Political Behavior of American Jews, 29; “Biographical Profiles: Emmanuel Hart,” in Maisel, Jews in American Politics, 351.

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9. Sarna, Jacksonian Jew, 109 – 113, 119; Evening Star, 18 February 1834, 15 September 1835, quoted in Leonard I. Gappelberg, “M. M. Noah and the Evening Star: Whig Journalism, 1833 – 1840” (Ph.D. diss., Yeshiva University, 1970), 156 – 157, 168; Asm, 30 October 1857. 10. Sarna, Jacksonian Jew, 111 – 112; Evening Star, 9 November 1839, quoted in Gappelberg, “M. M. Noah and the Evening Star,” 184 – 185. 11. For Know-Nothing articles, see Asm, 13 and 27 April 1855, 15 June 1855, 27 July 1855. 12. Asm, 25 July 1856, 8 and 15 August 1856, 5 September 1856. Some Jews were attracted to the Know-Nothing Party for its attacks on the papacy and the Catholic Church and for its fear of immigrants, in this case, Irish Catholic immigrants. Bertram Korn, “The Know-Nothing Movement and the Jews,” in Eventful Years and Experiences: Studies in Nineteenth-Century American Jewish History (Cincinnati, 1954), 64 – 65; Foner, Business and Slavery, 138; Asm, 30 October 1857, 19 March 1858. 13. Asm, 4 July 1851. 14. Asm, 13 December 1850, 4 April 1851. 15. Asm, 26 October 1850, 10 January 1851, 5 June 1851. In the Asmonean’s January 10, 1851, issue, Lyon quoted from both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament to explain how biblical literature can be misused and that the Bible supported the law. 16. Israel Goldstein, A Century of Judaism in New York: B’nai Jeshurun, 1825 – 1925 (New York, 1930), 110 – 114, 119 – 124; Hyman B. Grinstein, The Rise of the Jewish Community of New York, 1654 – 1860 (Philadelphia, 1945), 91 – 92. 17. “ ‘Bible View of Slavery,’ a Discourse by Rabbi Morris Jacob Raphall before Congregation B’nai Jeshurun, New York, on the National Fast Day, January 4, 1861,” in Morris U. Schappes, ed., A Documentary History of the Jews of the United States, 1654 – 1865 (New York, 1950), 405 – 418; Max J. Kohler, “The Jews and the American Anti-Slavery Movement,” PAJHS 5 (1897): 154 – 155. 18. “Bible View of Slavery,” 405 – 406; Jayme Sokolow, “Revolution and Reform: The Antebellum Jewish Abolitionists,” in Jonathan D. Sarna and Adam Mendelsohn, eds., Jews and the Civil War: A Reader (New York, 2010), 187 – 189; Bertram W. Korn, American Jewry and the Civil War (New York, 1951), 16 – 19; Kohler, “The Jews and the American Anti-Slavery Movement,” 154 – 155. 19. New York Times, 2 October 1856. 20. Sokolow, “Revolution and Reform,” 180, 188 – 189; Gustav Pollack, Michael Heilprin and His Sons (New York, 1912), 3 – 12; “Michael Heilprin Replies to Dr. Raphall, the New-York Daily Tribune, January 15, 1861,” in Schappes, Documentary History, 419. 21.“Michael Heilprin Replies to Dr. Raphall,” 418 – 428; see also Benjamin Braude, “The Sons of Noah and the Construction of Ethnic and Geographical Identities in the Medieval and Early Modern Periods,” William and Mary Quarterly 54 (1997): 103 – 142. 22. Sokolow, “Revolution and Reform,” 183; Robert R. Swerienga, “Samuel Meyer Isaacs: The Dutch Rabbi of New York City,” AJAJ 44 (1992): 616; JM, 9 November 1860, 4, 18, and 25 January 1861. Korn believes that the Messenger’s refusal to take a political position before the war was done out of fear. Korn, American Jewry, 249. 23. Myer Stern, The Rise and Progress of Reform Judaism: Temple Emanu-El of New

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York (New York, 1895), 40, 55 – 57; Sokolow, “Revolution and Reform,” 183 – 185; Kohler, “The Jews and the American Anti-Slavery Movement,” 147 – 149, 152; Korn, American Jewry, 161; Fuchs, The Political Behavior of American Jews, 36; Isaac Markens, The Hebrews in America (New York, 1888), 209; The National Cyclopaedia of American Biography, vol. 2 (New York, 1892), 413. 24. Quoted in Stanley R. Brav, “The Jewish Woman, 1861 – 1865,” AJAJ 17 (1965): 62. Max Kohler notes that a German Jew, perhaps a New Yorker, Mr. Lazar, was active at the meeting of the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society in New York in 1853. Kohler, “The Jews and the American Anti-Slavery Movement,” 144. 25. Naomi W. Cohen, Encounter with Emancipation: The German Jews in the United States, 1830 – 1914 (Philadelphia, 1984), 129 – 135; Sokolow, “Revolution and Reform,” 125. 26. “Government and Politics,” in Kenneth Jackson and Fred Kameny, eds., The Almanac of New York City (New York, 2008), 367 – 368; JM, 25 March 1861, 2 January 1863; Stanley Nadel, Little Germany: Ethnicity, Religion, and Class in New York City, 1845 – 80 (Urbana, IL, 1990), 136. 27. Abram J. Dittenhoefer, How We Elected Lincoln (New York, 1916), 2 – 6. 28. JM, 22 March 1861; Gershom Greenberg, “A German-Jewish Immigrant’s Perception of America, 1853 – 54,” AJHSQ 67 (1977): 320. 29. Foner, Business and Slavery, 251; Edmund Clarence Stedman, ed., The New York Stock Exchange, vol. 1 (New York, 1905), 128. A more recent book that covers the same ground generally confirms Foner’s findings while noting that manufacturers at times had different interests from merchants, notably in seeking tariff protection. Sven Beckert finds that Republicans, while a small minority of New York’s middle class, were most likely to be merchants involved in the western trade and manufacturers. Manufacturers were four times more likely to be Republicans than merchants. However, the bulk of Jewish manufacturers were in the garment trade, a trade deeply attached to the southern trade. Beckert, The Monied Metropolis, ch. 3; Basil Leo Lee, Discontent in New York City, 1861 – 1865 (Washington, DC, 1943), 8 – 13; Burrows and Wallace, Gotham, 864. 30. Adam Goodheart, 1861: The Civil War Awakening (New York, 2011), 177, 188. The quotation about Broadway is from the New York Herald, 19 – 21 April 1861. JM, 26 April 1861. Replying to this editorial, the Jews of Shreveport, Louisiana, canceled their subscription and published the resolves of their congregation stating their intent: “as law abiding citizens, . . . to stand by and honor the flag, . . . of the Southern Confederacy with all that is dear to us.” They scorned both the Messenger, a “black republican paper,” and editor Isaacs, who they compared to Brutus, plunging a dagger into Caesar’s heart while kissing him. JM, 7 June 1861. 31. JM, 26 April 1861, 24 May 1861; other sermons may be found in the May 24 issue. 32. Walter D. Kamphoefner and Wolfgang Helbich, eds., Germans in the Civil War: The Letters They Wrote Home (Chapel Hill, NC, 2006), 44 (Alexander Dupré, 26 April 1861), 61 (Julius Wesslau, 23 July 1861). 33. Simon Wolf, The American Jew as Patriot, Soldier and Citizen (Philadelphia, 1895), 111, 236 – 301; “Standing by the Union,” in Schappes, Documentary History, 689 – 690n. 2; Jacob R. Marcus, United States Jewry, 1776 – 1985, 4 vols. (Detroit, 1989), 3:39 – 41. See also

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“Identifying the Jewish Servicemen in the Civil War: A Re-appraisal of Simon Wolf ’s The American Jew as Patriot, Soldier and Citizen,” AJHSQ 59 (1969): 357 – 369. The percentage of Americans living in Union states that served in the Union army was about 11 percent. The percentage of New York Jewry would have been about 4 percent, based on a population of forty thousand. This likely reflects continuing disaffection by the majority of New Yorkers for the Republicans and their cause, a disaffection that continued throughout the war, following a brief moment of patriotic enthusiasm in the spring of 1861. 34. JM, 3 and 17 May 1861, 7 and 21 June 1861, 9 August 1861, 17, 24, and 31 January 1862, 7, 14, and 21 February 1862, 11 July 1862, 27 August 1862. 35. Korn, American Jewry, 56 – 67; Myer S. Isaacs, “A Jewish Army Chaplain,” PAJHS 10 (1904): 128 – 130. 36. Korn, American Jewry, 68 – 72; Isaacs, “A Jewish Army Chaplain,” 31 – 33; Marcus, United States Jewry, 3:43 – 45; JM, 31 January 1862, 5 May 1862. The Reform movement did not recognize the Board of Delegates’ claim to represent all of American Jewry, as it was composed only of Orthodox synagogues. After the board sent its protest to Washington, six Reform leaders including Rabbis Wise, Lilienthal, and Adler publicly protested that while they supported the legislation, it was their “duty” to dispute the Board of Delegates’ assumption that they represented American Jewry. Korn, American Jewry, 77 – 74; JM, 11 July 1862. 37. Korn, American Jewry, 74 – 80. Fischel returned to Holland, where he lived the rest of his life. 38. Ibid., 100 – 104. 39. JM, 20 June 1862, 18 July 1862; Joseph Hirsh and Beka Doherty, The Mount Sinai Hospital of New York, 1852 – 1952 (New York, 1952), 4 – 13, 42 – 44; Grinstein, The Rise of the Jewish Community, 155 – 157. 40. Korn, American Jewry, 161; George S. Hellman, “Joseph Seligman, American Jew,” PAJHS 41 (1951 – 1951): 27, 34 – 35; Elliott Ashkenazi, “Jewish Commercial Interests between North and South: The Case of the Lehmans and the Seligmans,” AJAJ 17 (1965): 25 – 29; Thomas K. McGraw, “Immigrant Entrepreneurs in U.S. Financial History, 1775 – 1914,” Capitalism and Society 5 (2010): 14 – 15; Ross L. Muir and Carl J. White, Over the Long Term: The Story of J. & W. Seligman & Co. (New York, 1964), 24 – 30, 44 – 48; Ron Chernow, The House of Morgan: An American Banking Dynasty and the Rise of Finance (New York, 1990), 13; Beckert, The Monied Metropolis, 112; Peter Chapman, The Last of the Imperious Rich: Lehman Brothers, 1844 – 2008 (New York, 2010), 10; Marcus, United States Jewry, 3:53 – 54. There is debate about the success of Joseph Seligman as a bond seller in Germany. The records that led an early biographer to make the claim of $200 million sold are no longer extant. See also Hood, “In Pursuit of Privilege.” 41. Stephen Birmingham, “Our Crowd”: The Great Jewish Families of New York (New York, 1967), 77 – 78. 42. Leonard Dinnerstein, Antisemitism in America (New York, 1994), 30; Korn, American Jewry, ch. 6; “Revoking General Grant’s Order No. 11,” in Schappes, Documentary History, 472 – 476, 702 – 704; Marcus, United States Jewry, 3:48 – 50; JM, 9, 16, and 23 January 1863.

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43. New York Times, 8 January 1863; see also New York Times, 19 December 1862, 5 and 7 January 1863, 8 February 1863. 44. New York World, 16 April 1861; New York Times, 2 and 7 April 1862, 19 December 1862, 23 November 1863, 28 February 1864; JM, 19 December 1863. 45. Quoted in Gary J. Bunker and John J. Appel, “Shoddy Antisemitism and the Civil War,” in Sarna and Mendelsohn, Jews and the Civil War, 314. 46. Korn, American Jewry, 161; New York Tribune, 13 March 1863; Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, 21 March 1863, quoted in Gary L. Bunker and John J. Appel, “ ‘Shoddy’ Antisemitism and the Civil War,” in Sarna and Mendelsohn, Jews and the Civil War, 320. Edmund Stedman does not list any Jews in his lengthy discussion of the gold trade and its fluctuations. Gold was critical to government finances during the war. Stedman, The New York Stock Exchange, 150 – 152. 47. Korn, American Jewry, 158 – 164, 173; JM, 21 November 1862, 19 December 1862, 20 June 1863. Many of Korn’s references are to the Jewish Messenger. McKay, The Civil War and New York City, 276; Stedman, The New York Stock Exchange, 162. Other instances of anti-Semitism were recorded in the New York Times, 11 January 1861, 28 September 1862, 8 February 1863, 2 April 1863, 27 July 1863, 2 November 1864. See also Hood, “In Pursuit of Privilege.” 48. Burrows and Wallace, Gotham, 886; Edward K. Spann, Gotham at War: New York City, 1860 – 1865 (Wilmington, DE, 2002), 89 – 91, 167; Iver Bernstein, The New York City Draft Riots: Their Significance for American Society and Politics in the Age of the Civil War (New York, 1990), 286. 49. JM, 8 May 1863, 24 June 1864; New York Times, 1 May 1863; for Purim balls, see ch. 8. 50. Burrows and Wallace, Gotham, 887 – 901; Korn, American Jewry, 162 – 163; Wolf, The American Jew, 284; Bernstein, The New York City Draft Riots, 34. 51. JM, 26 July 1863, 28 August 1863, 4 September 1863. After the first day of the riots, most Germans abandoned violence and some joined the authorities. Burrows and Wallace, Gotham, 894. In The Great Riots of New York (New York, 1873), Joel Headley argues that the German population “had no sympathy with the rioters” (246). 52. Burrows and Wallace, Gotham, 903; JM, 26 October 1864, 4 November 1864; Bertram J. Korn, “The Jews of the Union,” AJAJ 13 (1961): 221 – 224; McKay, The Civil War and New York City, 148. 53.; Beckert, The Monied Metropolis, 135, 137; Muir and White, Over the Long Term, 46; Lee, Discontent in New York, 175 – 177, 180 – 181, 204 – 205. McKay, The Civil War and New York City, 116, 140, 216 – 224, 285 – 286. Tailors’ wages dropped from sixty-seven and a half cents per day to thirty-seven and a half cents per day in 1861. A number of trades staged wartime strikes. On the plight of women workers, working sixteen hour days and ravaged by inflation, see New York Times, 2 April 1864. 54. Bertram Korn, the prominent historian of American Jewry in the Civil War, wrote that “New York Jewry was solidly behind Lincoln.” Korn was almost certainly too optimistic. Korn, “The Jews of the Union,” 222; Cohen, Encounter with Emancipation, 58; Spann, Gotham at War, 109 – 112, 172; Kamphoefner and Helbich, Germans in the Civil War, 64 (Emilie Weslau, 10 November 1862), 65 – 66 (Karl, Marie, and Emilie Weslau,

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28 July 1863); Stanley Nadel, “Jewish Race and German Soul in Nineteenth-Century America,” AJH 77 (1987): 8; Bernstein, The New York City Draft Riots, 223 – 224, 286. For ward-by-ward election results, see New York Times, 9 November 1864. After the election, a Republican analyst, bemoaning the loss of the German vote, blamed it on the Republican failure to have any lasting organization in the German wards. Unlike the Democrats, Republicans only showed interest there during the elections and did not cultivate Republican supporters afterward. The Germans felt “much more the instinctive hatred of slavery” and were “more intelligent” than the Irish, but they were also ”simple minded” and “suspicious” and, as they never heard anything from the Republicans, drew apart from them. New York Times, 20 November 1864. 55. JM, 21 April 1865, 9 June 1865; Brav, “The Jewish Woman,” 64. 56. Korn, “The Jews of the Union,” 239 – 243; JM, 28 April 1865. 57. Kamphoefner and Helbich, Germans in the Civil War, 71 (Karl and Marie Weslau, 13 June 1865); New York Times, 14 September 1863. 58. New York Times, 28 November 1862, 1 May 1863, 27 November 1864. 59. Isaacs, “A Jewish Army Chaplain,” 137. 60. Fuchs, The Political Behavior of American Jews, 42, 49 – 50; Emmanuel Hertz, ed., Abraham Lincoln: The Tribute of the Synagogue (New York, 1927), collects a number of the addresses by New York (and other American) rabbis. Few discuss slavery in the short excerpts, but there is a sense of common identity with Lincoln and the nation. Unfortunately, the strongest antislavery speaker, Samuel Adler, is represented with only a few passages. Rabbi Raphall, while expressing shock and sadness, again demonstrated that he had not been a Lincoln supporter, including in his remarks the wrongs Lincoln committed by imprisoning people who should not have been incarcerated, his early military failures, and his carelessness in being seen in the open so readily. The most passionate spokesman for Lincoln as a great emancipator was Max Lilienthal, who lived in New York for years but had left in 1855. In 1865, some rabbis were more willing to represent a common identity with bondage than others; that changed in the years to come. The book includes many later addresses in which the speakers are not reluctant to make these comparisons. The book also includes rabbis’ remarks on Lincoln in the early twentieth century, two generations later, allowing a good understanding of the immense change that the war brought to the Jewish community.

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N O T E S T O V I S U A L E S S AY

I thank Deborah Dash Moore for graciously inviting me to be part of this project, for her support of my work, and for her deep appreciation of objects and images. Jennifer Hammer of New York University Press has worked magic with my writing. It has been a delight to work with all four coauthors: Jeffrey S. Gurock, Annie Polland, Howard Rock, and Daniel Soyer. Danny earns a special thank-you for driving me around New York City to see murals and architecture. I also thank the anonymous readers for their helpful suggestions and advice. Numerous archivists, curators, librarians, collectors, and subscribers to the American Art listserv and the American Jewish History listserv offered valuable information. I appreciate all the living artists who granted me permission to reproduce their work.

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Laura Holzman, Nina Liss-Schultz, and Shoshana Olidort were terrific research assistants, and Alexandra Maron was of great help with the illustrations and permissions. Sonja Assouline, Kate Breiger, and Amanda Koire were loving, responsible, and very fun babysitters to Alex and Emily, allowing me to work. Friends, family, and colleagues have all generously given support, citations, personal stories and photographs, criticism, and beds on which to crash while in New York City. I thank Susanne Hunt for morning walks and for two years of hearing me go on about this book. She makes Claremont, California, home. David Brody finesses the perfect balance between his “amazings” to his “oy gevalts,” and I love him for that. Tom Burke, Sarah Cash, Kate Fermoile, George Gorse and Susan Thalmann (both of Pomona College), Martha Grier, Carol Hamoy, Camara Dia Holloway, Russet Lederman, Dr. Erica Rosenfeld, Kerri Steinberg, Craig S. Wilder, and Karen Zukowski — I thank you all. And Carolyn Halpin-Healy is just golden in all regards. My mom and dad, Joan and David Linden, put a subway map and a subway token in my hands at an early age with the mandate to go learn and love New York City. They are also the world’s greatest grandparents. My husband, Peter Ross, offers an unlimited supply of love, humor, understanding, and appreciation; he also holds everything together when I am off to New York on research trips. As my twins, Alex and Emily Linden-Ross, are New York Jews by heritage rather than birth, I am proud that they recognize the Flatiron Building at a distance, love Junior’s cheesecake, and hold on tight when the subway sways. I hope that they too will discover the magic of the City of Promises. 1. Jules D. Prown, “Mind in Matter: An Introduction to Material Culture Theory and Method,” in Robert Blair St. George, ed., Material Life in America, 1600 – 1860 (Boston, 1988), 18. 2. John R. Hebert, “The 1562 Map of America by Diego Gutierrez,” Library of Congress, http://lcweb2.loc.gov.ammem/gmdhtml/gutierrz.html (accessed February 1, 2010); and James A. Delle, “The Control of Space: Maps, Images and Patterns,” in Mark P. Leone and Neil Asher Silberman, ed., Invisible America: Unearthing Our Hidden History (New York, 1995), 106 – 107. 3. Delle, “The Control of Space,” 106. 4. I would like to thank Professor Susan V. Webster, College of William and Mary, for helping me locate images of the Inquisition and the Expulsion. 5. Richard I. Cohen, Jewish Icons: Art and Society in Modern Europe (Berkeley, CA, 1998), 10 – 67. 6. Steven Nadler, Rembrandt’s Jews (Chicago, 2003), 61 – 62. 7. Cohen, Jewish Icons, 33 – 34, concerns the controversy over identifying the figure represented by Rembrandt as Menasseh ben Israel, comparing textual and visual description of the rabbi. For decades, the Rembrandt Research Project, based in Holland, has been authenticating works by the Dutch master. 8. Art historian Michael Zell’s Reframing Rembrandt: Jews and the Christian Image in Seventeenth-Century Amsterdam (Berkeley, CA, 2002) is, to my knowledge, the first work to posit the idea of “philosemitism” and its shaping influence on Rembrandt (quotation on p. 3). I thank Michael for his guiding me through the vast literature on Rembrandt.

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9. One of the three versions de Witte painted of the Esnoga might possibly have been commissioned by a well-established Dutch Jew. See Yosef Kaplan, “For Whom Did Emanuel de Witte Paint His Three Pictures of the Sephardic Synagogue in Amsterdam?,” Studia Rosenthalia 32 (1998): 133 – 154. 10. Helen Rosenau, “The Synagogue and Protestant Church Architecture,” Journal of the Warburg and Court auld Institute 4, nos. 1 – 2 (October 1940 – January 1941): 80 – 84; Angela Vanhaelen, “Iconoclasm and the Creation of Images in Emanuel de Witte’s Old Church in Amsterdam,” Art Bulletin 87, no. 2 (June 2005): 249 – 264; Matthew Scribner, “Illusion and Iconoclasm in Emmanuel de Witte’s A Sermon in the Old Church in Delft,” SHIFT: Queen’s Journal of Visual & Material Culture 2 (2009): 1 – 12. 11. Jill Lepore, “The Tightening Vise: Slavery and Freedom in British New York,” in Ira Berlin and Leslie M. Harris, ed., Slavery in New York (New York, 2005), 58 – 60. 12. Ibid., 59 – 60. 13. Ibid., 353n. 1. David Grim, “Notes on the City of New York,” New-Historical Society. 14. Paul Needham, The Celebrated Franks Family Portraits (New York, 2008), 20. 15. Erica E. Hirshler, “The Levy-Franks Family Portraits,” Antiques, November 1990, 1021. 16. Jonathan D. Krasner and Jonathan D. Sarna, The History of the Jewish People: A Story of Tradition and Change, vol. 1, Ancient Israel to 1880’s America (Springfield, NJ, 2006), 162. 17. For a brief and persuasive discussion of the art of embroidery in relation to the creation of separate male (public) and female (domestic) spheres and, therefore, the differences between their arts, see Amy Elizabeth Grey, “A Journey Embroidered: Gender Redefined,” in Mark P. Leone and Neil Asher Silberman, Invisible America: Unearthing Our Hidden Heritage (New York, 1995), 140 – 141. 18. Ellen Smith, “Portraits of a Community: The Image and Experience of Early American Jews,” in Pamela S. Nadell, ed., American Jewish Women’s History: A Reader (New York, 2003), 19. 19. For an informative discussion of the role of Jewish women in colonial America, see Holly Snyder, “Queens of the Household: The Jewish Women of British America, 1700 – 1800,” in Pamela S. Nadell and Jonathan D. Sarna, eds., Women in American Judaism: Historical Perspectives, 15 – 45 (Hanover, NH, 2001); and Hasia R. Diner and Beryl Lieff Benderly, Her Works Praise Her: A History of Jewish Women in American from Colonial Times to the Present (New York, 2002). 20. Artist’s statement, September 2009. See also Amy Stone, “Feminist Funerals: Art Opens the Conversation,” Lilith, Summer 2009, 3; susan c. dessel, interview with author, 1 October 2009, New York City. 21. Joanne Reitano, The Restless City (New York, 2006), 11. 22. Ellen Smith, “Portraits of a Community in America at the Time of the Revolutionary War,” in Facing a New World: Jewish Portraits in Colonial and Federal America, exhibition catalog, Jewish Museum (New York, 1997), 13 – 14. 23. Ibid., 14.

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24. David Barquist, Myer Myers: Jewish Silversmith in Colonial New York (New Haven, CT, 2001). 25. This is now the busy thoroughfare of South William Street in New York City’s financial district. 26. David de Sola Pool, The Mill Street Synagogue: 1730 – 1817 (New York, 1930). 27. Jonathan D. Sarna, “Colonial Judaism,” in Barquist, Myer Myers, 13. 28. Jane Frances Amler, Haym Salomon: Patriot Banker of the American Revolution (New York, 2004), 45. 29. Norman L. Kleeblatt, The Jewish Heritage in American Folk Art (New York, 1987), 35. 30. Erin E. Eisenbarth, Baubles, Bangles, and Beads: American Jewelry from Yale University, 1700 to 2005 (New Haven, CT, 2005), 17. 31. Robin Jaffee Frank, Love and Loss: American Portrait and Mourning Miniatures (New Haven, CT, 2000), 130 – 132. 32. Ibid., 132. 33. Ira Berlin and Leslie M. Harris, introduction to Berlin and Harris, Slavery in New York, 4 – 5. 34. “Register of the Manumission of Slaves, New York City, 1816 – 1818,” 2:51 – 52, now housed at the New-York Historical Society; Morris U. Schappes, ed., “Four Documents Concerning Jews and Slavery,” in Maurianne Adams and John Bracey, eds., Strangers and Neighbors: Relations between Blacks and Jews in the United States (Amherst, MA, 1999), 137 – 146. 35. Michael W. Grunberger, introduction to Michael W. Grunberger, ed., From Haven to Home: 350 Years of Jewish Life in America (New York, 2004), 16 – 17. 36. Joshua Brown, “Reconstructing Representation: Social Types, Readers and the Pictorial Press, 1865 – 1877,” Radical History Review 38 (Fall 1996): 5 – 38. 37. Library of Congress, “Confronting Challenges,” From Haven to Home, exhibition companion website, http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/haventohome/haven-challenges.html (accessed November 12, 2009). 38. Robert Marcus, the owner of the photograph, shared the following with Shoshana Olidort, research assistant, in an email dated 11 March 2010: “The photographer’s imprint at the bottom reads, ‘Art Gallery, No. 411, Broadway.’ The men are unidentified. The uniformed man is a naval engineer.” According to Simon Wolf ’s 1895 rosters published in The American Jew as Patriot, Soldier and Citizen, the following Jews were naval engineers, and the man in the photo could well be one of them: Jonathan Manly Emanuel of Philadelphia, Frederic D. Henriques, and Charles H. Levy. 39. Joan Sturhahn, Carvalho: Artist-Photographer-Adventurer-Patriot: Portrait of a Forgotten American (Merrick, NY, 1976), 150 – 151.

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Huhner, Leon, “Naturalization of Jews of New York under the Act of 1740,” PAJHS 13 (1905): 1 – 6 Israel, Jonathan, European Jewry in the Age of Mercantilism, 1550 – 1750, 2nd ed. (Oxford, UK, 1989) Jaher, Frederic Cople, A Scapegoat in the Wilderness: The Origins and Rise of AntiSemitism in America (Cambridge, MA, 1994) Jick, Leon A., The Americanization of the Synagogue, 1820 – 1870 (Hanover, NH, 1976) Karp, Abraham J., The Jewish Experience in America, 5 vols. (New York, 1969) Kessner, Thomas, “Gershom Mendes Seixas: His Religious ‘Calling,’ Outlook and Competence,” AJHSQ 58 (1968 – 1969): 444 – 471 Kirsch, Guido, “Israel’s Herold: The First Jewish Weekly in New York,” Historia Judaica 2 (1940): 65 – 84 Kohler, Max J., “Civil Status of the Jew in Colonial New York,” PAJHS 6 (1898): 81 – 106 Kohler, Max J., “The Jews and the American Anti-Slavery Movement,” PAJHS 5 (1897): 137 – 155 Kohler, Max J., “Phases of Jewish Life in New York before 1800,” PAJHS 2 (1894): 77 – 100; PAJHS 3 (1895): 73 – 87 Kolmerton, Carol A., The American Life of Ernestine A. Rose (Syracuse, NY, 1997) Korn, Bertram W., American Jewry and the Civil War (New York, 1951) Korn, Bertram W., Eventful Years and Experiences: Studies in Nineteenth-Century American Jewish History (Cincinnati, 1954) Korn, Bertram W., “The Jews of the Union,” AJAJ 13 (1961): 131 – 230 Marcus, Jacob R. The Colonial American Jew, 1492 – 1776, 3 vols. (Detroit, 1970) Marcus, Jacob R., The Handsome Young Priest in the Black Gown: The Personal World of Gershom Seixas (Cincinnati, 1970) Marcus, Jacob R., United States Jewry, 1776 – 1985, 4 vols. (Detroit, 1989) Meyer, Michael A., Response to Modernity: A History of the Reform Movement in Judaism (New York, 1988) Moore, Deborah Dash, B’nai B’rith and the Challenge of Ethnic Leadership (Albany, NY, 1981) Nadel, Stanley, Little Germany: Ethnicity, Religion, and Class in New York City, 1845 – 80 (Urbana, IL, 1990) Noll, Mark A., America’s God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (New York, 2001) Oppenheim, Samuel, “Benjamin Franks, Merchant, and Captain Kidd, Pirate,” PAJHS 31 (1928): 229 – 234 Oppenheim, Samuel, “The Early History of the Jews in New York, 1654 – 1664: Some New Matter on the Subject,” PAJHS 18 (1909): 1 – 91 Oppenheim, Samuel, “The Jews and Masonry in the United States before 1810,” PAJHS 19 (1910): 1 – 94 Philipson, David, Max Lilienthal, American Rabbi: Life and Writings (New York, 1915) Pool, David de Sola, “Gershom Mendes Seixas’ Letters, 1813 – 1815, to His Daughter Sarah (Seixas) Kursheedt and Son-in-Law Israel Baer Kursheedt,” PAJHS 35 (1939): 189 – 206

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Pool, David de Sola, Portraits Etched in Stone: Early Jewish Settlers, 1682 – 1831 (New York, 1952) Pool, David de Sola, and Tamar de Sola Pool, An Old Faith in a New World: Portrait of Shearith Israel, 1654 – 1954 (New York, 1955) Rezneck, Samuel, Unrecognized Patriots: The Jews in the American Revolution (Westport, CT, 1975) Rosenwaike, Ira, On the Edge of Greatness: A Portrait of the American Jew in the Early National Period (Cincinnati, 1985) Roth, Cecil, “A Jewish Voice of Peace in the War of American Independence: The Life and Writings of Abraham Wagg, 1719 – 1803,” PAJHS 31 (1928): 33 – 75 Ruben, Bruce L., “Max Lilienthal and Isaac M. Wise: Architects of American Reform Judaism,” AJAJ 55 (2003): 1 – 29 Salomon, Herman P. “Joseph Jeshurun Pinto (1729 – 1782): A Dutch Hazan in Colonial New York,” Studia Rosenthalia 13 (1979): 18 – 29 Sarna, Jonathan D., “American Christian Opposition to the Jews, 1816 – 1900,” Journal of Ecumenical Studies 23 (1986): 225 – 238 Sarna, Jonathan D., “The American Jewish Response to Nineteenth-Century Christian Missionaries,” Journal of American History 68 (1981): 35 – 51 Sarna, Jonathan D., American Judaism: A History (New Haven, CT, 2004) Sarna, Jonathan D., “The Debate over Mixed Seating in America,” in Jack Wertheimer, ed., The American Synagogue: A Sanctuary Transformed, 363 – 371 (New York, 1987) Sarna, Jonathan D., Jacksonian Jew: The Two Worlds of Mordecai Noah (New York, 1981) Sarna, Jonathan D., and Adam Mendelsohn, Jews and the Civil War: A Reader (New York, 2010) Schappes, Morris U., “Anti-Semitism and Reaction, 1795 – 1800,” PAJHS 38 (1948 – 1949): 109 – 137 Snyder, Holly, “Queens of the Household: The Jewish Women of British America, 1700 – 1800,” in Pamela S. Nadell and Jonathan D. Sarna, eds., Women and American Judaism: Historical Perspectives (Hanover, NH, 2001) Snyder, Holly, “ ‘A Sense of Place’: Jews, Identity and Social Status in Colonial British America, 1654 – 1831” (Ph.D. diss., Brandeis University, 2000) Sndyer, Holly, “ ‘Under the Shado of Your Wings’: Religiosity in the Mental World of an Eighteenth-Century Jewish Merchant,” Early American Studies 8 (2010): 581 – 622 Sokolow, Jayme, “Revolution and Reform: The Antebellum Jewish Abolitionists,” in Jonathan D. Sarna and Adam Mendelsohn, eds., Jews and the Civil War (New York, 2010) Stern, Malcolm H., “Jewish Marriage and Intermarriage in the Federal Period (1776 – 1840),” AJAJ 19 (1967): 142 – 144 Stern, Myer, The Rise and Progress of Reform Judaism: Temple Emanu-El of New York (New York, 1895) Swetschinski, Daniel M., Reluctant Cosmopolitans: The Portuguese Jews of SeventeenthCentury Amsterdam (London, 2000) Swierenga, Robert T., “Samuel Myers Isaacs: The Dutch Rabbi of New York,” AJAJ 54 (1992): 607 – 621

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Temkin, Sefton D., Isaac Mayer Wise: Shaping American Judaism (New York, 1992) Wischnitzer, Rachel, Synagogue Architecture in the United States: History and Interpretation (Philadelphia, 1955) Wolf, Simon, The American Jew as Patriot, Soldier and Citizen (Philadelphia, 1895)

I NDEX

Page numbers in italics refer to a figure or a caption on the page. Abraham, Isaac, 98 Abraham, Simeon, 171 Abraham Lincoln and Diogenes (Carvalho), 296 Abrahams, Abraham (merchant), 80, 81, 284 Abrahams, Abraham (physician), 37 Abrahams, Abraham (shochet), 123, 124 Abrahams, Catherine, 98 Abrahams, Jacob, 73, 81 Abrahams, Joseph, 241 Academy of Music, 179 Ackerman, John, 117 Adams, John Quincy, 110 Adams, John Wolcott, 272 – 273 Address of Loyalty, 79 – 80 Adler, N. M., 171 Adler, Samuel: antislavery sentiments, 236, 341n60; on Civil War, 253; conversion to Judaism, requests for, 191; education, 188; Isaacs, Samuel, 236; Lincoln, Abraham, 251, 252; ordination, 330n10; photograph, 251; Reform Judaism, 188, 212, 251; Talmud, 215; Temple Emanu-El, 212 – 213, 225 Adolphus, Isaac, 72 Age of Reason (Paine), 139 Ahrens, Hanna, 171 Alien and Sedition Acts, 101 Ambrosius, Israel, 13 Ambrosius, Moses, 13 American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, 237, 238 American Anti-Slavery Convention, 231 American Bible Society, 110 American Hebrew Agricultural and Horticultural Association, 165 American Jewish Historical Society, 254 American Revolution, 71 – 91; 1776, 75 – 76, 79; Address of Loyalty, 79 – 80; Boston Tea Party (1773), 75; British patriotism, 78, 80; democratic consciousness, xv; entrepreneurialism, 94; Franks family, 76; fundraising/financing for, 83 – 84; intermarriage, 81, 82; Jewish abandonment of New York City,

xv, 78, 84 – 85; Jewish identification with British-American culture, 69; Jewish loyalists, 76, 78, 79 – 82; Jewish merchants, 73, 75, 84; Jewish military service, 82 – 84; legacy, 3, 91; non-importation pledge, 72 – 73; Philadelphia’s Jewish community, 84 – 85; Phillips, Jonas, 75 – 76; postwar period, 86 – 87; privateering, 83 – 84; Seixas, Gershom Mendes, 71, 76 – 78, 84, 141; Shearith Israel, 73 – 76, 78, 80; Torah scroll desecrated by British soldiers, 284 American Society for Evangelizing the Jews, 110 American Society for Meliorating the Condition of the Jews, 109, 110, 202 American Tract Society, 110 Americanization, 3, 4, 210 Amsterdam, 9 – 10, 15, 28, 46, 271, 282 Andros, Edmund, 26 Anglican Church, 27 Anglicization of names, 27, 66 Anshe Chesed congregation: architectural style, 184; confirmation ceremony, 109, 209; day school, 192 – 193; Gothic-style building, 185 – 186; Lilienthal, Max, 162, 187; Merzbacher, Leo, 188; Norfolk Street location, 181, 184; Polish Jews, 181; Sabbath violators, 207; synagogue decorum, 190; synagogue school, 192 – 193; Wise, Isaac Mayer, 206 antebellum New York City, 151 – 210, 227 – 240; Americanization without loss of Jewish identity, 3; anti-Semitism, 198 – 202; antiabolitionists, 229, 230 – 231; Democratic Party, 227 – 228, 229; democratic spirit, 152; eastern European Jews, 155; garment industry, 152, 156 – 157; German immigrants, 152, 153 – 154, 155; German Jewish immigrants (see German Jews); integration of Jews into American mainstream, 179, 202; intermarriage, 190; Irish immigrants, 152, 153 – 154; Jewish antislavery advocates, 234 – 237, 341n60; Jewish arts and entertainment,

351

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antebellum New York City (continued ) 176 – 179; Jewish community divisiveness, 185; Jewish education, 191 – 195; Jewish fraternal orders, 98 – 100; Jewish immigrants, 155, 156, 158; Jewish leaders, arrival of learned, 186 – 187; Jewish literary societies, 160 – 161, 162; Jewish merchants, 157, 228 – 229; Jewish mobility, 157; Jewish movement uptown, 179; Jewish Orphan Home, 172 – 173; Jewish participation in reform efforts, lack of, 166 – 167; Jewish philanthropy, 162 – 167; Jewish population, 155, 181, 190, 255, 256; Jewish poverty, 164; Jewish religious life, 188 – 191, 205 – 208; Jewish Republicans, 236; Jewish social standing, 186; Jewish southern sympathizers, 230 – 234, 237 – 238, 247, 254, 297; Jewish synagogues, average cost, 186; Jewish synagogues, grandeur of, 180, 185 – 188; Jewish wealth, 157, 186, 202; Jewish women, 173 – 175, 195 – 198; Jews’ Hospital (see Jews’ Hospital); newspapers, 152; nonimmigrant Jewish population, 154 – 156; Orthodox Judaism, 186; politics, 227 – 240; population growth, 151 – 152; secularization, 178, 205; slavery, 152 – 153, 229 – 234; social acceptance of Jews, 178; Southern ties, 152 – 153, 239, 338n29; speculation, 152 – 153; tenements, 154 anti-Semitism, 109 – 111; 1790s, 109; among educated men, 200 – 201; antebellum New York City, 198 – 202; Christian German Americans, 158; Civil War, 245 – 248; colonial New York City, 66 – 68; Delancey, Oliver, 67; dishonest commerce, 199; England, 27; evangelicalism, 200; Federalists, 109; General Orders No. 11, 245 – 246; Mortara case (Italy, 1858), 198 – 199; New Amsterdam, 22; New York Herald newspaper, 200, 201; Pennsylvania, 314n36; politics, 200; against proprietors of stores, 199; republican New York City, 109 – 111, 319n39, 319n41; Stuyvesant, Peter, 1, 14, 16 – 17, 22; in theater, 110, 319n41; visibility/public success, 199, 289 Apollo Saloon, 162 Ararat/Grand Island colony, 107 – 108 Argus (newspaper), 101 Arnold, Abram, 171 Aronson, Harris, 163 artisans, 37, 75, 87, 96 Asbury, Francis, 146 Ash, Rabbi, 184 Ashkenazic Jews: B’nai Jeshurun congregation,

126; colonial New York City, 28, 40 – 41; definition, 3; Dutch Republic, 8; England, 27; Hevra Hinuch Nearim (Society for the Education of Youth), 128; Levy, Asser, 21; merchants, 29 – 30; Shearith Israel, 28, 46, 126, 128; tombstones, 262 Asmonean (newspaper): anti-Semitism, response to, 201; arts and entertainment coverage, 176 – 177; call for umbrella philanthropic organization, 167; ceasing publication, 225; city’s schools, 193; conversion to Judaism, requests for, 191; Fugitive Slave Act (1850), 232; Hebrew Benevolent Society (HBS), 163; Jewish farmers, 165 – 166; Jewish firms, list of, 157; Jewish poverty, 164; Jewish women, 173 – 175; Jewish youth, 209; Judaism as an evolutionary doctrine, 214; Lyon, Robert, 152, 204, 213, 231; missionary attempts to convert Jews, 202; Orthodox Judaism, 220 – 221; Reform Judaism, 204, 231; seminary to train Jewish educators, 195; Temple Emanu-El, 218 – 219; Wise, Isaac Mayer, 188, 212, 213, 231; Young Men’s Library Society, 160 assimilation: Americanization, 3, 4, 210; colonial New York City, 65, 68 – 69; Enlightenment, 68; integration of Jews into American mainstream, 93, 179, 202, 258 – 259; integration without, 4; Jewish New Yorkers, 65; Jewish rituals, 147; republican New York City, 93; republicanism, 147 Astor, John Jacob, 94, 95 Astor family, 153 Astor Opera House, 176, 179 Bacon, Francis, 138 Baer, Israel, 133 Baldwin, James, 297 – 298 Barnet, Abraham, 98 Barnett, Henrietta, 171 Barsimon, Jacob, 12, 14, 17, 18, 20 Bayard, Stephen, 33, 60 Beach, Moses, 229 Beckert, Sven, 338n29 Bedford (Brooklyn), xviii Beecher, Henry Ward, 228, 234 Beekman, Gerardus, 38, 67 Beekman family, 30, 153 Bellevue, 167 Bellomont, Richard Coote, 1st Earl of, 29, 30 Belmont, August, 153, 179, 234, 247, 254 Bene Israel congregation, 181

Index Bennett, James Gordon, 200, 201 Beth HaMidrash congregation, 183 – 184 Beth HaMidrash HaGadol congregation, 184 Beth Israel congregation, 182 Bevis Marks synagogue (London), 308n15 Bible, slavery and, 232 – 234, 236 “Bible View of Slavery” (Einhorn), 294 “Bible View of Slavery” (Raphall), 294 Bien, Julius, 160, 188 – 189 Bill of Rights, 114 Birmingham Hebrew Congregation, 187 Blackwell’s Island, 167 B’nai B’rith, 3, 158 – 161, 165, 167, 188 – 189, 252, 258 B’nai Jeshurun congregation, 181 – 183; Ashkenazic Jews, 126; Board of Trustees, 182, 238; building, 127; Elm Street location, 185; First Coloured Presbyterian Church, conversion of, 127; founding, 126, 129 – 130, 181 – 183; Greene Street location, 185; Hart, Benjamin, 198; Hebrew Benevolent Society (HBS), 118, 164; Isaacs, Samuel, 182; membership of nonobservants, 207; Micholl, Morland, 182; public aid for schools, request for, 191; Raphall, Morris, 160, 186, 187; Raphall’s pro-slavery speech, 238; ritual baths (mikveh), 209; Shearith Israel, secession from, 126, 130; Wise, Isaac Mayer, 206 B’nai Jeshurun Educational Institute, 192 – 193 Board of Delegates, 199, 242, 339n36 Board of Trade, 30 Bolingbroke, Henry St. John, 1st Viscount, 139 Boston Tea Party (1773), 75 Brazilian Jews, 9 – 10 Breslauer, Charles, 241 Brick Presbyterian Church, 35 Broadway Theater, 179 Brooklyn, 153 Brown, John, 229 – 230 Brownell, George, 47 Bryant, William Cullen, 228 Buchanan, James, 198, 231, 234 Bueno, Joseph, 29, 55, 66. See also Mesquita, Joseph Bueno de Bueno family (later Bones family), 66 Burning of Spanish Jews and Others in Portugal (engraving), 265, 274 Burr, Aaron, 97, 102 Busch, Isidor, 216 Butler, Benjamin Franklin, 246

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Cameron, Simon, 242 Carleton, Guy, 82, 86 Carnegie, Andrew, 256 Caro, Joseph, 142 Carvalho, E. N., 120 – 121 Carvalho, Solomon Nunes, 296, 297 Cass, Lewis, 231 – 232 Castle Garden, xiii, 153, 154 Catlin, George, 92 Chamber of Commerce, 99 Chance (ship), 84 Chanukah menorah, 42 Chatham Square (Manhattan), 155, 156 – 157 Chatham Street (Manhattan), xvii, 199, 293 Chatham Street Cemetery (Manhattan), 17, 277 Child, Lydia, 205 – 206 Christian artists, 267 – 268 Christian elite, Jewish elite’s relations with, 50, 68 Christianity, conversion to: acceptance in American society, 148; conversos, 7, 269, 300n5; Franks family, 63, 65; intermarriage, 65 – 66; Jadownicky, Bernard, 110 – 111; Mendelssohn’s grandchildren, 63; missionary attempts to convert Jews, 110, 111, 147, 201 – 202 Churchman (magazine), 200 City Hall, 273 City Theater, 177 Civil War era, 258 – 259; 1862 elections, 248; 1864 presidential election, 249 – 251; antiSemitism, 245 – 248; beginning, 240 – 241; draft riots (1863), 243, 248 – 249; financing Union troops, 244; Fort Sumter, 240; gold trading, 247; integration of Jews into American mainstream, 258 – 259; Jewish chaplains, 242 – 243; Jewish New Yorkers, 227; Jewish patriotic service, 241 – 244; Jewish Union sympathies, 250; Jewish women, 243; Jews’ Hospital, 243 – 244; postwar years, 256 – 257 Clinton, DeWitt, 104, 125 Clinton, George, 30, 86, 87 Cock, Hieronymus, 263, 264 Coen, Daniel, 96 Coercive Acts (1774), 75 Cohen, Abraham, 16 Cohen, Barrow, 126 – 128, 129, 190 Cohen, Elkalel, 35 Cohen, Isidor, 241 Cohen, Jacob Raphael, 80 Cohen, Naomi, 151

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Cohen, Robert, 65 Cohen, Samuel Myers, 35, 39, 40, 55 Cohen, Solomon Myers, 89 Cohen Henriques, Jacob, 16, 18, 19, 20 Coleman, Edward, 319n41 colonial New York City, 25 – 69; anti-Semitism, 66 – 68; Ashkenazic Jews, 28, 40 – 41; assimilation, 65, 68 – 69; British patriotism, 60, 66; citizenship rights, xiii, xv, 2, 26, 78 – 79; English Atlantic trading network, 28, 33; Jewish average family size, 65; Jewish community, importance of standing in, 55; Jewish craftsmen, 35, 36 – 37; Jewish identification with British-American culture, 69; Jewish merchants, early colonial era, 28 – 35; Jewish militia members, 66; Jewish political participation, 66; Jewish population, 27, 34, 47, 71; Jewish religious life, 48 – 50, 55 – 59; Jewish residences, 45; Jewish rights and privileges, xiii, xv, 26, 67 – 68, 279; “Port Jews,” 25; portraits as mark of wealth and status, 274; Sephardic Jews, 28, 40 – 41; Shearith Israel, 28, 43 – 59; Torah scrolls, 283 Colored Orphan Asylum, 249 Columbia College, 97, 137, 140 – 141, 147, 200, 226 Columbus, Christopher, 5 Commercial Advertiser (newspaper), 101, 108, 109 Common Council, 24, 27, 43, 99, 122 – 123, 181, 230 Compromise of 1850, 229 Concise History of North America (Rodgers), 68 Conkling, Roscoe, 172 Continental Army Marching Down the Old Bowery New York (Pyle), 70 Continental Congress, 75, 84 Conversations (Dix), 192 conversos, 7, 269, 300n5 Cooper, Peter, 153 Cornbury, Edward Hyde, Viscount, 29, 66 Cosby, William, 59 – 60, 67 Crawford, William H., 104 Cromwell, Oliver, 12 Crown Galley (slave ship), 39 D’Acosta, Joseph, 16, 19, 20 dancing, 176 – 177 D’Andrada, Salvador, 16, 18, 19, 20 Davidson, D., 177

Davies, Thomas, 77 Davis, Jefferson, 249 De Acosta, Jacob, 36 – 37 De Costa, Jacob, 81 de la Motthe, Jacques, 13 de Lucena, Abraham, 16, 17, 18, 20, 22, 304n8 de Lucena, Abraham Haim, 55 De Torres, Simja da Silva, 40, 45, 64 Debow’s Review (periodical), 229 Declaration of Independence, 75, 126, 258 deference, Hamiltonianism and, 94, 100 – 101 deism, 139, 145, 323n1 Delancey, James, 62 Delancey, Oliver, 62, 63, 67, 76 Delancey family, 62, 84, 86 Delara, D. E. M., 166 Democracy in America (Tocqueville), 152, 179 democratic ethos, xv – xvi Democratic Party: antebellum New York City, 227 – 228, 229; German Americans, 250 – 251, 340n54; Jewish New Yorkers, 229, 238, 256; Jewish participation, 3, 166; Peace Democrats, 248; Raphall, Morris, 234; Tammany Hall, 230 Democratic-Republican Party, 100, 101, 102, 104 Democratic Society, 101, 109, 258 department stores, xvii, 152 DePeyster, Abraham, 33 Dessel, Susan C., 277 – 279 Detmond, William, 170 Dittenhoefer, Abram J., 161, 236, 238, 250 Dittenhoefer, Isaac, 158 Dix, Dorothy, 192 “Doctor” (the term), 330n10 Dohla, Johann Conrad, 81 Douglass, Frederick, 232, 237 Dred Scott decision, 229 Duane, James, 86 Duane family, 36 Duke of Portland (slave ship), 40 Dupré, Alexander, 241 Dutch Calvinists, 269 – 271 Dutch East India Company, 10 – 11 Dutch Jews: Amsterdam, 9 – 10, 15; Anshe Chesed congregation, 181; Bene Israel congregation, 181; commercial connections, 22; Dutch West India Company, 9; new synagogues for, 182; from Portugal, 8; Recife, Brazil, 1 – 2, 9 – 10, 14 Dutch Reformed Church, 8, 17, 185, 186

Index Dutch Republic, 8 – 9, 12, 268 Dutch West India Company: Barsimon, Jacob, 12; capture of northeast Brazil, 9; financial straits, 22; formation, 9; furs, 10; Jewish rights and privileges, 18 – 19, 279; Jewish stockholders, 9, 15, 16; New Amsterdam, 1; New Netherland, 10; powers, 9; Stuyvesant, Peter, 11, 14, 15, 17, 19, 279 Duyckinck, Geradus, 275 East India Company, 10 – 11 eastern European Jews, 8, 155 egalitarianism, 94, 141, 219 Einhorn, David, 234, 294 Einstein & Jacobs, 157 Eisenbarth, Erin F., 284 Ellis Island, 2, 259 Emancipation Proclamation (1863), 236 – 237, 248 Emanuel I, King of Portugal, 7 Embargo of 1807 – 1808, 103 emigration, secularization and, 151 Emmanuel, Solomon, 96 England, 27 – 28, 33 English, George Bethune, 140 English-language Jewish press, xxi Enlightenment, 58, 61, 68, 225, 258 entrepreneurialism, republicanism and, 94 Erie Canal, 94, 151 Esnoga synagogue (Amsterdam), 9, 28, 271, 282 Esther (Biblical), 64 – 65 Ets Haim Rabbinical Seminary (Amsterdam), 56 evangelicalism, 145 – 146, 200 Evans, Margaret, 62 Evening Post (newspaper), 109, 229 Eyttinge, Harry, 177 Faber, Eli, 28 Farmer’s Loan and Trust Co., 200 Farret, C. P., 177 Federalist Party, 100 Federalists, xvi, 101 – 102, 103 Fellow’s Minstrels, 177 Female Hebrew Benevolent Society, 131 Ferdinand II, King of Aragon, 5 – 6, 7 Ferdinand VII, King of Spain, 266 Ferera, David, 16, 20 Fifth Avenue (Manhattan), xvii Fillmore, Millard, 163, 231, 234 Fire Next Time, The (Baldwin), 297 – 298

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First American Haggadah, The (Jackson), 291 – 293 First Coloured Presbyterian Church, 127, 129 – 130 Fischel, Arnold, 187, 220 – 221, 222, 242 – 243 Fish, Hamilton, 163 Five Points, 92, 129, 156, 185 Flying Horse (sloop), 64 Foner, Eric, 338n29 Fonseca, Isaac Aboab da, 10, 270, 271 Fordham Road (Bronx), xvii Form of Prayer, The (prayer service), 57 Fort Orange (Albany), New York, 10, 18 Foster, George, 156 – 157 Fourteenth Street (Manhattan), xvii Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, 150, 247, 292, 293 Frankel, Joseph, 243 Franks, Abigaill (née Levy), 58 – 63; British patriotism, 60; daughter Phila, 61 – 62, 63; daughter Richa, 61, 310n42; death, 76; dietary advice, 59; education, 33, 58; Enlightenment values, 61; father (see Levy, Moses); Gomez, David, 61; gossip, 61; grandchildren, 62; husband (see Franks, Jacob); Jewish religious life, 48, 58; Long Island home, 62; marriage, 31; mother Rycha Levy, 59; Negro Plot (1741), 310n35; piety, 58 – 59, 61; political connections, 59 – 60; resurrection, concept of, 58; Shearith Israel, women at, 60, 63; on social conduct, 60 – 61; son David (see Franks, David); son Moses (see Franks, Moses); son Naphtali, 50, 58 – 59, 60 – 61, 62 (see also Franks, Naphtali); stepmother Grace Mears, 59; writers read by, 59 Franks, Abraham, 25 Franks, David, 31, 32, 62 – 63, 76, 79, 82, 305n16 Franks, Isaac, 83 Franks, Jacob: Christian elite, relations with, 33; country home, 33; daughter Phila (see Franks, Phila); daughter Richa, 61, 310n42; Delancey family, 62; elective offices withheld from, 67; emigration from London, 25; father Abraham, 25; grandchildren, 62; Hays, Judah, 54; legal disputes, 35; marriage, 31; as a merchant, 31 – 33; neighbors, 33; New-York Gazette newspaper ads, 31; portrait of his children, 274, 275; as scholar, 33; Shearith Israel, 44, 46, 47, 52, 54; slave trading by, 40; slaves owned by, 33, 310n35; son David (see Franks, David); son Moses

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Franks, Jacob (continued ) (see Franks, Moses); son Naphtali, 31; Watts, Isaac, 48; wife (see Franks, Abigaill); Yeshivat Minchat Arav school, 47 Franks, Moses, 31, 32, 38, 63, 76, 87 Franks, Naphtali, 31, 50, 58 – 59, 60 – 62, 63 Franks, Phila, 61 – 62, 63 Franks, Rachel, 283 – 284, 285 Franks, Rebecca, 79, 82 Franks, Richa, 61, 310n42 Franks, Simon, 37 Franks family: American Revolution, 76; arms dealing by, 305n16; British country and court parties, 60, 310n35; Christian counterparts, dining with, 50; Christianity, conversion to, 63, 65; intermarriage, 62; loyalism, 78, 82; neighbors, 60; Portrait of Franks Children with Lamb (Duyckinck), 275; replaced as merchant leaders, 91; Shearith Israel, 46 Franks-Levy Family Portrait Collection, 274 Free Academy (later City College of New York), 195 Free School No. 1, 125, 194 Fremont, John C., 131, 234, 235, 297 French and Indian War, 30, 37, 57, 71 – 72 French Jews, 182 French Revolution, 100 Frey, Joseph, 110 Friends of Light (Verein der Lichtfreunde), 214 Fugitive Slave Act (1850), 229, 232 Fulton, Robert, 95 Gage, Thomas, 73 Gans, Eduard, 108 garment industry: antebellum New York City, 152, 156 – 157; Civil War uniforms, xvii, 244; emergence, xvii; manufacturers in, 338n29; pre – Civil War, xiii; Singer sewing machine, 152; Southern ties, 228, 338n29; Strauss, Levi, xiii Garrison, William Lloyd, 237 Geiger, Abraham, 211 Gemilut Hasidim charitable society, 89 General Orders No. 11, 245 – 246 Gentleman’s Magazine, 59 German Americans, 250 – 251, 340n54. See also German immigrants; German Jews; Kleindeutschland German Democratic Club, 250 German Hebrew Benevolent Society, 162, 164, 165, 167, 168, 172

German immigrants, 152, 153 – 154, 155. See also Kleindeutschland German Jews: B’nai B’rith, 258; in Dutch Republic, 8; hospitals, 167 – 168; immigrants, 157 – 158, 165; Jews’ Hospital, 167, 170; Lincoln, Abraham, 238; native-born Jews, 172; Orthodox Judaism, 158; Reform Judaism, 210 – 211, 220; Rodeph Shalom and Shaaray Hashamayim congregations, 182; Sephardic Jews, 172; Temple Emanu-El, 182, 186 German National Theater, 177 German Union Society, 250 Gilman, Chandler, 170 Gold and Silver Smith’s Society, 36, 99 Goldberg, Henry, 190 Gomez, Abraham, 79 Gomez, Benjamin, 39, 96 Gomez, Daniel: elective offices withheld from, 67; Hays, Solomon, 53; as a merchant, 30 – 31; New-York Gazette newspaper ads, 30; piety, 56; Shearith Israel, 31, 52; son Moses, 53, 74; upstate trading house, 66; volunteering for military service, 83; wife Esther Levy, 30; wife Rebecca de Torres, 30 Gomez, Daniel (Moses Gomez’s son), 83 Gomez, David, 61 Gomez, Isaac, 39, 95, 98, 101, 116 – 117 Gomez, Isaac, Jr., 97, 122, 124 Gomez, Luis (born Moses Gomez) (later Lewis Moses Gomez): elective offices withheld from, 67; as a merchant, 29; Shearith Israel, 44; slaves owned by, 38, 40; son David, 61; Trinity Church, contribution to, 68; upstate trading house, 66; wife, first, 29 Gomez, Mordecai, 39 – 40, 45, 46, 52, 56, 68 Gomez, Moses, 53, 74 Gomez, Moses, Jr., 79, 81 Gomez, Rachel, 39, 81 Gomez, Rebecca, 64, 81 Gomez family: arms dealing by, 305n16; Christian counterparts, dining with, 50; etrog holder, 279, 280; prominent sons, 30; replaced as merchant leaders, 91; Shearith Israel, 46; snuff manufacturing, 34 Goya y Lucientes, Francisco Jose de, 266 – 268 Grace Episcopal Church (Manhattan), 153 Gradual Manumission Law (1799), 97 Grand Island colony, 107 Grant, Ulysses S., 199, 241, 245 Gratz, Bernard, 85 Gratz, Rebecca, 194

Index Great Christopher (ship), 20 Grecian Captive, The (Noah), 104 – 105 Greeley, Horace, 239, 247, 249 Grim, David, 273 – 274 Grinstein, Hyman, 2, 130, 148, 209 Gunther, C. Godfrey, 248, 250 Gutierrez, Diego, 263, 264 Gutterman, Jeff, 260 Haggadah, 291 – 293 Hallgarten and Herzfeldt, 247 Halsted, Benjamin, 35 Halve Maen (Half Moon) (ship), 5 Hamilton, Alexander, 86, 102, 109, 137 Hamilton, Alexander (physician), 57 – 58 Hamiltonianism, 94, 100 – 101, 118, 124 Hamiltonians, 100 – 101 Harison, Francis, 30 Harper’s Magazine, 200, 247 Hart, Becky, 132 Hart, Benjamin, 99, 198 Hart, Bilah, 59 Hart, Emmanuel, 98 – 99, 230, 239, 254 Hart, Ephraim, 87, 95, 99 Hart, Jacob, 121 Hart, Joel, 99 Hart, John, 98, 199 Hart, Lion, 87 Hart, Moses, 37, 106 – 107 Hart, Raphael, 98 Hays, Barak, 74, 79, 80 Hays, David, 34 Hays, Gitlah, 52 – 53 Hays, Hetty, 64 Hays, Jacob, 286 Hays, Joseph, memorial pendant for, 286 Hays, Josse, 53 – 54 Hays, Judah, 34, 40, 52, 53 – 55, 74, 79, 80 Hays, Michael, 74 Hays, Rachel, 74 Hays, Solomon, 52 – 53, 65, 74, 96 Hays, Solomon (Jacob’s son), memorial pendant for, 286 “hazan” (the term), 330n10 HBS. See Hebrew Benevolent Society Hebra Gemiluth Hasidim (or Hazedim) (Society for Dispensing Acts of Kindness), 89, 117 Hebra Hased Vaamet (Society of Kindness and Truth), 117 Hebrew Benevolent Society (HBS), 118, 162 – 165, 167, 168, 172

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Hebrew Commercial and Classical Boarding School, 194 – 195 Hebrew Orphan Asylum, 157 Hebrew Review and Magazine of Rabbinical Literature, 187 Hegel, G. W. F., 211 Heilprin, Michael, 235 Helena (ship), 28 Hendricks, Harmon, 95, 119 – 120, 123, 129, 147 – 148, 185, 250 Hendricks, Henry, 168 Hendricks, Rebecca, 275 – 276 Hendricks, Uriah, 50, 72, 79, 80, 86, 95 Henry, Henry, 219 Henry, Solomon, 81 – 82 Hershkowitz, Leo, 13 Hevra Bikur Cholim Vkadisch, 164 – 165 Hevra Hinuch Nearim (Society for the Education of Youth), 128 Holdheim, Samuel, 211 Holmes, Stanley, 282 Howe, Richard, 75 Howe, William, 75, 78, 79 Hudson, Henry, 5, 10 Humane Society, 137 Hunter, Robert, 30 Hyam, Uriah, 38 Hyams, Michael, 37 Ilowy, Bernard, 234 Inquisition, 7, 15, 300n5 Interior of the Portuguese Synagogue (Witte), 269 intermarriage, 62, 65 – 66, 81, 82, 190 Irish immigrants, 152, 153 – 154, 166 Irving, Washington, 110 Isaacs, Frances, 65 Isaacs, Isaac, 53, 65 Isaacs, Jacob, 37 Isaacs, Joshua, 45 Isaacs, Myer S., 178, 221, 223, 249 – 250, 253 – 254 Isaacs, Ralph, 38 Isaacs, Samuel, 220 – 224; Adler, Samuel, 236; B’nai Jeshurun congregation, 182; Board of Delegates, 242; call to arms, 240; on charity, 163; common standards for synagogues, 198; conversion to Judaism, requests for, 190 – 191; Fremont, John C., 235; German Hebrew Benevolent Society, 164; Hebrew Benevolent Society (HBS), 162 – 163; Hebrew high school, 195; Jewish education of youth, 193; Jewish Messenger newspaper,

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Isaacs, Samuel (continued ) 152, 186 – 187, 190 – 191, 193, 198, 235 – 236; Jews’ Hospital, 170; Lincoln’s death, 251, 252; obedience to God, 224; ordination, lack of, 330n10; political silence about slavery, 238; portrait, 221; Reform Judaism, response to, 220, 222 – 223; Rodeph Shalom congregation, 191; Sabbath violators, 207 – 208; Shaaray Tefilah congregation, 152, 182, 183, 186; son Myer S. (see Isaacs, Myer S.); Stowe, Calvin, 235; title designating spiritual leadership, 330n10 Isaacs, Solomon, 95 Isabella, Queen of Aragon, 6, 7 Israel, Abraham, 13 Israel, Andrew, 38 – 39 Israel, David, 8, 13 Israel, Isaac, 20 Israel, Menasseh ben, 12, 268 – 269 Israel, Saul, 97 Israel Vindicated (pamphlet), 111 Israel’s Advocate (magazine), 110 Israel’s Herold (newspaper), 167 – 168, 216 Italian Opera Company, 176 Jackson, Andrew, 104, 179, 227 Jackson, Edwin, 287 Jackson, Elizabeth, 287 Jackson, James, 287 Jackson, Samuel, 111 Jackson, Solomon, 97, 291 Jacobs, Benjamin, 66 Jacobs, Benjamin I., 87 Jacobs, Hart, 83 Jacobs, Michael, 38 Jacobs, Moses, 37 Jadownicky, Bernard, 110 – 111 Jamaican Jews, 49 Janeway, Richard, 39 Jay, John, 78 – 79, 137 Jefferson, Thomas, 101, 106, 138 – 140, 144 – 145, 238 Jeffersonianism, 138 – 142; biblical Judaism, 145; common school education, 125; Democratic-Republican Party, 100; egalitarianism, 94, 141; Jewish New Yorkers, 3; Noah, Mordecai M., 104 – 105; Orthodox Judaism, 149; Seixas, Gershom Mendes, 102, 137, 138 – 142, 141; Shearith Israel, 121 – 130 Jeffersonians, xvi, 100, 108 Jersey (prison ship), 99

Jew, The (periodical), 111 Jewish Clerks Aid Society, 209 Jewish denizens, 26 Jewish education, 191 – 195 Jewish fraternal orders, xvi, 98 – 100, 158 – 162 Jewish immigrants: 1654, xv; 1830s, 149, 155; agricultural careers encouraged, 165 – 166; Americanization, 210; antebellum New York City, 155, 156, 158; B’nai B’rith, 159, 160; economic advancement, 178 – 179; emigration to the West, support for, 165 – 166; European wars, 93; new synagogues, 181, 196, 256; New York as a destination for, xiii; secularization, 210; splitting of congregations into new congregations, 130 Jewish Marranos, 64 – 65, 300n5, 323n1 Jewish merchants, 28 – 41; 1654 – 1664, 255; 1750s and 1760s, 71; advertising by, 73, 80, 86, 96; American Revolution, 73, 75, 84; antebellum New York City, 157, 228 – 229; arms dealers and military suppliers, 32, 68, 80, 250, 305n16; Ashkenazic Jews, 29 – 30; banking by, 34; brokering by, 86; Buchanan, James, 231; colonial era, early, 28 – 30; colonial era, later, 30 – 35; cotton merchants, 244; crime by, 38; department stores, xvii, 152; English Atlantic trading network, hub in, 33, 34; failures, bankruptcies, 37 – 38; government contracts, 32; grocers, 96; insurance brokering by, 34; legal disputes, 34 – 35; loans to pay soldiers, 30; loyalists among, 80 – 81; manufacturing by, 34; money lending by, 34; New Amsterdam, 11, 16; New Netherland, 19 – 21; non-Jewish partners, 68; overseas trade patterns, 34; “Port Jews,” 25; post – Revolutionary War period, 86 – 87; real estate speculating by, 31; religiosity, 56; republican New York City, 94 – 96, 316n4; retailers, xvii, 96; risks faced by, 33 – 34; Sephardic merchants, 16, 28 – 29, 304n8; slavery, acceptance of, 40; small-scale merchants, 96; Southern ties, 228, 239; used-clothing market, 156 – 157; Whig Party, 231; women merchants, 63 – 64 Jewish Messenger (newspaper): anti-Semitism, response to, 201 – 202; Butler’s use of “Jew,” Benjamin Franklin, 246; call for umbrella philanthropic organization, 167; call to arms, 240; cultural events coverage, 177; draft riots (1863), 249; Fast Day (1863), 248; General Orders No. 11, 245; Hebrew high school, 195; Isaacs, Myer S., 178; Isaacs,

Index Samuel, 152, 186 – 187, 190 – 191, 193, 198, 235 – 236, 251; Jewish politics, denial of, 249; Jewish Union officers, 242; Jewish youth, 209; Lincoln, election of, 236; Lincoln’s death, 251; on literary careers, 162; national board of Jewish organizations, 198; orphan asylum, 172 – 173; Passover messages, 238 – 239; piano ads, 174; political articles, 235 – 236, 237, 253; Reform Judaism, 224, 225; Reform Judaism, response to, 220, 222; Sabbath observance, 209, 222; Sabbath violators, 207; women’s education, 197 – 198; women’s religiosity, 196 Jewish New Yorkers, xii – xxiii; 1730s, 282; 1765 – 1775, 71; Americanization without loss of Jewish identity, 3; Anglicization of names, 27, 66; assimilation (see assimilation); average family size, 65; citizenship rights in colonial New York, xiii, xv, 2, 26, 78 – 79; civil society, xxi; Civil War era, 227; communal structures, xxi; cosmopolitanism, 91; Democratic Party, 229, 238, 256; dress, 81; English-language Jewish press, xxi; Enlightenment, 58, 258; evangelical republican synthesis, 147, 149; fraternal orders, xvi, 98 – 100, 158 – 162; identification with British-American culture, 69; Lincoln, Abraham, 238, 340n54; literary societies, xvi, 160 – 161, 162; lower-middle class, 156; middle-class, 157, 239; modernization, xiv, 58; patriotism, 4, 223, 239, 241 – 244; Philadelphia Jews, nonmilitary contributions to, 84 – 85; political participation, xiii, xxi, 3, 4, 66, 101, 166 – 167, 200, 237; population, xi, xix, 2 – 3, 27; post – Civil War years, 256 – 257; poverty, 14; Republican Party, 236, 245, 254; republicanism, 93; rights and privileges in New Amsterdam, 16 – 17, 18 – 19, 22; slavery, stand on, 237 – 240; stereotypes of, xvi; synthesis of American republicanism and Jewish life, 4; women’s role, 63 – 65 Jewish Orphan Home, 172 – 173 Jewish religious life, 48 – 50, 53 – 59, 186 – 191, 205 – 209, 217 – 220; antebellum New York City, 188 – 191, 205 – 208; bar mitzvah, 48; boards of trustees, 189; circumcision, 48; colonial New York City, 48 – 50, 55 – 59; common standards for synagogues, 198; conversion (see Christianity, conversion to); conversion to Judaism, requests for, 190 – 191; dietary laws, 50, 147, 148, 208, 217; diversity, competitiveness and stridency,

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xvi; English Jews, 27; female religiosity, 196 – 197; festive affairs, 189; Franks, Abigaill, 48, 58; funerals, 48, 189; Hebrew literacy of colonial Jews, 309n29; Hebrew prayers, understandability of, 206; High Holy Days, 189; impatience with, 58; Jewish merchants, 56; Jewish youth, 209; kosher meat (kashrut), 48 – 49; learned leaders, arrival of, 186 – 187; life-cycle ceremonies, 189; marriage contracts, 48, 283 – 284, 285; Mosaicism, 216; New Amsterdam, 16 – 17; Noah, Mordecai M., 148; piety, 56, 58 – 59, 61, 65, 147 – 148, 206; republicanism, xv – xvi, 134 – 135, 148; resurrection, concept of, 55 – 56, 58, 323n1, 325n17; ritual baths (mikveh), 208 – 209; ritual observance, 217 – 218; Sabbath observance, 48, 147, 148, 207 – 208, 209, 222; seats, sale of, 148; separation of men and women, 219 – 220; Shearith Israel, 48 – 50, 55 – 59; synagogue attendance, 64, 116, 148, 197, 205, 217 – 218; synagogue decorum, 189 – 190, 219 – 220; synagogue membership, 206; synagogues’ relevancy to modern life, 202 – 203; Talmud, 215; tknines (female petitional devotions), 65; weddings, 48, 283 – 284; wills/bequests, 45, 55; Wise on, Isaac Mayer, 206; women’s gallery, 53 – 56, 219; women’s synagogue attendance, 64 Jewish rights and privileges, 16 – 19; citizenship rights, xiii, xv, 2, 26, 78 – 79, 91, 103 – 104; colonial New York City, xiii, xv, 2, 26, 67 – 68; New Amsterdam, 16 – 17, 18 – 19, 22; political and economic rights, 68, 312n55; voting rights, 67, 68, 312n55 Jewish Theological Seminary and Scientific Institute, 332n31 Jewish women, 53 – 56, 63 – 65, 130 – 134, 173 – 175, 195 – 198; antebellum New York City, 173 – 175, 195 – 198; Civil War era, 243; education, 131, 197 – 198; as merchants, 63 – 64; middle-class, 175; Purim balls, 175; Raphall on, Morris, 197; religiosity, 65, 196 – 197; in religious practice, 219; “republican mothers,” 130; republican New York City, 130 – 134; ritual baths (mikveh), 208 – 209; role of, 63 – 65; secular education, 175; at Shearith Israel, 53 – 56, 60, 134; synagogue attendance, 64; Temple Emanu-El, 219; tknines (female petitional devotions), 65; women’s rights movement, 173 – 175 “Jews’ Alley,” 282

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Jews’ Hospital, 167 – 173; autopsies, dispute over, 171; Civil War era, 243 – 244; consecration, 170; construction, 169 – 170; depiction, 169; draft riots (1863), 243; founding, 179, 252; German Jews, 167, 170; New York Times newspaper, 168, 170; patients, 172; recoveries, dramatics stories about, 171 – 172; Reform Judaism, 243; renamed Mt. Sinai, 169, 252, 253; Simson, Sampson (Solomon’s son), 168, 169 – 170; staff, 170 – 171; Temple Emanu-El, 243 Joachimsen, Philip, 236 Johnson, Henry, 82 Johnson, William Samuel, 35 Jonas, Lyon, 80 Jones, Henry B., 160 Jordon Lodge, 160 Josephson, Manuel, 72, 73, 74, 79, 83, 85, 148 – 149 Journal of Commerce, 201 Judah, Abigail, 90 Judah, Abraham, 83 Judah, Andrew, 37 Judah, Becky, 90 Judah, Benjamin, 86, 90, 102, 122 Judah, Moses, 97, 99 Judah, Naphtali, 96 – 97, 98 – 99, 101, 102, 120 Judah, Sally, 90 Judah, Walter Jonas, 97, 325n17 Judaism. See Orthodox Judaism; Reform Judaism Kalfe Sedaka Mattan Basether (Collection for Charity Given Secretly), 140 Kalm, Peter, 48, 50, 57 – 58, 68 Kalpe Mattan Basether charitable society, 117 – 118 Kansas Nebraska Act (1854), 229 Kant, Immanuel, 211 Karaites, 224 Karigal, Haim Isaac, 73 Kaufman, Sigismund, 236 Kessner, Thomas, 323n1 Ketcham, Hiram, 234 Kieft, Willem, 10 – 11 King, Charles, 200 King William’s War (1689 – 1697), 28 King’s College, 37 Kleindeutschland, 154, 156, 158, 248, 250, 251, 340n54 Kling, Henry, 158

Know-Nothing Party, 231, 234, 237 Korn, Bertram, 340n54 Kursheedt, Isaac, 131 La Motta, Jacob, 99 Laisch, Stubblefield & Barnett, 157 Lasher, John, 83 Lazarus, Samuel, 80 Lebanon Lodge, 159, 165 Leeser, Isaac, 162, 207, 235 Lehman, Emanuel, 244 Lehman, Mayer, 244 Lehman Brothers, 244 Lehman family, 256 Leisler’s Rebellion (1689 – 1691), 26 – 27, 43 Levy, Aaron, 99, 102 Levy, Abigaill. See Franks, Abigaill (née Levy) Levy, Asser, 12, 17, 18, 19, 21, 34, 303n38 Levy, David, 121 Levy, Eleazar, 83, 98 Levy, Esther, 30 Levy, Grace, 64 Levy, Hayman: arms dealing by, 305n16; bankruptcy, 37, 56; Hays, Barack, 74; as a merchant, 86; non-importation pledge, 72; Philadelphia, flight to, 85; Shearith Israel, 74, 89; son Eleazar, 83, 98 Levy, Isaac, 37, 39 Levy, Jacob, Jr., 97, 287 Levy, Miriam, 21 Levy, Moses: brother Samuel, 35, 81; daughter (see Franks, Abigaill); legal disputes, 35; as a merchant, 29; portrait of, 274 – 275; Portrait of Moses Levy (Duyckinck), 275; slave trading by, 40; soap manufacturing, 34; Trinity Church, contribution to, 68; wife Rycha, 59 Levy, Rachel, 60, 64 Levy, Richa, 131 Levy, Rycha, 59 Levy, Samuel, 35, 81 Levy, Simeon, 98 Levy, Solomon, 120 Levy and Marache, 34 Lilienthal, Max: Anshe Chesed congregation, 162, 187; B’nai Jeshurun Educational Institute, 193; Board of Delegates, 339n36; Cincinnati, move to, 225; education, 187; German Hebrew Benevolent Society, 164; Hebrew Commercial and Classical Boarding School, 194 – 195; immortal soul, concept of, 216 – 218; Jewish education,

Index 194 – 195; Jewish suffering overseas, 162; ordination, 187, 330n10; photograph, 215; Reform Judaism, 187 – 188, 212; science, role of, 213 – 214; Talmud, 215; Wise, Isaac Mayer, 205 Lincoln, Abraham: 1860 presidential election, 238; Adler, Samuel, 251; death, 251 – 252; Fischel, Arnold, 242 – 243; General Orders No. 11, 245; German Jews, 238; Greeley, Horace, 239; “house divided” metaphor, 293 – 294; Isaacs, Myer S., 249 – 250, 253 – 254; Jewish delegation to, 249; Jewish Messenger newspaper, 236; Jewish New Yorkers, 238, 340n54; Lilienthal, Max, 341n60; Meyer, William, S., 249; New York City vote, 250; Newman, Leopold, 242; posthumous pictorial representation, 296, 297; Raphall, Morris, 341n60 Lincoln Hospital (Manhattan), 167 literary societies, xvi, 160 – 161, 162 Livingston, Robert, 33, 60, 74 Livingston family, 35, 50, 60, 153 Locke, John, 138, 258 Loeb family, 256 Lopez, Aaron, 37, 56 Louzada, Mrs. Hannah, 47 Low, Nicholas, 94 Lower East Side (Manhattan), 192 Lower Manhattan, xviii, 93 – 94, 154, 272 Luis, Rachel, 45 Luiza, Rachel (later Rachel Lewis), 66 Lyon, Mosely, 161 Lyon, Robert: antiabolitionists, 231 – 233; Asmonean newspaper, 152, 204, 213, 231; Buchanan, James, 231; death, 225; KnowNothing Party, 231; New York Mercantile Journal newspaper, 231; public supplementary Jewish education system, 194; Shaaray Tefilah congregation, 152, 201; Southern sympathies, 230 – 231, 254; Wise, Isaac Mayer, 213; Wood, Fernando, 231 Lyons, J. J., 163, 187, 206, 207, 236 Maccabees, 209 Machado, David, 40 Madison, James, 104 Magen Abraham synagogue (Mauricia, Brazil), 10 Mahamad, the, 8 – 9, 10, 16, 46 Maimonides Library, 159 Maimonides Library Association, 160 Manumission Society, 97, 99

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Marache, Solomon, 84 Marbois (ship), 84 Marcus, Jacob: 23 Jews fleeing Recife, Brazil (1654), 12; anti-Semitism in republican America, 110; colonial tax records, 37; Hebrew literacy of colonial Jews, 309n29; Jewish merchants, 21; Judaism during republican era, 149; on Seixas, Gershom Mendes, 147, 323n1 Maretzek, Max, 176, 329n59 Marranos, 64 – 65, 300n5, 323n1 Mary (ship), 28 Masonic Hall, 159 Masonic Order, 99 – 100, 116 Mauricia, Brazil, 10 McClellan, George B., 242, 251 Mears, Grace, 59 Mears, Judah, 53 – 56 Mechanics Bank, 117 Mechanics Society, 99, 104, 116 Megapolensis, Johannes, 13, 14, 16, 301n19 Melville, Herman, 201 Mendelssohn, Moses, 63, 210 – 211, 220 Mendes, David Franco, 11 – 12 Merchant of Venice, The (Shakespeare), 110 Merchant’s Exchange (Broad Street), 24 Mereda, Judicq (Judith) de, 13 Merzbacher, Leo: Anshe Chesed congregation, 188; death, 225, 251; education, 188; funeral, 223; gender egalitarianism, 219; lectures by, 218; Reform Judaism, 212; Rodeph Shalom congregation, 188; Seder Tefilah, 213; Temple Emanu-El, 159, 188, 218 Mesquita, Joseph Bueno de, 28 – 29, 38 – 39 Meyer, William, S., 249 Michal, Moses, 39 Micholl, Morland, 182 Middleton, Peter, 35 – 36 Mikveh Israel (Philadelphia), 84, 85, 88 Miller, Samuel, 146 Mineralogical Society, 99 Minuit, Peter, 10 Missouri Compromise, 230 Mitchill, Samuel Latham, 139 Mordecai, Jacob, 83, 87 Morgan, J. P., 256 Morris, Richard, 84 Morris, William, 60 Morris family, 36, 50 Morse, Samuel B., 234 Mortara case (Italy, 1858), 198 – 199 Mosaicism, 216

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Moses, Isaac: escape from occupied New York City, 78; insolvency, 87; as a merchant, 95; Philadelphia, flight to, 85; poverty, 96; privateering, 83 – 84; Shearith Israel, 89, 121, 123 Moses, Israel, 170, 244 Moses, Jacob, 73 Moses, M. L., 121 – 122 Moses, Mrs. Gideon, 132 Mozart Hall, 198 Muhlenberg, Henry, 314n36 Mundy, Mary, 287 Myers, Asher, 85, 96, 98 Myers, Hyam, 66 – 67 Myers, Mordecai, 99, 102 – 103 Myers, Myer, 35 – 37, 39, 68, 89, 99, 279 – 281, 282 Myers, Solomon, 35 Nagtegaal, Aeronaut, 270 Nat Turner’s Revolt (1831), 230 Nathan, Benjamin, 168 Nathan, Grace, 95, 123, 131, 132 – 134 Nathan, Seixas, 122, 123 Nathan, Simon, 95, 123, 132 – 133 National Advocate (newspaper), 97, 102, 104, 105, 230, 287 Naturalization Act (1740), 68, 258 Negro Plot (1741), 310n35 New Amsterdam, 5 – 23; 23 Jews fleeing Recife, Brazil (1654), 1 – 2, 11 – 14, 255, 271 – 272, 277, 301n19; anti-Semitism, 22; British seizure (1654), 21; burghers, 11; citizenship, 15 – 16, 22; debt owed to de la Motthe, 13 – 14, 301n19; Dutch merchants, 22; economic opportunity, 22; Jewish births, 22; Jewish merchants, 11, 16; Jewish poverty, 14; Jewish religious life, 16 – 17; Jewish residences, 281 – 282; Jewish rights and privileges, 16 – 17, 18 – 19, 22; Kieft, Willem, 10 – 11; legacy, 22 – 23; legal disputes, 20 – 21; mismanagement, 10 – 11; order and growth, 11; portrait as mark of wealth and status, 274; prototype view (1650), 6; religious toleration, 22; Sephardic merchants, arrival of, 16; slavery, 38, 286 – 287; Stadt Huys (city hall), 11; Stuyvesant’s deportation request, 14 – 15. See also Dutch West India Company; Stuyvesant, Peter New Netherland, 10, 11, 15, 19 – 21, 25. See also Dutch West India Company; New Amsterdam New York City, xi – xxiii; American Revolution era (see American Revolution); antebellum

New York (see antebellum New York City); British-controlled era (see colonial New York City); as a city of promises, xiv – xv, 4; Civil War era (see Civil War era); colonial era, xxi (see colonial New York City); as a destination for Jewish immigrants, xiii; Dutch-controlled era (see New Amsterdam); hospitals, 167; Jewish population, xi, xix, 2 – 3, 27; Jewish values, xii – xiii; late 18th century, 114; multiethnic diversity, xi; name, 25; Panics of 1857 and 1873, xvi – xvii; population, 27, 79, 93, 151, 154; republicanism (see republican New York City); yellow-fever epidemics, 140, 143, 167 New York Directory, 97 New York Enquirer (newspaper), 287 New York Evening Star (newspaper), 230, 287 New-York Gazette (newspaper), 30, 31, 37, 68, 73, 80, 82 New York Harbor, 32 New York Herald (newspaper), 152, 164, 176, 200 – 201, 207, 239, 247 New York Historical Society, 234, 273 New York Hospital, 167 New York in Slices (Foster), 156 – 157 New York Medical and Physical Journal, 99 New York Medical Society, 99, 166 New York Mercantile Journal (newspaper), 231 New York Society for the Promoting of Manumission of Slaves, 287 – 288 New York State Constitution, 240 New York Stock Exchange, 95, 97 New York Tablet (newspaper), 200 New York Times (newspaper): cultural events coverage, 177; dishonest commerce, 199; General Orders No. 11, 245; Jews’ Hospital, 168, 170; Kleindeutschland living conditions, 156; missionary attempts to convert Jews, 202; Raphall’s pro-slavery speech, 234; Shearith Israel, 185; wartime Rosh Hashanah celebration, 227 New York Tribune (newspaper), 235, 239, 247, 249 New York University, 332n31 New York World (newspaper), 246 Newman, Leopold, 226, 241 – 242 Newton, Isaac, 138 Niblo’s Garden, 177 Niblo’s Saloon, 168 Nicholls, Richard, 25 – 26 Noah, Mordecai M., 103 – 110; abolitionists, view of, 230 – 231; agriculture as an

Index occupation, 105; America, view of, 108; Ararat/Grand Island colony, 107 – 108; Bennett, James Gordon, attacks by, 200; B’nai B’rith, 189; childhood, 103 – 104; death, 163, 189; debtor reform, 109; female education, 105; grandparents (see Phillips, Jonas; Phillips, Rebecca); The Grecian Captive, 104 – 105; Hebrew Benevolent Society (HBS), 162 – 164; Hebrew Commercial and Classical Boarding School, 194; Jefferson, Thomas, 106; Jeffersonianism, 104 – 105; Jews’ Hospital, 168; Mechanics Society, 99; National Advocate newspaper, 97, 104, 105, 230, 287; New York Enquirer newspaper, 287; New York Evening Star newspaper, 230, 287; Orthodox Judaism, 221; parody of, 287 – 289; plays by, 104 – 105; portrait, 103; religiosity, 106 – 107; religious life, 148; restoration of Jews to the Holy Land, 223; ridicule of, 108; She Would Be a Soldier, 105; Shearith Israel, 106, 129, 185; sheriff of New York, 99, 109 – 110, 199; slavery, 105, 230; southern sympathies, 230 – 231, 254; Tammany Society, 98 – 99; Tunis, consul to, 99, 104 Nochlin, Linda, 276 Noll, Mark, 145 Nordlinger, Isaac, 332n31 Nunes, Ricke, 13 Nunez, Joseph Tores, 55 Occident (newspaper), 207 Oglethorpe, James, 32, 305n16 Omer Counter, 49 Oppenheim, Samuel, 99, 303n38 Orthodox Judaism, 220 – 228; 1850s, 3, 220; antebellum New York City, 186; Asmonean newspaper, 220 – 221; Board of Delegates, 339n36; dietary laws, 217; divine punishment, concept of, 222 – 223; German Jews, 158; Jeffersonianism, 149; Noah, Mordecai M., 221; reason, assertions of, 221; Reform Judaism, response to, 210, 220 – 225; republicanism, 147; restoration of Jews to the Holy Land, 223; resurrection, concept of, 222; separation of men and women, 219 – 220; slavery, 236; Talmud, 215 Owen, Robert, 173 Pacheco, Robert, 40 Pacheco, Rodrigo (later Benjamin Mendes Pacheco), 33 – 34, 66

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Paine, Thomas, 96, 139 Panic of 1819, 98, 117 Panic of 1857, xvi – xvii, 157, 161, 164, 167 Panic of 1873, xvi – xvii Pardo, Esther (Hester) Brown, 64 Pardo, Saul, 64 Parma, Margarita de, 263 Parodi, Teresa, 176 patriotism: American Revolution, 78, 80; British patriotism, 60, 66, 78, 80; Franks, Abigaill (née Levy), 60; Jewish New Yorkers, 4, 223, 239, 241 – 244; Seixas, Gershom Mendes, 145 Pearl Street (Manhattan), 93, 95 Peartree (ship), 12, 13, 21 Peck, Elisha, 94 Peet, Harvey P., 200 Peixotto, Daniel, 99, 166 – 167 Peixotto, Moses, 99, 118 Pencak, William, 67, 74 – 75 Pennsylvania constitution, 71, 85 – 86, 145 Pennsylvania militia, 83 Pestalozzi, Johann, 194 – 195 Phelps, Anson G., 94 Phelps Stokes, I. N., 272 – 273 Philadelphia: anti-Semitism, 314n36; Franks, David, 76; Jewish New Yorkers’ flight to, xv, 84 – 85; Jews’ post – Revolutionary War return to New York, 314n36; Mikveh Israel, 84, 85, 88; Seixas, Gershom Mendes, 71, 84, 85, 139; Sunday schools, 194 Philips, Eleazer, 99 Philips, John D., 168 Philipse, Adolph, 67 Phillip II, King of Spain, 263 Phillips, Jonas, 72, 73, 75 – 76, 78, 83, 85 – 86, 103 – 104 Phillips, Naphtali, 97, 102 Phillips, Rebecca, 103 photography, advent of, 295 – 296 Pierce, John, 119 Pietersen, Solomon, 12, 13, 14, 17 Pinheiro, Isaac, 39, 304n8 Pinheiro, Jacob, 39 Pinheiro, Moses, 39 Pinto, Aaron, 47 Pinto, Isaac, 73, 74. See also Prayers for Shabbat, Rosh-Hashana, and Kippur Pinto, Joseph Jeshurun, 56 – 57, 76 – 77, 137, 309n26 Pitkin Avenue (Brownsville), xvii Pitt, William, 30

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Plan of the City and Environs of New York as they Were in the Years 1742, 1743 or 1744 (Grim), 273 Polish Jews, 155, 165, 181 – 182 Polony, Myer, 125 poor relief, 47, 98, 162 – 167 Por linage de ebros (For Being of Jewish Ancestry Condemned by the Inquisition) (Goya), 267 “Port Jews,” 25 Portrait of Franks Children with Lamb (Duyckinck), 275 Portrait of Isaac Aboab da Fonseca (Nagtegaal), 270 Portrait of Menasseh ben Israel (Rembrandt), 268 Portrait of Moses Levy (Duyckinck), 275 Portuguese conversos, 7, 269, 300n5 Portuguese Jews, 7 – 9, 12, 263 Prayers for Shabbat, Rosh-Hashana, and Kippur (Pinto), 57, 278, 279, 309n29 Presbyterian General Assembly, 201 – 202 Priestly, Joseph, 139 Protestantism, 3, 110, 145 – 146, 192, 200 Public School Society, 191 public schools, 179, 191 – 192, 193 – 194 Purim Association, 178 Purim balls, 150, 175, 178, 209, 262 Pyle, Howard, 70 Queen Anne’s War (1702 – 1713), 30 Queens, 153 “Rabbi” (the term), 330n10 Raphall, Morris: agricultural careers, 166; on America, 163; Beecher, Henry Ward, 234; Bene Israel congregation, 181; “Bible View of Slavery,” 294; Biblical literalism, 234 – 235; birth and education, 187; B’nai Jeshurun congregation, 160, 186, 187; B’nai Jeshurun Educational Institute, 192 – 193; on Civil War, 253; Democratic Party, 234; German Hebrew Benevolent Society, 164; God’s interactions with man, 222; Hebrew Benevolent Society (HBS), 163; Heilprin, Michael, 235; Jewish culture, promotion of, 160 – 161; Jewish poverty, 164; Jews’ Hospital, 170; Jews’ patriotism, 223, 239; lectures, 187; Lincoln, Abraham, 341n60; Lincoln’s death, 252; Merzbacher, Leo, 223; Mortara case (Italy, 1858), protests against, 198; ordination, lack of, 330n10; portrait, 233;

pro-slavery sermon/southern sympathies, 233 – 234, 236, 237 – 238, 247, 248, 254, 294; Rachama exercises (devotional prayers), 196; Reform Judaism, response to, 220, 223 – 224; salary, 187; Union, commitment to, 240 – 241, 248; Wise, Isaac Mayer, 222, 234 – 235; on women’s role, 197 Rashi (Shlomo Yitzhaki), 142 Raymond, Henry, 170 Recife, Brazil: 23 Jews fleeing (1654), 1 – 2, 11 – 14, 255, 271 – 272, 277, 301n19; Dutch Jews in, 9 – 10, 14; Mahamad, the, 10, 16; visual and material culture, 263; Zur Israel synagogue, 10 Redraft of Castello (1916) Plan, New Amsterdam in 1660 (Adams and Phelps Stokes), 272 Reform Judaism, 210 – 220; Adler, Samuel, 188, 212, 251; ancient rituals, condemnation of, 217; Asmonean newspaper, 204, 231; Board of Delegates, 339n36; confirmation ceremonies, 219; conversion to Judaism, requests for, 191; dietary laws, 217; divine punishment, concept of, 222 – 223; Enlightenment, 225; Geiger, Abraham, 211; gender egalitarianism, 219; German Jews, 210 – 211, 220; God as first cause, 216; historical understanding of Judaism, 216; Holdheim, Samuel, 211; immortal soul, concept of, 216 – 218; influences on, 211; Jewish Messenger newspaper on, 224, 225; Jews’ Hospital, 243; Judaism as an evolutionary doctrine, 214 – 215, 217; leaders, 211 – 212; Lilienthal, Max, 187 – 188, 212; Mendelssohn, Moses, 210 – 211; Merzbacher, Leo, 212; mixed choirs, 219; Orthodox Judaism’s response to, 210, 220 – 225; republicanism, 4, 225; as response to pressures of Americanization, 3; restoration of Jews to the Holy Land, 223; resurrection, concept of, 222; science and Judaism, wedding of, 213 – 214; Science of Judaism (Wissenschaft des Judentums), 211; Seder Tefilah (Merzbacher), 213; segregated seating, elimination of, 219; Talmud, 215; Temple Emanu-El, 159, 212 – 213; Wise, Isaac Mayer, 212, 222 Relief of Indigent Persons of the Jewish Persuasion, 166 Rembrandt van Rijn, 268 – 271 Reminiscences (Wise), 201 – 202 “republican mothers,” 130 republican New York City, 93 – 149; antiSemitism, 109 – 111, 319n39, 319n41;

Index assimilation, 93; citizenship rights, 103 – 104; educated women, 131; evangelical republican synthesis, 147, 149; integration of Jews into American mainstream, 93; Jewish communal identity, maintenance of, 108; Jewish fraternal orders, 98 – 100; Jewish identity in, 147 – 149; Jewish Masons, 99 – 100; Jewish merchants, 94 – 96, 316n4; Jewish mixing with Christian world, 134; Jewish physicians, 97; Jewish political participation, 101; Jewish population, 93, 94 – 95, 116; Jewish poverty, 97 – 98; Jewish welfare societies, 117 – 118; Jewish women, 130 – 134; mourning jewelry, 284; politics during, 100 – 103; second phase (see antebellum New York City); Shearith Israel, 113 – 135; slavery, 97; splitting of congregations into new congregations, 129 – 130; suicides, 98 Republican Party: Dittenhoefer, Abram J., 238; Jewish New Yorkers, 236, 245, 254; Jewish participation, 3; Kleindeutschland, 250, 340n54; manufacturers, 338n29 republicanism: assimilation, 147; democratic ethos, xv – xvi; entrepreneurialism, 94; evangelicalism, 145 – 146; integration without assimilation, 4; Jewish New Yorkers, 93; Jewish religious life, xv – xvi, 134 – 135, 148; monotheism, 142; Orthodox Judaism, 147; Protestant churches of America, 145; Reform Judaism, 4, 225; Seixas, Gershom Mendes, 258; separation of church and state, 148; synthesis of American republicanism and Jewish life, 4 retailing, xvii Revere, Paul, 95 “Reverend” (the term), 330n10 Rice, Abraham, 208 Richmond Daily Dispatch, The (newspaper), 234 Rise of the Jewish Community of New York, 1654 – 1860 (Grinstein), 2 Rivera, Abraham Rodriguez de, 43 Rivington, James, 80, 109, 319n39 Roberts, Elijah J., 287 – 288 Rockefeller, John D., 256 Rodeph Shalom congregation, 182, 188, 191 Rodeph Shalom sanctuary, 180 Roper, George, 97, 287 Rose, Ernestine (née Potowski), 173, 236 – 237 Rose, William, 173 Roth, John, 171

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Rothschild family, 245, 247 Rothstein, Joshua, 184 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 146 Royal Gazette (newspaper), 80 Ruden, Jacques, 96 Russian Jews, 155, 182, 183 – 185 St. Catrina (French ship), 1, 12 – 13 St. George Society, 99 St. Patrick’s Cathedral, 185 St. Vincent’s Hospital, 167 Salomon, Haym (Jr.), 99, 116, 122, 127 Salomon, Haym (Sr.), 81, 85, 86, 283 – 284, 285 Sampler of the 78th Psalm (Hendricks), 276 samplers, 275 – 276 Sampson, Deborah, 105 Samson, Gumpel, 76 Sarna, Jonathan, 283 Schano, Franz, 190 Schelluyne, Dirck van, 20 Schermerhorn family, 153 Schiff family, 256 Schlesinger, Daniel, 176 science, 138, 139 – 140, 211, 213 – 214 Scripture Lessons for the Young (Peet), 200 Second Great Awakening, 3, 110, 145, 192 secularization, xv, 151, 162, 175, 178, 205, 210 Seder Tefilah (Merzbacher), 213 Seixas, Benjamin: advertising by, 73; assault charge against, 74; brother (see Seixas, Gershom Mendes); as a craftsman, 36; Mechanics Society, 99; as a merchant, 86 – 87; New York Stock Exchange, 95; outfitting privateers, 84; Philadelphia, 71, 85; Shearith Israel, 89 Seixas, David, 96, 125 Seixas, Gershom Mendes, 137 – 149; American Revolution, 71, 76 – 78, 84, 141; biblical Judaism, 145; biographies, 323n1; brother (see Seixas, Benjamin); Christian community, closeness to, 323n1; Christianity, view of, 140; Columbia College, 137, 140 – 141; daughter Sarah, 131 – 132, 133; death, 146, 149; deism, 139, 145, 323n1; diseases suffered, 146; dress, 137; egalitarianism, 141; English, George Bethune, 140; Federalists, 1798 sermon on, 139; inequality, 140; Jeffersonianism, 102, 137, 138 – 142, 141; Jesus, divinity of, 146; Kalfe Sedaka Mattan Basether (Collection for Charity Given Secretly), 140; Kalpe Mattan Basether charitable society, 117; Marcus on, Jacob,

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Seixas, Gershom Mendes (continued ) 147, 323n1; Marranos, 323n1; Mikveh Israel (Philadelphia), 84, 88; monotheism, 142; Napoleon, 325n18; patriotism, 145; Pennsylvania constitution, 71, 85 – 86, 145; personality, 137; Philadelphia, 71, 84, 85, 139; Pinto, Joseph Jeshurun, 76 – 77, 137; portrait, 136; Protestant ministers, 146; reading, 139, 146; religious equality, 139; religious outlook, 142, 144 – 147, 220; republicanism, 258; restoration of Jews to the Holy Land, 144, 145, 323n1, 325n18; resurrection, concept of, 323n1, 325n17; salary, 88, 90; salvation, concept of, 142 – 144, 145, 146; science, faith in, 139 – 140; separation of church and state, 139; sermons, 323n1; Shearith Israel, 88 – 89, 90, 91, 101 – 102, 125, 137 – 149, 321n13; Simson, Sampson (Solomon’s son), 140 – 141; sister (see Nathan, Grace); son David, 96, 125; son James (born Joshua), 332n31; title designating spiritual leadership, 262, 330n10; yellow-fever epidemics, 140, 143 Seixas, Hetty, 132 Seixas, Isaac, 101 Seixas, Isaac Mendes, 60 Seixas, James (born Joshua), 332n31 Seixas, Nathan, 99 Seixas, Sarah, 131 – 132, 133 Seixas, Solomon, 122, 124 Seixas family, 131, 287 Seligman, Henry, 244 Seligman, Isaac, 244 Seligman, James, 161 Seligman, Joseph, 157, 164, 244, 249, 250 Seligman, William, 244 Seligman family, 157, 244, 256 Seneca Falls convention (1848), 173 – 175 separation of church and state, 139, 148 Sephardic Jews: Amsterdam, 9, 271; Catholic Church, 263; colonial New York City, 28, 40 – 41; definition, 3; Dutch Calvinists, 271; in Dutch Republic, 8; England, 27 – 28; German Jews, 172; merchants, 16, 28 – 29, 304n8; Portuguese Jews, 7 – 9; Shearith Israel, 28, 46, 129; Spanish Jews, 5 – 7, 300n5; tombstones, 262; Torah finials, 281 Seymour, Horatio, 248, 249, 250 Shaaray Hashamayim congregation, 182 Shaaray Tefilah congregation: B’nai Jeshurun congregation, 182; Board of Delegates, 199; founding, 182; Hart, John, 199; Isaacs,

Samuel, 152, 162, 182, 183, 186; Jews’ Hospital, 168; Lincoln’s death, 251; Lyon, Robert, 152, 201; poor relief, 165 Shaaray Zedek congregation, 181 – 182, 184, 192 – 193, 206, 207, 219 She Would Be a Soldier (Noah), 105 Shearith Israel (Spanish-Portuguese Synagogue) (Manhattan), 43 – 59, 113 – 149; American Revolution, 73 – 76, 78, 80; architectural style and scale, 282 – 284; Ashkenazic Jews, 28, 46, 126, 128; attendance, 116; authority, issues of, 51, 74, 114, 121; B’nai Jeshurun congregation, 126, 130; Board of Delegates, 339n36; Board of Trustees, 89 – 91, 90, 91, 114 – 115, 118 – 119, 121 – 124, 126, 128 – 129, 130, 190, 321n13; cemetery (see Shearith Israel cemetery); charter, 89; cholera, prayer for, 290; clerk’s role, 90, 116 – 117; colonial New York City, 28, 43 – 59; consecration, 43; constitution, xv – xvi, 89, 113 – 114, 118; conversion, requests for, 190 – 191; corporate model of organization, 91, 118; Crosby Street location, 185, 196; disciplinary cases, 120 – 121; dress, 57; dues, 51 – 52, 55, 116, 308n15; elders’ role (adjuntos), 46, 47, 50, 51, 80, 89 – 90, 114 – 115; employees, 45, 116; excommunication from, 52 – 53; finances, 116 – 117, 138, 321n13; fines, 52, 74, 321n13; fundraising for, 43, 44, 90, 120, 125; Gemilut Hasidim charitable society, 89; governance, 45 – 47, 74; Hamiltonianism, 118, 124; hazan’s role, 45, 46, 47, 56, 57, 115; Hebra Gemiluth Hazedim, 89; Hebrew Benevolent Society, 162; Hebrew pronunciation, 46; Hevra Hinuch Nearim (Society for the Education of Youth), 128; High Holy Days, 116; hinterland Jews, 49 – 50; income, 51, 90, 308n15; incorporation, 89; interior, 44, 183; intermarriage, 190; internal conflict/dissension, 46, 50 – 55, 73 – 74, 89 – 90, 121 – 124, 126 – 130, 138; Jeffersonianism, 121 – 130; Jewish religious life, 48 – 50, 55 – 59; Jews’ Hospital, 168; kosher meat (kashrut), 48 – 49, 122 – 124; life-cycle ceremonies, 116; Lincoln’s death, 251 – 252; members’ role ( yehidim), 46, 51, 114 – 115, 118; membership, 116; the mikveh, 44; Mill Street location, 43 – 44, 120; Mill Street Synagogue The (print), 283; minyan, waiting for a, 207; morning blessings, 46; new sanctuary (1834), 183; Omer Counter,

Index 49; outspokenness, issues of, 52; parnas’s role ( parnassim), 45 – 46, 50, 51, 74, 89, 90, 114, 118; physical condition, 116; physician for, 37; poor relief, 47, 98, 165, 166; public aid for schools, request for, 191; rabbi’s role, 45, 307n3; rebuilding (1818), 112, 120; religious leader, first learned, 309n26; republican New York City, 113 – 135; ritual, 206; Sabbath prayers, 119; sand on floor, 307n3; Saturday nights, 48; school, attempt to maintain a, 125, 130 – 131; seal, 124; seats, 90, 113, 116, 120, 131; Sephardic Jews, 28; Sephardic traditions, 46, 119, 129; sermons, 101; services, 116; shamash’s role, 44, 45, 90, 91, 120, 131; shochet/bodeck’s role, 45, 74, 90, 115, 122 – 124; social and administrative offices, 44; as a “synagogue community,” 44 – 45, 91, 113, 147, 148, 255 – 256; synagogue decorum, 189 – 190; Tisha B’Av, 57; Torah, call to (sepher), 119, 120; Torah scroll, 283; upstate trading house, 66; weddings, 283 – 284; West 19th Street location, 185; wills/bequests, 45, 55; women at, 60, 134; women’s gallery, trouble in, 53 – 56; Yeshivat Minchat Arav school, 46 – 47 Shearith Israel cemetery, 44, 51, 54, 260, 261 – 262 Shulchan Aruch (Caro), 142, 192, 215, 217 Silva, Moses de, 20 Simons, Levy, 37 Simson, Joseph, 74 Simson, Nathan, 30, 33 – 34, 35, 39 Simson, Sampson (Solomon’s brother), 49, 72, 73, 74 Simson, Sampson (Solomon’s son): bequest, 332n31; Beth HaMidrash congregation, 184; Chamber of Commerce, 99; Columbia College, 97, 147; father Solomon (see Simson, Solomon); Jewish Theological Seminary and Scientific Institute, 332n31; Jews’ Hospital, 168, 169 – 170; Mineralogical Society, 99; piety, 147 – 148; Seixas, Gershom Mendes, 140 – 141 Simson, Solomon: assault charge against, 74; brother Sampson (see Simson, Sampson (Solomon’s brother)); Democratic Society, 101, 258; father Joseph, 74; Jacobs, Michael, 38; Masonic Order, 99; as a merchant, 95 – 96; Rivington, James, 109; Shearith Israel, 89, 113, 122, 123; Shearith Israel, bequest to, 45; son Sampson (see Simson, Sampson (Solomon’s son))

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Simson family, 79 Singer, I. M., 152 Singer Sewing Machine Company, 152 slave owners: Bueno, Joseph, 29; Cohen, Samuel Myers, 39, 40; Franks, Jacob, 33, 310n35; Gomez, Benjamin, 39; Gomez, Isaac, 39; Gomez, Isaac, Jr., 97; Gomez, Luis, 38, 40; Hays, Judah, 40; Hyam, Uriah, 38; Levy, Asser, 21; Levy, Jacob, Jr., 97, 287; Machado, David, 40; Mesquita, Joseph Bueno de, 38 – 39; Michal, Moses, 39; Myers, Myer, 39; Pinheiro, Isaac, 39; wealthy Jews, 38 slave traders: De Torres, Simja da Silva, 64; Franks, Jacob, 40; Gomez, Mordecai, 39 – 40; Janeway, Richard, 39; Levy, Isaac, 39; Levy, Moses, 40; Simson, Nathan, 39; Walton, William, 39 slavery: antebellum New York City, 152 – 153, 229 – 234; Bible, 232 – 234, 236; in colonial New York City, 38 – 41; Hebraic law, 233 – 234; Hebrew slaves, 233 – 234, 238 – 239; Jewish merchants, 40; Jewish New Yorkers, 237 – 240; manumission, 39, 288; New Amsterdam, 38, 286 – 287; Noah, Mordecai M., 105, 230; Orthodox Judaism, 236; republican New York City, 97; slave revolts, 40 slaves, individual: Andover, 39; Cajoe, 40; Cavandro, 38; Cuffee, 40; Daphne, 39; Diana, 40; Edwin Jackson, 287; Elizabeth Jackson, 287; Ishmael, 39; Jack, 40; James Jackson, 287; Jenny, 39; Kattey, 39; Lucena, 40; Mary Mundy, 287; Piro, 39; Prins, 39; Roper, George, 97, 287; Samuel Spures, 287; Sharlow, 39; Tham, 39; Windsor, 40 Smith, Ellen, 281 Smith, William, Sr., 67, 68 Snyder, Holly, 64 Society for the Education of Poor Children, 166 Society of Zeire Hazon (Tender Sheep), 165 Solomon, Isaac, 73 Solomon, Mark, 123 South American Society for Promotion of National Unity, 234 South Sea Bubble, 81 Spanish Jews, 5 – 7, 263, 300n5 Spanish-Portuguese cemetery. See Shearith Israel cemetery Spanish-Portuguese Synagogue. See Shearith Israel

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Index

Spinoza, Baruch, 9 Spures, Samuel, 287 Stamp Act (1765), 72 Stanton, Edwin, 249 Steendam, Jacob, 5, 10 Stensheimers’ Cafe, 158 Stettheimer & Rosenbaum, 157 Still-Lives (Dessel), 277 Stouffer, Chauncey, 201 Stowe, Calvin, 235 Strauss, Jonas, xiii Strauss, Levi, xiii, 157 Strauss, Louis, xiii Strong, George Templeton, 153, 200 – 201 Stuyvesant, Peter: anti-Semitism, 1, 14, 16 – 17, 22; deportation request, 14 – 15; Dutch West India Company, 11, 14, 15, 17, 19, 279; Jewish rights and privileges, 26, 279; New Amsterdam, 11 Stuyvesant Hall, 160 Sugar Act (1764), 72 Susman, Moses, 38 Tammany Hall, 104, 230 Tammany Society, 99 Temple Emanu-El: Adler, Samuel, 212 – 213, 225; Asmonean newspaper, 218 – 219; B’nai B’rith, 159; Chrystie Street location, 186; confirmation ceremonies, 219; conversion to Judaism, requests for, 191; Dittenhoefer, Abram J., 236; Forty-Third Street location, 186; founding, 212; gender egalitarianism, 219; German Jews, 182, 186; growth, 186; Jewish Republicans, 236; Jewish women, 219; Jews’ Hospital, 243; lay control, 213; lectures at, 218; Lincoln’s death, 252; marriage ceremony, 213; Merzbacher, Leo, 159, 188, 218; mixed choirs, 219; Reform Judaism, 159; reforms, 212 – 213; segregated seating, elimination of, 219, 224 – 225; Seligman, James, 236; Seligman, Joseph, 236; trustees, 213; Twelfth Street location, 186, 211; women in religious practice, 219 theater, 177 – 179 Thompson, George, 232 Tindal, Matthew, 139 Tisha B’Av, 57, 217 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 152, 179 Torres, Rebecca de, 30 Touro, Isaac, 80, 82 Touro Society, 161

Townshend Acts (1767), 72 – 73 Treaty of Paris (1763), 71 Trinity Church, 68, 185, 240, 273 Tuska, Simon, 234 Union Club, 244 Unitarian Church, 185, 186 U. S. Constitution, 89, 90, 114, 240, 258 Valck (ship), 12 Valentine’s Manual, 92 Van Cortlandt, Jacobus, 60 Van Cortlandt family, 30 Van der Donck, Adriaen, 12 Van Horne, Cornelis, 67 Van Wyck family, 30 Vanity Fair (Civil War era magazine), 246 Vervelen, Johannes, 20 Virginia Statue of Religious Freedom, 139 Voltaire, 146 Wagg, Abraham, 81 – 82 Walpole, Robert, 81 Walton, William, 39 War of 1812, 95, 104, 137 – 138, 141 Warburg family, 256 Washington, George, 75, 78, 84, 86, 93, 115 Waterman, Sigismund, 159, 161, 165, 167 – 168, 232 Watts, Isaac, 48 Webster, Daniel, 163 Week in Wall Street, A (pamphlet), 199 Wells, Henry, 177 Wertheimer, Edwin, 242 Wesslau, Julius, 241 Wesslau, Marie, 252 West India Company. See Dutch West India Company Western Guiana, 303n38 Whig Party, xvi, 3, 228, 229, 231 Whitman, Walt, 201, 240 Williamsburg (Brooklyn), xviii Wise, Isaac Mayer, 205 – 207; Albany, New York, 188; Anshe Chesed congregation, 206; arrival in New York, 151; Asmonean newspaper, 188, 212, 213, 231; B’nai B’rith, 161; B’nai Jeshurun congregation, 206; B’nai Jeshurun Educational Institute, 193; Board of Delegates, 339n36; on Chatham Square (Manhattan), 156 – 157; Cincinnati, move to, 225; education, 188; Hebrew prayers, understandability of,

Index 206; immortal soul, concept of, 216 – 217; on Jewish religious life, 206; Lilienthal, Max, 205; Lyon, Robert, 213; missionary attempts to convert Jews, 201 – 202; on Mosaicism, 216; poor Jews, view of, 158; portrait, 212; Raphall, Morris, 222, 234 – 235; Reform Judaism, 212, 222; Reminiscences, 201 – 202; Shaaray Zedek, 206; Shearith Israel, 206, 207; on traditional morning prayer, 219 Witte, Emanuel de, 269, 271 Wolf, Simon, 241 women, “feminization” of, 195. See also Jewish women

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369

Wood, Fernando, 201, 228, 229, 231 Woolin, Elias, 37 Yeshivat Minchat Arav school, 46 – 47 York, James Stuart, 5th Duke of, 25 Young Men’s Hebrew Benevolent Society, 164, 168 Young Men’s Library Society, 160, 167 Zell, Michael, 271 Zionism, 108 Zuntz, Alexander, 80 – 81, 87, 95 Zunz, Leopold, 108 Zur Israel synagogue (Recife, Brazil), 10

ABOUT

THE

AUTHOR

Howard B. Rock is Professor of History, Emeritus, at Florida International University, where he has taught since 1973. His books include Artisans of the New Republic: The Tradesmen of New York City in the Age of Jefferson; The New York City Artisan, 1790 – 1825: A Documentary History; Keepers of the Revolution: New Yorkers at Work in the Early Republic (with Paul A. Gilje); American Artisans: Crafting Social Identity, 1750 – 1850 (with Paul A. Gilje); and Cityscapes: A History of New York in Images (with Deborah Dash Moore).

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