Gentile New York: The Images of Non-Jews among Jewish Immigrants 9780813552194

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GENTILE NEW YORK

GENTILE NEW YORK The Images of Non-Jews among Jewish Immigrants G i l R i ba k

Rutgers University Press New Brunswick, New Jersey, and London

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Ribak, Gil. Gentile New York : the images of non-Jews among Jewish immigrants / Gil Ribak. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978–0–8135–5164–7 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Jews—New York (State)—New York—Attitudes. 2. Gentiles—Public opinion. 3. Public opinion—New York (State)—New York. 4. Immigrants—New York (State)— New York—Attitudes. 5. Jews—New York (State)—New York—History—19th century. 6. Jews—New York (State)—New York—History—20th century. 7. New York (N.Y.)— Ethnic relations. I. Title. II. Title: Images of non-Jews among Jewish immigrants. F128.9.J5R44 2012 305.8009747—dc22 2011010860 A British Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the British Library. Copyright © 2012 by Gil Ribak All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 100 Joyce Kilmer Avenue, Piscataway, NJ 08854–8099. The only exception to this prohibition is “fair use” as defined by U.S. copyright law. Visit our Web site: http://rutgerspress.rutgers.edu Manufactured in the United States of America

To my parents Eliezer of blessed memory and Bruria, may she be set apart for long life

Contents Acknowledgments — ix A Note on Transliteration — xi Introduction — 1 1

“Never Before Have Gentiles Hated Jews So Much”: The Images of Non-Jews in Eastern European Jewish Society in the Late Nineteenth Century — 12

2

“Lovers of Man”: The Images of Americans among Eastern European Jews in the Last Third of the Nineteenth Century — 34

3

“In Goodness They Even Exceed the English”: The Idealization of “Yankees” in the 1880s and 1890s — 52

4

“The American Is Not Very Musical and Not So Sociable”: The Beginnings of an Attitudinal Change in the Early 1900s — 76

5

“You Could Almost Forget That He Is Not a Jew”: The Jewish Labor Movement and Secularized Chosenness, 1909–1914 — 101

6

“The ‘Green’ Italian Pays the Same Good Taxes as the 14-Karat Yankee”: The War in Europe and the Beginnings of Reorientation toward Certain Minority Groups, 1914–1917 — 126

7

“What the American Can Do in His Anger”: World War I and the Red Scare, 1917–1920 — 156 Epilogue: Self-Image and Its Limitations — 188 A Note on Methodology and Sources — 199 Notes — 203 Index — 283

Acknowledgments It is a pleasant duty to express my gratitude to the many individuals and institutions that have supported and assisted the publication of this book. A number of scholars have read different versions of my work and provided me with perceptive comments: at the dissertation stage my advisor, Tony Michels, and David Sorkin prodded me into rethinking my project. Bill Reese’s and Mark Louden’s friendliness and advice were a significant source of support. Jeremi Suri was always an invaluable powerhouse of suggestions and encouragement. Other historians, such as Thomas Archdeacon, Paul Boyer, Stanley Cutler, and Stanley Schultz, were models of scholarship and expertise throughout my years in Madison, Wisconsin. I was very fortunate to have colleagues like Pamela Barmash, Hillel J. Kieval, and Rafia Zafar at Washington University in St. Louis. Their amicability and understanding contributed much to my development as a scholar. I am equally blessed to have colleagues such as Beth Alpert Nakhai, David L. Graizbord, Tom Kovach, Anat Maimon, and J. Edward Wright at the Arizona Center for Judaic Studies, University of Arizona. Their spirited companionship has given me the perfect intellectual and social environment during the final stages of preparing my manuscript for publication. Over the years I had the privilege and pleasure of meeting several scholars who offered invaluable insights into my embryonic book, like Israel Bartal, Hasia R. Diner, Jonathan Karp, Nancy Sinkoff, and Gary P. Zola. Throughout my career Arnon Gutfeld has exhibited a remarkable degree of friendship and kindness, and I am deeply indebted to him. I would like to thank the anonymous readers of my manuscript, who have made very helpful suggestions. Needless to say, all errors remain mine. I am also grateful to the various institutions and foundations that helped fund my work. I benefited from the generosity of the Kenneth Kitting and Zalman Aran Fellowships, the Institute of International Education and the Fulbright Foundation, the Wisconsin Distinguished Graduate Fellowship and the Mosse Advanced Dissertator Lectureship (the last two were both granted by the George L. Mosse Program in History at the University of Wisconsin–Madison), the Center for German and European Studies at UW-Madison, and the Lewin Postdoctoral Fellowship at Washington University in St. Louis. Finally, I am thankful to the ix

x

Acknowledgments

Foundation for Jewish Culture and to the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Foundation for awarding me my current postdoctoral position at the University of Arizona. The research for this book could not have taken place without the dedicated work of the archivists and librarians at the American Jewish Archives, American Jewish Historical Society, Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People, Central Zionist Archives, Dorot Jewish Division at the New York Public Library, Institute for Jewish Research (YIVO), Jewish National and University Library, Kheel Center for Industrial and Labor Relations (at Cornell University), Oral History Research Project (at Columbia University), Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives (at New York University), and Wisconsin State Historical Society. Marlie Wasserman and all those at Rutgers University Press who were involved in the production of this book—Marilyn Campbell, Allyson Fields, and Beth Kressel—have done a superb job in guiding me through the publication process. Romaine Perin deserves special thanks for her meticulous copy editing.

During the years of preparing my manuscript, friends like Emmanuel Darmon, Ehud Eilam, Rob Rhyner, and Michael (Meyshe) Sweet were sure to cheer me up and offer a useful word of advice. Most significant, my family has served as a constant reminder that there is normal life out there. My brother, Effie, and his spouse, Galit; my niece, Reut; and my two nephews, Eitan and Ela’ad, have done much to perk me up even on the dreariest of days. My sister, Limor, was usually ready to offer her (sometimes blunt) opinion about my work. My mother, Bruria, though not always sure what it is that historians actually do, was a steady fountain of straightforward suggestions. I can only wish that my late father, Eliezer, were here to witness this book (and make one of his wry observations). Last but never least, I wish to thank my wife, Sonja Mekel, who shared my moments of anxiety and joy. Her love and encouragement kept me going during the toughest periods connected to this book.

A Note on Transliteration While the transliteration of names, phrases, and words in Yiddish usually follows the guidelines of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, certain titles are spelled as they appear in the original sources: Abend (not Ovnt) -blat, and Yidishes tageblat (not togblat). The same applies to names whose common spelling does not follow YIVO’s standardized spelling: Abraham (not Avrom) Cahan and Jacob (not Yankev) Gordin.

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GENTILE NEW YORK

Introduction Philosopher Morris Raphael Cohen, who hailed from the town of Neshwies (Niasviž) in Byelorussia and later taught for many years at City College of New York, recalled that when he was growing up in the 1880s, “as the majority of Goyim (Gentiles) whom one met in Neshwies were peasants or poor city dwellers, some of them former serfs, few of them literate, the Jews generally regarded them as an inferior race. . . . My first attitude toward non-Jews . . . was that they were not fully human beings. Those I saw were ignorant peasants and I heard of generals and pritzim (lords) who were our persecutors. I did not understand their ways and they did not understand mine.”1 Even though the idea for this book had begun germinating before I read Cohen’s autobiography, it paralleled a story I heard from a fellow graduate student at the University of Wisconsin–Madison that made me more aware of the topic’s implications. In the late 1990s that student worked as a book clerk at a major midwestern trading institute. A managing director of a big financial firm, an American Jew, told the student that he was the smartest Gentile he had ever met, because he “did not drool on his shoes.” Amused by the story, I at first thought that in a nutshell, it was the tale of successful Jewish integration into American society— only in blissful America at the turn of the twenty-first century could the Jewish minority attain such a level of acceptance and self-confidence in relation to the non-Jewish majority that Jews could make such an irreverent remark about Gentiles to their faces. In different countries and times there might have been harsh and even violent consequences had any Jew dared to make such comments in the presence of Gentiles. Yet later the whole matter seemed less amusing than intriguing: throughout their history Jews faced Gentile majorities, and America was no exception. The status of Gentiles and their relations with Jews have always occupied a central place in Judaism. The Halakha ( Jewish law) set Jews ritually apart in laws governing holiness and purity as well as in civil and criminal laws, which prescribed very different rights and obligations for the Jew, the righteous Gentile (“son of Noah”), and the idolater. Every Orthodox Jew thanks God daily for not making him or her a heathen, while the Sabbath is ushered out with a blessing of the Lord who makes a distinction between holy and profane, Israel and the nations.2 Beyond 1

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religious laws per se lies a profound cultural and attitudinal milieu, in which Cohen’s account and the Jewish executive’s words are merely two examples. That fascinating theme—the ways Jews viewed Gentiles— seemed worthy of exploring, as it is arguably one of the most important facets of Jewish life and history. The subject matter, which does not lend itself easily to methodical examination, raised the question of whether it is possible to conceptualize the images of Gentiles among Jews while avoiding common generalizations—those are ubiquitous in antisemitic fulminations, which are convinced of Jewish undying hatred toward all non-Jews. Lehavdl (in a very different context), such generalizations are also customary in popular literature about Yiddish culture that serves the term goy on the same platter with putz or klafte.3 A more nuanced elucidation might address a host of questions: How did the images of non-Jews evolve and fl uctuate over time? What can one learn about Jewish cultural and political trajectories by tracing Jewish perceptions of Gentiles? Could the study of those conceptions actually challenge rather than affirm the upbeat narrative of the American Jewish experience? Looking at images of Gentiles has offered me an opportunity and a unique perspective with which to systemize my doubts regarding the supposedly universal values of Judaism, especially their cultural and political ends. The particularistic (or downright ethnocentric) aspects of Jewishness fly in the face of an old axiom to the contrary: a long procession of rabbis, thinkers, and scholars have argued that the left-of-center character of Jewish political culture in twentieth-century America inevitably derived from the universal values of prophetic Judaism that stressed tzedakah (charity), social justice, and tikkun olam (repairing the world).4 The source of Jewish liberalism/radicalism has typically been identified as religious beliefs, or as the Jewish historical experience in Europe, where the Left was more likely to oppose antisemitism and support Jewish emancipation; or as the relative Jewish inexperience with electoral politics that caused Jews to think about the political process in redemptive terms;5 or as Jewish identification “with people more marginalized than themselves.”6 All these interpretations have largely disregarded the crucial dimension of how Jews perceived their non-Jewish surroundings. A close scrutiny of the images of Gentiles among Jews could reveal the drawbacks of the facile (and occasionally self-congratulatory) generalizations about the sources of Jewish left-leaning political inclinations and suggest a different analysis altogether.7 This book focuses on Jewish immigrants in New York City from the beginning of the mass infl ux of Eastern European Jews in 1881 until 1920. It examines the different ways Jewish immigrants perceived Gentiles in general as well as different groups such as “Yankees” (the common term

Introduction

3

for WASPs in many Yiddish sources), Germans, Irish, Italians, and Blacks. I look at those perceptions through the prism of events that stirred New York’s Jewry across differences of class, gender, ideology, and place of origin. Some of those episodes were local, like a 1906 incident, when thousands of wailing parents stormed public schools on the Lower East Side and in Brooklyn, believing that evil “Christian physicians” were slitting the throats of their children in class. Other events were international, such as the anti-Jewish pogroms in postwar Poland that almost immediately infl uenced Jewish-Polish relations in America. My study demonstrates the complexity of the category “Gentile” and how Jewish immigrants distinguished between different groups and strata, how they displayed different sets of attitudes toward them, and how those images fl uctuated over time. I argue that while Jewish commentators often idealized the image of the “Yankee” in Eastern Europe in the late nineteenth century and during the first years after immigration, the representations of Americans became less favorable in the 1910s as a result of a few simultaneous developments: the rise of American nativism and recurring attempts to close America’s gates, the changing character of Jewish immigration (in particular after the abortive Russian revolution of 1905), the intensification of Jewish nationalism, and the xenophobic panic that spread during World War I and the ensuing Red Scare. That period witnessed how many immigrants’ belief in the benevolence of “Yankees” was replaced to some extent by a withdrawal to older and more alarming images of Gentiles. At the same time, the images of other minority groups, chiefly Italians and African Americans (which were unflattering beforehand), began to improve gradually; the increasing awareness of America’s shortcomings galvanized the Empire City’s immigrant Jews into seeking cooperation with those minorities as the only viable self-defense in a society that seemed to grow increasingly hostile. The vicissitudes in the images of different groups and the growing appreciation and empathy for the minority groups noted above marked the origins of a shift from self-defense to the defense of others. However, one should not envision a “rainbow coalition.” The relations between Jews and some immigrant groups, like Polish Americans, deteriorated due to the events in Europe, especially during and after the Great War. The relations with Italian Americans and especially with African Americans would see antagonistic episodes as well, and the improvement of their images would be neither immediate nor complete. Yet the more positive perceptions of those groups were vital for creating a foundation on which different channels of collaboration would develop in the interwar period.8 The transition to the defense of others did not mean

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Jews ceased defending themselves. It signaled the gradual understanding that American Jews were one minority among many, all of them with a vested interest in working together against a potentially intolerant majority. Thus the defense of other minorities—no matter how ambivalent Jewish attitudes were toward them—was increasingly seen as the best approach for self-defense.9 In summary, despite the genuine yearning (and in some cases obsession) of most Jewish immigrants to become true “amerikaner,” one has to take into consideration a concurrent dynamic, namely, one of initial admiration and gradual disillusionment and disappointment afterward. The findings presented here exemplify the importance of a transnational framework, illustrating how the events in the Old World continued to rouse the immigrants in New York long after their arrival. The concern for relatives left behind and the sustained flow of immigrants and new information kept the pulse of Eastern European life throbbing in New York. The pogroms and other misfortunes in the Russian Pale of Settlement echoed in the city’s Jewish sections through rallies, mass processions, and unprecedented relief efforts. The overseas turmoil and suffering during World War I and the ensuing pogroms had an important effect on shaping Jewish relations with other ethnic groups in America.10 My analysis runs counter to the intuitive narrative of linear acculturation, in which the would-be immigrants knew very little about their new country and after arrival gradually became more and more Americanized. But the dynamics that characterized the encounter of the Jewish world with modernity in general were much knottier. Modernizing Jews frequently held in high regard the Gentiles whom they perceived as carriers of a more advanced culture. That pattern had happened in relation to other nationalities like Russians or Germans, a theme that this book discusses as well. But the high esteem was often followed by disenchantment once concrete connections were made. The close proximity of other immigrant groups and their offspring in New York City helped to delay somewhat the process of disillusionment concerning Yankees by attributing the negative sides of American urban life to other groups (e.g., Irish Americans). In a sense, then, the path analyzed below shows certain continuities with the Old World: the pattern of idealization and later discontent with members of the group associated with the country’s higher culture or central government was not so different from that in Eastern Europe. The images of Gentiles served as a potent tool in intra-Jewish affairs and debates as well. While the Irish, the Germans, or the Poles in America were frequently portrayed as antisemitic, they were also seen as more “normal” and served as a role model for political assertiveness

Introduction

5

and organization.11 Jewish public figures mentioned those groups, or non-Jews in general, as a yardstick against which Jews were judged. In comparison with those groups, argued those activists, Jews seemed to be wanting in their educational institutions, charitable organizations, political infl uence, or willingness to stand up to their enemies. That constant comparison with Gentiles served to attack a timid leadership, warn the passive masses, and try to prompt them into action. By using the image of Gentiles as a rallying call, Jewish communal workers, intellectuals, and leaders believed the best stimulus for their constituencies was to tell Jews that they were lagging behind non-Jews. Yet those exhortations were not merely instrumental. Nationalists and assimilators, socialists and the bourgeoisie alike truly looked up to non-Jews as markers of normalcy and examples for Jews to emulate. Contempt and envy were hardly mutually exclusive. The argument about a path of rising disenchantment seems to contradict the conventional wisdom about Jews in America. In the latter view, “America is different” from Europe, because of the former’s milder forms of antisemitism; the granting of full civil rights since the new republic’s inception; and the fact that the state has never been in the hands of antisemitic parties, nor has it officially enacted anti-Jewish policy.12 Still, although one cannot refute the impressive record of achievements and the vitality of Gotham’s Jewry (and American Jews in general), its unprecedented upward mobility, and the level of its social acceptance in post-1945 America, American Jews in 1905 or 1920 could not have predicted all that. What do those attainments tell us about the consciousness of American Jews, especially at certain junctures when a hostile non-Jewish environment loomed large? Too often writers, inside and outside academia, have examined the Jewish past in America with too fixed a gaze on the present. As several historians of European Jewry have reminded us, later events should not have a monopoly over the way one interprets the history that preceded them. Historicization challenges the scholar to feign—temporarily and willingly—ignorance and to suspend hindsight. Historians of Russian Jews, for example, have analyzed Jewish integrationists in czarist Russia on their own terms, rather than passing judgment only in light of the later pogroms, Bolshevism, and the Holocaust. Such historicization is no less pertinent to the study of American Jews than to the study of Russian or French Jews: the Jewish experience in America should be explained not only in light of later acceptance and achievements but also in view of Jewish sensibilities at different points in time.13 It is worth keeping in mind that the very question of how Jews perceive non-Jews was repeatedly used as a device by the Jews’ persecutors

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and enemies. The detractors were especially prolific in producing pamphlets and books that purported to expose how Jews allegedly scorned and despised all Gentiles. Jewish apostates like Johannes Pfefferkorn of Cologne (1507–1509) or Jacob Brafman in czarist Russia (1867–1870), as well as a Christian-born professor of Oriental languages at Heidelberg, Johann Andreas Eisenmenger (1699), set out to prove not only Jewish contempt for all Gentiles but also the existence of a Jewish world conspiracy.14 The question of how Jews thought of non-Jews continued to evoke heated and often venomous debates with the rise of pseudoscientific antisemitism by the late nineteenth century. Like their predecessors, antisemites like the German historian Heinrich von Treitschke used, among other things, extracts from ancient Jewish authorities to demonstrate how the idea of the chosen people caused all Jews to despise Gentiles and secretly seek their ultimate destruction.15 Those recurring “revelations” naturally provoked anxious Jewish responses. It was hardly a mere issue of public relations: in the Middle Ages the question of Jewish perceptions of Gentiles stood at the center of dozens of religious disputations, where a Jewish defeat could have wreaked havoc on the local community. In those debates, usually foisted upon the Jewish side, the Christian disputants (sometimes represented by baptized Jews) typically argued that Judaism allows Jews to cheat and despise Gentiles and spill their blood. The claims about bloodshed transformed in the twelfth century into the blood libel—the accusation that Jews not only killed Christians but also ritually consumed Christian blood. Most Jewish reactions to those explosive allegations were interwoven with an acute awareness of their potential ramifications and thus were often indistinguishable from apologetics.16 It was not only fear of the surrounding non-Jewish majority’s responses that shaped the Jewish discourse on Gentiles. The growing infl uence of rationalism and universalism on the Haskalah ( Jewish Enlightenment) in the eighteenth century and Reform Judaism in the nineteenth century prompted Jewish thinkers in Europe and America to stress the common humanity of all people and that Judaism had always taught universal ethics. One of the leading maskilim (proponents of the Haskalah), Moses Mendelssohn, wrote in 1781 to the German philosopher Johann G. Herder, “Moses, the human being [Mensch], is writing to Herder, the human being, and not the Jew to the Christian preacher [Superintendent].” A conference of Reform rabbis at Braunschweig in 1844 stated, “The Jew calls the members of the people among whom he lives his brothers.” In America, a conference of Reform rabbis in Pittsburgh in 1885 yielded an infl uential platform, which acknowledged the “providential mission” of other monotheistic religions and extended a “hand of

Introduction

7

fellowship” to them. By the late decades of the nineteenth century the sway of universalistic attitudes toward Gentiles had become prevalent among Western and Central European Jews, and established American Jews, who formulated Judaism in a universal light.17 Hence any discussion of Jewish attitudes toward non-Jews should take into account the sensitivity of this theme, in addition to the infl uence of modern ideologies that sought to deny the very existence of such attitudes. Nevertheless, Jewish-Gentiles relations are at the core of most facets of Jewish civilization, and Jewish identity and culture has developed in relation to those of the non-Jewish majorities. The questions of how Jews viewed non-Jewish society and how these views in turn affected their cultural and political paths are important for a better understanding of Jewish identity, acculturation, and interactions with Gentiles.18 New York Jews are probably one of the most studied populations in U.S. history. A cornucopia of research has vastly enhanced our knowledge about varied aspects of Jewish life in the city. Until fairly recently, most studies on Gotham’s Jews have conveyed an upbeat analysis: they have portrayed an immigrant community whose energetic adjustment was not confined to the material realm, as public schools, settlement houses, trade unions, the newly formed Yiddish press, and American culture at large recast the immigrants’ parochial experience into a new, modern pattern. But simultaneously those new Americans and their offspring managed to draw from both ancestral traditions and American middle-class norms to re-create a vibrant Jewish culture. In that process, American Jews became more affl uent, more educated, and more integrated into American society.19 In the past decade several historians have challenged the historiographical mainstream in ways that have informed this study. Exploring various themes, they have shown how topics like discontent, estrangement, and repression have been integral to the American Jewish experience, as was the struggle with American racial categorization.20 Other historians and sociologists have focused on the topic of Jewish interrelations with other groups, comparing socioeconomic characteristics and analyzing ethnic contact and confl ict between American Jews and other groups.21 By far the most notable topic (in sheer volume) is that of Jewish-Black interactions. The trials of the civil rights movement, the ascendance of Black Power, and various expressions of anti-Jewish sentiment among Black militants in the late 1960s produced a surfeit of books and essays on the subject, many of which were defensive or hostile polemics.22 Perhaps most relevant for my approach are the works of sociologist Ewa Morawska and historian Hasia Diner. Both these scholars have convincingly demonstrated how Old World conceptions and

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assumptions, especially about peasants and non-Jewish mobs, continued to inform Jewish-Gentile relations in the United States.23 Still, most studies on New York Jewry and even those on interethnic relations rarely deal with Gentiles qua Gentiles, although that category is central not only to Jewish law but also to a better understanding of Jewish consciousness and Jewish relations with other groups.24 Moreover, examining Jewish attitudes toward Gentiles may integrate American Jewish history into the wider field of Jewish history, where scholars of (mostly Eastern) European Jewry have conceptualized the Jewish perceptions of non-Jews.25 Their questions and elucidations are also germane to the study of Jewish immigrants in New York. American conditions notwithstanding, Jews in America should be studied like any other Jewish population, without making a priori assumptions regarding their exceptional situation. Studying the images of a range of groups among Jews also links American Jewish history to the larger field of American immigration and ethnic history. Scholars in those fields have revealed that the process of Americanization/assimilation/acculturation, however defined, was far less voluntary than usually assumed and entailed forced conformism and exclusion as well as integration. More specifically, some of them have explored the idealization of America prior to immigration and their growing disenchantment with their new country after arrival.26 In order to gain a better understanding of Americanization, it is essential to study how Jewish immigrants perceived their fellow Americans, what characteristics they ascribed to different groups, and what traits were considered laudable and worth emulating. My study concentrates less on the images of the country America, which was a more elastic concept, and more on the images of its various inhabitants.27

The main focus of this book is on Jews from Eastern Europe (czarist Russia, Habsburg-ruled Galicia, and Romania) who settled in New York City between 1881 and 1920. Although a German-Jewish immigrant, Jacob Schiff was already a leading patrician in uptown Jewry by the late nineteenth century and therefore not part of the downtown immigrant population. On the other hand, Abraham H. Fromenson, though American born, was active in New York’s Jewish immigrant life: he was involved in working against Christian missionaries, served as coeditor of the Yidishes tageblat ( Jewish daily news), and was active in the Zionist movement, thus playing an integral part in the immigrants’ communal life.28 The motivations, structure, and even geographical origin of the Central European (often labeled “German”) Jews who came to America

Introduction

9

mostly between the 1830s and the 1870s were not so different from those of Jews who hailed in much larger numbers from czarist Russia, Galicia, and Romania chiefly from the 1870s on.29 Nonetheless, there were significant dissimilarities: in the latter regions traditional Judaism remained far stronger than in German-speaking areas, and no less important were the differences between the surrounding societies. Central European Jews were beginning to enjoy gradual emancipation and saw themselves mainly as a religious group.30 Most Eastern European Jews (until at least the late nineteenth century) still dwelt in towns where they made up a very large part of the population and viewed their Judaism in communal-ethnic terms. Furthermore, in countries checkered with many national groups, Jews and non-Jews alike thought of Jews as constituting a nation and not as Poles or Russians of the “Mosaic persuasion.” While the impact of the Enlightenment brought about Reform Judaism and integrative liberalism in Germany, its effect in Russia manifested itself more through novel political movements: socialism, anarchism, and Jewish nationalism.31 The categories of “Eastern” versus “Central” European Jews, however, were never fixed. Austrian-ruled Bohemian or Moravian Jews, Hungarian Jews, or Polish Jews in Prussian-ruled Poznan´ (Posen) proved hard to define, as indicated in the emblematic words of a Jewish social worker who in 1905 termed them “the missing link” between Central and Eastern European Jews.32 What further complicates such definitions is the fact that some of those Jews (including those from Russia proper) had acquired at least some proficiency in German, often described themselves as Germans, and preferred to pass as German Jews in America.33 Most Jewish immigrants disembarked at the port of New York, and almost half of them remained in the city. In 1880 most of Gotham’s Jewish population of about eighty thousand came from Central Europe. Twenty years later New York’s Jewry had mushroomed to half a million, only a fifth of this number from a Central European background. When the city’s Jewish population had swelled to more than 1.3 million in 1914, Jewish immigrants from czarist Russia, Galicia, and Romania and their offspring constituted more than 90 percent of New York City’s Jewish population. By 1910 more than 540,000 Jews lived on what would later be called the Lower East Side. The next largest Jewish concentrations at that time were in Chicago and Philadelphia, with a population of one hundred thousand Jews each. New York City—even without Brownsville—made up a staggering proportion of American Jewry.34 Although very different from the experiences of Jews in small-town America, New York did represent the dominant experience of American Jews, particularly those of Eastern European ancestry. In 1898 the Russian-born Hebrew writer and future rabbi Max (Mordecai Ze’ev)

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Raisin, wrote from New York to the European readers of the Hebrew periodical Ha-shiloach (Berlin), “The eyes of all Russian Jews in the United States are fixed on New York. . . . Hebrew immigrants in other cities look at New York as the Jewish metropolis that will lay out the teachings for all the Jews in America.” In New York quantity became quality: the city, called the “megashtetl on the Hudson,” was the center of the most important Jewish organizations and the strongest Jewish unions; a cultural hub for the burgeoning Yiddish press, literature, and theater; and headquarters for Jewish philanthropic endeavors at home and abroad. The city was not only a place where the manifold expressions of modern Jewish life and culture flourished, but also a central arena for contact between Jewish immigrants and various ethnic and racial groups.35 Even though any periodization is assailable, some seem more valid than others. Undeniably, communities of Jews from czarist Russia, Galicia, and Romania had lived in the city since at least the 1850s. Yet despite those qualifications,36 1881 signaled the beginning of mass emigration from Eastern Europe to the United States. The study concludes with the Red Scare of 1919–1920. This period has usually been given short shrift, since it occurred on the heels of World War I and toward the end of the European mass immigration. From the other end, those years happened to be just at the beginning of the interwar period.37 That phase is crucial, however, in the appearance of a new realization among Jewish immigrants regarding their country’s faults and dangers and what would be the best strategy to cope with them. The period under review coincided with an unprecedented movement for political and urban reforms (known as the Progressive Era), the Great War, growing nativist sentiments at home, and calls for immigration restriction.38 That cauldron would comprise the formative years of American Jewry. The following chapters proceed chronologically, yet they also correspond to themes like the Jewish labor movement, World War I, and its aftermath. Chapters 1 and 2 focus on Jewish society in Eastern Europe: chapter 1 demonstrates how Jewish society featured identifiable patterns of thought and behavior toward various strata in the non-Jewish environment, and distinguished between the surrounding peasantry and those seen as carriers of higher culture. Chapter 2 examines the sometimes idealized portrayal of Americans in Eastern European Jewish sources. The image of the American enabled Jewish commentators to equate Jewish and American characteristics and to associate any expressions of antiJewish prejudice in the United States with European immigrants rather than “real” Americans. Chapter 3 looks at Jewish immigrants in New York City in the 1880s and 1890s, tracing the creation of a gap between the more idealized

Introduction

11

image of “Yankees” and the Americans the newcomers actually met. That chapter focuses mostly on Irish and German Americans. Chapter 4 shows how a combination of local and international events, occurring mainly in the first decade of the twentieth century, signaled the beginnings of gradual changes in the attitude of the city’s immigrant Jews toward the usually venerated “real” Americans. The Jewish labor movement and the period of mass strikes and organization (1909–1914) are the topics of chapter 5. Jews who were part of the emerging powerful labor unions in the garment trades developed a self-image that recast the concept of Jewish chosenness in a totally secularized form, which viewed egoism, apathy, frivolity, and backwardness as trademarks of Gentile (whether American-born or Italian) workers. Chapter 6 deals with the period between the onset of World War I in Europe and America’s entry into the war (1914–1917). The simultaneity of events abroad (especially the suffering of Jews in the Pale of Settlement and Galicia) and mounting nativism at home engendered alarm about American intolerance and rising Jewish resentment toward certain immigrant groups, especially the Poles. Chapter 7 illustrates how those tendencies grew stronger in the years during the U.S. entry into World War I and the Red Scare (1917–1920). As “real” Americans and Slavic immigrant groups assumed more menacing features, the representations of other minority groups—predominantly Italians and African Americans—improved, since Jewish immigrants increasingly considered them potential allies. The reorientation toward enhanced collaboration with those groups would lay the foundation for a central component of twentieth-century American liberalism: the recognition and defense of minorities. In a final thought, some harsh, and even hateful, quotations about non-Jews recounted below might certainly raise more than a few eyebrows. My aim, nonetheless, is to analyze and understand the mental landscape of historical subjects, rather than pass judgment. Just as the prevailing attempt to mold the Jewish past to suit contemporary concerns and interests is misguided, so would be a condemnation of Jewish immigrants for failing to conform to current standards of political morality.

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“Never Before Have Gentiles Hated Jews So Much” T h e I m ag e s o f N o n - J e ws i n E a s t e r n E u r o p e a n J e w i s h S o c i et y i n t h e L at e N i n et e e n t h C e n t u ry

A leading figure in the Jewish Enlightenment (Haskalah) movement in Russia and a prolific recorder of Jewish life, Avrom Ber Gotlober, had lived as a (married) teenager in the town of Chernikhov (Ukraine) in the 1820s. Gotlober remembered the peasants who frequented his father-inlaw’s tavern: “Anyone who beat up his wife when he cheated on her or she cheated on him” visited the inn. The peasants imbibed “until they were drunk and exposed themselves.” After drinking and hugging each other, they usually began to fight among themselves “until blood was spilled.” Similar imagery appeared in the memoir of the socialist Yiddish poet Avrom Lesin, who did not grow up in a shtetl but in a city (Minsk) in the 1870s and 1880s and had a completely different background from Gotlober’s. As a child he visited a local tavern whose owner he knew. There “[Gentile] drunkards lay around on the dirty floor, embracing and jostling one another, singing with hoarse voices, [and] snoring” as the Jewish owner stood at the door and “laughed with such deep contempt that his whole body shook.”1 Although separated by more than half a century, ideology, and cultural tastes, the resemblance between Gotlober and Lesin’s accounts was not coincidental. Undeniably, Eastern European Jews were subject to a spectrum of infl uences, and later events like the pogroms (whether those of 1881–1882, of 1903–1906, or after World War I) had surely colored many recollections. At the same time, Jewish society featured identifiable patterns of thought and behavior toward various strata in the non-Jewish environment. The late nineteenth century witnessed bifurcated images of Gentiles that distinguished between the surrounding peasantry and individuals seen as carriers of higher culture, like Germans and later Russians.2 Still, that distinction was more ambiguous because of the dynamics of Jewish-Gentile interactions: whereas the negative images of peasants were sometimes mitigated by familiarity, the high regard for the bearers of more developed societies was often marred once extensive 12

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contacts were made. The Jewish encounter with cultures that were seen as more advanced and alluring (as opposed to the surrounding peasant societies) entailed a process of initial idealization and later disillusionment when anti-Jewish animus appeared. To be sure, some of the sources below are retrospective accounts, written decades afterward and affected by later events. Still, reformers, Zionists, socialists, and unaffiliated Jews kept reverting to the same set of images and assumptions. Those representations were undoubtedly intensified by the pogroms and legal restrictions, but existed beforehand. The tendency to view the Gentile masses as basically coarse, explosive, violence prone, and drunk did not begin in 1881. If anything, such events usually had the effect of deepening stereotypes rather than overturning them. Group attitudes continued to infl uence those who genuinely tried to rise above them (like socialists) and would continue to operate in that way west of the Atlantic as well. The Images of Gentiles in Yiddish Folklore and Eastern European Jewish Society The place of the Gentile in Jewish law must preface any discussion of common perceptions of non-Jews. Apart from setting apart Jews and Gentiles in purity, civil, and criminal laws, many Jewish authorities assumed that the distinction between Jew and Gentile would remain even after the coming of the Messiah. The dichotomy between Jews and Gentiles was accentuated in Talmudic times (mainly between the first and fifth centuries c.e.), yielding assertions like “the breast milk of a Gentile woman breeds a bad character in a baby.” That dichotomy, however, had become weaker in later periods because of intensified economic connections between Jews and Gentiles. No longer living in economically self-contained communities, Jews in medieval Europe had to reckon with a reality in which contact with Gentiles was an unavoidable necessity. Although by the closing years of the nineteenth century observance was declining, the cultural and social separation of boundaries between Jews and non-Jews had hardly vanished and continued to inform even those who renounced Judaism.3 Economic and social contacts had arguably more bearing on Jewish attitudes toward Gentiles than prescribed Jewish law. Eastern Europe, where nearly 6 million of the world’s 7.7 million Jews resided in 1880, exemplified that pattern. By the mid-nineteenth century most Eastern European Jews still resided in shtetlekh (small to midsize market towns) that provided surrounding villages with commercial services. Despite frequent and varied economic relations between Jews and Gentiles, social mingling remained fairly uncommon. Jews differed from the rest of the

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population in their domiciles and language (Yiddish) and in their clothing and other aspects of appearance (beards and sidelocks for men, covered hair for married women). While the social separation of Jews from their surrounding society was never complete, a barrier of mutual dislike divided the two worlds, allowing mostly functional interactions. Peasants brought over to the shtetl’s marketplace their grain, fruits, vegetables, fish, livestock, and hides and bought in exchange products such as tools, dry goods, and clothing that were imported by the town’s Jews. Additionally, on Sundays and holidays many peasants would drink up their earnings at the Jewish-owned taverns and inns. As a result of their economic position in Eastern Europe, the non-Jews normally encountered by most Jews until the mid-nineteenth century were usually limited to (occasionally drunk) peasantry (whether Belarusian, Polish, Romanian, or Ukrainian, etc.), the Polish porets (lord, landowner), and Russian or Austrian officialdom.4 By the late nineteenth century certain archetypical images of nonJews were entrenched throughout Eastern European Jewish society. The basic image of the Gentile in Jewish folklore was that of a peasant, portrayed as inherently Jew hating, strong, coarse, drunk, illiterate, dumb, and sexually promiscuous. That attitude yielded songs with lyrics like “oy, oy, oy / shiker iz a goy / shiker iz er/ trinken muz er / vayl er iz a goy” (drunk is a Gentile / drunk is he / drink must he / because he is a Gentile); sayings like “A Gentile remains a Gentile”; “When the Gentiles have a feast they beat up Jews”; “When the Jew is hungry he sings; when the Gentile is hungry he beats up his wife”; and “The Jew is small and Vasil [a common Ukrainian name] is big.”5 Countless accounts and folktales by Eastern European Jews depicted Gentiles as dim-witted peasants whose ignorance could only compete with their ruthlessness.6 Yiddish speakers used lehavdl (differentiation) language—a separate set of words to depict the life cycle of Gentiles. Future anarchist Yisroel Binimetsky (later Beneqvit), who grew up in a shtetl in Ukraine in the 1870s, recalled how the local Jews refrained from using the regular verb shtarbn (to die) when talking about the death of non-Jews; instead, they applied the word peygern (which denotes the death of an animal). The Gentiles did not eat, but “devoured.” Their family members were “fatheru, motheru, sisteru” (mocking Ukrainian pronunciation). There were also contemptuous names for Gentiles, especially peasants, like “Zhlob” (a boor or yokel), “Doverakher” (literally “other thing,” figuratively meaning something impure like a pig or an abominable person), “shkots,” “orl” (a more contemptuous term than goy, referring to the uncircumcised), “poperilo,” “kaporenik” (figuratively someone who is worthless), or just “Ivan.”7

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The staying power of those images could be also measured through those who sought to transcend them. The Haskalah coalesced into a fully articulated movement in Central Europe by the mid-eighteenth century, calling for the adoption of German language, secular education, and European manners (such as modern clothing). Since proponents of the Haskalah (maskilim) saw acculturation as a precondition for emancipation, they fostered loyalty to the state while condemning the Jewish concept of alienation in exile. In the early nineteenth century the Haskalah’s ideas reached Russia for the most part from Austrian-ruled Galicia, whose Yiddish-speaking communities were in the German cultural sphere and had widespread economic and cultural ties with Russian Jewry, and from East Prussia and Kurland (in today’s Latvia), which had commercial ties with the big Jewish centers in Lithuania. Although the Haskalah’s social basis had remained quite narrow throughout those years, some of its ideas permeated later movements such as Jewish nationalism and socialism.8 One of the important dimensions of the Haskalah lies in its relation to non-Jews and their culture: maskilim accepted the authority of nonJewish thought and values as at least equal (if not superior) to traditional Jewish teachings and behavior. Moreover, while enlightened Christians seemed as liberated from their antiquated superstitions, maskilim felt that Jews were still entrapped in their backwardness. In 1861 the maskil Eliezer Yitschak Shapira (who owned a bookstore in Warsaw) complained in the moderate Orthodox Hebrew periodical Ha-magid (the Herald) about the Jewish masses: “With their endless fears” they were willing to believe any rumor about Gentiles. Shapira claimed many Jews in Poland that year were hysterical, since they believed that “the Christians conspire to massacre all Jews, both young and old, on the night of Yom Kippur.” Such fears and beliefs, Shapira wrote, might “excite hatred against us among the common people.” Alexander Tsederboym, a pioneer of the Jewish press in Russia and an indefatigable maskil, who established in Odessa the leading Hebrew paper of the period, Ha-melits (the Advocate, 1860–1904), had often used both Ha-melits and his Yiddish organ, Kol mevaser (Heralding voice) to criticize what he saw as Jewish chauvinism toward Gentiles. In 1862 he assaulted the common Jewish attitude that regarded the Gentile as “a murderer, a clogged head,” and believed that “all Gentiles are morons, fools.” But Tsederboym optimistically added that today “Jews and Christians know each other better, they see there is no danger.”9 Although later occurrences affected the representations of non-Jews, it is telling that numerous memoirs and accounts by people from different regions and dissimilar political and cultural trajectories still invoked

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that basic image. Member of the socialist Bund (the General Jewish Labor Union in Lithuania, Poland, and Russia, formed in 1897) and labor activist Meyer Kushner, who was raised in the Ukrainian city of Kremenchug in the 1880s and 1890s, recounted that when the peasants came every Sunday to the city’s churches, the Jews were frightened, since the peasants “were easily agitated to a pogrom.” Future garment worker Avrom Pinkhes Unger, who grew up in the Polish town of Strykov in those years, recollected how during local fairs peasants sometimes got drunk and, thinking a Jew had cheated them, began shouting, “Beat up the Jews,” and fights broke out. The Yiddish author I. J. Singer, who grew up in a Polish shtetl at the turn of the twentieth century, described how during Christian holidays thousands of peasants swarmed into town; right after the religious ceremonies, the peasants “got drunk, danced, and beat each other up.” Singer mentioned the alarm of the Jewish merchants in the shtetl’s market square when fights broke out between drunken peasants, who would crack each other’s skulls with big wooden rods. The Jews would pack up their goods, fearing that “it’s starting” again. The Yiddish poet Yoysef Rolnik, who grew up in the 1880s in a small village near Minsk, portrayed the peasants as crude: they swam in the local river in “a primitive way, kicking their thick feet,” and their women would ride horses “spread-legged, like men.”10 Unquestionably, one cannot verify that the preceding incidents actually happened as the memoirists depicted them. The examples suggest that while the peasant’s basic image was not divorced from a certain reality, it often congealed into a fixed set of traits. It is noteworthy that some of the memoirists did not just describe actual events but also wrote about the Jewish attitude in their hometowns toward the peasantry. Furthermore, the fact that immigrants of different backgrounds, regions, and political convictions ascribed similar basic characteristics to the peasantry attest to the potency of the latter’s image. The peasant was so closely associated with rudeness and dullness that as late as 1952 linguist and folklorist Hirsh Abramovitsh argued that one should not use the word poyer (peasant) when referring to Jewish farmers or agricultural workers, declaring that “my pen does not let me write down the word poyer” when discussing Jewish farmers. The image of the peasant was deeply rooted in the Yiddish language and folklore, where the words for “peasant” like poyer or muzhik denoted rusticity, small-mindedness, and churlishness.11 One should emphasize at this point that both Jews and Gentiles relied on their particularistic (to put it mildly) traditions in medieval and early modern eras that stretched into the late nineteenth century in Russia, Poland, and Romania, if not later. Each side tended to picture the other as an undifferentiated group with immutable characteristics and

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attributed a greater moral worth to its own adherents. Thus a double standard of ethics was an inevitable result. Yet whereas the Christian majority’s attitude brought about a system of legal restrictions and various kinds of attacks that seriously impinged upon the lives of Jews, Jewish attitudes (which were hardly more elevated) were tempered by the Jewish political situation and historical experience. In consequence, the reason Jewish leaders frowned upon Jews who cheated Gentiles had less to do with moral issues than with self-preservation: such behavior not only would bring Jews into disrepute but also was likely to endanger innocent Jewish individuals and communities.12 The Gentile’s basic image was so central to the Jewish consciousness that it served as a negative marker of conduct within Jewish society, as well as a standard of measurement. A less observant or ignorant Jew was simply called a “Gentile” (or a “complete Gentile,” a completely irreligious Jew). “Drinking like a Gentile,” “stupid as an old Gentile,” “rude as a Gentile,” and “big as a Gentile” were common phrases, and when someone proved to be somewhat slow, he or she had a “Gentile head.” Union leader Philip Zausner, who grew up in Lemberg (L’viv) in the 1890s, recalled how a traditional father worried that his daughters were growing up as “peasant women, like the goyim.” Such concerns were linked not only to the daughters’ lack of Jewish observance, but also to the common conception that Jewish sexual mores were much more stringent and purer than those of non-Jews. Beyond sexual codes, certain forms of behavior—shouting, fighting, having a dog, or even playing with a ball—were seen as “not Jewish,” even when conducted by children. Only a sheygets (Gentile boy) would do those things; therefore an unruly Jewish boy was called by that name.13 The general image of Gentiles, nevertheless, was more dynamic than what such examples may suggest. Jewish folklore often portrayed non-Jews as down-to-earth, no-nonsense people, whose directness and simplicity were not corrupted in comparison with the tortuous ways, casuistry, and nervousness among Jews—“A good Gentile is better than a good Jew,” “A Jewish shrew is worse than a Gentile one,” “When a Jew has a lot of money and a Gentile just a little, he lives better than the Jew,” “Sometimes it’s harder to depend on a Jew than on a Gentile.” Another pattern was to present Gentile shortcomings side by side with Jewish ones, as in “It’s better to fall in the hands of Gentiles than in the mouths of Jews,” “It’s better to live among Gentiles and die among Jews,” and “God save us from Jewish arrogance and Gentile lust.” Gentiles were coarse and simple, but they were not suffering from goles (exile) complications and lived happily on their land. In 1867 the Hebrew and Yiddish writer Hertz Ha-cohen Naymanovitz from Lublin wrote a short piece

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in which he portrayed himself as a dreamy visitor who causes a wagon accident. The peasant who drives the wagon is uncouth and snores loudly, but he is practical and knows his way with a horse and wagon. A vocal yearning for normalcy, to be ke-khol ha-goyim (like other people) in economic and cultural life would not become widespread before the closing years of the nineteenth century. Before that it was subdued by the doctrinal belief in an innate Jewish uniqueness and election by God. But the desire to break free from the traditional way of life, which later Jews felt was degenerate, would gradually and partly modify Jewish attitudes toward Gentiles in Eastern Europe.14 As external infl uence pervaded most facets of Jewish life, Jews increasingly adopted components of their neighbors’ cuisine, garb, and language. In remote areas, where the whole Jewish population amounted to one or two families, closer personal relations formed in spite of religious and social inhibitions. Some shtetl or city Jews employed nonJewish maids and servants, who lived with them and brought a Gentile presence into the Jewish domestic sphere. Those Christians often became very attached to the family and learned to speak excellent Yiddish. Female maids sometimes said the blessings with the children and referred to other Gentiles as “goyim.” Growing up in Vitebsk (Byelorussia) in the 1870s, future revolutionary and Yiddishist Chaim Zhitlovsky remembered a maid at his parents’ house called Yulke, who was “assimilated”: she spoke spicy Yiddish, called the local janitor an orl (derogatory for “Gentile”), and before Passover warned he might contaminate the house with khomets (the janitor answered her with a folksy Yiddish swearword). Playwright and theatrical designer Mordecai Gorelik, who grew up in a small shtetl near Minsk after the turn of the twentieth century, recalled how the local Gentiles spoke Yiddish, and even went to the Jewish bathhouse. The regular hiring of Gentiles to perform necessary work on the Sabbath (shabes goy) also made certain Gentiles very familiar with Jewish customs. The level of familiarity with those Gentiles rendered JewishGentile relations more complicated, revealing a level of friendliness and even intimacy with the “next door,” nearly household Gentiles. Bessie Moskowitz, who was born in 1868 in the Romanian city of Jassy, distinguished between the few non-Jews of her neighborhood, who spoke Yiddish, and all the others: “People used to speak constantly about the [other] Gentiles who beat up and murder Jews.”15 Peasantry was not the only stratum encountered by Eastern European Jewry, and the porets (Polish lord, pritsim in the plural) was a ubiquitous figure in Jewish sources. Jewish estate managers (arendators) for in absentia Polish gentry, merchants who arranged the sale of those lords’ produce, and whole communities who received permission by a local

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lord to live on his land had various contacts with Polish landed gentry. Since Jews managed the lords’ estates and collected their taxes among the peasantry (who were often not Polish), they were identified with the hated gentry and from time to time incurred the serfs’ wrath. In some cases Polish nobles defended the Jewish communities against peasant aggression and even vouched for “their” Jews in legal disputes against non-Jews.16 Historians have revealed the dual image of the pritsim in the Hebrew and Yiddish literature. on the one hand there were signs of empathy with the stratum that was an economic ally and protector, and was seen at times as a carrier of higher culture than the surrounding peasantry. But on the other hand, there were feelings of revulsion and alienation amid what Jews saw as the brutal and licentious behavior of Polish lords, who habitually treated their Jewish lessees with utter contempt, if not violence: the very term porets was derived from the Hebrew verb “to transgress,” and Yiddish writers often described the lord as wanton, capricious, and cruel. Yekhezkel Kotik, who became a Yiddish and Hebrew writer and a communal reformer in Warsaw, depicted in his memoirs the conduct of the Polish lords in his native Kamenets (Byelorussia) in the mid-nineteenth century. The porets used to flog “his” Jews, humiliate them, and set his dogs on them, and “if the Jewish estate manager had, God forbid, beautiful daughters, it was a terrible misfortune” and the parents prayed they would not attract the porets, who might have his way with them. Countless Jewish folktales characterized the porets as mean, capricious, and tyrannical. One porets ordered a Jew to teach a dog to speak or face decapitation. Another tale presented a porets who visited his estate with his new wife and commanded his Jewish manager to cover the distance from the train station to the estate with green fabric.17 One of the symbols of the charged relations between Jews and Polish lords was the term mayufes (literally “how beautiful art thou”), originally derived from a Sabbath dinner song. Yiddish linguists and scholars have traced it to Polish lords, who used to entertain themselves by humiliating Jews who came to them on business or to request something. The lords forced the Jew to sing and dance the mayufes under threat of flogging, or at least not granting the Jew’s appeal. Hence to “sing mayufes” became synonymous in Yiddish with being servile. The rise of modern Jewish nationalism in the late nineteenth century brought about the term mayufesnik, or as the 1911 dictionary by Yiddish poet Yeohash (YehoashShlomo Blumgarten) defined it, “A Jew who has no national self-respect, who tries to hide his Jewish origins or seeks to assimilate among non-Jews or conceal his Jewish characteristics.” The extent to which the humiliating mayufes routine was practiced remains unknown, but it left a distinct

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mark on the image of the Polish lord. The progressively negative image of the Polish lord was linked to developments wider than the behavior of the Polish gentry toward Jews: it also had to do with the gentry’s decline as a stratum, resulting from the emancipation of the serfs (1863) by Czar Alexander II and the confiscation of the property of Polish nobles after the failed Polish revolt of 1863.18 The attitudes toward Gentiles that underlay Jewish sensibilities featured clear markers that separated Jews and non-Jews. Although barely monolithic, as a rule Eastern European Jewish society tended to view Gentiles with trepidation and distrust. When distinguishing between different types of Gentiles, Jews had well-defined prototypes of thought and behavior for dealing with them, whether the Polish porets, the (predominantly Slavic) peasant, or the Russian/Austrian state official.19 That mindset in relation to Gentiles hardly disappeared as the nineteenth century progressed, and it had lost very little of its hold. Yet the last third of the century witnessed the appearance of new attitudes in Jewish society. The Lure of Modern Non-Jewish Cultures and Its Discontents During the reign of the “Czar-Liberator” Alexander II (1855–1881) Russia eased many residence and education restrictions, allowing more Jewish merchants and professionals to move into the Russian interior, while large numbers of young Jews were admitted to Russian gimnazii and universities. Processes of urbanization, industrialization, and a growing integration into Russian society were coupled with the spread of movements that sought to minimize or abolish the chasm between Jews and non-Jews.20 Jewish modernizers, whether maskilim or the later assimilators who advocated the abolition of any Jewish distinctiveness, had envisioned a great Gentile world (beyond the surrounding one), whose culture could enrich and reform many aspects of Jewish life. Consequently those modernizers frequently idolized those whom they perceived as the bearers of higher culture. A case in point was the image of Germans, since nineteenth-century modernizers (and many others) held in high esteem all things German; the German origin of the Haskalah movement, and the situation whereby German literature and science represented a more advanced Kultur than anything the Gentile world in Eastern Europe seemed to offer, help to explain this. In Austrian-ruled Galicia and Bukovina, German was the language of the state and of the cultural elites. Bohemian-born Abraham Kohn, a maskil who in 1843 became Lemberg’s rabbi, asserted, “The German mother tongue alone is . . . that on whose ground we can acquire true culture” and concluded that no “Slavic dialect” was able to compete

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with German. Yoysef Margoshes, who would become a communal activist and an important Yiddish journalist in New York, grew up in an Orthodox family in Lemberg of the 1870s and 1880s and recalled that none of his friends “displayed even the least interest” in learning Polish (not to mention Ukrainian), but only German. In Russia, government policy in the 1840s fortified that disposition by encouraging the extensive use of German at the government-sponsored schools for Jewish children and viewing Germany as a cultural model. The proximity of the Yiddish language to German facilitated making German the gateway to European culture. When the young Yoysef Rolnik was on his way to America (1899), he arrived in the port city of Libau (today Latvia’s Liepāja). Upon arrival, Rolnik stopped and stared at the window of a local bookstore, which displayed German books. Years later he recalled, “I felt that I am almost in Germany, in Europe.”21 Already before the mid-nineteenth century the appellations daytsh or daytshish (German) were common when referring to almost any new custom or social phenomenon, and also designated the new type of man who personified the Haskalah in his language, ideas, and looks: without a hat, without a beard, without sidelocks, and wearing a short jacket (“German” style) rather than a caftan. In one of his short stories the great Yiddish writer Sholem Aleichem mocked the character who was “a Jewish German or a German Jew” and whose clean-shaven face was “smooth like a plate.” German culture and manners, channeled through German and Eastern European maskilim—as well as Jewish bankers and merchants in Galicia and cities across the Pale of Settlement like Warsaw, Odessa, Berdichev, and Zamoshtsh—were the symbols of modernity and a shibboleth separating the enlightened from their Orthodox opponents. Even the fiercest detractors of the new ideas, like Hasidim, reluctantly admitted the weight of the new Gentile knowledge. They objected, of course, to the government’s Germanization effort in Austrian-ruled Galicia and attacked the “berlintshikes” (as maskilim were often called) as unable to understand the real meaning of life. But also in Hasidic tales, they were shrewd and full of knowledge. The German was seen as a bearer of higher culture and science with a universal appeal, a world of difference from what Yiddish-speaking Jews knew from their encounters with surrounding Slavic peasantry and Russian officials. Although there were German colonists in Russia, contact with them remained infrequent, something that made the idealization of German culture easier.22 By the late nineteenth century the respect for Germans and their culture was still noticeable among Yiddish-speaking Jews. In 1870 an unnamed reader wrote to Kol mevaser (whose editorials often criticized German antisemitism) about a simple, uneducated Jew in his shtetl

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who wanted “to pass for a daytsh” because he thought “only in that lies real education!” Similarly, Chaim Zhitlovsky noticed that his father and neighbors had a clearly distinct attitude toward Germans. Zhitlovsky’s father felt deep respect toward Germans: “The German nature had made a tremendous impression on him.” The father was particularly impressed by the German’s “absolute honesty,” where “a word is a word!” and even a simple German like a local locksmith was clean and well dressed. The Hebrew critic Avraham Ya’akov Paperna recalled how the Jewish bourgeoisie in Russia aped German culture such that even a vulgar parvenu had “the statues of Schiller and Goethe on marble columns” in his house. The Zionist leader Shmaryahu Levin wrote in his memoir, “I admired the strict order of German life in general; I admired the German drive for education and knowledge. . . . I admired even more the German language and literature, with which I became more familiarized than the Russian.”23 With the growing connections between Germany and Eastern Europe in the later part of the century, nevertheless, the picture of Germans had become more realistic. The rise of pseudoscientific, racial antisemitism in Germany from the late 1870s on had legitimized its espousal by the Russian intelligentsia. Although it did not dethrone Germany from its position as a carrier of high culture, the anti-Jewish tirades showed Jews that the land of Goethe and Schiller was also that of antisemites like Wilhelm Marr, Adolf Stoecker, and Heinrich von Treitschke. The disappointment was evident in the exclamation of Ha-magid in 1881: “Hatred is the result of the German character and soul.” In 1881 Ha-magid’s rival, the Warsaw Hebrew weekly Ha-tsefirah (the Dawn), equated anti-Jewish violence in Germany (in the city of Neustettin) with Russian pogroms, stating, “The Germans, who boast of their enlightenment, are not more elevated in virtue and human spirit than their like-minded brethren, the ignorant Russian masses.” During the eruption of anti-Jewish riots across Hungary in 1883 in the wake of the Tiszaeszlár blood libel, the same paper determined that “most instigators are Germans” and described how “small groups of Germans” traveled around, agitating the masses against the Jews.24 Furthermore, most of the 2.4 million Eastern European Jews who immigrated to America between 1881 and 1924 had made their way through Germany, heading to one of the major European ports (Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Antwerp, Bremen, or Hamburg). While transients stayed in Germany for various time periods, most of them had brushed against German border officials, police officers, train conductors, innkeepers, and ordinary Germans. Germany’s administrative structure had granted local and state bureaucrats almost unlimited power over

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foreigners, which made Eastern Europeans vulnerable to arbitrary treatment by unsympathetic officials. Paul Nathan, head of German Jewry’s chief relief agency, commented that the medical control of transients was “the most stringent imaginable.”25 Under such circumstances, even simple actions like delousing could turn traumatic. Mary Antin, who passed through Germany in 1894, remembered how she and other immigrants were taken off the train and hurried by “white-clad Germans shouting commands, always accompanied with ‘Quick! Quick!’—the confused passengers obeying all orders like meek children . . . strange looking people driving us about like dumb animals.” While Antin penned her recollection before World War I, the long shadow of the Holocaust is clearly seen in the autobiography of future Zionist leader Meyer Weisgal, who traveled through Germany a decade after Antin. Mentioning “the grim efficiency of the Germans, their treatment of us as cattle,” Weisgal saw it as “a rehearsal” for the Holocaust. Other immigrants recalled harsh German officials. Passing through Germany in 1894, Warsaw-born Minnie Goldstein remembered a railroad employee in Berlin, a tall German, who looked “as angry as a mad dog” and who threatened the twelve-year-old Goldstein and her mother with a whip.26 Such experiences were far from exceptional. Undoubtedly many immigrants savored what a towering figure of Jewish socialism, Abraham Cahan, depicted as “the difference between a highly civilized country, and a country like Russia”; in the former the roads were clean, even the smallest towns had streetlights, all the children had shoes, and healthy-looking blond women wore clean aprons. Many memoirs and autobiographies, nonetheless, detail running into disagreeable Germans, whether in Germany proper or on board America-bound German ships. The emergence of political and pseudobiological antisemitism in Germany after its unification (in 1871) had also contributed its share to the travails of transient Jewish immigrants in Imperial Germany. Pushed aside on crowded streets, called “damn Jews” and “Russian pigs” and handled as the scum of the earth, Jewish immigrants found there was more to Germany than high culture, running water, and clean aprons. Stopping in Berlin in 1882 on his way to America, future radical Yisroel Kopelov was deeply impressed by the Germans’ fine manners and “smooth, fresh” faces, especially in comparison to the people in his native Bobroysk, with their “gloomy, yellow faces” and embarrassing gestures. But soon after a corpulent German shouted at him, “Goddamn Jew!” Kopelov begged “Bobroysk’s forgiveness.” Three decades after Kopelov, an immigrant by the name of Isaac Donen passed through Germany and described the Germans as “proud people, cultured antisemites, who look down on every non-German.”27

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Unpleasant and frequent brushes with hostile German crew members and passengers aboard German ships bound for America are also ubiquitous in many accounts. In 1882, a pioneer of the Jewish labor movement in America, Bernard Vaynshteyn, sailed to America aboard a German ship and recalled the hostility of the German crew, who called the Jewish passengers “Russian pigs.” Minnie Goldstein described how one of the young German stewards cursed them, declaring, “Damn Jews! All they eat are onions!” A letter signed by ten Jewish immigrants from Minneapolis that appeared in Ha-tsefirah (1891) warned potential Jewish immigrants not to choose German ships because of “the ignorant Germans” and mentioned how the German crew members “did not spare spitting” at them and occasionally beat them up. In 1908 seventy-five Jewish immigrants in America signed a letter that was published in Yiddish newspapers both in New York and Russia, advising Jews to boycott German ships, especially those of Norddeutscher Lloyd: on their way from Bremen to New York, German crewmen “raised their hands against” Jewish passengers, and when a passenger asked for a clean glass, the German buffet worker answered, “Why do you want a clean glass when you stink, Jew.”28 The vicissitudes of the Jewish perceptions of Russians were not less thorny than those concerning the Germans. Until the reforms of the 1860s virtually all Jews in Russia lived in the Pale, where their neighbors were mostly Poles, Ukrainians, Byelorussians, Lithuanians, and Latvians. The Russians they encountered, therefore, were by and large state officials, whose images were hardly benign because of, among other reasons, Russia’s brutal juvenile conscription system (1827–1856). As many young Jewish men mutilated themselves in order to evade the hated draft, Yiddish folklore abounded with derogatory terms for Russians like “Fonye” (derived from the nickname Vanya for Ivan), commonly combined with another pejorative like “pig Fonye,” “murderous Fonye,” or “lice Fonye.” The expression yovn, originally from the word Greece in Hebrew (Greeks being the ancient enemy of the Jews), was close enough to “Ivan” and was used to describe Ukrainians and Russians, and particularly Russian soldiers. The yovn symbolized everything foreign to Jewishness, and the term yevonish scholarship meant “obscene language.”29 The unflattering image of Russians appeared even in the memoir of someone who had become engrossed in Russian culture like Chaim Zhitlovsky. He recounted the feelings of Jews in his hometown, which were “laden with hatred toward the Russian landowners and state officials who fleece us, take our children as soldiers, persecute .  .  . and treat us like dogs.” In his close environment one looked at the Russian masses as “animals and beasts.” Zhitlovsky’s description of the situation in his native Vitebsk is echoed in a letter of 1875 from an anonymous

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pro-Russian maskil from that city, who complained about the tension between Russians and Jews. An account of a later period, by Bund member Shneyer Yafe, relayed similar sensibilities: growing up in Lithuania in the 1890s, Yafe remembered how his father had a dispute with a few Russians: “With some Gentiles you can still come to understanding, but with Russians—it’s bad.”30 Small groups of maskilim and the burgeoning urban middle class, however, viewed the Russian state as a key ally in the effort to ameliorate their less enlightened brethren and sang obsequious paeans to the Russian czars. In itself, reliance on the state was not a novelty: Jewish political allegiance had persistently gravitated toward central authority, as Jews learned early that their ultimate safety could not be entrusted to the kindness of the surrounding Gentile population or to the whims of local authorities. Whereas previously such an approach was based on practical consideration, enlighteners genuinely regarded state officials as benevolent. The belief in the goodwill of the czarist state reflected the reformers’ conviction that a well-argued and rational presentation of the truth about Jews and Judaism (which later generations would see as apologetics) could uproot anti-Jewish sentiments in the non-Jewish world.31 Reformers’ laudations were directed not only at czars, but to the Russian people as a whole, extolling the Russian character. The St. Petersburg maskil Emanuel Levin claimed in 1859 that anti-Jewish prejudice was relatively undeveloped among ethnic Russians. One of the first writers who used Yiddish in maskilic literature, Yisroel Aksenfeld, contrasted in his 1861 novel Dos shterntikhl (The headband) the “bitter, puffed-up Polish boastfulness, the Polish arrogance” with “our Russian officials.” “A Russian, when he knows a Jew and has dealings with him several times, calls him ‘brother’ or ‘dear brother.’” When a Russian had a longer contact with a Jew, “the greatest Russian becomes the Jew’s good friend (yes, yes, a good friend).” Tsederboym’s Kol mevaser declared in 1862, “We Jews in Russia should thank and praise God for living among a people that has no hatred against Jews in its heart . . . the Russians are the best nation.” Later that decade the same newspaper declared that unlike among other European nations, “the Russian religion has not planted hatred against Judaism, as did the Catholic,” and that “of all the Slavic peoples” Russians were the only ones who harbored “no rooted hatred” toward Jews.32 The last point was reiterated time and again as avid Russifiers contrasted the purported Russian amity toward Jews with the enmity of other nations. In 1861–1862 the editors of the Russia-Jewish weekly Sion (Zion) got into a confrontation with the Ukrainian periodical Osnova (the Foundation) that referred to Jews as zhids (kikes). The editors of Sion, Leo Pinsker and Emanuel Soloveichik, attacked not only Ukrainian

26

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nationalism as exclusionary, but also Ukrainian culture. They denounced the Ukrainian language as “subsidiary to Russian” and concluded that “Little Russia” (Ukraine) produced no great native poets, writers, or scientists. Thus the Ukrainian culture was merely part and parcel of Russian culture. In 1862 Kol mevaser argued that while “in Russia you rarely hear about blood libels,” the Germans “hate the Jew in their soul” and were willing to “seize upon any false accusation against Jews, regardless of whether they really believe it or not.” Three years later, after the failed Polish rebellion, Kol mevaser strongly denounced the Poles. It cited a report about a Polish town where a Polish girl was drowning, but no one jumped in the water to save her, because the bystanders shouted that she was Jewish. The paper hoped that such a case would awaken our “enticed brothers,” who were “fooled by the Poles”; “certainly Russians would have never done that [refrain from saving the girl].”33 The 1860s and 1870s witnessed the emergence of a Jewish urban upper middle class as well as a Jewish intelligentsia, whose immersion in Russian culture and social intermingling with non-Jews were unprecedented in Russian Jewish history. Some among those newly risen entrepreneurs and students became apostates. Small numbers of young Jews joined radical groups (narodniki, or populists) that espoused popular agrarian revolt and land redistribution. By the 1870s, the radicals, apostates, and assimilators, albeit a small minority, fully identified with the Russian people and ceased seeing Jews as their group of reference. In a sense, those radicals continued the maskilic line in relation to Gentiles: both chose certain Gentile strata to identify with. While the enlighteners had usually put the upper echelons of society on a pedestal, narodniki idealized the peasantry and left the universities in the hundreds for the villages. A pioneer of Jewish socialism in London and New York, Morris Vintshevsky (pseudonym of Bentsiyen Novakhovitsh), who became a narodnik in Kovno in the mid-1870s, remembered how he and his comrades felt: “Our natural brethren are the peasants. Chaim-Yankl the cobbler can wait.” One of the earliest Jewish radicals, Aren Liberman, wrote to a non-Jewish colleague in 1876, “I am an internationalist .  .  . I know only people and classes, not more.” Aren Zundelevich, who would play an important role in the terrorist organization Narodnaya volya (the People’s Will), wrote in the early 1870s, “As a distinct nationality, Jewry had no reason for existence.”34 By the late 1860s and 1870s alarm concerning the extremity of assimilation and the frustration over the endurance of anti-Jewish discrimination and hatred led to a self-conscious effort by Jewish modernizers to strengthen Jewish national consciousness, while eschewing fossilized forms of orthodoxy. In 1868 Tsederboym attacked what he called the “fanatic cultured,” who shunned all things Jewish and socialized only

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with Russian speakers. In 1869 an unnamed reader of Kol mevaser wrote a letter titled “I Cannot Keep Quiet!” in which he attacked young assimilated Jews, who wore “short jackets” and “shiny boots,” so “it’s impossible to recognize whether that’s a Jew or a Gentile.” Hebrew poet Yehuda Leib Gordon, who only in 1866 advised Jews, “Be a man abroad and a Jew in your tent / A brother to your countrymen and a servant to your king,” lamented five years later the abandonment of Jewish values and culture by a younger generation.35 The effort to boost Jewish national awareness was closely tied to what some called the “international benevolent society for the preservation of Judaism”—antisemitism. From the late 1860s on tenacious expressions of anti-Jewish enmity in Russian society and government (as in the 1871 pogrom in Odessa or the agitation during the Russo-Turkish war, 1877–1878) had disappointed the acculturated Jewish intelligentsia, which pointlessly hoped that Jewish assimilation would abate Gentile enmity. As early as 1866 a leading proponent of Russification, Lev Levanda, published an article in a Russian newspaper in Vilna, where he implored Russians to refrain from the “errors made by the Poles,” who oppressed and excluded the Jews. In 1876 Aren Liberman was reproached by his comrades for daring, though a Jew (!), to present himself as a Russian at an international socialist conference.36 By the 1870s the malaise was spreading in the ranks of the RussianJewish intelligentsia. Some critics, like David Gordon and Perets Smolenskin, who published outside Russia the Hebrew periodicals Ha-magid and Ha-shachar (the Dawn) respectively, conveyed pessimism about the chance that Gentiles would ever accept Jews as their equals. After a Russian delegate at the Berlin Congress (1878) declared that Russian Jews did not deserve equal rights, the socialist poet “Yehalel” (acronym of Yehuda Leib Levin) recounted that as he felt closer to “my people, my poor people,” he also became aware of how “the many threads that affectionately tied my soul to the common [Russian] people were cut off in my heart.”37 Russian culture offered many young Jews a much more elevated Gentile world that was a sea of difference from that of the Belarusian, Lithuanian, Polish, Romanian, or Ukrainian peasants who surrounded them. Already prior to the pogroms of the early 1880s, nonetheless, the Jewish Russified circles had become disenchanted with the optimistic assumptions of modernizers and assimilators about the nature of nonJewish society. Ivan’s Return As one historian has quipped, besides czar and vodka, “pogrom may well be the Russian word most widely understood and used by non-Russians.”

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Scholars have disputed the extent to which 1881–1882 signaled a turning point and the beginning of new Jewish politics in Russia.38 While pogroms occurred in Russia before 1881, in Jewish eyes the violence that erupted after the assassination of Alexander II (March 1881) and continued in several waves until 1884 was seen as a sudden worsening in Russian Jewish fortunes. The shockwaves that reverberated throughout Eastern European Jewry unsurprisingly had to do with the loss of life (more than sixty casualties) and property damage (about twenty thousand Jews had their homes destroyed and an additional hundred thousand suffered major property loss). The Russian government’s response seriously deepened Jewish dismay, when it explicitly put the blame on “Jewish exploitation” as the root cause of the pogroms and enacted a new and harsh series of residence, employment, and education restrictions (the May Laws of 1882).39 The violence, which received tacit or explicit support from wide circles in Russian society, had shocked many in the assimilated Russian Jewish intelligentsia. Whereas the pogroms of the early 1880s reinforced the preexisting image in traditional Jewish society of Gentiles as volatile, lawless, and violent mobs, the greatest disillusionment was felt within the orbit of the Jewish intelligentsia. An avid Russifier like Tsederboym, who established in St. Petersburg the most popular Yiddish periodical of the time, the weekly Yudishes folks-blat (the Jewish people’s newspaper) sighed in 1882: “It’s bad, bad, brothers! .  .  . Never before have Gentiles hated Jews so much as today.” That year Tsederboym, a longtime maskil, reverted to older images when contrasting the behavior of Jews and Gentiles; without directly referring to non-Jews, he wrote, “A Jew is rarely licentious, the Jewish women are pure and clean. . . . You would hardly ever meet a Jew who is drunk.”40 The crisis was even more acute for young Jews who were immersed in Russian culture and considered themselves Russians. Soon to become a Zionist, Moscow student Chaim Khisin wrote in his diary in 1882, “But fool, don’t you see that to your ardent love, they respond with insulting and cold contempt? . . . My God, why are we refused the love and sympathy of those around us?” Boris Bogen, who would become an important social worker in America, grew up in Moscow (his father was a government contractor) and went to one of the prestigious gimnazii in the city in the early 1880s. He soon discovered the depth of antisemitism in his school and how fighting a fellow student who called him a “kike” got him punished—a Jew he was and what right had he “to slap a Russian’s face.” The post-1881 rude awakening led some Jewish radicals to even more energetic activity in the revolutionary movement as the only alternative route to winning equal rights for Russian Jews. Others, disillusioned by the flare-up of anti-Jewish venom among the country’s revolutionaries,

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turned to work in the Jewish sphere, believing that self-emancipation, rather than trying to achieve emancipation from Gentiles, would be the best solution for Russian Jews. In the early 1880s the slogan Para domoi (It is time to go home) became the motto of many assimilated Jews. Concomitantly, the Russian official all but vanished as a positive model in the Yiddish and Hebrew literature of the 1880s and later.41 The pogroms not only strengthened older perceptions of Gentile masses as hostile and prone to brutality, but also politicized them: if the Russian people not only refused to accept Jews as equals but also axed dozens of them or threw them from rooftops, the possibility of peaceful Jewish-Gentile coexistence seemed much gloomier. That pessimism manifested itself in the writings of Leo Pinsker and Moshe Leib Lilienblum, thinkers in the emerging Zionist movement. Pinsker, a physician who served in the Russian army, diagnosed non-Jews as suffering from a mental illness—Judeo-phobia, which was “incurable.” Lilienblum, who prior to 1881 called to modernize Jewish religious observance to overcome the gap between Jews and Gentiles, also revised his position, and in 1881 he wrote that among “many Russians there is recently . . . a certain feeling of superiority,” which led to pogroms. In 1883 Lilienblum argued that “the hatred of European nations against us is . . . instinctive,” and whether in enlightened Germany or medieval Russia, anti-Jewish hate derived from an “inexplicable inner emotion.” From Vienna, Perets Smolenskin exclaimed in 1882, “Now an iron wall separates” Jews and Christians, and the non-Jewish masses were increasingly seeking “any pretext to harm us.”42 The situation was hardly better in Romania. In 1859 a Romanian Jew wrote, “If a Christian sees a Jew on the main road he will push him aside with hatred and disgust and curse him.” In 1866 the young country designated its Jewish population as “strangers” and members of a vagrant race, and encouraged anti-Jewish violence to an extent that won Romanians the moniker “Amalek” (after the biblical sworn enemy of the Israelites). Between 1899 and 1914 Jewish migration from Romania was proportionally the heaviest from Eastern Europe: circa twenty thousand Romanian Jews left the country in 1900 by literally walking away (hence they were termed the fusgeyers); without passports, permission, or money they began walking westward. The members of a Zionist society from the town of Frumusica pleaded for help in 1900: “Have mercy on us . . . save us from this dark, cursed land.” Around that time Rabbi Israel Berger of Bucharest wrote, “The hatred of every Gentile to Jews reaches the bottom of the netherworld.”43 As the crisis of Eastern European Jewry was unfolding in the late nineteenth century, Jewish nationalists exhibited an intriguing dualism:

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while they underscored Jewish particularism and emphasized the futility of the attempts to assimilate into an antagonistic Gentile society, they strove to normalize Jewish life and create a “New Jew” that would resemble those very Gentiles—physically strong, a toiler in the field or factory, and proud. Kovno-born Yiddish essayist Isidor Kissin (nom de plume of Yekotiel Garnitsky), who immigrated to America in 1904, visited Europe in 1909 and wrote admiringly to his friend the Bundist leader Borekh Charney Vladeck about the young German men in Danzig (Gdansk): “German young men [are] . . . so healthy, handsome, fresh, that envy seizes you just by looking at them.” Other Russian Jewish intellectuals, who were more under the infl uence of Tolstoyan populism, looked closer at home, viewing the Russian muzhik as the desired archetype. In 1914 Zionist intellectual Yosef Chaim Brenner contrasted “the millions of strong and patient” Russian peasants and their “formidable instincts” with the indecisive, hesitant Jews. That characterization did not prevent Brenner from pronouncing in the same place a negative perception of the Russian people, with their “slavish spirit . . . stupefying cruelty . . . terrible way of life.” The ideal of normalization did not change the traits attributed to Gentiles but rather their evaluation: as before, the Gentile was seen as simple, strong, and coarse, but by the turn of the century such features became gradually more desirable by modernizers.44 That dualism was frequently expressed in acknowledging—almost in the same breath—both Gentiles’ relentless hatred of Jews and what was seen as non-Jewish healthier conduct. Other (often unspecified) nations became a yardstick against which to measure Jewish failings. As Smolenskin warned in 1882, “We must not trust the benevolence of [other] nations,” and condemned the enlighteners who tried to teach Jews how “to ape the Gentiles,” he also despaired when juxtaposing healthy nations and Jews: “Against our will we have to admit that we are not a nation. . . . We are a dead nation.” The Zionist journalist Aren Hirsh Zupnik was less illustrative than Smolenskin, yet writing in Tsiyon (Zion), a monthly he edited in Drokhovitsh (Galicia), he lamented in 1896 that “no other people” was divided as were the Jewish people: “There is a saying that experience makes you wise, but also in that respect the Jewish people apparently lags behind all other nations.”45 Non-Zionists shared that ambivalence toward non-Jews. Am oylem (Eternal People) was a group of mostly radical students from Odessa, Kiev, and Vilna, which sprang up in the wake of the pogroms in Russia. Under the infl uence of populist ideals Am oylem sought to bring Jews back to the soil by establishing agricultural communes in the American West. As many members of Am oylem upheld the Russian peasants, people of the earth, as a role model for the would-be Jewish colonists,

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they admitted that those very peasants were unabashedly anti-Jewish and made emigration necessary. Abraham Cahan recalled his meeting in 1882 with Israel Belkind, one of the pioneers of Zionism in Russia, and how the latter wondered why Cahan, a revolutionary, was willing to sacrifice his life—“and for whom? For the Russian people that commits pogroms against us!” Though Belkind did not succeed in converting him to Zionism, Cahan recalled that he made him an “amerikanets,” that is, a believer in mass immigration to America.46 Suspicion toward Gentiles was also noticeable in the Marxist Bund; despite the organization’s commitment to class solidarity with nonJewish workers, it displayed a more complex stance. The Bund oscillated between internationalists who envisioned that Jews would totally integrate into Russian society, and those who sought to preserve Yiddish culture and create Jewish autonomy in Eastern Europe. No less important than doctrine, nevertheless, were the attitudes of party members that reflected prevalent Jewish conceptions regarding non-Jews. A protoBundist underground Yiddish publication, edited by one of the Bund’s future leaders, Vladimir Kosovsky, remarked (1896) about the Jewish proletariat’s relations with Gentile workers: “Usually it’s accepted among us in Russia that Jews and Christians hate each other and friendship between them is impossible.” The paper lamented that “Jewish workers are secluded from the Russian workers” and were also totally separated from and uninterested in the Polish labor movement. Moreover, the Bund’s daily, Der veker (the Awakener), though normally championing class solidarity between Jewish and non-Jewish workers, simultaneously confessed in 1899 to the “wild hatred against Jews that exists among Christians” and how the social basis of political antisemitism was composed of “the peasants and the ignorant masses.” As the unnamed writer declared that Jewish and Russian workers ought to stand together against czarist tyranny, he also wrote, “Even now they [Gentiles] look at the Jew with such hatred as if he were a totally repulsive creature,” while the Jew “identifies every non-Jew as his deadly enemy.”47 The Bund’s Marxist doctrine could barely eradicate some members’ distrust of non-Jews. By 1905, when Shneyer Yafe cooperated with Gentile Lithuanian socialists, he was forced to deal with what he saw as their reckless behavior. They “lost control and got drunk” and robbed the local post office in his hometown (Kopishok). A local Bund committee was hastily summoned to consider “what to do with the Lithuanians.” Chaim Zhitlovsky, who was briefly associated with the Bund (before becoming a bitter rival from 1904 on), knew well that organization and its leaders: in 1911 he perceptively asserted, “The distrust of the Gentile workingclass masses has never disappeared from the soul [of most Bundists] and

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remained there at least as an unconscious instinct.”48 As Marxists, many Bundists probably interpreted antisemitism as a sign of the masses’ lack of awareness, which would be corrected through progress and revolution. When encountering anti-Jewish animosity and violence, however, some Jewish radicals still suspected that non-Jewish masses were not about to change in the foreseeable future. The preceding does not suggest that Bundists’ commitment to socialism was disingenuous (it would indeed be ironic to accuse devoted Marxists of having “false consciousness”). But they shared with other Jews who were not socialists certain assumptions about Gentile behavior, and those conceptions and assessments of the non-Jewish masses had a direct (though never exclusive) effect on the Bund’s policies and organization. By the closing decades of the nineteenth century familiarity was increasing in Jewish-Gentile relations, as were withdrawal and suspicion. While acculturation grew, so did new forms of violence, segregation, and prejudice. Along with the pogroms in Russia and the onset of a mass exodus, the last quarter of the nineteenth century was a period of intensified contacts between Jews and non-Jews. But the increasing anti-Jewish antagonism had recast many of the older images of Gentiles, as Jews fitted them to changing conditions; after 1881 the conception of non-Jews became an important idiom in the political intra-Jewish debate on how should one solve the “Jewish Question.”49

Although Jewish attitudes toward non-Jews were multifaceted and in a state of fl ux, certain patterns are noticeable. First, Eastern European Jewish society clearly distinguished between the surrounding peasantry and those perceived as bearers of higher culture (sometimes also identified with the central government), like Germans and Russians, and held the latter in higher esteem. Second, in relation to the cultures that were regarded as more advanced, there was a dynamic of admiration and disappointment. Idealization required distance: the appeal of German or Russian culture largely depended on a certain distance between them and the large Jewish population centers. As more concrete contacts were formed, various expressions of rejection and enmity toward Jews had frequently turned enchantment into disillusionment. In turn, such feelings led acculturated Jews to return to the older and more menacing images of non-Jews held by Jewish society. A pattern not unlike that in Eastern Europe would appear in New York with respect to Americans, but the proximity of other immigrant groups and their offspring (who were not seen as “real” Americans) would delay the disenchantment.

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Third, with the rise of Jewish nationalism and the aspiration to normalize Jewish life through Jews being “like all the nations,” an intriguing ambivalence gradually developed: along with increasing anti-Jewish violence, Jewish nationalists called on Jews to acquire the features (whether physical strength, steadfastness, or simplicity) of the very nations that rejected them. That dualism would characterize the politicization of Jews not only in Eastern Europe, but also in the United States, especially in their relationship with other minorities. The images of Americans in Eastern Europe had emerged within the aforesaid attitudinal context, which differentiated between different strata in the non-Jewish society. An examination of the representations of Americans and juxtaposition between them and the images of other Gentiles would reveal the uniqueness of the traits associated with “di amerikaner.”

2

“Lovers of Man” T h e I m ag e s o f A m e r i c a n s a m o n g E a s t e r n E u r o p e a n J e ws i n t h e L a s t T h i r d o f N i n et e e n t h C e n t u ry

The popular Yiddish writer and journalist Shomer (nom de plume of Nokhem Meyer Shaykevitsh), who penned dozens of novels and plays, published in 1897 a novel called Di farkerte velt (The reversed world). Shomer contrasted the hatred expressed by grammar school students in Russia (and other Russians as well) toward Jews with the benevolent American. The Russians constantly curse Jews, call them zhids (kikes), and believe that Jews eagerly drink the blood of Christian children. When the main Jewish character, young Carolina, comes to America, she meets a very humane immigration inspector. After realizing that she had been conned and all her money stolen, the inspector cries out, “Poor child! I understand well what a terrible situation you are in now.” He promises to do everything to capture the “scoundrel” (who was not an American) and lends her some money for the time being. Later Carolina learns that Americans respect Jews and see “no difference between a Jew and a Christian.”1 Undeniably, the optimistic representations of Americans possessed a core of reality, since the expressions of antisemitism in the United States remained fairly isolated and were not backed by the state. Yet the images of Americans in Eastern Europe had less to do with actual Americans and more with the grave difficulties that bedeviled Russian or Romanian Jews at the time of war, revolution, anti-Jewish legislation, violence, and mass immigration. As more and more acculturated Eastern European Jews were exposed to growing prejudice and exclusion by the very culture into which they tried to assimilate, the image of the American served as an affirmation: by its malleability and abstraction, that image asserted the validity of noble values, whereby Jew and Gentile were equal and could live harmoniously. Although Jewish integrationists in Russia hardly vanished after 1881, their notions of a kind and broadminded Gentile world seemed to crumble in the political and social climate that followed the pogroms. In a troubled period the American became the embodiment of the egalitarian and tolerant Gentile that 34

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was in short supply in Eastern Europe. The scope of the phenomenon was more important still: the encouraging representations of Americans were disseminated and popularized in the Yiddish and Hebrew press and in letters and folksongs and made a strong impact that integrationists could have only dreamed about. When Jewish sources described America, they usually oscillated between the “goldene medina” (the golden country) and the “treyfene medina” (the impure/nonkosher country). The former term relates to the images of America among Eastern European Jews as the land where “gold and silver is found on the streets,” the land of infinite economic opportunities and religious freedom; Jewish reformers regarded the new world as a place where Jewish life would be regenerated in a climate of political equality. By contrast, rabbis and traditionalists in Eastern Europe used the latter term to describe America as a place where Judaism was discarded, observance neglected, rabbinical authority vanished, and the learned elite pushed aside as common tailors and cobblers ruled the community.2 Those wide categories, however, do not convey how late nineteenthcentury Eastern European Jews viewed Americans, rather than America, and how images of “di Amerikaner” differed from those of other Gentiles. An analysis of these conceptions is vital for understanding the process of immigration and the more general mindset on the eve of the great exodus and during its earlier stages. The images of Americans in the late nineteenth century should be understood within the matrix of attitudes toward non-Jews that were delineated above. In that respect, Shomer’s portrayal of Americans was hardly exceptional; the positive, and sometimes idealized, representation of Americans allowed potential Jewish immigrants (and their relatives and friends) to envisage particular non-Jews—and a specific non-Jewish society—that were largely untainted by the menacing or contemptible features attributed to Gentiles in Eastern Europe. Unquestionably, Jews faulted America’s shortcomings, but frequently found a way to exculpate Americans (a definition that tended to exclude people of color and certain European immigrants) while affixing the blame to others groups, including American Jews.3 Early Images Probably the first literary portrayal of America was in the Hebrew and Yiddish translations (1807 and 1817, respectively) of Joachim Heinrich Campe, Entdeckung von Amerika (The discovery of America [1782]), which was primarily aimed at children and youths. This book, whose Yiddish title was Tsofnas paneakh (Revealer of secrets), was very popular in Eastern Europe and came out in several Yiddish editions throughout the nineteenth

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century. Avrom Ber Gotlober argued that when he grew up (1820s) the book became so popular that “almost all the Jews, even the most pious, read it” and “needless to say the women”; they closed their prayer books “and read only Columbus” (Gotlober mistakenly called Campe’s book by that name). Gotlober recalled that his imagination carried him along with Columbus, and he “was amazed by the savage people in America.”4 Prior to the late 1860s and early 1870s, when famine and a cholera epidemic in the Pale of Settlement brought about the beginning of more substantial immigration from Russia to the United States, knowledge about “Columbus’s country” was fragmentary. Maskilic circles, which could communicate German or Russian texts, were usually those who disseminated the information. Maskilim typically echoed the mixture of curiosity and derision expressed in European writers’ representations of the “savage peoples” of America and one should understand Gotlober’s astonishment in that context. Alexander Tsederboym, for instance, seemed to be unsure where the Black slaves in America originally came from: in the first issue of Kol mevaser (1862) he explained to his readers that “Negroes” were “the Black people who are born there [United States] since the days of yore.” Tsederboym condemned the slaveholders. In such a “free country,” he remarked, where “nobody asks whether . . . [you are] a Jew or a Christian,” they still “torment them [slaves] mercilessly.” But Tsederboym commented that only Blacks understood the hard work and “how to go around the plants. . . . No European can do that.” In its report about the Civil War that year, Ha-melits commented that the Northerners wanted to free the slaves “without paying heed that a great calamity might happen to the wild slaves themselves, because they are unfit for freedom anymore.”5 More often than not, the discussion of America’s nonwhite populations reflected the prevailing racial and cultural assumptions of nineteenth-century Western thought. Israel Joseph Benjamin was a Romanian-born Jew who set out to emulate the twelfth-century traveler Benjamin of Tudela in a search for the remnants of the tribes of Israel. Between 1859 and 1862 Benjamin II (as he called himself ) made a journey across the United States, whose impressions he published in a book, Three Years in America, which came out in German (1862). Benjamin’s stories, which percolated Eastern Europe through German-reading maskilim, extolled German immigrants while criticizing America’s materialism. Yet he was much harsher toward American Indians. Infl uenced by both European standards of civility and the attitudes of the white Americans he met, Benjamin wrote, “The only difference between an Indian and a wild beast is that . . . [the Indian] walks on two legs and speaks an unintelligible language.”6

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The thesis that American Indians were descended from the ten lost tribes of Israel (and therefore perhaps related to Jews) notwithstanding, other observers were not much kinder than Benjamin. In 1872 Ha-magid reported on “one of the wildest Indian chiefs,” who scalped an engine driver and nearly derailed the train. Even when the same newspaper depicted Indian chief Red Cloud as an honorable leader and mentioned that white Americans expelled the Indians from their ancestors’ land, it still termed the latter “savages” who “mercilessly” slaughtered white settlers. The Warsaw-born rabbi and Hebraic scholar Zvi Falk Vidaver, who lived for a while in Evansville, Indiana, explained in Ha-tsefirah in 1881 to his Eastern European readers, “The hatred toward white Europeans is deeply rooted in the Indian’s character . . . yet the government is hospitable toward them.” The prolific Polish-born scholar and writer Yehuda David Eisenstein relayed a more optimistic note. Eisenstein, who came to New York in 1872 at the age of eighteen and was active in Orthodox circles, wrote in 1879, “There is hope that within a few years they [Indians] would no longer be notoriously wild and walk in the light of the enlightenment.” Eisenstein hoped that the Indians would follow the Blacks, “who were previously like them and now share the customs of the country’s citizens.”7 Blacks and American Indians were not the only nonwhite groups presented to the Jewish reader in Eastern Europe. The venomous infl uence of the anti-Chinese movement in America undoubtedly cast its shadow on the reports sent across the Atlantic. Israel Joseph Benjamin noted that while the Chinese “rid the city [San Francisco] annually of thousands of rats,” they had “no particularly agreeable odor.” He admitted that the Chinese in America “deserve the deepest sympathy, for they are treated worse than dogs,” only to go on to lambaste Chinese women as “the most shameless and the least respectable.” A resident of San Francisco, Israel Pinchas Grodzinsky, informed the readers of Ha-magid in 1874 that “they [Chinese] all look the same. Almost all of them have a nose sunken between their eyes and their little eyes seem shut, just slanted splits.” Four years later, a fellow San Franciscan, Zvi Hirsh Kramer, enlightened the readers of that periodical about the anti-Chinese movement in California, opining that the Chinese “don’t change their oriental clothing” and do not intermingle, and all they eat are “millet and insects and reptiles.”8 The blend of curiosity, exoticism, and disdain that characterized reports about nonwhite groups was in sharp contrast to the flattering portrayal of Americans (a classification that ruled out nonwhites, and frequently certain European immigrants as well). In accordance with their conviction that the state—and especially the enlightened ruler— represented the common good, Jewish modernizers had put American

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presidents on a pedestal as beacons of freedom and equality. The heroic figure of Abraham Lincoln usually stirred the most passionate tributes. The popular Yiddish writer I. M. Dik published Di shklaferay (The slavery), his 1887 rendition of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, in which he added information about the Civil War and “the great man Lincoln,” who was “a friend of humanity.” The Hebrew poet and educator Ephraim Lissitsky, who grew up in Slutsk in the 1890s before immigrating to America, remembered his huge interest in the slain president, with “his Jewish name Abraham and the physiognomy of his bearded face, with the expression of Jewish sorrow impressed on him.” Other presidents also received praise: Yehuda Buchalter, an Orthodox author who lived on Manhattan’s East Side and cofounded a society for the preservation of Orthodox Judaism, informed his European readers in 1889 that the new president, Benjamin Harrison, was “exceptional in his love for the Jews,” apart from being “good-hearted by nature.”9 It was not only eminent Americans who were described in positive terms. Americans were typically viewed as tolerant and free of the hatreds of the Old World. In Vilna, S. Y. Fuenn’s journal, Ha-karmel (the Carmel) expressed in 1864 such belief when it translated an article from a Hungarian moderate Orthodox periodical, Ben-Chananja (Son of Chanania). The article contended that Americans “appreciate[d] handicrafts” and did not have contempt for occupations that in Europe were seen as “lowly.” The unnamed journalist wrote that Americans easily absorbed the immigrants; showed “tolerance toward Jews”; and enabled them to hold senior positions, such as judges, legislatures, and army officers. One of the pioneers of the Yiddish press in America, Zvi Hirsh Bernstein, the son-in-law of a rabbi in Lithuania, arrived in New York in 1870 and shortly thereafter reported to his readers in Ha-magid that “not a single person among the local Christians” complained against the new immigrants, because “in America there is no hatred and no resentment.” Henry (Zvi) Gersoni from Vilna, who came to America in 1869 and became active as a rabbi and journalist, sang the praise of the American people, determining that “the Americans who live in villages and small towns are lovers of man and their heart is far from any prejudice.” Gersoni added that immigrants were coming from across the world to America, and “an American would never think to defame them.” Various writers in different publications also cast Americans favorably, like the unnamed author who in 1887 wrote in Ha-tsefirah a serialized history of Jews in America, extolling the virtues of the country, “with its millions of hardworking, enlightened and cultured residents.”10 When anti-Jewish animosity did appear in America, Jewish observers tended to ascribe it to European immigrants: the long shadow of the

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German “sons of Haman” was often cast west of the Atlantic. In 1865 the leading German Jewish periodical Allgemeine Zeitung des Judenthums (General newspaper of Judaism), which was often quoted in Eastern European maskilic publications, complained about the hostility of German immigrants, including the radical ones, toward Jews in America: “We owe all rishes [antisemitism] in America to those freedom heroes [a sarcastic reference to German radicals]—originally the American knows nothing about rishes.” Similarly, Rabbi Henry Vidaver (the older brother of Zvi Falk), who served congregations in New York, Philadelphia, and San Francisco, warned in 1865 in Ha-magid that “most Christian Germans are like bottles filled with antisemitism; with antisemitism they were created in the womb. . . . [Germans] arrive by the thousands and tens of thousands in America, the land of freedom, and bring the seed of antisemitism to implant in the hearts of the Americans who are not accustomed to it.”11 Nearly twenty years later (in 1884) Ha-tsefirah published a report by a man from Chicago who was identified as Ben Ha-shilony. The writer pictured in bright colors the “exalted” Republican presidential candidate James G. Blaine, who was “beloved” by the American people. Blaine, who was actually infamous for his corruption even by Gilded Age standards, received commendations in the Jewish press for intervening on behalf of Russian and Romanian Jews. Yet Germans in America opposed him, Hashilony argued, because Blaine backed the temperance movement and objected to the use of the German language in Ohio and Pennsylvania. Ha-shilony cautioned that German Americans were trying to assert their nationalism, “and if, God forbid, they should succeed, then woe unto us Jews, because the Germans hate us here more than in their country,” and the German customer often said to the Jewish peddler, “I don’t buy from a damn Jew.” Such writings not only differentiated between Americans and immigrant groups, attributing the country’s negative features to the latter, but also saw Americans as a bulwark against the anti-Jewish enmity that such groups brought over from Europe.12 It is noteworthy that the juxtaposition of broad-minded Americans and potentially pernicious European immigrants (mostly Germans and Irish) found its way even into the writing of the detractor of America Tuvyah Pesach Shapira. A Hebrew scholar from the town of Sejni (northeast Poland), Shapira put the blame on immigrant groups—as opposed to “Americans”—for the country’s deficiencies. Shapira immigrated in 1882 to the United States, but returned to Russia after a short period and reported on the difficulties that awaited Jewish immigrants and the decline of Judaism. Shapira also warned that antisemitism might develop in America; in New York and Chicago “many reckless and

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ignorant people chase the Jew” and “derisively call him ‘bloody Jew’ and ‘sheeny.’” Who were those bigots? “the religiously fanatic Irish are multiplying like locusts, and the Germans, the fathers of Hep [a reference to the anti-Jewish riots that swept Germany in 1819] are growing like sycamores in the plains, and they could do in America everything they initiated in their country.” An opponent of Jewish immigration to America, Shapira still believed that an anti-Jewish sentiment in America could not have been homegrown.13 Westward Shapira’s remarks were part of a larger debate within the Eastern European Jewish intelligentsia about whether the solution to the “Jewish Question” was to stay in Russia and struggle for emancipation and integration or emigrate and, if so—whither? As the pogroms in Russia (1881–1882) immensely exacerbated the problem, the opponents of immigration to America had to contend with the image of Americans as a different, tolerant kind of Gentiles. It is telling how the critics of America mostly decried the lack of religious observance and pointed to economic difficulties, and when relating to anti-Jewish animosity, they usually saw it (as Shapira did), as a European import. A Vilna-born maskil, Shaul Pinchas Rabinovitsh, who favored America as a haven for Jews (before he became a Zionist activist), noted in 1881 that those opposing immigration to America shared the belief that Americans were tolerant, yet he added, “Who can guarantee that . . . trouble won’t travel by sea,” that is, that European immigrants would not import anti-Jewish hatred to America. In 1882, Moshe Leib Lilienblum, who supported immigration to the land of Israel, wrote an open letter to Odessa’s well-to-do Jews in an attempt to dissuade them from emigrating to America. He argued that Jews “will not be able to compete with the American Yankees,” who “are more experienced than you [Jews]” in business. In that description, Lilienblum echoed earlier impressions of European commentators, who paralleled Yankees and Jews as having inborn aptitude for commerce. The German travel guide author Franz Loeher wrote in 1847, “One says the Yankee is too Jewish in trade and religion, even for the Jew himself.” Lilienblum conveyed a comparable image, which depicted Americans as Gentile Jews. When cautioning that anti-Jewish feelings might arise in America, Lilienblum did not base his view on American traits, but rather reminded his readers of the Jewish trials in another highly developed nation: “After the German antisemitism, we must not have any trust in progress or in this century!”14 “Real” Americans were often termed “Yankees”; Jewish references to Yankees did not generally imply opprobrium for the inhabitants of the

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northern states, but rather referred to white Anglo-Saxon Protestants as the authentic Americans. One of the chief champions of Yankees in the Hebrew press was Yehuda David Eisenstein, who also saw their characteristics as being similar to Jewish ones. In 1886 he published an article in the Warsaw Hebrew annual Ha-asif (the Harvest), where he rejected the idea that Jews should work in agriculture. Eisenstein argued that in their preference for commerce over manual work, Jews resembled Yankees, who also preferred occupations requiring brain over brawn: “The Yankees, who exceed the Jews in their intellect, do not carry out hard work, but rather learn clean, easy artisanship and commerce.” Eisenstein penned enthusiastic reports about America in various Hebrew publications in Eastern Europe and espoused the cause of immigration to America over the land of Israel. After Ha-magid doubted whether the United States would continue to escape anti-Jewish hatred, Eisenstein mocked the periodical for attempting to tell the future, while “for now there is not even a glimpse of it [antisemitism].” Eisenstein maintained that if the people “whom Europe vomited,” among them “socialists from Germany, nihilists from Russia, and real robbers from Italy,” would try to threaten the order, as they purportedly did in an 1877 demonstration in New York City’s Tompkins Square, there were enough guardians of the law to stop them. Eisenstein’s tendency to absolve Americans of any sin can be seen in his response to Ha-magid’s claim that the anti-Chinese sentiment in America might be channeled one day against the Jews: “The Chinese are indeed despicable,” he wrote, unconsciously echoing anti-Jewish canards, because “they profit and accumulate a lot of money in our country, but spend nothing,” and because “mice are a delicacy to their palate.” But Eisenstein naively concluded that if anyone “touched a hair of their [Chinese] heads” they would be punished as if they attacked white Americans. Eisenstein also described how American Christian ministers were sharper in their critique of Russia than those in England, and in their sermons “they pour scorn and burning tar” on the Jews’ enemies.15 In cases in which blue-blooded Americans were involved in blatant anti-Jewish discrimination, Jewish correspondents interpreted them as the doings of bigoted individuals who were atypical of the American character. Moreover, their reports emphasized how the American press and public chided and ridiculed such bigots. In 1877 Judge Henry Hilton refused accommodation to the leading Jewish banker, Joseph Seligman, at the Grand Union Hotel in Saratoga Springs, New York. Eisenstein wrote with satisfaction in his diary that “the famous minister Henry Ward Beecher” and “all the American newspapers chastised Hilton for his hatred of the Jews” and that “Christian customers, lovers of Israel” participated in the Jewish boycott of the company that owned the hotel.

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Two years later, the head of the Manhattan Beach Corporation in Coney Island, Austin Corbin, announced that Jews would not be allowed in his hotel. Zvi Hirsh Kramer stressed the negative response in the American press to Corbin’s ban: “One [newspaper] says that the scoundrel should move to Romania [where the persecution of Jews was rife] . . . but here there’s no place for a good-for-nothing man like him.” Kramer noted that it was not only Jews who decided to avoid Corbin’s resort, but also “now many Christians avoid going there.”16 The preceding does not imply that no criticisms were hurled at the Americans.17 But even the country’s main drawback for many Jews, namely, its detrimental effect on Jewish religious observance, was rarely blamed on Americans per se. After all, the Yankees did not persecute Jews or hamper religious practice. Quite the contrary: the lack of Jewish observance in America was highlighted by the country’s freedom. One of the leading rabbis of Eastern Europe, Chaim Soloveitchik, said that unlike in Russia, the decline of Judaism in the United States “was only the Jews’ fault, because the country is free.” Other prominent rabbis, like Kovno’s Yitschak E. Spektor, espoused that view as well, and Eastern Europe’s rabbinical elite was far from unified in opposing Jewish immigration to America. Future anarchist and labor firebrand Lucy Robins Lang, who grew up in Ukraine in the 1890s, recalled how the local rabbi instructed her father (who had returned from America) to go back there, because only in America “could God’s children live in peace.” In any case, the image of America as the “treyfene medina” had much more to do with the perceived humble origins of the Jews who emigrated there than with the conduct of the Americans.18 As Jewish immigration to the United States increased in the 1870s and especially in 1881 and thereafter, more and more Eastern European Jews received letters and money from relatives in America. Those letters played a significant role in shaping the image of America in the Old World and persuading relatives and townspeople to emigrate. The letters proved to be much stronger than the exhortations of certain rabbis not to go to America. A few months after his arrival in New York, Eisenstein wrote (1873) to a friend, describing the Americans as “a wise people”: “Almost all of them are lovers of liberty. . . . Most of them are good-looking and tall, and show a smiling face to every man.  .  .  . They love every man regardless of whether he is a Jew, a Christian or an Ishmaelite.” Other immigrants were probably less passionate than Eisenstein, yet the Yudishes folks-blat printed letters from immigrants who hailed the Americans’ fairness toward Jews: a man identified as Israel ben Joseph Saroka wrote in 1882 from St. Paul, Minnesota, “I find it necessary to report through your newspaper how friendly the Christians here are toward Jews” and contrasted the gracious

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“American Yankees” with the Russian “sons of Haman.” Other letters reiterated Saroka’s point, underlining the amicability of Americans and the equality between Jews and Gentiles. Such descriptions circulated in Jewish society; despite some examples to the contrary, most memoirs by immigrants relate how the letters they received from America (or sent themselves after emigrating) served as “an advertisement” to join them. Bernard Vaynshteyn, who would become a labor leader in New York, recounted that when he decided to leave Odessa for America at the age of fifteen (in 1881), everyone around him had heard “that magic word ‘America,’” where “all people, Jew and Christian, are equal.”19 Furthermore, visitors who returned to their hometown flashed around their material success and told wonderful stories about America, bolstering the encouraging image of the American; they embodied the wealth one could accumulate as well as the tolerance of a Gentile society that treated Jews as equals. Growing up in the 1890s in Lyuban, a small shtetl in Byelorussia, Hebrew writer Rachel Feignberg-Imri recalled that the women in town whose husbands were already in America “were called American—a very esteemed title” and that Jews who returned from America were “recognizable by their spotless clothing.” Gertrude Yellin, who grew up in Bialystok, Poland, before and during World War  I, remembered how her mother, who lived in New York for one year, returned home “as a lady”: “All the neighbors . . . surrounded her and listened to the miracles of the beautiful American lifestyle.” Other immigrants also relayed the impression made by visitors from America and their stories about the relative affability of Americans toward Jews (marred by the occasional attacks of Irish or German rowdies). Such stories by visitors and in letters were so widespread that already by 1892 the celebrated Yiddish author Sholem Aleichem (Sholem Yankev Rabinovitsh) published a folksong, “Shlof, mayn kind” (Sleep, my child), that became immensely popular; in it he wrote that America was “a paradise” for Jews and a “real joy for all.”20 Even a radical Jewish immigrant like George M. Price, who had lived in America since 1882 and wrote about the disappointment and misery of fellow Jewish immigrants, had conveyed an idealized image of the American to Russian-reading Jews. Price was initially a member of the Am oylem group; by the early 1890s he was studying medicine at New York University while also serving as a health inspector on New York’s East Side. In 1890–1891 Price published a series of articles in the RussianJewish journal Voskhod (Ascent), about the life of Jewish immigrants in America, which came out later in Russia in a book form. Although Price was at times a blunt critic of America, he lauded the Americans: “Every day there appears a new invention by the energetic and enterprising

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Yankee.” In spite of the fact that Jews competed with local workers for jobs, Price wrote admiringly, “Not a single labor organ . . . or labor union expressed its resentment” against Jews. The Jewish socialist believed that the reason was “the very make-up of an American,” which “would seem strange to a Russian anti-Semite.” As he noted, “For the American racial, national or religious differences do not exist.”21 What about instances in which Americans behaved in, say, a less egalitarian manner? Price determined that “if the Americans objected to the Chinese . . . it was not because they were Chinese,” but because the Chinese “do not contribute anything to this country” and, unlike the Jews, did not adhere to the “standards governing free competition.” Like other Jewish commentators before him, Price not only rationalized American racism, but also drew a parallel between Jewish and American characteristics—industriousness, fairness, and ingenuity. Price had been living in America for nearly a decade when he wrote those words. An active member of the Socialist Labor Party, he was later close to the circles of urban reformers and did not hesitate to picture the harsh conditions of poverty and congestion on the East Side to his readers in Russia. Still, though a member of the radical Jewish intelligentsia, who knew well the situation of Jewish immigrants, Price romanticized Americans and justified the prevailing racial conceptions.22 Writing a decade later in the Voskhod, Isaac Max Rubinow largely continued Price’s line. Rubinow, who was also a physician and served as a medical inspector for the New York Board of Health, published in May–August 1903 a few articles that portrayed Jewish life in the Empire City. Like the Jewish observers noted above, Rubinow attributed “the product of European culture”—antisemitism—to the city’s Europeanborn population and their offspring rather than to Americans. Although Americans had regarded the Jewish newcomers as “semi-savage” only a few years ago, Rubinow wrote, now they actually “sympathize[d]” with Jews. Some Americans, unlike any “intelligent Russian,” were fascinated by Yiddish theater. Moreover, Rubinow argued that the anti-immigration campaign in America was not anti-Jewish; it was directed at other minorities as well, such as the Irish, Italians, and Poles: “The Americans may be right. The above-mentioned elements [Irish, Poles, etc.] are culturally inferior.” Rubinow contended that Americans showed more interest in Yiddishspeaking immigrants than in assimilated German Jews and assaulted the latter for looking down on Eastern European Jews. As in Price’s case, American bigotry was explained away and the dominance of “AngloSaxons” heralded in a widely read Russian Jewish organ. In addition, the image of the American was used as a trump card in an intra-Jewish debate to chastise the haughty established Jewry: if the carriers of high

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culture, the Americans, were interested in immigrant Jews, who were the German Jews to dispute it?23 At the time when Rubinow published his articles, Russian Jews were facing the beginning of a tumultuous period (1903–1906), which would witness a barrage of pogroms, ushered in by the pogrom in Kishinev (April 1903), continuing after the Russo-Japanese war (1904–1905), and cresting during the abortive Russian revolution (1905) and its aftermath. In the period from 1903 to 1906 more than seven hundred pogroms broke out in Russia, with more than three thousand Jews murdered. In the pogrom of Odessa alone (October 1905) about eight hundred Jews were murdered and five thousand wounded. The pogroms involved much more violence and murder than those of the early 1880s; in 1905–1906, many pogroms were committed with the implicit or open approval of the authorities. The scope and ferocity of the violence reawakened the image of bloodthirsty, reckless Gentiles and shocked Jewish integrationists. Numerous memoirists recount feelings of fear, agony, and anger and a resolve to fight back. The pogroms led to a startling growth in the number of immigrants and Jewish resentment was felt against not only the Russian government but also the non-Jewish masses. A few days after the Kishinev pogrom the Yiddish writer Avrom Reyzin published a short sketch, Der giber (The hero). The main character, Chaykel, listens to the “wild songs” of drunk peasants and in his mind they sound “like a scream: hit the Jews, hit!” More than two years later, historian and advocate of Jewish self-government in Eastern Europe Simon Dubnov published (December 1905) in the Voskhod an infl uential series of articles titled “The Lessons of the Terrible Days.” Dubnov wrote what many Eastern European Jews believed: the mobs across Russia who “broke Jewish heads, tore out children’s eyes, raped women and cut them to pieces” were simply doing what their fathers and brothers did in the past, and “will do again given favorable circumstances.”24 The increased violence by the surrounding Gentile population and the swelling emigration to the United States facilitated the idealization of the image of Americans. That was true for a popular Jewish newspaper, Der fraynd (the Friend), although it published critical reports about America sent by its New York correspondents. The first Yiddish daily in Russia, Der fraynd made its appearance at St. Petersburg in January 1903 and reached a circulation of close to fifty thousand at its peak in 1905. The Fraynd’s coverage of affairs in America had a great impact on its readers, many of whom were potential emigrants. Undoubtedly, because of Russian censorship, it was easier for the pro-Zionist daily to attack foreign countries; at times the Fraynd included reports or short literary pieces that hardly romanticized America. The historian and

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critic B. Gorin (pen name of Yitskhok Goydo) wrote in 1904 from New York about many Jewish immigrants’ initial disappointment with their new country and that the first instinct of “all immigrants” was to return home. Gorin also mentioned “the cold manner” of the immigration officials at Ellis Island.25 Nevertheless, during the turbulent years of 1903–1906 the pages of the Fraynd typically communicated a sanguine image of Americans. Even though the writers of the 1900s had enjoyed a much richer and detailed volume of correspondence and knowledge about the journey to America, admittance procedures, and American society than those who wrote in the 1870s and 1880s, they too, tended to represent Americans in idealized terms. Already in one of the paper’s first issues (1903), an unnamed writer explained the principles of the Monroe Doctrine and why the United States objected to European intervention in Venezuela by evoking the American democratic legacy: “From the beginning on, the Americans have been used to giving heed to popular wishes and to respecting a country’s freedom and independence.” Later that year the daily published a series of articles about the United States titled “America Works,” which offered reasons for the country’s economic power. The writer, named as B. N., also reiterated the mantras about America as the cradle of liberty and equality. More important, the writer endeared Americans to the readers by cleverly likening purported American characteristics to Jewish self-image: in America education was important for “everyone,” including the “very poor.” The first “immigrants” (not Pilgrims, colonists or settlers) who came to America were “mostly capable and energetic people, but persecuted and oppressed.” Those early Americans “left behind all the old ideas, all the traditions of European life.” They also left behind deplorable practices such as drinking: “American workers drink very little whiskey and other hard liquors.” Since Americans were pictured as paralleling Jewish self-perception, it was only fitting that they would be shown as devoid of the negative attributes frequently ascribed to other Gentiles.26 What separated the American wheat from the malicious Gentile chaff was the alleged friendliness (or, at the very least, lack of enmity) of Americans toward Jews. The journalist C. Alexandrov (originally Chaim Miller) was pleased to report to his readers about New York’s election season in November 1903: “Mainly they see to it that the Jews here are cajoled,” and both parties nominated “many Jews” as candidates. Alexandrov wrote that the claims made by Tammany Hall about “Jew-haters” in the city’s Tenement House Department proved to be “naturally false”: three-quarters of the workers were Jewish, and the department pleaded

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with them (but not mandated) that they would work on the Jewish holidays, if possible. Alexandrov commented that the important and interesting fact was how in New York, “antisemitism was considered a crime, against which one must fight.”27 While such attitudes during an election campaign arguably could have been explained by political expediency, the paper’s reports usually absolved Americans of any anti-Jewish prejudice. When complaints piled up in 1903 against procedures at Ellis Island and the strictness of William Williams, the New York commissioner of immigration, the Fraynd’s American correspondent, I. I. Ragoler, acknowledged them, but claimed that “[Williams] is far from antisemitism.” In a different story that year, Ragoler described a group of pupils at a New Jersey public school who formed a secret society called “Kill the Jews,” aimed at battering Jewish pupils. How could Americans do that? No, Ragoler reassured his readers, a “thorough investigation” found that all those pupils were “children of immigrant Poles, Hungarians, and Germans. Therefore they have inherited their hatred for Jews from their parents, who brought over that cherished gift from the beloved home [Europe].” Ragoler mocked the European immigrants who could not comprehend “how a country could be without gentry and without serfs. . . . How could it be that all people are equal, including even Jews?” The journalist depicted recent Polish immigrants in America as “not very liked by the Americans,” adding “but they are also not hated, because here nobody is hated.” Ragoler wrote that many Polish newcomers brought with them the baggage of anti-Jewish bigotry, such as a Polish merchant in Chicago who tried to initiate a boycott against Jewish businesses. But Ragoler expressed optimism, since “the effect of American public schools, American virtues and ideals are a deadly poison for antisemitism.”28 The disparity between Americans and non-Jews in Eastern Europe was especially sharp during the period of violent outbreaks in Russia. The Fraynd reported that many Americans joined protest rallies against the pogroms and donated considerable sums to relief funds for victims. A few weeks after the pogrom in Kishinev, the American correspondent of the daily was elated to announce that “our fellow citizens, American Christians, have proved themselves to be our best friends in trouble” and detailed protest meetings in many cities. After violence in Russia peaked in the fall of 1905, Alexandrov praised Christian ministers who met at a New York church, strongly condemning the Russian government. Like the Jewish publications that preceded it, the Fraynd found the fact that American ministers came out against antisemitism—a far cry from what its readers expected of the clergy in Russia—particularly poignant.29

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First Impressions In his report (1912) about conditions at Ellis Island, the prolific Yiddish and Hebrew author Hersh Dovid Nomberg confessed, “The first Yankee I saw made a strong impression on me. A tall, handsome young man, with a rough yet intelligent face.” Nomberg stared at the American and smiled, so the latter suspected he was “feeble minded” and had him sent to further inspection. Another Jewish commentator noted that upon disembarkation in 1908, the American passengers became impatient with delays caused by the immigrants; the former began “to behave rudely, pushing along the immigrants who got stalled,” until “they made everyone sick with their coarse manners.”30 The first real-life encounter with Americans was unquestionably a harrowing experience for many an immigrant. It typically occurred at the port of entry, which in New York was at Castle Garden, at the southern tip of Manhattan, until 1892, and after that, at Ellis Island. By 1902 an observer claimed that the roughness and pushing on the island gave the immigrant the feeling that “he [had] landed in the czar’s domain.” Robert Leslie, who worked as a physician on Ellis Island in the 1900s, recounted how the immigrants “were afraid of police or badges.” To be sure, immigrant accounts contain many tales of woe, and being processed through the “grinding machinery of the law, which sifts, picks, and chooses,” could hardly be pleasant: twelve-year-old Ida Richter, who was detained in 1907 with her family for two weeks, recalled “such a smells [sic] and such a terrible, terrible place.” A few years later, the Yiddish vaudeville comedian Shlomo Shmuelevitsh wrote the song “Ellis Island”; in it he lamented, “Such outrages only devils know / You torment the tormented for no reason.” The presence of uniformed Gentiles who asked questions of and checked immigrants evoked bitter recollections of Old World arbitrariness, and some newcomers were entangled in lies.31 Despite the jostling and brusque handling, quite a few immigrants had favorable impressions of their passage through Ellis Island and of meeting friendly officials. In 1910 the socialist Yiddish daily the Forverts ( Jewish daily forward), wrote, “[Immigration] officials are sympathetic. They know the Jewish immigrants get ‘confused’ and they usually let them in.” Aaron Domnitz, who arrived in New York in 1906, remembered that “the new immigrant felt right at home” and that “people were goodnatured here and they were joking. I liked the reception.” Future labor leader Philip Zausner, who arrived in Ellis Island a year later, found an inspector who “seemed to be a rather nice person” and waved his hand approvingly before letting him in. Irving Chait, who came at the age of eleven in 1913, was detained at Ellis Island for more than a month because

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his mother had trachoma (an infectious eye disease). But he remembered, “They were very nice, in Ellis Island, to us. . . . I think we were treated very nicely.”32 Leaving the port of entry, the newcomer often did not stray far. Already in the 1870s the growing infl ux of Yiddish-speaking immigrants had begun to change the character of New York’s East Side, a neighborhood that would later be seen as the American Jewish “Plymouth Rock.” Representatives of German Jewish aid societies cast a nervous eye on their “wild Asiatic” coreligionists, fearing the impression non-Jews might get. Augustus A. Levey, the secretary of the established Jewry’s Hebrew Emigrant Aid Society (HEAS), cautioned in 1882 that “these wretches” (immigrants) would bring “only disgrace and a lowering of the opinion in which American Israelites are held.” Shortly after the arrival, in 1882, of Boris Tomashevsky, the up-and-coming star of the Yiddish theater, delegates of a Jewish aid society warned him not to play in any roles (such as thieves or swindlers) that might tarnish the Jewish reputation in America.33 By 1892, 75 percent of the city’s Jews lived on the East Side, and even though almost two-thirds of them had left the area by 1905, the teeming streets were quickly filled with recently arrived immigrants. The older Irish and German residents of the area south of Houston Street and east of the Bowery had to retreat—grudgingly and gradually—to less crowded sections by the closing years of the nineteenth century. Still, some of these older populations clung to their domiciles, saloons, beer gardens, and political clubs. In fact, most of the Gentiles the newcomers encountered had descended from older waves of immigration or were recent immigrants (such as Italians or Greeks). The East Side was far from being exclusively Jewish, even when the number of Jews crowding it reached its peak of 542,000 in 1910; enclaves of Jewish life functioned alongside areas shaped by other ethnicities.34 Beyond the surrounding Gentiles, one should bear in mind the noteworthy intra-Jewish regional divisions in those enclaves: haughty Litvakes (Lithuanian Jews) regarded themselves as more rationalistic and erudite and looked down on Polish and Galician Jews, who in turn thought of Litvakes as cold and irreligious. Hungarian Jews were seen as very different from Eastern European Jews:—one observer mentioned that Hungarian Jews walked huge dogs, “a suspiciously non-Jewish custom.” When the Forverts began its popular “Bintel briv” (Bundle of letters) section in 1906, it featured questions and complaints by readers about “intermarriage” between Hungarian, Russian, and Romanian Jews. A Jewish mother from Russia, whose daughter had married a Hungarian-Jewish man, wrote to the newspaper in 1906 that she opposed such a marriage:

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“In my opinion, a Russian and a Hungarian are worlds apart and one cannot understand the other.” A Galician man argued six years later that “the Russian, and especially the Lithuanian Jews, hate the Romanian and Galician Jews even more than outright Gentiles hate the Jews.” Galicians tended to congregate between Houston and Broome Streets, east of Clinton Street, while Romanians settled between Houston and Grand Streets to the north and south, and between the Bowery and Allen Street to the west and east. Hungarians Jews were to be found above Houston Street between Avenue B and the East River, and “Russian Jews” (a heterogeneous category of Jews from different areas of the Pale of Settlement) were concentrated between Grand and Monroe Streets east of the Bowery. As Romanian-born Marcus Ravage depicted it, to the north (a few blocks above Houston Street) lay “the untracked wilds surrounding Tompkins Square Park, which to me was the vast dark continent of the ‘real Americans.’”35 While marveling at the material abundance and political freedom of their new country, many immigrants were disheartened at first by what they found. Economic hardship, harassment on the street by nonJewish youths or policemen, the poor state of religious observance, and general estrangement had deflated hopes, which in turn inspired the expression “a klog tsu kolombus” (damn Columbus). In 1889 the young anarchist poet Dovid Edelshtat described the cruel life of a sweatshop tailor, whose face was “wet with tears” as he sighed, “I have no rest, I have no bread.” Three years later it was a traditionalist, the poet and wedding bard Elikum Tsunzer (who often sang the praises of America), who acrimoniously ridiculed America’s nickname, the “Golden Land”— where workers were disabled at work, went hungry, and were thrown out into the streets by heartless landlords; even “the air is a regular pestilence.” In 1904 B. Gorin told his Jewish readers in Russia that as a rule, once the immigrant arrived in America, “his first thought” was to save enough money and return home as soon as possible. In their hearts newly arrived immigrants mocked everything they saw, “[shook] their head in discontent,” and “mutter[ed] ‘well, America!’” When the “greenhorns” (the common epithet for recently arrived immigrants) made their way on filthy and swarming sidewalks between dark tenements and shrieking pushcart vendors, America looked very different from the promising stories they had heard at home. Jewish prostitutes stood on Allen Street and upon seeing a traditional-looking bearded Jew, would call out in Yiddish, “Mister, come in to pray.” Yiddish poet Morris Rosenfeld encapsulated the feelings of many when writing that Jewish immigrants in America lived and worked on the corner of “Pain and Misery” Streets.36 Yet those conditions did not necessarily mar the image of the Yankee. If anything,

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those hardships would sharpen the distinction between “real” Americans and those who were perceived as not deserving that designation.

The highly romanticized image of Americans drawn by Jewish commentators had paralleled the Jewish self-image and equated Jewish and American characteristics: an industrious and sober people, persecuted for its religious beliefs, had left bigoted Europe and created an egalitarian society. Like Jews, Yankees were traders by nature and preferred occupations that required them to use their heads, not brawn. Americans were portrayed as a freedom-loving people. Thus manifestations of anti-Jewish prejudice were habitually associated with European immigrants, who presumably brought over the old hatreds from home; examples of American racism toward nonwhites (such as the Chinese) were often explained away by the latter’s misconduct. Hence various Jewish sources in Eastern Europe not only provided their readers with reports on American life, but also reproduced (and in some cases justified) the prevalent racial and ethnic hierarchy of turn-of-the-century America. Already prior to departure, many would-be immigrants were acquainted with some crude versions of American exceptionalism and information about the difference between “genuine” Americans and others. Those perceptions would help them to rationalize and cope with the much less pleasant conditions with which they were actually met.

3

“In Goodness They Even Exceed the English” T h e I d e a l i zat i o n o f “ Y a n k e e s ” in the 1880s and 1890s

One of the pioneers of Jewish socialism and of the Yiddish press in America, Louis E. Miller (formerly Bandes), offered in 1896 the main reason for the success of the women’s rights movement in Britain and the United States: the movement’s accomplishments derived from the diff erence between the “Anglo-Americans” and other peoples. Writing in the socialist monthly Di tsukunft (the Future), which popularized scientific, literary, and historical themes, Miller argued that “since Anglo-Americans have more respect for the human being and his rights, they also have more respect than others for women’s rights.”1 How did immigrant Jews view Gentiles of various nationalities in New York City in the two closing decades of the nineteenth century? While Miller was a sharp critic of American capitalism, he held the “Anglo-Americans” in high esteem, and many immigrants from a wide range of backgrounds and political convictions shared that view. Here lies an apparent dissonance that continued to accompany Jewish immigrants’ conceptions of their Gentile environment beyond their fi rst days in the Empire City: in spite of the often harsh conditions in New York of the 1880s and 1890s, despite the economic hardship, labor strife, and incidents of anti-Jewish antagonism, most immigrants continued to view Americans in a positive, not to say rosy, light. The image of “true” Americans functioned to resolve discrepancies between the immigrants’ pre-emigration expectations and the realities they faced. That resolution demonstrates that one cannot adequately explain the process of Americanization without understanding how immigrants perceived the American people—and who were considered as such. The fi nal decades of the nineteenth century witnessed Jewish newcomers’ clinging to a romanticized image of Yankees as they tended to identify American deficiencies with members of several ethnic groups they encountered.2 52

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The Idealization of “Real” Americans Looking back on the 1880s, the Yiddish journalist Yankev Magidov remarked that “nowadays” (early 1920s) a Jew could live in New York City for many years “without coming across a Christian.” Magidov, who arrived in New York in 1886 and was active in the Socialist Labor Party and the radical Yiddish press, noted that back in the 1880s one encountered non-Jews everywhere—when looking for a job, peddling one’s wares, or walking down the street. The non-Jews whom most immigrants met were typically police officers, firefighters, street ruffians, political bosses, city workers, and trolley car conductors. In the last quarter of the nineteenth century most of those were Irish, and those areas of contact did not spell harmony in Jewish-Irish relations. No less important, such patterns of connection also allowed a juxtaposition of favorable (and for most immigrants hardly present) “real” Americans with the potentially volatile Irish and other groups.3 Undeniably, some of the earlier general disdain for Gentiles proved to be quite durable. Writer and publicist Zalmen Yoffeh, who grew up on Manhattan’s East Side before the turn of the twentieth century, recalled that “Gentiles, we understood, were a race of mental inferiors, fit only for the more menial tasks of life.” Yet Yoffeh acknowledged that the nonJews he came upon were “the janitor in the tenement, the barber around the corner and the policeman,” and those were mostly Irish, Italians, and Poles. Yoffeh confessed, “When later I met intelligent Gentiles I was astounded.” The pianist and radio producer Samuel Chotzinoff, who was born in the Pale (Vitebsk circa 1889) and spent his childhood on the East Side in roughly the same years as Yoffeh, felt no antagonism toward Gentiles but looked upon them “with the friendly contempt one normally felt for goyim.”4 Against the more generalized image of Gentiles, der amerikaner stood out as a role model for many a Jewish immigrant. To dress, look, and talk like an American became a collective endeavor, especially for younger immigrants, even if it meant jettisoning hallowed traditions. Some of the local Jews had already rid themselves of beards and sidelocks, dressed in the latest American fashion, and jeered at the newly arrived. Learning English was nearly an obsession, rather than a necessity. A leading Jewish anarchist in America, Shoel Yanovsky, was bewildered by his Jewish landlord (an Eastern European tailor); upon Yanovsky’s arrival in New York (1885), the landlord commanded him to “speak United States.” Yanovsky thought Americans spoke English, but a common acquaintance explained that the tailor was an avid patriot and despised England, which oppressed the American people—thus you should not say “to speak English,” but

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to “speak United States.” In Abraham Cahan’s novel The Rise of David Levinsky, the main character believes that native speakers of English were “superior beings.”5 More important, the term Yankee or simply American continued to differentiate between those seen as authentic Americans and other Americans, who were identified according to their national origin (Irish, Germans, etc.). Writer Shmuel Shur, who composed propagandist revolutionary poems, published a humorous list of “improbabilities” in a Yiddish socialist paper in 1886; it was impossible that “an American would not take pride in his country” or that “an Irishman would not take pride in his hard fist.” More than a decade later, in 1898, the Hebrew satirist Abraham Kotlyor published a parody that used a Talmudic formula of measurement to distinguish between Yankees, whose worst offense was chewing tobacco, and others: “Ten measures of drunkenness were given to the world, the Irish took nine . . . and the rest of the world took one. . . . Ten measures of antisemitism were given to the world, the Germans took them all.”6 Philosopher Morris Raphael Cohen reminisced about growing up in New York in the 1890s: “The World that we faced on the East Side at the turn of the century presented a series of heartbreaking dilemmas. . . . We learned that all non-Jews were not mere soulless heathens. We found that the Jews had not been the only conservators of wisdom and civilization.”7 Cohen’s positive impression of the Yankee in comparison with Eastern European Gentiles was far from unique. While on the whole most immigrants had little, if any, acquaintance with WASPs, in the 1880s and later some Jewish immigrants came in closer contact with progressive old-stock Americans, especially at the Empire City’s settlement houses. Reformers such as Charles B. Stover, Frances Perkins, and James B. Reynolds (as well as American Jews like Felix Adler, Charles Bernheimer, and Lillian Wald) worked closely with Eastern European–born communal workers like Paul Abelson, David Blaustein, Boris Bogen, and Henry Moskowitz. They presented a generation of Jewish youths and adults with an American role model that was both kind and vibrant: Stover, who headed the University Settlement, lived in a tiny East Side apartment, which became, in the words of Lillian Wald, “a Mecca” for immigrants, who sought “help or interpretation.” One immigrant reminisced, “We adored them,” when describing the infl uence of young, selfassured Gentile college graduates. More often than not, however, actual contact was with those whom Yiddish writer Dovid Hermalin called “Yankee Jews” rather than “real” Americans.8 Thousands of Jewish children and youths participated in the variety of activities and clubs offered at settlement houses, where they held

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political and literary debates, performed Shakespearian plays, sang in choral groups, dabbled in painting, or played ball. Although quite a few parents feared that the settlements were trying to proselytize their children, the settlements remained a popular place. Reynolds, who served as the University Settlement’s headworker, reported in 1900 that many juvenile immigrants (or the American offspring of immigrants) respected themselves for being Americans, while “having more or less contempt for . . . [their] father’s habits and manners.” The Yiddish playwright Jacob Gordin echoed that opinion in 1901, writing that young Jews ridiculed all things Yiddish and tried as much as possible to become “‘like unto Yankees.’”9 Bohemian and literary circles also served as a meeting point between Jewish intellectuals and WASP journalists and writers. There were surely many WASPs who were less interested in Jews than in slumming downtown. Still, the brothers Norman and Hutchins Hapgood, Lincoln Steffens, and William Dean Howells were genuinely intrigued with the East Side cafés; the Yiddish theater; and the lively discussions over steaming glasses of tea between anarchists, single-taxers, Socialists, and Zionists. One of the prominent figures in the Yiddish press and Jewish socialism, Abraham Cahan, met Steffens in the offices of the Evening Post and was fascinated by him and by Norman Hapgood, with his “truly American face.”10 The feeling that “true” Americans possessed nobler characteristics than those of other Gentiles was also sounded by a small minority of immigrants who left the city and worked, at least temporarily, for American farmers. The comparison between them and the Polish, Ukrainian, or Byelorussian muzhiks was unflattering to the latter. Harris Rubin, who came to America from his native Lithuania in 1882, was deeply impressed by the “cleanliness and tidiness” of the American farmer’s house. Rubin noticed that American farmers drank less than did peasants in Eastern Europe and seemed more respectable than “a landlord” in the Old World. When future Soviet affairs expert Maurice Hindus arrived at an upstate farm in the 1900s, he discovered that American farmers loathed people who hit dogs with sticks. He was equally puzzled to learn that people who “considered themselves as good Christians” never went to the local Protestant church. Whereas the village in Russia symbolized “the ugliness of life,” American farm life stood for “the friendliness of the country” and “dignity and good manners.”11 Yankee attributes made an impact on Bobroysk-born Yisroel Kopelov, who arrived in America in 1883 and became active in Jewish labor circles and the anarchist movement. When he began peddling in New England’s small towns shortly after his arrival, Kopelov found the Yankees to be

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not only friendly but good-hearted as well. Assuming that everyone he met in that area was a “Yankee,” Kopelov thought, “in goodness they [Yankees] even exceed the English.” (Kopelov came to America via England, a path taken by thousands of Jewish immigrants in those years.) When another Jewish peddler expressed his disappointment with America and peddling, Kopelov passionately argued that the man was mistaken, since “with what kindness and courtesy they [Americans] treat people who are complete strangers.” Years later, Kopelov became somewhat disillusioned by Americans, writing about their materialism and dislike of foreigners. Still, he appreciated American individualism and that Yankees were shrewd in business, claiming that “a Yankee will always get the best of a Jew.”12 Kopelov’s assumption that courteous people who spoke good English were Yankees was not uncommon. For many immigrants the notion of true Americans was interwoven with middle-class status, education, refinement, and a respectability that radiated confidence and a sense of cultural authority. Rose Cohen, born in the Pale of Settlement in 1880 and arriving in New York at the age of twelve, was baffled when her parents sent her uptown for medical treatment at a Presbyterian hospital. At first, “all Gentile English-speaking people were Americans to me.” But the people in the hospital as well as the nurses at the settlement house “looked so different” from the Gentiles she met on Cherry Street. Her impression was that those Americans were friendlier, happier, and even better looking than the Gentiles she knew on the East Side. Cohen’s portrayal of the cheerful and friendly American was echoed in an 1898 report by Leon Zolotkoff, a radical who later became one of the pioneers of the Zionist and conservative Yiddish press in America. While still residing in Chicago, he wrote for the traditional daily Yidishes tageblat ( Jewish daily news), which enjoyed the highest circulation of all newspapers on the Jewish street before 1900. Zolotkoff described the Americans he met on board a steamer en route to Europe as the “most lovable co-passengers one could hope to find.” Americans “show no sign of the German stiffness,” wrote Zolotkoff; they were “chatty, funny, and cheerful,” and after a couple of chats they were won as friends.13 The infl uence of the Yiddish press made views like Zolotkoff ’s increasingly important. Among the Yiddish papers of the late nineteenth century, the Tageblat (and its weekly edition, Yidishe gazetn, which had debuted earlier) led the way in painting a positive picture of Americans, while attempting to keep level with the American press in smearing its pages with items concerning sin, crime, and other sensationalistic topics. Both the Tageblat’s owner and its chief editor, Kasriel Sarasohn and John (Yoyne) Paley, respectively, received a traditional Jewish education,

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yet were touched by the ideas of the Haskalah. Paley was rumored to have gone further and to have been baptized in Russia. Both supported Zionism (though until the late 1890s Paley thought it was impractical) and had an ambivalent approach toward non-Jews—they played on the traditionalism of their readers and bridled at inequities caused by Gentiles; at the same time, their suspicion of non-Jews was frequently mixed with admiration for nations that appeared to stand up for their rights.14 When the French Jewish army captain Alfred Dreyfus was falsely accused of treason in 1894, the affair attracted great attention in the Yiddish press and among New York’s Jews. The Dreyfus case, as with other expressions of anti-Jewish enmity in Europe, allowed Jewish commentators to compare Americans favorably to Europeans. In 1897 the Gazetn featured an article by a young socialist named William Edlin (later to become a leading Yiddish journalist). The Russian-born Edlin grew up in San Francisco before moving to New York in 1896 and therefore perhaps encountered less discrimination in his youth. His personal experience might have infl uenced his argument that anyone who feared an antisemitic movement in America simply revealed ignorance about the American character. Apart from tolerance, “one of the strongest traits of the American people is to assimilate” people from “other civilized nations,” even in large numbers, and soon these newcomers adopt American manners and the country’s way of life. In a similar statement in reference to the Boer War, Zolotkoff claimed in 1899 that tolerance was an inherent part of the Anglo-American character and that Jews ought to “bless the Anglo-Saxon race, when compared to other races. The English and the Americans are incapable of having a Dreyfus scandal.”15 One of the attributes ascribed to the Americans was their progressivism. In 1888 linguist Alexander Harkavy emphasized the egalitarian ethos of American society and noted that “Jews are welcomed by most of their Christian brothers of all factions.” Fourteen years later the essayist Yankev Pfefer pointed to what he saw as the exceptional American vigor. Pfefer, who arrived in New York from his native Galicia in 1895 and wrote popular moral tales in Yiddish, cited a report by a German Jewish banker, Ludwig Max Goldberger, about economic conditions in the United States. Pfefer used the report to enlighten his readers about what made America so successful. The main factor was “the remarkable energy the Americans have”; “the American is courageous by nature,” and “such a thing as danger does not exist for the American.” Pfefer added, “Remaining in the same position is alien to the American. He must constantly make progress.”16 Undeniably, deep-seated suspicion and anxieties concerning nonJews did endure: longtime social worker David Blaustein, who came

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to America from his native Lithuania in 1886, stated in 1909 that Jewish immigrants tended to associate Gentiles “with persecution, injustice, cruelty and massacres.” Such apprehension about Gentiles reverberated in the speeches of the temperamental Joseph Zeff: the Russian-born orator earned a reputation as one of the finest Yiddish speakers in Russia, and he arrived in New York in 1899 to attract new Zionist recruits on the East Side. Zeff delivered fiery speeches in Yiddish at many mass meetings. He was fearless and intransigent, and his often tactless attacks on almost everyone—the Gentiles, uptown Jews, the leaders of the Federation of American Zionists (FAZ)—brought him into confl ict with many, including Zionist leaders. In June 1900 Zeff spoke at a meeting of a Zionist society, Dorshey tsiyon (Seekers of Zion) at a Brooklyn synagogue, where he thundered, “Don’t fool yourselves that you are Americans.  .  .  . The Russian will be assimilated with the Pole, the German with the French, and all will become one big nation, but not the Jew! . . . If he will refuse to live apart and would wish to assimilate, they [Gentiles] will force him to be isolated.”17 Yet in the late nineteenth century most immigrants remained lukewarm toward angry or separatist oratory vis-à-vis the Americans. It is crucial to keep in mind that lingering negative feelings toward Gentiles or newly accumulated bitterness toward America did not necessarily sully the image of Yankees. Zeff ’s status in New York did not match his reputation in Europe. It was not just the old, cautious self-defense instinct: many Jews felt that Americans were better than Gentiles elsewhere, and any suggestion that they were loathed by non-Jews here, just like in the Old Country, made them uneasy. In early 1901 Richard Gottheil, who headed FAZ, sent a letter to Theodor Herzl, complaining that Zeff made himself unpopular among American Zionists by “running down America and the American people.”18 If anything, displeasure with American life was usually directed inward. Rabbis and traditionalists repeatedly bemoaned the steep decline in observance on the part of American Jews, but more often than not, they blamed American Jews (both immigrants and established Jewry) for creating a selfish and cynical environment that discouraged observance. In 1892 a sharp critic of American life, the Hebraist and satirist Gershon Rosenzweig, parodied the style of a Talmudic tractate, where he included a pun that deprecated America, calling it “ama reka” (Aramaic for “an empty-headed/vain nation”). But Rosenzweig was quick to clarify that his disapproval related “only to the Jews of America.” Even if America was not perfect, “blessed is the country whose blemishes are few” and writers were free to discuss them. Whereas the perpetual Jewish circumspection probably throbbed through his explanation, Rosenzweig’s main

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aim was different: he was determined to emphasize the faulty ways of American Jews, as seen against the backdrop of a tolerant America. In 1899 Rabbi Shimon Yitskhak Halevy Finkelstein, who would later serve as an Orthodox rabbi in Brownsville, Brooklyn, wondered who prevented American Jews from upholding Judaism; the country was free to anyone, and “only we are to blame.”19 The dissimilarity between the portrayal of Gentiles in general and that of Yankees appeared vividly on the stage of the Yiddish theater. Starting in the early 1880s, the Yiddish theater became a leading cultural medium among the city’s Yiddish speakers, serving as a fantasy weaver, educator, recreational center for the family, social gathering place, agent of charity, and barometer of the public mood. By the 1890s there were already three successful Yiddish theaters on the Bowery, to which thousands of enthusiastic Jewish immigrants of all classes and ages flocked every week. On stage they saw uneven mixtures of tragedy, comedy, variety shows, farce, free adaptations of famous plays, dramatized “current affairs” (such as the Dreyfus affair), and especially pompous and nationalist versions of Jewish history. Intellectuals in the 1880s and 1890s scoffed at what they saw as shund (literary trash), in which actors with tin swords and golden paper crowns declaimed bombastic and heavily Germanized texts. But Jewish audiences adored those plays, which satisfied their concept of cultured and dignified art that highlighted Jewish sufferings and triumphs while providing folksy comedy and music.20 The Yiddish theater of the 1880s and 1890s in New York had mostly cast Gentiles as villains, using the stage as a place to take revenge on all the persecutors and tormentors of Jews over the centuries. The leading playwrights were Morris Hurvitz (a self-styled professor) and Joseph Latayner, who were extremely prolific in writing (and plagiarizing) dozens of plays and operettas, in which non-Jews were typically reduced to negative caricatures—evil Greeks fighting the Maccabeans’ rebellion, Romans besieging Jerusalem and destroying the Temple, Frenchmen persecuting Jews in the Middle Ages or libeling Captain Dreyfus in the 1890s, Spanish inquisitors tormenting heroic Jews, vile Hungarians fabricating a blood libel, or drunk Russian peasants and soldiers murdering Jews in a pogrom. The dramas’ visceral manifestations of Jewish nationalism were often interwoven with fervent American patriotism and a heroic image of Americans. American bravery and justice were celebrated in numerous popular plays such as Latayner’s Exile from Russia (1891) or Hurvitz’s The Heroes of Homestead (1892). The idealized image of Americans peaked during national confl icts, like the Spanish-American War (1898), when the Yiddish theater bubbled with such plays as The War against the Spanish Barbarians and acts titled “Remember the Maine!”21

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The wave of jingoism that arose during the Spanish-American War certainly agitated the Jewish ghetto beyond the theater halls and exemplifies how Jewish collective memory could be harnessed to contemporary use. Spain was an easy target. Moshe Blumenfeld, who immigrated from Bucharest to New York circa 1885 and was active in Zionist circles, advised Jews in 1887 against settling in Mexico, “because the residents there are the descendants of Spaniards, and the hatred of Jews is eternal in the Spaniards’ heart.” When the war broke out, Jewish observers in America and Eastern Europe alike were quick to invoke the Spanish Inquisition, with its autos-da-fé and burned Jewish martyrs. Abraham Cahan noted how the crowds in front of the Yiddish dailies’ bulletin boards on East Broadway showed their hostility toward Spain in violent gesticulation and vehement verbal expression. Before President William McKinley issued a call for volunteers, members of immigrant Jewish societies met New York’s mayor, Robert Van Wyck, and volunteered to take up arms against the Spaniards. Akiva Fleischmann, the New York correspondent of Ha-melits, saw the war as “an act of God”: “The way Spain treated us, the Eternal People, four hundred years ago, the United States government is treating Spain now.”22 The onset of the war gave the conservative Tageblat a chance to celebrate the character of the American people while assaulting Spain. Under Paley’s direction the leading Yiddish newspaper in America of the time reminded its readers that now they lived among a free people who fought against a bloodthirsty country. The paper boasted of the superior American ability to both build and destroy ships and called patriotism a “holy ideal.” Upon McKinley’s proposal of a peace plan, an editorial argued that the plan showed how “noble, philanthropic and virtuous” was the American character. Sounding a similar tone, the playwright and pioneer of the Yiddish theater Avrum Goldfaden called on American Jews to prove their patriotism and fight against the “inquisitors” who spilled Jewish blood, and Boris Tomashevsky composed a war song, “Yudele, ervakh!” ( Jew, awake!) that was filled with hatred for the “Spanish parasites.”23 The Radicals’ Dilemma The image of Yankees was more complicated in Jewish socialist and anarchist circles. Those radicals envisioned working-class solidarity that would transcend ethnic divisions and were ideologically committed to universal ideals. One of the leading internationalist socialists and a bitter opponent of Jewish nationalism was Benyomen Faygnboym (originally a Hasidic yeshiva student from Warsaw). He argued that all national feelings were “stupidity” and prevented people from seeing that humankind

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was “one family.” In reality, however, the overtly Jewish packaging of a revolutionary ideology (outlandish appearance and insurmountable accent included) had little appeal for Gentile workers who kept Jewish socialist and labor organizers at bay. Those radicals whose activity did take them outside Jewish circles, among them anarchist Emma Goldman and socialist Morris Hillquit, criticized what they saw as Jewish parochialism and isolation. Hillquit described Jewish workers as “dull, apathetic, and unintelligent.” Whereas some young radicals came from assimilated families and hardly spoke Yiddish, others pondered Marxist texts the way they had read Talmudic tractates only a few years earlier. What typified them was a fusion of provincialism with universal aspirations, or as Irving Howe quipped, hoping to move in one leap “from blessing the Sabbath wine to . . . international revolution.”24 It would be a mistake to assume that Jewish socialists and anarchists had a negative view of Americans just because they often railed against the injustices of American capitalism and the rule of plutocrats. In the late nineteenth century Jewish radicals disagreed about the American national character and its responsibility for the continuation of an exploitative order. To be sure, the discussion included a barrage of rigid Marxist condemnations of American “false consciousness.” Socialist writer Shlomo Elizovitsh wondered how was it that America had the best public schools and enjoyed impressive technological progress, but when one examined the American people one found “coarse ignorance.” In 1896 the caustic Louis E. Miller (who later broke with his socialist comrades), complained that many Jewish socialists shared a basic, yet unfounded, axiom regarding Americans: they saw the Yankee as “conservative, reactionary, . . . not very intelligent though not stupid.”25 The frustration among many Jewish radicals in the 1880s and 1890s over their inability to capture the hearts and minds of the American masses helps to explain the alienation and bitterness some of them harbored toward the surrounding society. It is worth mentioning that the same estrangement was also evident in relation to the majority of Jewish immigrants, whom many radicals considered provincial and antiquated.26 But despite their livid attacks on American capitalism and frustration over the lack of success among Yankees, Jewish radicals tended to view Americans in a favorable light. For socialists, like other immigrants, the Yankee was a marker of cultural propriety and acceptance for which immigrant Jews should strive. In 1896 Louis Miller used modern notions of progress (like the use of soap or the enhanced status of women) to demonstrate that whatever criterion of advancement one chooses, “we find the American at the top, standing head and shoulders above all other nations.” Miller maintained

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that Americans were “as educated and intelligent” as members of any European nation and “in a certain sense much more.” Miller was debating the issue of the American national character with Benyomen Faygnboym, who argued that many Americans were “hard-boiled [religious] zealots and egoistic money-seekers.” Yet even a detractor of the American makeup such as Faygnboym agreed with Miller about the high level of “education and science” among the American people. In the Jewish radical circles that had an all but messianic belief in progress and science, such acknowledgment entailed unconcealed admiration.27 Avrom Lesin, another critic of Americans’ lack of political awareness, mentioned Massachusetts in 1899 as “the heart of true Yankeeism,” from which “all the noble ideals” originated. A year later he described how Americans had paid dearly, “with the blood of their noblest men,” so all citizens could have a free vote.28 The infl uential editor of the Forverts Abraham Cahan was a chief exponent of Americanization among Yiddish-speaking immigrants. Cahan was able to fuse traditional Jewish motifs, socialism, and contemporary American culture in turning a sectarian Yiddish daily into a landmark of the immigrant press. In 1896 Cahan published a series of articles titled “How Do the Yankees Live?” in the socialist (and dogmatic) Abendblat (Evening paper). Before the series began, the paper teased its readers: “Obviously, you are in America. Do you know anything about the real Americans? As much as you know about the Turks. Where would you see a Yankee?” Apart from Cahan’s lively account of “quilt parties,” he endeared New England’s Yankee life to his readers by drawing parallels to Jewish shtetl life in Eastern Europe; he likened the Yankee minister to “a Jewish cantor” and portrayed the Yankee schoolteacher as “half a yeshiva student and half a melamed” (teacher in a traditional Jewish school), in that Yankee teachers were supported by the community and taught in a one-room school.29 By equating different aspects of life of New England towns with those of Jewish shtetls, Cahan cleverly created a sense of shared experience and qualities linking Jews and Yankees. To that he added his observations about Yankee sobriety and stressed that even when having enjoyable social activities, Yankees conducted themselves in a respectable manner. In Cahan’s articles one could easily replace Yankees with Jews to obtain a better understanding of Jewish self-image: the image of the Yankee matched many of characteristics Jews attributed to themselves, such as sobriety, modesty, thriftiness, and industriousness. Less than a decade after Cahan, settlement house worker Charles Bernheimer, a perceptive observer of Jewish immigrants, echoed Cahan’s view. Bernheimer asserted that Jewish competitive traits were welcomed in the United

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States, since “the Yankee, the Anglo-Saxon,” had the same cleverness and was too tolerant to permit any claims against intellectual achievements.30 Regardless of ideological shades, a key component in the image of Yankees among immigrant Jews was the former’s purported lack of antisemitism, or at least a weaker inclination for Jew-hatred. Zionist Abraham H. Fromenson wrote in 1899 that there was no “antisemitic tendency” on the part of Americans. Fromenson also believed that the “Jew Joke” was dying in popular culture, as evidenced by Puck magazine’s expunging of jokes about Jews from its columns. Even the Forverts, usually more critical toward America than the “bourgeois” press, admitted that Yankee tolerance necessitated different socialist tactics. Avrom Lesin commented that it was hard to tell whether in the future America would witness antisemitism of the European kind, but in the meantime, “the Jewish worker barely suffers” because he is a Jew.31 The will to believe that Yankees were different from other Gentiles made rationalization a necessary device. An interesting example for explaining away American antisemitism could be found in an article from 1900 by the Zionist (and former anarchist) writer Avner Tanenboym, who made his name by translating popular novels and scientific texts into Yiddish. Tanenboym referred to an alleged remark by an urban reformer, Reverend Charles H. Parkhurst: “Jews have only one good characteristic—they hate the Irish.” Although Tanenboym deplored Parkhurst and other nativists who callously fanned “national hatred” for political gains, in a way he also rationalized nativism: the fact that “real Americans, old-stock Americans” had little sympathy for immigrants was “natural.” It was “human nature to hate the foreigner,” wrote Tanenboym, and it was no wonder that Moses repeatedly decreed love toward the alien. Usually, when thundering against antisemitism in general, Jewish observers did not argue that anti-Jewish hatred was “natural”; but Tanenboym refused to group Yankees and other Gentiles under the rubric soyney yisroel (antisemites).32 The idea that Yankees were nobler than other Gentiles was surely affected to some degree by the popularization of racial theories that celebrated the supremacy of Anglo-Saxon over other races in the 1880s and 1890s. Tanenboym himself in 1898 echoed those beliefs as he called for racial equality in America. He wondered why the developed race, the white race, was unable to civilize other races like Blacks, Chinese, and Indians. Tanenboym argued that if “half-wild Irish, ignorant Italians and completely crass Slavs” had civilized themselves, so could the others. While decrying the inequities of American imperialism and calling for universal equality, Jewish radicals implicitly affirmed the prevailing racial conceptions of late nineteenth-century America. In 1896 Socialist

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columnist M. Baranov (pseudonym of Moyshe Gormidor), whose acerbic style won him popularity with Yiddish readers, applied a specific criterion for civility: Baranov used the difference between men and women to determine the level of development of any human society. According to him, the most primitive people “on the steps of human development” were “the Negroes of Africa, [the] Indians of America and the completely savage peoples of Australia.” The socialist Abend-blat argued that Yankees could take a lesson from Filipinos about collectivism, but then called the same Filipinos “savages” and “very dirty.” Despite the strength of political divisions among immigrant Jews, there was a tacit belief that Yankees/Anglo-Saxons were carriers of the most advanced culture.33 The Shamrock Challenge The perceived tolerance of Americans stood in sharp contrast to New York City’s daily life. Many streets on the East Side were blighted by abusive and aggressive gangs. One immigrant, who arrived in New York in 1895 from his native Lithuania, remembered how “Irish ruffians” stood on Cherry Street and greeted Jewish passersby with the epithets “goddamn sheeny,” “rotten kike,” and other pleasantries. Frequently the exchange did not remain verbal, as those youths enjoyed chasing traditional Jews and beating up Jewish peddlers in broad daylight, stealing their wares, and pelting them with stones. Venturing onto a predominantly Irish, German, or Italian block was a risky endeavor, likely to result in a black eye, a bleeding nose, or worse. Anti-Jewish rowdyism was hardly confined to the East Side. By the 1890s Yiddish-speaking immigrants were moving to the newly built sections of Harlem, Brownsville, Williamsburg, and later the East Bronx. Improvements in public transportation, like the opening of the Williamsburg Bridge (1903) and construction of underground transit (1904), facilitated the move to those newer sections. Between 1880 and 1900 the Jewish population in the city swelled from some 80,000 to nearly 600,000; Brooklyn, which was incorporated into New York in 1898, had more than 160,000 Jewish residents by 1900. By comparison, Queens had only 20,000 Jewish residents at the time.34 Local residents in those neighborhoods were often less than graceful in receiving the “sheenies.” In Harlem of the late nineteenth century rental signs stating, “Keine Juden und keine Hunde” (No Jews and no dogs) were almost as ubiquitous as beer gardens, while roving Irish gangs repeatedly assailed Jews. But as in the East Side of previous years, the numbers of German and Irish residents in Harlem dropped by half in the first years of the twentieth century, as Jews, Italians, and Blacks kept moving in. In Brooklyn Jews were usually given a similar welcome. Attacks on Jews in Brooklyn became so commonplace by the early 1890s that the

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local community established the Jewish Protective Association, which worked together with city officials to curb anti-Jewish rowdyism. Despite the association’s activity and a growing Jewish willingness to fight back, attacks on Jews persisted. In the spring of 1899 the American Hebrew League of Brooklyn was established to defend the borough’s Jews from hooligans in the streets. The league organized mass meetings and sent a delegation to Mayor Robert Van Wyck to protest the continued assaults on Jews and police neglect.35 At one of the protest rallies in Brooklyn, a maged (preacher) named Abramovitsh, from a local Jewish society, advised the crowd that pretending to be Gentiles usually did not help, since the attackers could “recognize a Jew.” But to use one’s fists and fight was “not a Jewish business” and Jewish Brooklynites would do better with mass protest. More significant, at a later mass meeting of the league, one of the speakers, a Hungarianborn Reform rabbi, Leopold Wintner, cried, “There is no antisemitism in America,” and furthermore, “it cannot exist”: the American people were honorable and did not tolerate antisemitism. Wintner emphasized that “the Yankees love justice too much to allow [anyone] to persecute Jews.” He mentioned that Italian immigrants were also assaulted, “but the difference between an Italian and Jew is that the Italian can defend himself with a stiletto.”36 Unquestionably, Jews were not the only immigrants facing difficulties with local toughs, who were predominantly Irish. Jews as well as Italians, Chinese, and Blacks discovered that to the Irish, beating up newcomers was a kind of “sport.” Turn-of-the-century Irish youths were overrepresented in violent gangs because of the high rate of absent-father households and mothers’ working outside the home, which resulted in less parental supervision. Moreover, many Irish felt that newcomers were encroaching on them, but since the former experienced slower social mobility than did Germans, they tended to reside longer alongside the new immigrants. In one incident, in August 1900, a crowd of predominantly Irish Americans on a block of Madison Street tried to drive out the newly settled Jewish tenants and a fight ensued. The Irish also entered New York’s police force in great numbers, and with a predominantly Irish police force, too often it was the victim who was arrested, rather than the Irish aggressor, or the police would even join in against the victim. In addition, the East Side bordered what in 1897 the urban reformer Frank Moss termed the “lowest elements” of the Irish community, concentrated in tenements along the East River. By the turn of the twentieth century urban displacement, residential congestion, social dislocation, hooliganism, and local politics converged to bring about an unflattering image of the Irish among immigrant Jews.37

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The fact that the Irish spoke English probably blurred the distinction between them and Yankees for some Jewish immigrants, especially in the immediate period after arrival. But soon thereafter, friends and relatives, as well as daily experiences, served to highlight the differences. The speeches made at the rally of the American Hebrew League of Brooklyn were just one example of how immigrant Jews reconciled the rough daily reality of American life and the image of the American as the tolerant bearer of a higher culture. Jews viewed their assailants as “bums and loafers,” and since many of them were Irish immigrants or their Americanborn offspring (Germans were mentioned as hooligans to a lesser extent for reasons discussed below), they were cast as not genuinely Americans. Furthermore, many immigrant Jews typically identified the Irish as the New World’s embodiment of the drunk and violent muzhik. In numerous recollections (and in the ever combative Yiddish press) immigrant Jews related their encounters with their Celtic neighbors. The reminiscences regularly tell how Irish youths and men, clustered together on street corners and outside saloons, would accost and curse Jewish passersby, particularly picking on peddlers and those who looked “green” (recently arrived) and pulling their beards and sidelocks. The Reform rabbi and scholar Max Raisin, who came to the East Side in 1893 from his native Byelorussia, argued that among the neighboring Irish “many were robbers and murderers.” Certain notorious streets, among them the Bowery and Cherry Street, were unsafe for traditional-looking Jews. Jackson Street Park, at the East River waterfront, was also infamous; Jewish visitors to the park relayed how Irish gangs accosted and assaulted them. Playwright and stage designer Mordecai Gorelik, who lived on East Seventy-Third Street, recounted how Irish boys had constantly beaten him up and called him “Christ killer.” After some of the boys made him swallow some pesticide, Gorelik’s mother went to look for them. A “fat Irish woman” answered her question with, “Shut up, you God-damned Jew-kike.” The sociologist Thomas Jesse Jones, who studied an East Harlem block between 1897 and 1901, reported that the Jewish residents thought the Irish were “drunken,” “thriftless and careless.” One elderly Jewish woman confessed she “doesn’t like” the Irish.38 More than other nationalities, the Irish came to signify an unadulterated kind of goyishkayt, a Gentile essence that was seen as the innate opposite of Jewishness. As the popular preacher Hirsh Masliansky attacked Reform Judaism, he poked fun at the use of what he claimed were choirgirls, who exclaimed, “Hear O Israel!” with an “Irish accent.” When Abraham Cahan wanted to demonstrate how easy was it for Jewish men to weep at will, he juxtaposed them with the tough Irish. In the early 1890s Cahan wrote a column under the pen name “Der

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proletarishker maged” (The proletarian preacher), where he took on the manner of traditional Jewish orator. In a column before the Ninth of Av (a day of fasting commemorating primarily the destruction of the First and Second Temples), Cahan contended that “just as the cantor gives the signal,” Jewish men could cry until “you go deaf.” But if you “gather a few dozen Mikes and Patricks” and tell them to burst into tears, do not expect “even a sigh.” Another Yiddish journalist and writer, Yisroel Tsiyony, also saw the Irish as quintessential Gentiles. Tsiyony, a scion of a rabbinical dynasty who came to America in 1894, expressed the perpetual concern in 1899 about the lack of Jewish education. What will happen to our younger generation, Tsiyony asked, that raises itself in the public school and on the street between “Irish and other Christian” friends?39 The physical attacks and hooliganism encountered by Jewish immigrants were undoubtedly central to their image of the Irish and intensified the derision aimed at alleged Irish drunkenness and filthiness. In the late 1880s Yisroel Kopelov worked briefly as a door-to-door salesman in New York and wrote that the Irish were less antisemitic than the “much cleaner” Germans, but “in the Irish neighborhoods the dirtiness was exceptional!” and “roused disgust when [one looked] at them. Just the smell from the house was unbearable!” It was not only “the head lice, vermin, and roaches . . . the hunger, dejection, drunkenness and sight of battered faces,” but the whole atmosphere of “neglect and ignorance.” Hence Kopelov found it both sad and laughable when Irish children shouted at a Jew, “Dirty sheeny!” In a more “scientific” manner, Yiddish writer and editor Max Bukansky, who came to America from his native Lithuania in 1889, wrote an article in 1902 titled “Us and Them,” in which he detailed the traits of Jews in comparison with those of other groups. He roared: “Alcoholism: Irish and Poles 100%, Jews nil. Murder: Italians and Irish 100%, Jews nil. Immoral conduct: Irish, Germans and others 100%, Jews nil.” It is revealing that Yankees, who were less associated with general Gentile shortcomings, were left out. Future novelist Isaac Raboy was less scientific than Bukansky, yet he observed that an Irish worker, who taught him how to make hats, was drunk at the time and smelled of whiskey. Born a Jew in the Habsburg Empire (Slovakia), Edward A. Steiner came to America in 1886 and five years later became a Congregationalist minister (and therefore perhaps harbored an anti-Catholic tinge). Years later he admitted, “I pride myself upon not having any race prejudice, but smoldering within me . . . is a prejudice against the Irish.”40 Such sentiment was expressed in a debate about the viability of Zionism that was published in 1890 in a nonaligned Yiddish weekly, Der folksadvokat (the People’s advocate). While John Paley dismissed Zionism as impractical, the Yiddish wedding bard Elikum Tsunzer, whose folk poems

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were beloved by Yiddish-speaking Jews, believed that Zionism was necessary. Tsunzer claimed that in America anti-Jewish venom was on the rise because of demographic changes: “Here the whole regime is passing into the hands of the Irish and the Germans, who brought their antisemitism from Europe.” Advancing the idea that European immigrants like the Irish or Germans imported their anti-Jewish hatred to the United States was a common means of reconciling the elevated image of Americans and instances of bigotry. In the same year (1890), the Polish-born rabbi Marcus Jastrow echoed that attitude when he said at a conference of Jewish ministers in New York that anti-Jewish “poison .  .  . has been imported” to the country.41 The folkloristic dimension of jokes about Irish characteristics was scarcely absent.42 One text that reflected the image of the Irish, with its drunkenness and promiscuity, was “Sobered Up,” a short story published in 1901 by the playwright and poet Zisl Kornblit in the Zionist monthly the Maccabaean. In the story, a Jewish man falls in love with an Irish woman, leaves his Jewish family for her, and moves to an Irish neighborhood. Shortly thereafter the woman becomes unfaithful to him and brings home other (Irish) men, who call him a “sheeny.” The man becomes a drunkard, outdrinking all the Irish, and since he becomes one of them, they cease calling him a Jew. Before his death, he ponders the chasm separating his dignified Jewish life and his present bestial existence. Kornblit wrote the story as a sharp warning against intermarriage and assimilation, but his depiction of the Irish environment and its debauchery was no coincidence. Like other Jewish writers and speakers of the period, he expressed a Jewish sensibility that saw the Irish as a personification of a non-genteel “Gentileness” and the difficulties that bedeviled Jewish immigrants.43 The overall unfavorable image of the Irish among many Jewish immigrants was ironic, given Jews’ high regard for teachers in New York’s public schools—these paragons of pure Americanism were often the daughters of the same Irish who were usually cast as the brutish persecutors of Jews. In 1870 Irish women were 20 percent of the teachers in the city’s schools, and the number continued to grow. By 1900 American teachers in New York whose parents were born in Ireland exceeded the combined total of all female teachers with English- and German-born parents. For many immigrants (children and adults alike) the first encounter with the Gentile world was in the public schools and was embodied primarily in the form of a “Yankee” female teacher. Veteran Tammanite Louis Eisenstein recalled that his teacher was “of pure American background . . . of Anglo-Saxon descent.”44

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Jewish pupils looked up to these Irish American teachers as models of “true” Americans whose conduct should be followed. In 1886 a New York Orthodox Jew by the name of Yehuda Chaimsohn claimed, “The public school teachers are honest” with students and “talk to them gently,” and consequently Jewish youths “admire” them. Writing years later, Zalmen Yoffeh recalled, “Teachers were strange, awesome beings to us. We knew they were not Jewish, most of them, but neither did they fit into our conception of Christians.  .  .  . We knew Christians were an ignorant lot. Yet these teachers were so clever, seemed to know everything. . . . They were of a superior world and this was due them.” Journalist and humorist Harry Golden contrasted his teachers with Eastern European Gentiles: “These Christians [teachers] were different; they were kind, gentle, and generous.”45 Moreover, aside from “Yankee” schoolteachers, the image of the Irish was hardly unequivocal. Golden, who was born in Eastern Galicia and grew up on the East Side (and later married an Irish American wife), certainly exaggerated when writing, “It was the Irish and the Irish alone we Jews admired.” Yet especially for young immigrants, the Irish represented an Americanization model: they spoke the language and displayed toughness, and serving as police officers, firefighters, politicians, and pugilists, they emanated authority and self-confidence. Irish males exemplified a type of manliness that attracted some Jewish boys and young men—Jewish prizefighters and ballplayers frequently assumed Irish names: Cohen became Callahan and Moskowitz became Moran. The Sun reported in 1904, “The majority of Jack O’Briens and young Mc-Coys are Hebrews.” Further, Jewish and non-Jewish observers alike noted that, the low rate of intermarriage notwithstanding, the most common ones in those years were between Jewish men and Irish women. Since Irish women outnumbered Irish men, the former were more willing to marry outside their group. Rose Cohen, remembering how Irish “loafers” beat up Jewish peddlers, mentioned that it was often Irish women who escorted Jewish men past dangerous places, to prevent assaults by Irish youths.46 One could find among Jewish commentators admiration for Irish political shrewdness and national pride and for how they came to be the rulers of “New Cork.” The Yidishe gazetn in 1902 called on its readers to emulate the Irish American society the Ancient Order of the Hibernians, which struggled against the derogatory portrayal of the Irish in the press and vaudeville. Although Tammany Hall of the 1890s and 1900s did not allow Jews to achieve high-ranking positions (as late as 1907 there was still only one Jewish district leader in the city), it made its appeals in Yiddish

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and employed a group of young, ambitious Jews. Despite Jewish-Irish antagonism, impatience with antisemitism became a trademark of Tammany politicians. When a group of Irish toughs harassed Orthodox Jews, Tammany’s Big Tim Sullivan had the police raid the ruffians’ clubhouse and made the landlord throw them out; Sullivan then rented the place and allowed to it to be turned into a synagogue. John F. Ahearn, leader of the Fourth Assembly District, paid the fines of numerous Jewish peddlers who did not have a license. By the late 1890s young Jews and Irish were socializing in Hepster Club on Second Avenue and other of Tammany’s clubs. As a rule, among American-born Jews or those who came at a very young age (like Golden) there was more willingness to appreciate the virtues of the Irish.47 Reencountering Ashkenaz The image of Germans among Yiddish-speaking Jews in the closing years of the nineteenth century was even more ambiguous and fraught with internal difficulties than were representations of the Irish. Many Yiddishspeaking Jews shared an affection for German culture shown by German Jews, holding German language and culture as an indicator of refinement and modernity. One Yiddish historian commented that among Yiddish-speaking Jews there was a “deeply seated, exaggerated respect for German culture.” Certain immigrants tried to pass as German Jews, although when they tried to speak “datsh,” noted Yankev Magidov, you “could split your sides laughing.” Galician-born Louis Borgenicht, who came to New York in 1889 and became a successful clothing manufacturer, wrote that he was raised to look upon anything “‘German’ as the stamp of excellence in trade, science, thought.” An important Hebraist in America, Wolf (Ze’ev) Schur, whom a rival Jewish journalist called “dirty,” responded in 1892 in an angry letter to a friend: “I’m not a Russian Jew who just left the ghetto . . . and in my house reigns cleanliness like that of the Germans.”48 Yiddish-speaking immigrants were drawn to Manhattan’s southeast sections, in the area known as “Little Germany” (mainly south of Fourteenth Street and east of the Bowery), already prior to the great post1880 waves of immigration. In time the infl ux of Eastern European Jews, Italians, Greeks, and other groups would de-Germanize Little Germany (pushing out Germans of the Mosaic persuasion, too). Before and during that process, however, Yiddish-speaking Jews lived in close proximity to a large German population, whose language they could understand and whose culture was often more accessible to them than the American one. Thus to a certain degree, the nearby German community life provided a paradigm for the recently arrived immigrants.49

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Jewish immigrants thought of German organizational forms as a role model for themselves in the late nineteenth century. The landsmanshaftn (hometown associations) were the most popular organizational form among Jewish immigrants in America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Landsmanshaftn included various types of associations (Orthodox, socialist, or Zionist), most heavily infl uenced by German organizational culture and the German Vereine (associations). While immigrants had a high opinion of American fraternal orders and lodges, the German model was easier to emulate in terms of physical proximity, language, and the sway of existing German-Jewish fraternal orders. Besides the Germanized Yiddish that seemed to introduce an aura of grandeur, Jewish societies readily adopted the regalia, rituals, and rules common in German orders and lodges. Looking back in 1911, the Workmen’s Circle monthly, Der fraynd (the Friend), praised the socialist German workers’ mutual benefit society as the “spiritual father” of the Jewish order, and mentioned it as the first socialist benefit order in America.50 The high regard held by Jewish radicals for their German comrades was not for all things German per se, but rather was intertwined with class and ideological affiliation. However, since Jewish socialists and anarchists came in close contact mainly with likeminded Germans, their frame of reference was that particular segment of the German population, which then became “the Germans.” German immigrants in New York established a strong labor movement, which impressed a young Jewish cigar-maker called Samuel Gompers as “aggressive and rational.” Already before the Workmen’s Circle (1892) was patterned after a German socialist mutual benefit society, Russian Jewish intellectuals modeled the United Hebrew Trades (UHT; founded in 1888 at a meeting at the German labor lyceum on Fourth Street) after the United German Trades. German unions also contributed money in 1890 to establish the UHT’s weekly.51 The self-confidence, class-consciousness, and theoretical accomplishment that emanated from the German left-of-center environment in New York deeply impressed Jewish radicals. Russian Jewish youths, with their potpourri of socialism, anarchism, positivism, and collectivism brought over from Russian revolutionary circles, flocked to lecture halls and taverns, thirstily listening to talks by Sergius Schewitsch (a scion of the Latvian nobility educated in Germany and bridging Russian and German cultures), German socialists like Friedrich Sorge and Alexander Jonas, and anarchists like the fiery Johann Most. Jewish socialists had regularly read the socialist Volkszeitung (People’s newspaper), while Jewish anarchists preferred Most’s Freiheit (Freedom). German radicals often spoke to gatherings of Jewish Genossen (comrades), who attempted to use their less-than-perfect German in meetings of German socialists.

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Bernard Vaynshteyn, the longtime secretary of the UHT, sympathized with German workers—who were largely socialists, according to him— as opposed to Irish workers, who were conservative. At times the conditions of German workers were the standard by which to pass judgment. In the early 1890s, when Vaynshteyn visited a Jewish bakery in a basement on Orchard Street, he was shocked by the filth and the sight of the halfnaked bakers who slaved away near the ovens. One of the bakers, defending their situation (“in half-German”), cried out, “Things are not much better at the German bakeries.”52 Nonetheless, the images of Germans were more ambivalent than what the preceding might suggest, being sometimes marred following more direct contacts between Jewish immigrants and Germans. Many immigrants recounted unpleasant encounters with Germans, whether at workplaces or on the street. Some negative feelings remained from the transcontinental journey; those were coupled with the pain of dislocation and uncertainty (and in some memoirs a subsequent antipathy toward Germany, especially after 1933), which sometimes put Germans in a bad light. In spite of the aforesaid respect for German culture, Germans in person seemed less alluring. In New York, signs that barred Jews were not a rarity in turn-of-the-century German neighborhoods: Orthodox and Zionist journalist Joseph Isaac Bluestone recalled a German landlord on Delancey Street who, in 1882, had flatly refused to rent apartments to Jews. Years later, another German landlord on First Avenue called Jews “untidy and dirty.” Jewish immigrants who worked at predominantly German shops had not escaped the antagonism of their coworkers. When Yisroel Kopelov moved to New Jersey (circa 1884) and began working at a garment shop, most of his coworkers were Germans, who “did not hide their hatred toward Jews.” Later, when he began peddling in New York City, he recalled that, “the Germans were much cleaner [than the Irish],” but “in their hatred of Jews, the Germans surpassed the Irish many times over.”53 In the 1890s, New York’s waiters and bartenders union, which was mostly German, by and large refused to accept Jews (admitting only a few who could speak German well), thus forcing Jewish waiters to form their own union. In the early years of the twentieth century sixteen-year-old Sam Carasik came from Bobroysk to Baltimore, where he worked at a shop that made wooden fixtures (he would later move to New York). On his first day he thought he was back at the port of Bremen—most workers were the same big Germans with “potbellies that looked like kegs.” Carasik felt that the workers hated the few Jews who worked there, and “straight away on my first day I heard the phrase goddamn Jew.”54

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Adding to Jewish resentment was the problem of rowdyism, and German youths proved to be a match for Irish gangs, with whom they sometimes operated in tandem. Yehuda David Eisenstein complained equally about youths of Irish and German parents who beat up and injured Jewish peddlers. In reference to the establishment of the American Hebrew League of Brooklyn (1899), Eisenstein was filled with anger at the hooliganism of children of German and Irish immigrants, whom he called the “garbage of Europe” and “scum of the earth.” Such immigrants, binging on alcohol while listening to “Wacht am Rhein” (Guard on the Rhine; a popular nationalist song in Germany after 1840), could not control their offspring, who roamed the streets, pelted Jews with stones, and “pull[ed] the beards and sidelocks” of old men. Other Jews had also complained of what were referred to as mixed gangs of Germans and Irish. In February 1900 a Brooklyn Jew was arrested after he shot a young man described as the head of an Irish-German gang that would throw stones at his house.55 All the same, it is interesting that since Germans were seen as originating from a higher culture than the Irish, many immigrants (as well as the American-born) were more reluctant to make an overall negative generalization about them. Morris Hillquit (still called Hilkovitsh in the 1880s), who would become a key figure in the Socialist Party, asserted that German workers outranked American workers by far in “political intelligence.” Yisroel Beneqvit, who emigrated from the Pale to New York in 1888 and became an active anarchist, noted that Americans “had no progressive ideas” unlike the German intelligentsia in New York. Appreciation was not limited to radical circles: when Jewish observers mentioned German’s instinctive disposition for antisemitism and alcoholic beverages, they usually related to certain redeeming features or qualified their harsh characterization. Thus Abraham H. Fromenson wrote in 1899 that any Jew “who has strayed into the Irish or low German quarters” would be “the victim of cowardly brutality.” Boris Tomashevsky and his father were amazed to see how much a German could drink, yet Tomashevsky also came to appreciate German “calmness.” While acknowledging that the antisemitism of Goethe’s compatriots exceeded that of the “Paddies,” Jewish commentators still remarked that Germans were politically advanced, cleaner, and more respectable.56

The fact that most immigrant Jews had little, if any, contact with “Yankees” facilitated the idealization of the latter’s character. The pain of dislocation, economic adversity, anti-Jewish harassment, and unsympathetic and corrupt politics were rationalized as unrepresentative of

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true Americans, but rather were the doings of sordid and un-American elements. The portrayal of Americans as mostly open, amicable, industrious, thrifty, and tolerant enabled immigrants to reconcile the discrepancy between their pre-emigration expectations and the realities of American life. It is hardly surprising that many of the preceding characteristics attributed to Americans reflected Jewish self-image and demonstrated how Yankee ways were parallel to Jewish ones. This largely abstract image of the American was distant from how traditional Jewish society viewed Gentile society in general. It allowed the largest segment of Jewish immigrants to think in optimistic terms about fellow Americans, to desire to become American, to have great respect for teachers at public schools, and to enthusiastically adopt American cultural modes. The culture of Yankees did not seem antithetical to immigrants’ Jewish identity; moreover, the characteristics of the “Amerikaner” became part and parcel of American Jewish life also through the immigrants’ children, whose virtues and vices supposedly mirrored American collective traits. In a sense, meeting the Yankee ceased to be an extra-Jewish affair. For the immigrant population, the serpent in the garden was the kind of Americans they did meet. There was a noticeable and intriguing duality concerning non-Jews in the late nineteenth century: alongside positive images of “real” Americans emerged a very different image in daily life. Amid cases of maltreatment, brutality, and a fair amount of mutual dislike, Jewish immigrants often identified the shortcomings of America with their new neighbors (the images of Italians and Blacks will be dealt with in the following chapters). Those Jews saw in their neighbors the pernicious qualities generally associated in traditional Jewish society with Gentiles (in particular the peasantry), such as drunkenness, violence, and sexual promiscuity. Hence the image of Yankees shared some of the optimistic assumptions that modernizing Jews had about the upper echelons of non-Jewish society in Europe, while real-life neighbors were frequently seen with the blinders of long-established Jewish suspicion and trepidation. As in Eastern Europe, Jews continued to categorize surrounding Gentile society according to strata and national origin. Furthermore, in its view of the (middle-class and respectable) Yankee as the benchmark of civility, good judgment and proper behavior, the Jewish intelligentsia showed how it was touched by late nineteenthcentury American conceptions that had put Anglo-Saxons at the helm of human progress. Even those who strongly deplored American imperialism and the country’s political system often reiterated the distinction that classified Anglo-Saxon Protestants as genuine Americans. In that regard, one of Hutchins Hapgood’s observations is indeed germane: Jews were “susceptible to their Gentile environment, when that environment is of a

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high order of civilization.” As in Eastern Europe, Jews were drawn to the carriers of what they saw as a higher culture (hence Germans were portrayed in somewhat better terms than were the Irish) and not the culture of those whom they frequently encountered.57 The multifaceted image of non-Jews also served as a powerful tool in intra-Jewish affairs, as bickering sides chastised their opponents for shaming Jews as a whole in front of the “world.” This world was sometimes delineated as an enlightened entity functioning as an eternal judge and audience, to which Jews must always justify their behavior. At other times the Gentile world was depicted as fervently antisemitic and constantly seeking to condemn Jews, thus making it all the more crucial not to raise its ire. Those contrasting versions about the nature of the non-Jewish world preoccupied Jewish political debates and revealed the continuing ambivalence toward non-Jews. In the first decade of the twentieth century, local events in New York, turmoil in Eastern Europe, and the changing character of Jewish immigration to America would bring about a gradual shift in the attitudes of New York’s immigrant Jews toward non-Jews, including Yankees.

4

“The American Is Not Very Musical and Not So Sociable” T h e B e g i n n i n g s o f a n A t t i t u d i na l C h a n g e i n t h e E a r ly 1 9 0 0 s

In 1906, Abraham H. Fromenson, president of the Zionist Council of Greater New York and coeditor of the Tageblat, painted a gloomy picture of Americans’ attitude toward Jews. Addressing the Students’ Zionist Society at Yale University, Fromenson claimed that American Jews were still “regarded as aliens,” even if their ancestors came over in the midseventeenth century. That stood in stark contrast, he said sarcastically, to “the ingrained Americanism of those who, born here of foreign parents, were clever enough to have chosen other than Jewish parents.” Fromenson argued that when someone like former president Grover Cleveland extolled the Jews, he “draws the line between the American people—‘our nation’ and ‘them’—the Jews.” Fromenson’s opinion was quite different from four years earlier; in 1902 he had maintained that only recently arrived immigrants from Europe brought antisemitism to America, since such hatred was harbored “rarely if ever by the real American—the American whose American ancestry harks back several generations.”1 How was it that in a relatively short period Fromenson had moved away from an optimistic view of Jew-hatred as an imported, non-American phenomenon to a belief that prejudice was deep rooted in America? The early 1900s signaled the beginnings of a gradual attitudinal shift among the city’s immigrant Jews toward Gentiles, including the usually venerated Yankees. Fromenson’s later outlook was merely one indication of that shift toward “real” Americans, which began to erode their elevated image. That change was linked to a series of local events, which included an attack on a prominent rabbi’s funeral procession, and many parents’ protests against public schools and the board of education. Nevertheless, such episodes would have had less effect without their coinciding with international upheavals, mainly between 1903 and 1906: the pogroms and the abortive revolution in Russia. The old-stock identity of the most avid advocates of immigration restrictions contributed much to the disenchantment with “true” Americans, especially at a time of dire conditions in Russia. In their efforts to keep America’s doors open, Jewish 76

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immigrants found themselves in the same boat with other immigrants. That fact did not mean, however, that they instantly came to value those other groups; the early and sometimes cumbersome attempts to defend immigrants in general were mostly self-serving. But they were early signals of a shift from self-defense to the defense of others. Out on the Street The opening years of the twentieth century witnessed immigrant Jews in New York airing their grievances in outbursts of public protest. In some cases these demonstrations were aimed at abuses by other Jews, like the boycott of kosher butcher shops resulting from rising prices in kosher meat (1902), and a rent strike (1904), in which several hundred East Side residents took to the streets in protest against their landlords and refused to pay their rent. The anger in those consumer strikes was mainly directed at other Jews (butchers and landlords, though police officers were also regarded as villains). During a 1904 rent strike a reporter noted that the mutterings and threats on the streets and cafes ceased when a stranger approached.2 The funeral of Rabbi Jacob Joseph was the first event in the new century that directly pitted Jews against their Gentile assailants and the police, and seemed to continue the previous decades’ pattern of antiJewish hooliganism. On July 30, 1902, workers from Hoe and Company, a printing press factory on Grand Street, attacked the rabbi’s funeral procession, which passed by the building. Out of the factory’s windows and onto the mourners they rained down iron bolts, screws, oil-soaked rags, melon rinds, and sheets of water. On several occasions in the past Hoe’s male employees, many of Irish and German descent, had jeered at and physically attacked Jewish passersby, especially those with beards.3 After the workers’ first missiles hit the procession, some angry mourners in turn hurled those objects and other projectiles at the factory windows, while others ran into the factory’s downstairs offices to protest.4 The hearse continued to the Grand Street ferry; meanwhile, the police arrived, clubbed mostly the Jewish participants, and left more than two hundred people requiring medical attention.5 The reactions of the city’s immigrant Jews to this episode was more rage than surprise; street ruffians frequently assaulted Jewish immigrants, and indifferent or hostile police officers were far from novel. Yet the vileness and scope of the offense—an assault on a chief rabbi’s funeral procession in broad daylight—seemed to test Jewish patience to the maximum. At least half a dozen mass meetings were convened on the East Side, attracting thousands of people in the two days following the funeral. One produced the East Side Vigilance League, which demanded

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a fair investigation to bring to justice the culprits (both among Hoe’s workers and the police) and that New York’s Jews would receive adequate protection from the police.6 In numerous such meetings and special sessions of Jewish societies the mood alternated between fury and anxiety. In a huge rally that took place at Cooper Union a few speakers (among them the socialists Meyer London and Louis Miller) cautioned that Jews should protect themselves, receiving the longest rounds of applause.7 An important aspect of Jewish reaction to the assault was the relative absence of references to the ethnic identity of the attackers. There were surely a couple of reports that mentioned the “German and Irish” workers, or referred to hooligans who “come here from abroad” and “get drunk on Kentucky whiskey and Milwaukee beer” (read “Irish and Germans”). The vicissitudes of Jewish history—especially the Holocaust—infl uenced later accounts of the funeral, which portrayed Hoe’s workers as mostly Germans rather than Irish.8 But overall at the time, most Yiddish newspapers and speakers at the protest rallies identified the perpetrators as “antisemitic loafers,” “bandits,” “vile savages,” “hoodlums,” “dead-drunk slaves,” or just “Christians” without pointing out their ethnicity. Given the ubiquity of previous references to Irish and Germans as the main instigators of anti-Jewish violence in New York, the paucity of such accusations could be explained by the magnitude of the transgression: such an attack was too hard to write off as the usual mischief of Irish or German “wild shkotsim” (Gentile lads). The attack occurred during the administration of Yankee reformer Mayor Seth Low, who promised to fight police corruption and brutality.9 In the days following the rabbi’s funeral Jewish immigrants vented their anxieties about their place in America in light of the attack. Some took comfort in reiterating their belief in the infallibility of Yankees. The labor leader Joseph Barondess, who came to America in 1888 and was known for his melodramatic speeches, spoke at the protest rally in Cooper Union, declaring, “It is not the Americans who are to blame for it [anti-Jewish behavior], but the police.” Another speaker went further, arguing that antisemitism was “impossible” in America. Such attitudes led even the moderate, not to say bland, Yidishe velt ( Jewish world), which had been established by cautious uptowners, to complain that on the Jewish street you were not allowed to call Americans “antisemites”; they were always “loafers,” “bums,” or “hoodlums.”10 For some Jewish observers the entire affair indicated a more profound problem than the daily street violence and pestering. At a meeting of a Romanian Zionist women’s society called Shtern (Star) on Forsyth Street, guest speakers saw the incident as a proof that, also in America, Jews were “unsafe from antisemitism” and therefore they must focus on

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building a national home in the land of Israel. Others hurried to draw comparisons: “Chinese carry their deceased through the streets of New York and no one assaults them,” thundered the Yidishe gazetn, concluding that in New York, “we are treated worse than the Chinese.” Alarmist as ever, the Tageblat believed that many immigrants in New York were too insular: only Jews who lived in the ghetto and “see a Gentile only when he shines their shoes” could say that antisemitism was negligible in America. But those who traveled across the country attested that Jewhatred “exists in every corner of the country.”11 In a rare agreement with his conservative rivals, Louis Miller argued that “a new chapter” had opened in the history of Jews in America. Before this, “nobody” had talked about anti-Jewish hatred, and many Jews had “tried to hide it.” But the attack “clearly showed” that Jews were “not very liked by their Christian neighbors.” Socialist journalist (and esteemed ophthalmologist) Shmuel Peskin, who usually took an internationalist stance, had to acknowledge that too often socialists “idealize[d]” the American working class. Referring to the cultural preference of American workers (prizefights and ballgames), Peskin emphasized the divide between Americans and immigrant Jews, who did not share those tastes: “No serious, intelligent person can waste his free time fl inging a ball, shoving it with the feet, hitting it with a club, etc.” In the aftershocks of the funeral incident the traditional image of the Gentile masses as simple, unreflective, and potentially pernicious was applied to Americans.12 Throughout the summer of 1902 there were several cases in which Jews were assaulted and injured, especially on and off trolleys. A Brooklyn Jew named Shabtai Soyfer wrote in August 1902 that he saw so many Jews harassed, pushed, and hit by “bums” (with either tacit or explicit support of the conductor) that every Jew who got home safely should recite the goyml (a prayer said by Jews after escaping a great danger). Hardened preconceived beliefs facilitated the process of putting the blame on the Irish and Germans. A few days later Forverts reported that a group of twenty “Irishmen” attacked a group of Jews at Jackson Street Park, but a police officer who arrived later arrested two Jewish men who defended the group. The Tageblat warned that the funeral attack had “signaled to the Irish and German antisemites of this country” that they could freely “beat up and murder” Jews.13 The aftermath of Rabbi Jacob Joseph’s funeral marked a turning point; it brought to the surface doubts about the character of Yankees. The notion that perhaps such a case represented deeper hostility than the usual street hooliganism had unnerved Jewish observers and evoked shades of Old World imagery. The references to Chinese were not accidental and exposed the depth of Jewish insecurity about their own

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place in America. Despite the expected exaggerations of Jewish commentators, early and genuine anxiety appeared that deep down, “real” Americans did not see Jews as so different from nonwhite groups like the Chinese. Nonetheless, the funeral marked only the very beginning of a gradual shift. In the main, anger on the East Side was directed against the police, while Mayor Low was generally applauded for his honorable effort to investigate the case and punish the culprits. And as the Tageblat gloomily described the “pogrom” on Grand Street, it published a series of articles about American history and civics, praising the character of Americans and their love of freedom. A few weeks later, the daily rejected its own alarmism and concluded that the attack on the funeral procession did not reveal antisemitism, just hooliganism. It would take more than a riot to blemish seriously the image of the American.14 Forty-eight Hundred Miles Away The funeral assault and the ensuing police violence would soon pale in comparison with an event that happened less than nine months later. The three-day pogrom that broke out at Easter time (April 19–21, 1903) in the city of Kishinev in southwest Russia shocked New York Jews and propelled them to offer an unprecedented level of relief and of organized protest. The Yiddish press carried full reports and commentary on the slaying of forty-seven Jews; the injuring of nearly five hundred (some very severely); and the cruelty of the murderers, who drove nails through victims’ heads and noses, split open women’s bellies and stuffed them with feathers, or cut off their breasts. The director of the Educational Alliance (established by uptown Jews to Americanize the immigrants), David Blaustein, observed, “The whole of the East Side was in tears, in mourning and in sackcloth.” The Tageblat’s publisher, Kasriel Sarasohn, headed the hurriedly formed Kishinev Relief Committee, as dozens of protest meetings were held across New York, some large but many organized by small lodges and societies. Crowds flocked to the Windsor Theater on the Bowery to see Morris Hurvitz’s heartrending Yiddish play The Destruction of Kishinev, whose revenues were donated to the survivors of the pogrom who remained destitute. Lillian Wald visited Ellis Island and was horrified to see “little children with saber-cuts on their heads and bodies, mutilated and orphaned.” Virtually all New York Jews identified with the desperate cry of the Yiddish poet Shimen Frug: “Give shrouds for the dead and for the living—bread.”15 Reports in the Yiddish press about the murderous, drunken, axwielding Moldavian, Ukrainian, and Russian rioters evoked the traditional images of the violent, dull-minded muzhik. For some the cruelty

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reaffirmed their previously held perceptions. Peter (Perets) Wiernik, a Vilna-born intellectual and historian (and lifelong bachelor) and the longtime editor of the Orthodox Morgen zhurnal (Morning journal), had written some time before the pogrom, “Left to himself, the Russian is a most helpless human being” who was “below everything we know here.” Revealing his bias, Wiernik characterized the Russian as “the unhappy medium between the Asiatic and the European, possessing the low cunning of the former without his stoicism and the brutal aggressiveness of the latter without his fairness or activity.”16 The violent reality in Eastern Europe often reinforced the humane image of Americans. Particularly heart-warming for Jewish immigrants was the participation of many non-Jews at hundreds of protest meetings and benefits across the country, and the many sympathetic editorials in the American press. Even if those texts were inaccessible to many, the Yiddish press or English-reading family members and friends were quick to inform them. President Theodore Roosevelt himself condemned the “outrages” in Kishinev. More than a decade later, Joseph Barondess would praise Americans who showed their respect for the mourning Jews.17 In New York, khshuvim (prominent men) like former president Grover Cleveland (whom immigrants, in a play on his first name, had in earlier years sometimes called grober—a combination of “fat” and “coarse”), Mayor Seth Low, Reverend Lyman Abbott, the statesman Carl Schurz, Bishop Henry C. Potter, and the writer William Dean Howells (among many) partook in benefit and protest meetings or sent letters of sympathy. In addition, New York’s Chinese merchants held a benefit performance for the Kishinev victims, and the United Irish-American Societies of New York expressed their condemnation of the pogrom to President Roosevelt, Congress, and the Russian ambassador.18 The admiration of Jewish immigrants for well-known Gentiles who championed Jewish causes reveals the importance of the political gesture. Inexperienced with party politics and deeply impressed by respectable Americans who purportedly stood up for Jewish rights, East Side Jews treasured people like William Randolph Hearst, who became quite a votegetter in that district. Hearst’s New York American and Journal was fiercest in its attacks against “the bear with the bloody paws,” prodded the U.S. government into acting more firmly, nearly called for a war against Russia, and even criticized uptown Jews for being too timid in their protests. Although Hearst offered largely empty demagogy, East Side Jews adored him for his rhetoric, and in his abortive bid to be mayor of New York City (1905) and then governor (1906), the press magnate carried the Lower East Side by great majorities, producing East Side chants like “Hoist, Hoist / He is not the woist / We are for Hoist / Last and Foist.”19

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A parallel pattern appeared in the career of East Side congressman William Sulzer, who made flaming speeches in Congress against the maltreatment of Jews in Russia and Romania and, as chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, initiated measures against the czarist regime. On the campaign trail Sulzer cajoled Jewish audiences with such statements as “I am a friend of the Jew for what he has done to bless our civilization in art, in literature, in science.” Veteran Tammanyite Judge Jonah J. Goldstein, who was involved in many downtown associations, claimed that Jews “worshipped” Sulzer; they continued to support Sulzer, who had become New York’s governor, after he broke off with Tammany and was impeached in 1913. Although they were able to show few tangible achievements, the pro-Jewish gestures and style of local politicians contributed to the positive image of Americans and further sharpened the differences between them and Eastern Europeans Gentiles, especially with the outbreak of pogroms.20 The initial doubts, however, that had begun to cast shadows over the sunny image of “real” Americans did not dissipate. In 1903 William Williams, the New York commissioner of immigration, was quoted as saying that the physical condition of poor Jews and Italians was inferior to that of other immigrants. Writing a few weeks after the Kishinev pogrom, Abraham Cahan responded to Williams. Aside from his fuming that Williams focused on “Jews and Italians (only those two),” Cahan’s concern turned to the near future. He accurately predicted that a new wave of Jewish immigrants was about to flow out of Russia. “Would the Jews be admitted to America?” Cahan asked, adding, “The American or the Irish is allegedly more civilized than the Russian; but we know already of what his civilization consists.” Cahan then ominously remarked, “We can imagine by now to what those enthusiastic fighters, sportsmen could stoop, when their ‘fighting blood’ boils.” Paralleling the American with the Irish was in itself telling, as was the general characterization of Americans’ dormant violent temper. The reference to Williams anticipated signals of disillusionment that were linked to calls to restrict immigration.21 A month later Cahan wrote an editorial titled “Are We Safe in America?” in which he argued that antisemitism grew in places like New York City, where the large Jewish population was separated from non-Jews “exactly like in Russia.” Cahan described the American protests against the pogrom as ephemeral and claimed they did not reflect any real willingness to absorb more Jewish immigrants. “The Yankee cannot stand even the German,” warned Cahan, so “imagine the chasm between our antiquated Jews and the Americans.” But an avid Americanizer like Cahan could not bring himself to utter a sweeping denunciation of Americans,

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so he reminded readers of how “the Irish worker” resented Jews, and recalled the attack on Rabbi Joseph’s funeral. That event was hardly a Russian pogrom, Cahan wrote, but in case of “a real clash between the Irish, for example, and Jews, more blood would be spilled than in Russia.” Cahan’s articles disclose both the persistence of and the early cracks in the distinction between the elevated image of the American, who stood for justice and equality, and the rougher reality, which was conveniently blamed on other groups or corrupt American individuals.22 Meeting the Offspring of La Bella Paese By the first decade of the twentieth century the images of other groups, such as the Italians, had crystallized. Some historians and labor leaders on occasion have idealized the relationship between the two groups. Several historians have suggested that both Italians and Jews were extremely verbal and shared the habits of loud speech, broad gestures, and pleasure in food—the two groups ostensibly helped to “de-puritanize” America. Labor leaders and chroniclers have claimed that Jews and Italians worked “harmoniously” together and have pointed out the low level of antisemitism in Italy.23 A few Jewish immigrants also commented on the resemblance between Italians and Jews. Yehoshua Vagman, a maskil who came to New York from Odessa in 1878, remarked in 1888, “There are no other people” like the Italians, who reminded one of the “pig market” Jews (using the sarcastic term for the market on Hester Street where one could buy anything but pork). “Their Mulberry Street is almost as clean as our Hester [Street],” he noted sardonically, “and their trades are also as pretty and fine as ours.” Some immigrants marveled at the physical likeness between Italians and Jews, mistaking fellow Jews for “lokshn” (noodles, meaning Italians). When Yiddish writer Leon Kobrin first met the poet Morris Rosenfeld (early 1890s), he was sure that the man “with the fiery black eyes, pitch-black mustache and black curly hair [was] an Italian.” Moyshe Vaysman, a Jewish immigrant from Poland who worked as a barber in different cities, described how upon moving from New York to Chicago in 1913, he was looking for a job. He was perplexed as he went into a big barbershop on Maxwell Street, because the young man who stood there “looked like either a Jew or an Italian,” and only after Vaysman approached him, hesitantly speaking in Yiddish, did he learn that the man was a Jew.24 Whereas in general immigrant Jews rarely viewed Italians with the level of antagonism and fear shown toward the Irish, the picture was more ambivalent than some of the preceding impressions might imply. In the 1890s Italian immigrants began to enter New York’s garment industry

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in large numbers, and by 1900 several neighborhoods in New York became Italian enclaves, in close proximity to Jewish neighborhoods, where about 225,000 Italian-born immigrants (mainly from Sicily and southern Italy) lived. At that period Jewish immigrants already had a discernable set of images of the Italians, usually a superficial mixture of exoticism and aversion. Apart from the omnipresent image of the Italian organ-grinder (with the inevitable monkey), the Yiddish press abounded with stories about knife-brandishing Italians, who were willing to stab almost anyone over a trifle dispute. Dovid M. Hermalin, who came to New York in 1885 from Vaslui (Romania) and would become one of the most popular columnists in the Yiddish press, wrote about criminality in New York in 1887, rhetorically wondering, “Is there a bigger murderer or thief than the Irish and the Italian?” Never in short supply in turn-of-the-century Yiddish newspapers were such stories as that of one Italian stabbing to death another Italian (because the latter parked his horse and carriage at the former’s stable without permission), a young Italian cutting his ex-girlfriend’s face after she married another man, and two Italians shooting each other over a card game. The image of the knife-wielding Italian was so vivid that in 1899 the Tageblat marveled at an Italian man who did not avenge himself on his wife “with a stiletto or a revolver in the Italian style.”25 The fact that Jews were occasionally the victims of crimes committed by Italian perpetrators tended to fortify the image of Italian hotheadedness and the ensuing Jewish trepidation. New York police commissioner (1904–1906) William McAdoo remarked that Jewish immigrants showed an ill-concealed distrust of the Italians, since Jews feared the “baser sort” of Italians who were armed with deadly weapons. There were a few cases in which Jewish jewelry peddlers, whose merchandise and installment plans were especially popular in the Italian quarters, were attacked and murdered by Italian buyers over a confl ict about payments. Different background and languages caused unavoidable misunderstandings between Jewish and Italian immigrants: Galician-born Louis Borgenicht, who peddled in the Italian sections of Hoboken in the 1890s, recounted how his Italian customers tried to steal from him, and had he dared say anything, they “might kill you” on the spot. Undoubtedly, Borgenicht also depicted how Irish youths harassed him (and how Jewish peddlers avoided streets bordering on the East River for that reason), but he did not imply that they might have stabbed him. In 1901 a crowd of Jews nearly attacked an Italian fruit vendor on Ludlow Street after the latter stabbed a Jewish peddler. When the crowd saw the peddler’s bloody face, people began shouting in Yiddish and English, “Beat the Italian,” and “Lynch the murderer,” and possibly roughed him up before the police arrived. With such impressions, it was almost natural that the “Italian-looking” Morris

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Rosenfeld, in one of his feuilletons, wrote of an Italian fruit vendor who was testy and “ready to stab” a loud Jewish customer of his.26 In some cases Jewish immigrants showed a reluctance to live next to Italians. In 1899 the Jewish residents at an East Harlem tenement block complained to the board of health about Italians in a neighboring building and compelled the landlord to remove them and rent the apartments to Jews. Other Jewish families on that block moved out of buildings containing Italians (and other nationalities) to tenement houses that had no Italian residents. Yiddish journalist Dovid Shub recalled that by about 1900 Forsyth and Chrystie Streets had been populated mainly by Jews, but seven or eight years later they had become predominantly Italian. In 1904 the Forverts noted the growing Jewish population in East Harlem, dubbing it the “new East Side.” The article explained that Italians were concentrated especially between 103rd and 115th Streets, and though some Jews and Germans also live in those blocks, you could barely see them “because of the Macaronis.” The unnamed writer added that “murders, stabbings, shootings, and brawls” frequently occurred in those blocks because of its Italian population. Still, many Jews continued to live next to Italians, and it is noteworthy that Italians were rarely cast as the reincarnation of “Gentileness,” as was often the case with the Irish; and the level of intergroup tension was considerably lower than between immigrant Jews and Irish Americans. The intensive contacts between Jews and Italians in the needle trades and in the labor movement would later alter the image of Italians, adding nuance to the picture.27 Signs of Jewish alarm regarding the “italyener” sometimes reached the city’s public schools. In 1904 New York witnessed a few scares that drove wailing, panic-stricken immigrant Jewish parents to storm the public schools their children attended, hammer at the doors, occasionally smash the windows, and demand that their children would be immediately let outside. In the background were gruesome stories about Italian crime that were splashed across New York’s papers, which in 1903 began applying the term “Black Hand” when reporting almost any violent offense occurring in Italian neighborhoods. The scares were provoked by rumors that the Black Hand allegedly planned to dynamite public schools. In September 1904, for example, close to a thousand Jewish parents and relatives massed outside Public School 177 (at Monroe and Market Streets), nervously banging on the heavy oak doors, shouting out their children’s names, and begging them to come home at once. The rumors about the Black Hand and the ensuing scares unquestionably involved Italian parents as well and revealed in general the insecurity, anxiety, and volatility of immigrant communities. The panics showed that besides the impressions created by unmediated contact, susceptibility to American

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stereotypes also affected the ways immigrant Jews viewed other groups. In an age of a mass, sensationalist press, even “greenhorns” who could barely speak or read English absorbed bits and pieces of information that sent them charging toward the schools.28 Revolution Abroad and Different Kinds of Immigrants The Black Hand panics were eclipsed two years later by a different school-related scare, but in the meantime a series of events overseas had an important effect on New York’s Jewish population. While the impact of the Kishinev pogrom had not yet been fully absorbed by New York Jews, hundreds of pogroms erupted (especially in 1905–1906) in Russia, in which more than three thousands Jews were murdered. Those catastrophes changed, in turn, the character of Jewish immigration to America. The pogroms involved much more violence and murder than those of the early 1880s and were usually committed with the authorities’ implicit or unconcealed approval. Immigration peaked, and more Jews immigrated to America between 1903 and 1907 (circa 615,000, mostly from Russia) than between 1890 and 1902 (about 580,000). Even more significant than sheer numbers was the ideological background of many of the newer immigrants. In October 1904 the Forverts enthusiastically reported that many of the newcomers were educated; the paper declared there were days at Ellis Island when you could find 10 percent of “intelligent” people among the immigrants, who brought with them the convictions and tastes of the Russian revolutionary movement.29 The supposedly higher culture of the new immigrants enabled the socialist daily to argue that they outdid the Americans in a few respects. In 1905 the Forverts published an unsigned article about “Jewish immigrants in the parks,” where their behavior was juxtaposed with that of Americans: Jews “like companionship more than the Americans” and would sit in a circle and listen to one of them read Russian poetry or prose aloud. The American sat alone, “stiff and starched and not saying a word, as the American usually does when he is in the park.” Seeing hundreds of young people in Central Park, Prospect Park, and parks in the Bronx spending their weekends singing Russian songs “was a novelty for the American. He is not very musical and not so sociable, and his songs do not have that lusciousness” of the Russian songs.30 The Forverts’s elation was connected to the varied radicalism of many of the new arrivals. Although Bundists, socialist Zionists, and socialist territorialists were sharply divided, they shared a commitment to both socialism and Jewish nationalism. The latter was particularly noticeable: Kishinev and subsequent massacres, with their large number of casualties, the cruelty of the murders, and the complicity of the czarist regime,

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brought about a tidal wave of Jewish nationalism in various forms. Jewish resentment was naturally felt against not only the Russian government but also the non-Jewish masses. Already in April 1903 Zionist leader Louis Lipsky wrote about the deep shock of Russian Jews in New York and mentioned how Jewish radicals were especially “paralyzed”; many had dedicated their lives to the revolutionary movement in Russia, and when the oppressed masses expressed their will, they massacred Jews. The internationalist wing of the Jewish labor movement, which viewed Jewish identity as irrelevant, was seriously weakened. Yiddish journalist and historian Herts Burgin described a “nationalist epidemic” that had swept the Jewish masses in America.31 The nationalist tide brought up thoughts about innate differences between Jews and Gentiles. Jewish intellectuals were touched by turnof-the-century racial categorizations, which they blended with the traditional Jewish concept of “Zera Yisrael” (the seed of Israel): the belief that all Jews are descended from the biblical Abraham. This perceived primordial kinship was sometimes interpreted as a flaw, like entailing a certain physique. In 1901 Avner Tanenboym lamented that Jews were “weaker” than other groups and “the strongest Jew cannot stand up to the average Irishman or American, and that is sad.” Yet the rise of Jewish nationalism also added assertiveness to the idea of common ancestry. In that context Cahan remarked, in 1903, “The weakest Jew has in him healthier and purer blood than the strongest Christian,” and even the internationalist editor of the Tsukunft, Philip Kranz, was willing to air such a sentiment; he accepted a piece by A. Litvin (pseudonym of Shmuel Hurvitz), the Yiddish journalist and a pioneer of socialist Zionism in America, who exclaimed, “I am proud that I am descended neither from the Hottentots nor from the Chinese, but that I am a Jew.” The amalgamation of older ideas about Jewish descent with the new, fashionable vocabulary about race appealed to Jewish intellectuals at a time when violence abroad seemed to deepen the divide between Jews and non-Jews.32 Acquainted with revolutionary tactics and professing various forms of Jewish nationalism, the newcomers had profoundly enriched the organizational life of Gotham’s Jewish immigrants, galvanizing them to be bolder in manifesting their passions and sorrows. An idea that was embraced by virtually all New York Jews was the support of self-defense in Russia. In late 1905 a group of East Side Jewish radicals created the short-lived Jewish Defense Association, which raised funds to purchase weapons for the Jewish self-defense forces in Russia. The association’s motto was the Talmudic dictum “If I am not for myself who is for me?” and the high point of its brief existence occurred in December 1905, when all segments of New York Jewry came together for a huge troyer

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marsh (mourning march) for the victims of the pogroms in Russia. Joseph Barondess led the somber main column of a march that attracted some two hundred thousand Jews, who passed through unusually quiet Lower East Side streets, closed shops and black buntings hanging from windows and fire escapes.33 The savagery of the pogroms reinforced negative images of Gentiles in general. In late 1905 Morris Rosenfeld wrote a short piece called “My Shadow and I,” confessing that he had always been a proud American, and thought, “Here is my mayor, my Senator, my President, my military” and “my citizenship papers are my guard.” But since “Jewish blood is devalued . . . the knife lies here on my throat,” and Rosenfeld began envisioning “pogroms on East Broadway, on Canal Street.” The poet wrote that “I give way to the smallest sheygetz [Gentile boy]” on the street, for fear the latter would “take a look at the newspaper and see that it was still permissible to murder Jews.” Rosenfeld complained that in times like those, “the Italian garbage man,” whose people had a nation-state, was more secure than the richest Jewish banker: “if heaven forbid you brush against an Italian banana peddler, King Emmanuel would drown you in boiling macaroni.” Although subjective, Rosenfeld’s impressions capture the Jewish mood and its tendency to bridge continents with a heightened awareness of danger.34 Educational Aspersions Rosenfeld had lived in the country for about two decades when he wrote “My Shadow and I.” The effect of the pogroms abroad was particularly visible among the newly arrived immigrants between 1903 and 1906, when Jewish immigration to America had significantly increased. The substantial infl ux of immigrants into New York was at the backdrop of a school scare in 1906, which was larger than the earlier and sporadic “Black Hand” panics.35 On the morning of June 27, 1906, riots erupted on the Lower East Side. Tearing their hair, beating their breasts, and shaking their fists, a few thousand wailing parents (mostly Jewish immigrants) stormed a dozen public schools in the neighborhood. The parents cried out that physicians were cutting the throats of their children—“Give us our children, murderers!” a journalist at the scene heard one parent shout. “My goodness, they slaughter Jewish children! I’ll break the windows if they don’t return my child! Vey’s mir, eighty-two children were slaughtered at the Cannon Street school!” The Sun reported that during the panic it was dangerous to walk on the East Side wearing eyeglasses, because parents there might mistake you for a doctor and chase after you. Not being admitted at first, the parents smashed windows, broke down doors, and threw anything they could pick up—stones, bricks, and

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vegetables—at the schools. When the children were let out to calm the crowds, suspicious parents made them open their mouths to see whether something was missing. The next day saw similar disturbances in Jewish neighborhoods in Williamsburg and Brownsville, and also in Manhattan’s Little Italy. The catalyst for the turmoil was swollen adenoids that could interfere with breathing. A week before the panic, the principal of PS 110 (at Broome and Cannon Streets) had invited board of health physicians and nurses to perform the relatively minor operation of removing the adenoids of a few pupils, to save their parents the trouble and expense of taking the children to the hospital. Although the principal explained to a reporter that no child was touched without the consent of his or her parents, many parents could not read the English notes sent from school (and even Yiddish explanations did not clarify the technical terms); in some cases the pupils themselves signed the authorization.36 According to the New York press and an unnamed official of the Board of Education, those who initially spread rumors about “Christians” who slit the throats of Jewish children were East Side practitioners; often Jewish immigrants themselves and not always certified physicians, they made a living by offering cheaper medical treatment to tenement dwellers. They feared that the board of health would rob them of a major source of livelihood. As in the earlier school scares, the parents’ hysterical charge was linked to broader anxieties and to the volatility of immigrant populations, evident in similar disturbances by Italian immigrants. Jews were not the only immigrants who worried themselves sick about their children’s situation in the institutions of a foreign country, whose language and culture were initially a closed book to them.37 Beyond the wider immigrant context, however, the panic reflected not only particular Jewish sensibilities but also the multifaceted attitude toward non-Jews. The rumors about murderous doctors drew in mostly Jewish men and women. All in all, thousands of Jewish parents and relatives (though not fifty thousand, as the Sun maintained) rushed to at least fifteen schools over two days on the East Side and in Brooklyn, while the disturbance in Little Italy involved a few hundred people who concentrated around three schools. The cries of some parents— “Remember Kishinev!” and “They are working for the czar!” showed the deep scar of the latest pogroms in Russia on immigrants who either had survived them or had heard harrowing stories about them from family and friends. The most recent of those pogroms had occurred in Bialystok earlier that month ( June 1906) and cost the lives of approximately two hundred Jews. As the Yiddish papers and the New York Times aptly noted, the recently arrived Russian Jews were prepared to believe any tale of violence against Jews.38

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For the parents and relatives who stormed the schools the differences between Americans and other Gentiles seemed negligible. Twenty-fouryear-old David Stern of Orchard Street, who jumped on a wall in front of PS 20 (at Rivington and Forsyth Streets) and made an impromptu speech in Yiddish before the agitated crowd. “Here in free America, it is worse than Bialystok! They take children and cut them up!” he shouted, adding, “Fools, to send your children to American schools!” Likewise, sixteen-year-old Esther Blaustein of Rivington Street stirred up the crowd with a Yiddish speech from the back of a wagon, claiming she had seen schoolchildren murdered by teachers. Twenty-eight-year-old Cipora Flohr of Stanton Street fought her way into a school building four successive times, coming back even after she was shown that her children were alive and well. Otto Gottlieb, a jeweler from Grand Street, egged on the crowd with shouts of “They’re cutting their heads off !”39 While apprehensive newcomers tended to suspect that every Gentile was potentially as pernicious as those in Eastern Europe, the elites in the Yiddish-speaking population (e.g., teachers, social workers, physicians, and journalists) and older immigrants scoffed at the panic-stricken rioters. A Jewish health department physician, who was almost attacked by parents outside a Brooklyn school, reproached the throng around him in Yiddish, scolding that they “should be ashamed of themselves” for believing that the doctors were about to “commit a Bialystok in the public schools.” An unnamed young Jewish teacher who tried to calm the parents down noted, “We Jews are a very excitable race . . . and those women in their imagination could probably see their children lying dead before them.” The Yiddish press reported that the children wanted to “bury themselves with shame” for what their parents did, and many “made fun of their parents’ stupidity.”40 The Orthodox Morgen zhurnal also attacked the crowd, whose “crazy excitement” could be expected only in a mental institution or “among the wild Filipinos.” The mothers acted in a way that was more suitable for “Negroes or Indians” than Jews; but it happened “to Jews, to Jewish wives,” bemoaned the paper, and “instead of laughing, we felt like crying in shame.” The paper wondered what Americans would think now, after immigrant Jews showed their ignorance, believing “Americans were capable of committing such inhumane crimes”; and the women attacked not just Americans, but the “kindhearted and innocent teachers,” who sacrificed so much for their children. Did those “women . . . delude themselves that the teachers [had] become antisemites overnight?” No one can deny, concluded the paper, that we Jews had retained a few shortcomings from our long exile, and “in some Jews these deficiencies reached a disgusting level.”41

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The Morgen zhurnal’s disapproval of the “wives” was neither coincidental nor unique. To put the scare in context, Yiddish papers emphasized that it was the women who had run amok. Despite reports that many men also rushed to the schools, clashed with police officers, and tore out their hair, it was convenient to depict the participants as hysterical mothers or “foolish wives.” The Tageblat assured its readers that “once the fathers returned from work,” they calmed the mothers down and the panic ended. The Forverts described women “in dirty aprons” leading the riots, pulling out doors, and throwing stones at windows. Restricting the participants to hysterical women enabled the Yiddish press to dismiss the incidents as typical feminine outbursts, reconciling such conduct with the Jewish selfimage as that of a nonviolent and judicious people. The uncomplimentary portrayal of the crowds attested to the writers’ fears that Americans might view Jews as being as uncivilized as nonwhite groups and suggests why they offered a gender-specific explanation.42 However, the Yiddish press also pointed a finger elsewhere. The daily Varhayt (Truth), established by Louis E. Miller in November 1905 as an independent socialist paper (which gradually became a mouthpiece for secular Jewish nationalism and Tammany Hall), defended the parents while reaffirming gendered images. “Many of the women,” wrote the Varhayt’s Dovid Hermalin, “were present at the pogroms in Kishinev, Homel, Zhitomir, Minsk, or Odessa,” where the mobs “slit the throats of Jewish children.” When mothers spotted a little blood on their children, it was no wonder that their “weak nerves” betrayed them. For a paper that would soon back Tammany, the proffered identity of the real culprits in the panic was somewhat surprising: “Irish teachers and principals.” They had little respect for the women’s feelings and did not let them see their children (the pupils in most schools were actually let out after a short time). Hermalin complained that only the East Side Jews were “sleeping” and gave “free rein to the Irish teachers and principals who hate and scorn Jews.” Hermalin even mentioned Italians as an example to follow, since they purportedly succeeded in their demand to bring in Italian teachers, or teachers who spoke Italian.43 One should not be too impressed by the early depiction of Italians as role models. Overall the Yiddish press provided vivid details of how Italian parents “took out their stilettos,” and nearly stabbed the teachers and janitors, as their children brought salt and pepper to school to throw in the doctors’ eyes. The Italians’ reaction probably gave some consolation to the Jewish press and communal leaders, who were acutely preoccupied with public relations; at least Italian immigrants were “the same fools” as the Jewish parents and perhaps even exceeded them in foolishness. A more direct apologetic device was applied by Fromenson, who drew

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a different analogy to excuse the parents, asking, “Would German or Irish, or even blue-blooded American mothers and fathers have acted differently” had such a report “reached their ears from a hundred tongues?” Those responses illustrate how the Jewish obsession with group image and apologetics were frequently aimed internally as well.44 In any case, whereas the school panic fl ickered and vanished almost immediately, it demonstrates how the horrors abroad and a lack of knowledge on the part of many newcomers combined to question the benevolence of Americans, even if temporarily. Six months later, an event that also involved public schools—a citywide boycott of pre-Christmas classes by Jewish pupils—did not cause a violent disturbance, but unnerved immigrant Jews (and this time their elites and some uptown Jews as well) in a more profound way than the rumors about murderous doctors and teachers. The Jewish fear of proselytizing in school should be understood against the backdrop of what was regarded as a looming menace: Protestant missionaries.45 By 1905 there were no less than seven Christian missions on the East Side devoted mainly to attracting Jews, and especially children. In the 1880s pious Jews in New York even suspected that the “tsitsilisten” (socialists) were missionaries. Missionaries who preached on the ghetto’s street corners got their fair share of jeers, rotten fruit, eggs, and spittle and were occasionally roughed up. The head of one mission in the late 1890s, Wilson W. Dunlop, was paralyzed; thus he was mostly spat on, while his large wagon received more extreme treatment. In 1899 the Yiddish papers bristled with stories about “hundreds” of cases in which missionaries “cut the flesh” of East Side children by engraving crosses on their hands, most famously in the case of five-year-old Morris Braf, whose body was reportedly burned with a branding iron.46 Nevertheless, attitudes toward missionaries were hardly monolithic. It is true that in general, immigrant Jews tried to refrain from turning to non-Jewish aid. In 1914 Jacob Schiff, the famed Jewish philanthropist and leader of the American Jewish Committee, remarked, “A Jew would rather cut his hand off than apply for relief from non-Jewish sources.” Yet at times poverty was a counterpoint to such unwillingness and suspicion and somewhat mitigated the intimidating image of missionaries. Needy immigrants occasionally approached the missions, which offered clothing, medical clinics, English classes, sewing classes for women, and a host of activities for children. With their treats, outings, parties, and lectures, missionaries were often indistinguishable from genuine settlement houses (and some of the latter were imbued anyhow with a Christian sense of mission). In 1905, for instance, the Federation of Churches and

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Christian Organizations of New York City sponsored eight summer vacation Bible schools on the East Side that enrolled more than two thousand Jewish children. Sometimes parents were not aware that a building bearing the inscription “Hear O Israel” in Hebrew was actually a mission, or they did not supervise their children that closely to know they went to receive candy (plus lectures) from the evangelizers. After all, despite the horror stories in the Yiddish press, American komrim (clergymen), who gave Jewish children milk, cookies, and ice cream, seemed much less intimidating than the galokhim (priests) of Eastern Europe. As late as 1912 the American Hebrew complained of the “indifference” of Jewish parents in Brooklyn who rendered “helpless” those who fought the missions.47 Christian teachings at public schools were seen as a much greater threat. One could dismiss a soapbox missionary or a storefront mission on Grand Street, but for Jewish immigrants the public school was a coveted institution, which held out great democratic promise and served as a bridge to non-Jewish society. The significance of the 1906 school strike is that Jewish immigrants came out against the revered schools, which seemed to threaten Jewish identity.48 In December 1906 the Board of Education rejected the request of the Orthodox Jewish Congregational Union of America (a fairly moderate and Americanized association, later known as the Orthodox Union, or OU) to eliminate all Christmas ceremonies. When teachers told their pupils (before the weekend of December 22–23, 1906) to report in their best clothes on the day before the Christmas recess for closing exercises, it gave rise to concerns about Christian ceremonies in school. Over that weekend a call for a citywide boycott of the schools was published in the Tageblat and the Morgen zhurnal, resulting in tens of thousands of Jewish pupils—as many as half of those registered in some neighborhoods—remaining home on December 24.49 The school boycott was hardly consensual among the city’s Jews. Yet it is significant that both the pro- and antistrike sides invoked positive images of the American character to bolster their stances. Even the Varhayt—which warned that the struggle might fan antisemitism—commented that the overwhelming Christian majority could have announced that “in America Christianity is the state religion.” But although they had the power, American Christians refrained from doing so. They avoided that, argued the paper, “because the development of civilization has dismissed” such an option. Therefore the Jews ought to be “as polite and civilized” as the Gentiles in America. On the other side, the Morgen zhurnal claimed that fears of antisemitism proved to be foolish. Hatred of Jews, contended the Orthodox daily, was not related to Jewish behavior but to the character of non-Jews: “The Christians [in America] are

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better. . . . Had eighty million Russians populated the United States, there would have been pogroms in America just like in Russia; had the population been German, we would have had Stoeckers and Ahlwardts” and legal discrimination. The situation of American Jews was totally different from that of Jews in Russia or Germany because Gentiles in those countries were worse than the Americans.50 Another voice argued that both sides were wrong. The socialist Zionist weekly Der yidisher kemfer (the Jewish fighter) was established in 1906 by the Poalei Zion (Workers of Zion) Party. Edited by Kalman Marmor and the Yiddish playwright Dovid Pinsky, the Kemfer attacked uptown German Jews and the Varhayt, which thought that Jews should remain “quieter than water and shorter than grass.” But the weekly also opposed the “simply useless” school strike. The Kemfer argued, “We cannot force our will on others,” and advised, “Do not complain about others [public schools]”; it concluded that Jews in America should establish their own schools. In December 1910 socialist Zionists launched their first folkshul (folk school; also called National Radical School), which provided secular Jewish education on the weekends. In 1911 and 1912 more schools were founded in Harlem, Brownsville, the Bronx, and other cities, with a total of twelve hundred pupils, educating Jewish youth in a national secular spirit. The socialist Zionists were not alone in those years in their thorough criticism of American life; Chaim Zhitlovsky, champion of Yiddish and Jewish Diaspora nationalism, argued in 1911 that “our radical labor is very displeased with the type of person that the American school produces . . . and it tends to throw the blame entirely on American life and the American education system.” In that year the Arbeter Ring (Workmen’s Circle) founded ten Sunday Yiddish schools in New York with about fifteen hundred students.51 Both Orthodox and secular advocates of Jewish educational separatism without doubt remained an isolated minority in the period of the great wave of immigration. The overwhelming majority of immigrant Jews continued to cherish public schools as the only avenue for the education of their children. Still, the two school-related episodes reveal many parents’ belief that American teachers, principals, and administrators, while working for a venerable institution, were willing to abuse Jewish pupils (whether the children’s physical safety or their Jewishness). It is impossible to estimate how many among the tens of thousands of parents who kept their children home in December 1906 had stormed the same schools at the cutthroat panic six months earlier. But both cases show how even in the relatively benign setting of the public school, immigrant Jews began attributing to Americans the more generalized, negative images of Gentiles.

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The Torquemada of Ellis Island In the same year as the school riots and boycott (1906), Vermont senator William P. Dillingham introduced an immigration bill that included a literacy test amendment. Although it failed to pass the House, the bill eventually led to the establishment of an immigration commission (the Dillingham Commission).52 New York Jews were quite aware of the changing mood in America that dimmed the prospects of future immigration. For them this issue had become acute: the waves of pogroms in Russia between 1903 and 1906 and the increasing flow of emigrants leaving Eastern Europe made it all the more important to keep America’s gates open, as the well-being of family members was at stake. Other immigrant groups were in the same boat, and their help was essential to fend off the curtailment of immigration.53 The growing movement for immigration restriction, and the old-stock identity of the strongest advocates of restriction would contribute a good deal to disenchantment with “true” Americans. In the summer of 1909 New York Jews received a stark reminder of immigration restriction, one that hit home much more than the Dillingham Bill. William Williams, New York’s commissioner of immigration, decreed in June 1909 that each immigrant would have to show the possession of twenty-five dollars in order to be admitted. That sum was out of reach for many Jewish families, who spent nearly all their savings on purchasing ship tickets and on paying for lodging while crossing Europe en route to America. Hundreds of Jewish immigrants were detained in Ellis Island and some were sent back to Europe. One of these detained individuals described how the twenty-five-dollar edict ruined many Jewish families across Russia. A few heated mass meetings assembled on the East Side to protest the decree; a big rally in Clinton Hall on July 10, 1909, with representatives from fifty landsmanshaftn and organizations, nominated a committee that included socialist essayist Karl Fornberg (pseudonym of Yisha’aya Rosenberg); Bernard Zemel, leader of the Galician Jews; and Alexander Harkavy, who served as representative of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS) on Ellis Island. The committee was not only to lead a campaign against the decree, but also to cooperate with immigrant societies of other nationalities.54 The news of Williams’s requirement had provoked much confusion and panic among immigrants making their way to America. Reports from the cities of Bremen and Eydtkuhnen mentioned that dozens of Jews and non-Jews alike who could not present the necessary sum were sent back. Fornberg, who served as New York correspondent for Der yudisher emigrant (the Jewish immigrant), warned in 1908 of “growing

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antisemitism“ in America and predicted that immigration restrictions “would be directed mainly against the Jews.” A year later he wrote bleakly that Williams deported even those who had enough money.55 The responses of other Jewish observers to the decree not only reflected their contradictory political allegiances but also demonstrate how the old imagery of the benevolent Yankee clashed with more critical descriptions; the latter evoked images of Gentile state functionaries in Eastern Europe and attributed them to Americans (or at least Americans in authority), while defending various immigrant groups. The Tageblat called for intergroup cooperation, claiming that American Jews must not fight against immigration restriction as if it were a Jewish problem. Such measures (Williams’s or other restrictive legislation) “are also a blow for Italians, Slavs, and all the others” and the struggle for free immigration must be carried out together with them. That position was a reversal of what the same conservative daily argued ten years earlier (1899): back then, after the New York Sun accused “hyphenated” Americans of not being real Americans, the Tageblat expressed the traditional approach that Jews should not get enmeshed in Gentile politics. Columnist Avner Tanenboym wrote that Jews should let other immigrants (Irish, Germans, or Italians) fend off such accusations. First of all, those groups had larger numbers and therefore would be more successful. But more important, the problem of hyphenated Americans was actually not a Jewish problem, Tanenboym averred, since “this question began with Irish and Germans, who accumulated wealth in America, and then return to their old countries.”56 Others expressed in stronger words the anger and fears of the city’s immigrant Jews over Williams’s regulation. A public school pupil from Pike Street—though not yet proficient in English—sent an unsigned letter to Williams in July 1909 in which he wrote, “You kill people without a knife. Dos [sic] money make you a person? . . . They [immigrants] are people with a mind and with as much sence [sic] as you are but not such murderers as you are.  .  .  . They [immigrants] are as bright, intelligent, gentle as the Americans and perhaps more.” The Yiddish papers were filled with heartrending stories of families detained at Ellis Island and awaiting deportation back to Russia, thus fueling the agitated mood on the East Side. One hundred Jewish immigrants detained at Ellis Island sent a letter to the Forverts, begging for help and describing the foul conditions of the detention center. The socialist daily complained that hundreds of immigrants were locked in inhuman conditions and that even the prisons in “darkest Russia” were better, because “there the prisoner is at least informed of his crime.”57

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The identification of Jewish immigrants with criminality and immorality by Yankee reformers and journalists also alarmed Jewish observers. In response to accusations that Jews controlled trafficking in women, in 1909 Tanenboym pointed to the Yankee origin of many antivice crusaders, writing that “the old, wild spirit of Puritanism” and its “sad hypocrisy” still dominated New York. Three years later, Mayor William Gaynor, considered friendly toward Jews, stated that New York had the largest foreign-born population of any city “and a large number of these are degenerates and criminals.” Although Gaynor later claimed that he was not referring to Jews in general, a reader in Harlem, S. Feldstein, wrote to the Varhayt, “In the best Christian there is a little gall toward Jews that he must let out at the first chance.” The Tageblat rhetorically asked, “Does not the educated mayor know . . . that among Americans there are drunkards, murderers, and all kind of wretches?” The accusations that linked Jews with crime prompted the establishment of a New York Kehillah in 1908; it was headed by Reform rabbi Judah L. Magnes and sought to encompass all the city’s Jews with authority over religious, social, philanthropic, educational, labor, and even crime-fighting matters.58 The Defense of Others as Self-Defense For Jews, the threat of restrictions on immigration induced an increasing tendency to defend Jewish immigration and traits by discussing the merits of other immigrant groups, an argument that established Jews had already used earlier.59 That line signaled a budding recognition that Jews had a stake in cooperating with other groups and acknowledging the similarity of their difficulties. Writing during the protests over Williams’s regulation, the Varhayt lamented America’s “ungratefulness” toward German immigrants. Without them, America would have “surely turned worse,” argued the paper, noting that German Americans “produced a good, healthy race.” The writer (probably either editor Louis Miller or Dovid Hermalin, who penned many editorials) concluded, “how cruelly ungrateful is America.”60 The Tageblat echoed that attitude when it defended Chinese immigrants: “The Chinese quarter in New York is plagued by missionaries and all kinds of settlement workers just like our Jewish East Side.” Citing (or more likely inventing) an unnamed Chinese man who made a speech in Chinatown, the Tageblat depicted Jewish self-image and concerns while attributing them to the Chinese: “We are not drunkards but we see your drunks all around us. . . . We do not beat up our wives, we know nothing of the scandals that happen in your family life.” Jonah Goldstein recalled an instructor at the Educational Alliance conveying a similar message,

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saying in 1904: “The attitude of society toward the Jew is the same as the attitude of society toward the Chinese. . . . The Americans can little compete with them. Therefore, they abuse them on account of jealousy.” In 1911 Dovid Hermalin listed the minority groups that were most hated in different regions of the country; he grimly noted that the only reason Americans did not treat Jews “like the Russians did” was because “they hate the Negroes and Mongolians [Asians] even more.”61 As in the positive characterization of the Chinese, Jewish commentators’ manifested Jewish concerns while defending another nonwhite minority. In 1906, at the height of anti-Japanese agitation in America, it was the Tageblat’s columnist, Gedaliah Bublik, who expressed his empathy for the Japanese Americans. The Polish-born Bublik, who would become a central figure in Orthodox Zionism, invoked the sympathy that most Jews felt toward Japan during its war against the hated czarist Russia (1904); he commented that immigrant Jews identified with the beleaguered Japanese in America and compared anti-Japanese rabble-rousing to antisemitism. “As we feel the pain of the Japanese in California,” wrote Bublik, “we feel also a great envy of them.” The reason was the huge difference in the responses of the two groups to incitement against them. Whereas Jewish leaders “fell to their knees” and begged for mercy from whomever they could, the Japanese acted differently; “rather than appealing to ‘justice,’ a cable was sent from Tokyo telling the world that Japan would build new [military] divisions.” In the same year that Bublik relayed his envy of the Japanese, the critic B. Gorin wondered, “What do people have against the Japanese?” The Japanese were “quiet, polite,” and industrious; assiduously learned the language; and tried to achieve equality, “even though people are rude to them.”62 In 1908 the Zionist socialist Yidisher kemfer proffered a similar critique of Jewish leadership to that of the Orthodox Bublik. In 1911, when the National German-American Alliance began its own campaign against Williams and what it considered the mistreatment of immigrants on Ellis Island, the Kemfer commended them while attacking Jewish leaders; when Jewish organizations had protested against Williams and sent a delegation to Washington, they were timid and “played a ‘mayufes’ piece and political schemes.” The term “mayufes” referred to Jews who allegedly had no self-respect and tried to curry favor with Gentiles. But unlike the fearful Jews, “the Germans play no trickery, they are not afraid, and they strongly come out with plain words.”63 Positive comments about other immigrant groups appeared in response to nativism. The Varhayt offered a comprehensive argument in favor of immigration: not only did the new immigrants not compete with American workers, the daily opined, but they were necessary to

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the American economy. The Italians worked where “there is bad air .  .  . where people have to breath dust and microbes, in short, where no other nation and race are willing to work, the Italians work.” A few years later, in 1911, during the deliberations of the Dillingham Commission, journalist M. Yakobson, who wrote for the conservative weekly Der amerikaner, made a similar point. Immigrants were rarely “tramps,” Yakobson wrote, since they were busy from the moment they arrived: the “Italians build railroads, dig tunnels and water canals, the Slovaks and Hungarians go to the coal mines,” and Jews worked in the needle trades. The labor advocate and economist Isaac A. Hourwich published a book (Immigration and Labor, 1912) that showed how recent immigrants created (rather than took) more jobs and were less of a social burden than were earlier immigrants. Uptown Jewish dignitaries had made similar arguments. Morris Waldman, who headed the New York branch of the United Hebrew Charities (UHC), recalled a congressional hearing in the early 1910s, when a congressman attacked the Italians, saying they returned home and took their money with them. Nathan Bijur, chairman of the executive committee of UHC, wryly replied, “But they left the subways here.”64

The first decade of the century saw the move toward immigration restriction gradually clouding images of the American with mistrust and fears, coupled with nascent signals of improved attitude toward other groups, and particularly of the more recent immigration. Jewish immigrants increasingly rubbed against American institutions and faced experiences that could no longer be explained away. What was new was not anger at the usual suspects (like the Irish or other groups), but a budding feeling that maybe the problem ran deeper. A willingness to protest against a progressive municipal administration or a revered institution like the public schools (for real or imagined inequities) demonstrated a readiness to assign more responsibility—and culpability—to Yankees and their concrete actions rather than ascribing the guilt to “un-Americans” of any ethnicity. At the same time, the very self-confidence that enabled those remonstrations was still based on assumptions about the open-mindedness and fairness of Americans that would render the protest useful. Hence the cracks in the image of the American in those years should not be overstressed. At a time when horrifying blows rained down on Jews in Eastern Europe, the positive attitude of some Americans (especially prominent ones) sharpened the difference between the way Jews viewed them and the Russians or Ukrainians of the Old World. An inclination remained to channel elsewhere the blame for everything that was

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wrong, whether toward Irish principals and teachers, Italian criminals, or missionaries. Finally, the discourse about “Negroes,” “Chinese,” and “wild Indians” after Rabbi Joseph’s funeral and the school riots shows Jewish immigrants’ familiarity with contemporary American society. These newcomers were sufficiently exposed to the surrounding culture to absorb some of the prevalent conceptions of civilization and savagery. The statements on “how even the Chinese” were undisturbed when laying their dead to rest or the fear that Jewish women would come across as “wild Indians” reveal how the notions of a racial-cultural hierarchy had been largely disseminated and taken in. At any rate, Americanization remained a coveted objective, and Americans still enjoyed a higher cultural status than that of other groups. In those very years, however, one of the main experiences of immigrant Jews in New York was working alongside other nationalities in thousands of shops. By the 1900s the Jewish labor movement became a leading force on the Jewish street, and its ideology and activities had a major impact on the ways immigrant Jews viewed other groups and cooperated with them.

5

“You Could Almost Forget That He Is Not a Jew” The Jewish Labor Movement a n d S e c u la r i z e d C h o s e n n e s s, 1 9 0 9 – 1 9 14

Established in 1903 by middle-class reform-minded women to organize female workers, the Women’s Trade Union League reported in 1911 on a recent strike of shirtwaist (blouse) makers in New York City. The league’s journal noted that the strike had better informed the league about the different characteristics of various “racial groups”: “The Russian Jewish girl, in her responsive warm-heartedness, is accounted as being by far the readiest to get hold of the idea of solidarity and the most reliable in standing by principle and the sisterhood at any self-sacrifice. This Russian Jewish girl thinks that the American working girl is as hopeless for purpose of concerted action as the Italian.” The anonymous writer acknowledged that American women were less responsive than Jewish women to unionization efforts and must be appealed to on the grounds of definite returns in the immediate future. Echoing the attitude noted in the report, also in 1911 a Jewish woman who worked in millinery told a research team headed by social reformer Mary Van Kleeck, “It is no use to organize American women. They don’t care about anything but making dates. It’s all men and dances.”1 Working long hours alongside non-Jews in different trades was one of the main areas where Jewish immigrants encountered Gentiles. The ways in which Jewish workers and trade unionists perceived and interacted with non-Jewish workers and union representatives shows how Gentile workers (such as Italians) came to be seen as uncommitted interlopers in the predominantly Jewish unions and other institutions of the labor movement. Those perceptions of non-Jews and the intensification of Jewish nationalism strengthened Jewish distinctiveness even among those who sought to transcend it. Ethnic divisions were brought to the fore especially between 1909 and 1914, years that saw the Sturm und Drang period of the Jewish labor movement: a succession of mass strikes, especially in New York’s apparel industry, had signaled the beginning of a new era and transformed struggling and fragmented unions into a powerful 101

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movement. There were certainly Jewish unions and radicals beforehand, but as noted by B. Vaynshteyn, the longtime secretary of the socialist United Hebrew Trades and one of the pioneers of Jewish socialism in America, 1909 opened the “real period” in the history of the Jewish labor movement in America.2 Whereas several scholars have focused on intergroup relations in the needle trades at the turn of the twentieth century, they were more interested in the ways ethnic confl ict and cooperation affected unions’ structure, policies, and bargaining power or the construction of new womanhood.3 The more standard historical interpretation sees the Jewish labor movement as an agent of Americanization that taught Jews the intricacies of collective bargaining and electoral politics.4 In relation to non-Jews, however, there was a frequent paradox about Jewish internationalists: as they eschewed Jewish ethnicity and sought universal working-class unity, the task of building a movement led them—against their ideology and intentions—to reinforce the ethnic character of institutions like the United Hebrew Trades, the radical Yiddish press, the Jewish Socialist Federation, and the all-Jewish Arbeter Ring. These institutions, therefore, in effect strengthened Jewish separatism and had very little appeal for non-Jews.5 The discussion below has benefited from the insights of the scholars who have underscored the function of ethnic divisions in complicating the task of labor organization.6 Yet the Jewish labor movement’s distinct ethnic character was anchored to a profound conviction: in their commitment to a militant trade unionism, Jewish workers, labor unionists, and socialists had shaped a self-image that reproduced the notion of chosenness. They often saw themselves as the vanguard in a fight for a better world, while non-Jews were considered apathetic at best. In their characterizations of non-Jewish workers as indifferent and interested only in the here and now, workers and radicals reiterated some of the images of Gentiles as dull and unreflective that were common in Eastern European Jewish society. There was a connection, even if circuitous, between older Jewish attitudes toward non-Jews and those of Jewish radicals, even as they professed and were dedicated to class solidarity.7 It is important to clarify that Jewish workers and trade unionists’ sense of chosenness had nothing to do with divine election or religion in general. Not only was it completely secular, but also did not include all Jews as a group of reference—Jewish employers, uptown yahudim (German Jews), downtown immigrant parvenus, and Jewish American Federation of Labor (AFL) unionists were not part of the group. They were reviled for their economic role, while by contrast devoted Gentile organizers and socialists were hailed as brethren. But the latter’s numbers

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were small, and the Jewish character and language of various labor institutions probably deterred many others. As a rule, Jewish workers coded dedication to class struggle, willingness to sacrifice, and idealism as Jewish, whereas egoism, apathy, and frivolity were regarded as trademarks of Gentile (whether native-born or Italian) workers. Undoubtedly, those conceptions were rooted in a certain reality. The American labor movement was conservative and it often cold-shouldered immigrant Jews. Jews made up the ethnic base of socialism in New York City in the 1910s, played a crucial role in building the garment industry’s unions, and were overrepresented in strikes. Yet there also developed a prevalent ethnic self-image, whose fl ip side was the perception of a Gentile essence that bore the negative characteristics mentioned above, regardless whether its carriers were unresponsive coworkers, nativist trade unionists, or condescending upper-class women. Those Gentiles who did not match that essence were viewed as exceptions to the rule. The construction of the image of non-Jews was also affected by the dynamics of group competition and rivalry in the apparel trades: non-Jews seemed to be interlopers or latecomers at best, not entitled to the same rights as immigrant Jews, who had sacrificed so much to establish those institutions. Such Jewish self-perception, born in the shops, meeting halls, and streets of New York, usually brushed aside incompatible details, like the fact that most members of the American Socialist Party were not Jewish. For young Jewish immigrants, those were years of disappointment with (and even contempt for) their American coworkers, because they often thought of the latter as frivolous or “hopeless” when it came to class struggle. Still, shared interests and experiences began to cross ethnic borders; though negative images and bitter complaints remained, by 1914 there was a fair degree of cooperation between Jewish and Italian organizers. While the images of Italians improved neither immediately nor unequivocally, the budding mutual work in the labor movement would bring Jewish workers and trade unionists to appreciate better their Italian coworkers. Eventually, that appreciation would somewhat alleviate Jewish workers’ sense of ethnic chosenness, though it would not disappear for years to come. Class Solidarity: The Problematic Official Version In theory, late nineteenth-century socialists believed that any differences between Jews and non-Jews were a product of national or religious indoctrination, by which the bourgeois ( Jewish and Gentile alike) sought to create a false feeling of common origins and identity. Jewish socialists aspired to transcend religious and ethnic differences, which derived

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from “false consciousness.” Writing in the Tsukunft (1896), Abraham Cahan proclaimed that socialists, “as you know, do not see any difference between Jew and Gentile.” Similarly, Yiddish writer Isaac Raboy was a radical and declared, “For me there was no question of ‘Gentile and Jew.’” As Raboy began working on a farm in North Dakota in 1909, he moved into what he called a “true Yankee home.” Despite his ideology, Raboy admitted that he felt “strange” taking his first step in that house, and “something in the manners” of his hosts made him “edgy.”8 Raboy’s story exemplifies how, in practice, differences in ethnicity, language, culture, and modes of life brought about much more ambivalent and complex attitudes among Jewish socialists. In 1910 Cahan himself juxtaposed the Jewish and non-Jewish working class, and especially focused on the theme of how “civilized” were Jewish workers in comparison with Gentile ones. “Jews are an exception among the nations” contended Cahan, since they “are willing to devote much of their free time to reading or listening to lectures.” In contrast, “the Irish or Italian worker seeks to spend their free time in saloons or sports, [whereas] our worker is by nature inclined toward spiritual interests . . . to the theater, to lectures, to books.” Drunkenness, “which by Christians is a widespread plague, is almost unknown by us.” Jewish immigrants were hardly drawn to “[prize] fights, baseball or athletic games.” It was very common to see on a train “a Jewish passenger absorbed in a novel. . . . That an Irishman, for example, would be enthusiastic about a novel—such a picture is hard to imagine.”9 It is noteworthy that contemporaneous reports, later memoirs by Jewish union leaders, and texts by several historians tended to admire the cooperation and solidarity of workers, mainly between Jewish and Italian immigrants. In their recollections labor leaders have smoothed over intergroup tensions in order to celebrate interethnic class solidarity; they wanted to stress how workers of different ethnicities rose above what divided them and united in a fight against capitalism. To demonstrate such unity, the memories of latter cooperation were sometimes stretched to an earlier period. Consequently they obscured the strains and confl icts that often marred relations between Jews and non-Jews at the time. B.  Vaynshteyn wrote of “a remarkable solidarity” between Jewish and Italian workers. Union leader Joseph Schlossberg reminisced Jews and Italians working “harmoniously” together and attributed this to a lack of antisemitism in Italy. Yet in 1919 Schlossberg himself said, “Italians are harder to organize and do not make as good unionists as the Jews.” Scholars have repeated the praise for Jewish-Italian solidarity, asserting that Jewish-Italian relations in the labor movement were “the most harmonious historic relationship ever to exist” between ethnic groups in America.

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The picture, however, was much more complicated and was fraught with difficulties and ambiguities.10 Historical Background Before 1881 the garment industry was practically the only trade where Jews were employers. In the 1880s and 1890s Jewish immigrants typically flocked to that burgeoning industry in Manhattan’s southeast sections— there they could work for (German or Polish) Jewish employers, refrain from working on the Sabbath, and needed little or no English. Prior to the 1880s most workers in the trade were Germans and native-born American women and, to a lesser extent, Irish. In the 1880s Eastern European Jews and, later, southern Italians had increasingly displaced those workers in New York. Some of the non-Jewish workers moved up to the more well-paid jobs of that industry (such as cutters), or left altogether. While the number of Germans in the trade had dropped significantly in the 1890s they hardly vanished and Jewish immigrants were working together with a host of different ethnicities. By 1900 one report estimated that nearly 40 percent of New York’s garment workers were foreign-born Jews, followed by 27 percent of the workforce from southern Italy.11 The aversion of older workers toward newcomers was evident as early as 1886, when thousands of striking cloak makers (mostly Jewish immigrants) found out that the largely German and Irish cutters refused to work alongside “funny Jews.” American trade unionists often mirrored that attitude, resenting immigrants as competitors who drove down the wages of American workingmen. On their part, early Jewish toilers (mainly in the needle trades) showed a lack of enthusiasm to look for a job among non-Jews; they found kinship in existing Jewish communities and preferred employment in the predominantly Jewish-owned garment industry, where English was not a prerequisite and they had the opportunity not to work on the Sabbath.12 As nativism and craft interests reinforced each other, Jewish distrust of the AFL, because of its anti-immigration stance, deepened. In 1914 Abraham Rothenberg, a member of Local 1 of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU), in the name of “many members,” wrote a protest letter to the union’s Yiddish organ. Rothenberg complained that even the union’s own ( Jewish) delegates at the AFL convention were unable to represent correctly the spirit of union members “and also the Jewish masses,” who demanded free immigration. The very procedures in America’s largest labor organization seemed to be tilted against immigrants.13 Besides the immigration question, some immigrant Jews found American unions to be foreign to their cultural milieu. Jewish workers’

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alienation from the Knights of Labor’s fraternal rituals, and the unwillingness to join what B. Vaynshteyn called “the vain ceremonies of the Irish” were hardly the biggest problem of Jewish workers. Outside the garment industry, immigrant Jews were merely a small minority in most trades. In many cases (though not as a rule) a combination of prejudice and craft exclusiveness caused non-Jewish unions to refuse organizing Jewish workers, who were forced to form their own unions. Jewish house painters encountered such prejudice; though several locals in New York did accept some Jews, they resisted admission of any large number of Jews or other immigrants. The Jewish painters therefore founded their own Alteration Painters’ Union in New York City in 1909. The ability of Jewish workers to organize separately (after being rejected) and their large numbers at a few locals compelled the national union to accept them.14 The fact that Jews were allowed into certain unions hardly meant full integration. Sol Broad, a Jewish organizer of the International Association of Bridge and Structural Iron Workers, remembered that Jews were only “reluctantly admitted” to the union, and then were rarely given the floor to discuss matters: “If a Jew did get a chance to speak, he was disregarded.” In Local 2 of the Amalgamated Painters’ Union (Brooklyn), Jews were accepted as members and in fact made up the majority. Nonetheless, according to a committee of Jewish painters from that local, non-Jewish workers controlled the local, and when in December 1906 the Jewish members demanded a vote count on a certain proposal, “someone gave a signal and the Christian union members assaulted the Jews using sticks, clubs, and even revolvers.” In 1914 a Brooklyn Yiddish weekly decried the situation in the American unions: “A Jew must bow his head to the ground when he arrives in a non-Jewish workers’ organization.” It is hardly surprising that Jewish immigrants had “no sentimental attachment to American trade unions.”15 The Nationalist Surge and Socialist Politics Unlike most other trades, the Empire City’s garment industry was mostly in Jewish hands (both workers and employers) by 1900, but that did not imply less labor strife. Arguably the most important difference between the Jewish labor movement and most American trade unions (with the exception of Germans unions) was that socialists had controlled the labor movement from its inception in the 1880s. In political campaigns both socialists and their opponents did not hesitate to play on the Jewish/ Gentile divide. When Morris Hillquit ran for Congress on the Socialist Party (SP) ticket in New York’s Ninth Congressional District (located on the mostly Jewish East Side) in 1906 and 1908, the Forverts presented him

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as “one of us” (an immigrant Jew), while denigrating the Jewish supporters of William Randolph Hearst’s bid for governorship (1906): “That is the old timid spirit of singing ‘mayufes’ for the ‘dear porets’!” roared the socialist daily, comparing Hearst’s supporters to “dogs who lick the hand of their master.” Hillquit’s Jewish detractors, on the other hand, claimed that “among strangers [he] denies that he is a Jew” (as Louis Miller maintained). The Tageblat reminded his readers that the young Hilkovitsh changed his name to Hillquit “because he thought it is more appealing to be a Gentile than a Jew” and wanted to “crawl after the Gentiles on all fours.” Apparently, many Jewish voters thought Hillquit was not “one of us”: he lost both campaigns, in 1908 receiving the total vote of almost one-third less than his showing two years earlier (when he polled 26 percent of the vote).16 The reluctance to vote for Hillquit in 1908 was interwoven with mounting Jewish concern over immigration restrictions and growing hostility among the American public. While by the 1900s the goal of keeping America’s gates open had united most American Jews, Hillquit and the SP were seen as ambiguous on the issue. Hillquit increased Jewish worries by insisting that there was indeed “undesirable immigration” (though he referred primarily to the arrival of Asians). Even a devoted socialist like Avrom Lesin doubted that immigration restrictions would stop with Asians. In 1910 he wondered, “Why wouldn’t they fit them [anti-immigration measures] to us? Who could guarantee us.  .  .  . You should not fool yourself; we Jews are not very popular even in America.”17 Against a backdrop of rising intolerance, Jewish unease about coming across as radicals and un-Americans lingered as a component in the internal Jewish debate about socialism. Shortly after the 1908 election, socialist journalist M. Baranov wrote that many “coarse proprietors” on the East Side explained to him, “But Jews are still in exile. We are foreigners, guests here in America. We will make a bad impression on the Christians if we elect the first socialist in Congress; let the Gentiles have the honor [of electing a socialist].” At the national conference of the SP in 1910 Socialist lawyer Meyer London mentioned how Jews were concerned that “if you should send a Socialist to Congress, they will exclude the Jews from America.”18 New York socialists would learn their lesson from Hillquit’s defeat. Meyer London, an opponent of any immigration restrictions, was considered more intimately familiar with the East Side and its sensibilities than Hillquit, and in November 1914 he was elected as the first socialist from the East Coast to the U.S. House of Representatives.19 By the early 1910s the socialists’ primary source of support in New York City was Jewish voters. Throughout the 1910s the SP received little backing among Irish

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and Italians, New York’s other major working-class ethnic groups. One SP organizer reported in 1912 that the West Side Irish were so indifferent to socialism that it would be “impractical” to organize them. The executive secretary of the SP in New York, Julius Gerber, wrote in 1914 that the Italians were “the weakest in the Socialist organization.” German-born workers were aging, and their unions were gradually incorporated into more conservative unions. Being a socialist in New York increasingly meant being Jewish, and the party in turn had become much more willing to accommodate its Jewish supporters. It is noteworthy that the widening Jewish power base of the SP in New York corresponded with mounting Jewish nationalism. A few months after London’s election, A.  S. Zaks, a former rabbinical student and later a revolutionary who came to America in 1908, noticed “a deep Jewish national consciousness among our American comrades.”20 The intensification of a Jewish national sentiment in America coincided with the infusion of a new type of Jewish immigrant, following the pogroms (1903–1906) and the abortive Russian Revolution (1905). Unlike most socialists of the 1880s and 1890s, the nationally oriented socialists who arrived (mainly after 1905) in New York believed that Jews constituted a nation; though deeply divided over what the national program should be, Bundists, socialist Zionists, and territorialists alike were equally convinced that Jews should retain their distinctiveness. Those who espoused Yiddish as the national language viewed it as a buffer against assimilation, thus affirming the usage of Yiddish in the different institutions of the Jewish labor movement. Many of the newer radicals insisted on organizational and cultural forms that reinforced a de facto independent and all-Jewish character of socialism and trade unionism among Jews. That created the ideological basis for not only the creation of a separate Jewish sphere, but also a nationalist critique of assimilation.21 In the aftermath of the Kishinev pogrom (1903) Avrom Lesin assaulted the antinational radicals, whom he called “eunuchs of socialism,” in a style befitting any nonradical nationalist: Old-fashioned Jews believed that they were the chosen people so they paid respect to the Gentile, but only for appearance’s sake. But the progressive Jews do that from the bottom of their hearts. . . . They will consider and reconsider and re-reconsider when it comes to a Jewish issue, in case it will not please those or others of their Gentile comrades . . . hoping that their Gentile comrades will keep quiet and forget their hatred [toward Jews]. . . . You hear quite often the voices of those Jews thunder in favor of the Poles, the Finns, the Armenians; but they remain mute when they hear the voices of their own miserable brothers.22

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One of the most infl uential public figures in those years to formulate the synthesis of Jewish nationalism and socialism was Dr. Chaim Zhitlovsky. An intellectual who swung between Jewish autonomism, territorialism, and briefly even Zionism, Zhitlovsky remained committed to Yiddish culture, Jewish nationalism, and (non-Marxist) Jewish socialism. His elegant Yiddish lectures in New York drew large crowds of eager immigrants and the uptown American Hebrew claimed in 1906 that Zhitlovsky had “made nationalists of such men as Barondess, Dr. Solotaroff [Zolotarov], M. Kats and many others in the radical groups of the East Side.” Zhitlovsky was an antithesis of old-guard Jewish radicals, with their contempt for all things Jewish. In 1906 Zhitlovsky rebuked those socialists who wished to “jump out of their Jewishness” and looked down on Jews as a “pile of garbage.” He announced that a new generation of Jewish socialists had emerged who were immersed in their people’s soul, history, and fantasy.23 Whereas internationalists asserted that “socialists do not see any difference between Jews and Gentiles,” left-wing nationalists thought there was a difference. In 1914 Karl Fornberg wrote a scathing indictment of the United Hebrew Trades (UHT), which invited a non-Jewish lawyer as the keynote speaker to its twenty-fifth jubilee. Fornberg called the invitation an example of “the mayufes disease” and attacked the profound psychological humility before Gentiles that led the organizers to bring “a Christian lawyer.” In addition to all his other merits, Fornberg wrote sarcastically, “his greatest merit is that he is not a Jew and not one of us.” Who would have believed, Fornberg asked, that “the United Hebrew Trades jubilee would have such an explicitly non-Jewish and non-labor character?” Voicing a similar critique was A. S. Zaks, who by then was editor of the Tsukunft and active in the Jewish labor movement. Zaks also criticized the UHT, which rebuffed those who worked for it and “invite[d] pritsim who have no relation to the gathering.” Zaks lamented the fact that “we bow before every Gentile” and sardonically concluded, “I am busy working for the Gentiles in order to become important among the Jews.”24 “It’s Always Hardest to Get the Americans to Strike”: The Perceptions of Gentiles in the Garment Industry The nationalist wave occurred just as the apparel trades were about to undergo a period of mass strikes and organization. Even among those Jewish radicals most dedicated to international class struggle, that very commitment had paradoxically generated—against their own principles—an unfavorable image of Gentile workers and trade unionists, who were perceived as much less devoted than were Jewish workers. In

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the garment industry, some of those non-Jewish workers were Americanborn, usually of German or Irish origin. In 1895 pioneer settlement worker Jane Addams witnessed the chasm between native and Jewish workers in Chicago: “They were separated by strong racial differences, by language, by nationality, by religion, by mode of life, by every possible social distinction.” In 1906 the ILGWU’s executive board acknowledged that they were unable to organize non-Jewish ladies’ shirtwaist makers in Philadelphia and turned to the AFL for help. Labor firebrand Elizabeth Hasanovitz, who arrived in New York in 1912, worked in a shop where the American girls “considered it beneath their dignity to belong to a ‘labor organization,’ especially to a ‘Yiddish Union’” (such as the ILGWU). Other Jewish workers encountered similar attitudes by native women, who did not want to be involved in an immigrant organization. As late as 1916 Fortshrit (Progress), the organ of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America, complained about German girls in Ridgewood (Queens), who worked for “dirt cheap” and were hard to unionize: “for them the word union is treyfe.” Differences in ideology and trade interests exacerbated existing ethnic rifts and deepened Jewish suspicions—and in some cases contempt—toward their fellow employees.25 The significance and number of Italian workers (mainly from southern Italy and Sicily), was on the rise in New York’s predominantly Jewish garment industry already before 1900. In 1889 a New York factory inspector found not a single Italian clothing-manufacturing place in all Manhattan; two years later there were hundreds. In 1900 the headworker of the University Settlement House reported, “The Italians are underbidding the Jews in the garment making.” A year later the U.S. Industrial Commission echoed this: “The Italian is able to crowd the Jew out of the trade.” At first Italians were typically employed at semiskilled tasks, with many Italian women working at home as finishers. Homework suited the demands of Italian husbands, in that their wives would stay home, care for the family, and supplement its earnings. After the turn of the century, when state legislation and trade unions put curbs on homework, the locus of production had gradually shifted to the factory and increased contacts between Jewish and Italian workers. John A. Dyche, a Yiddishspeaking Russian Jew who served as the ILGWU’s general secretary, stated in 1904, “This influx of Italians is the primary cause for the comparative inferiority of trade unions in cloaks.”26 From early on, Jewish workers and trade unionists had not held their Italian coworkers in high esteem. Italians were seen as scabs, tainted by their submissive and tractable nature, qualities that made them poor material for a militant union. ILGWU president Abraham Rosenberg recalled how in the union’s early years (it was founded in 1900) in “tens

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of times” Italian workers (with several Jews) would go on wildcat strikes and turned to the union for help. But within a few hours “all the Italians went back to work,” and the few Jews were left with no work. Working to organize female workers in different trades in 1908, the secretary of the New York Women’s Trade Union League (WTUL), Helen Marot, wrote, “The Jewish woman is quicker to organize than the Italian; she is full of confidence, while the Italian is retiring. The Jewish girls therefore control the union.” Marot noted that many Italian girls did not attend union meetings, since Yiddish was spoken there “for the most part.” As union meetings usually took place at late hours, Italian parents objected to their daughters being out late at night. Marot asserted, “The Jewish girl seldom discovers why the Italian does not attend meetings. She says they are ‘slow’ or ‘stupid.’” The WTUL report of 1907/1908 concluded, “There is a general impression that they [Italian women] are difficult to organize.” Jewish women were reported to have greater self-confidence, “without appreciating the strong points of the Italians or sympathizing with their weaknesses.”27 The way Jewish workers viewed their non-Jewish colleagues hardly improved in the great strikes of 1909 and 1910, which marked a new era in New York’s garment industry. The strikes followed a rough period for the trade during the recession of 1907–1908. By 1908 the ILGWU was affl icted by internal squabbling, a decline in membership, and a bitter struggle against the revolutionary-syndicalist Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). But by mid-1909 the recession in the industry had run its course and signs of recovery appeared. On November 22, 1909, what was dubbed the “uprising of the twenty thousand” broke out; it was a general strike of approximately twenty thousand shirtwaist makers, about 90 percent of them Jewish and mostly unmarried girls and women in their late teens and early twenties. Less than a year later ( July 1910), some sixty thousand cloak makers went on strike, called the “Great Revolt.” Upon viewing the thousands of strikers jamming Fifth Avenue and its side streets on the strike’s first day, Abraham Rosenberg felt that such a scene had taken place only “when the Jews were led out of Egypt.” Continuing the biblical analogy, Rosenberg referred to the Gentile strikers, “Even the motley rabble [e’revrav] was included, as it was back then.”28 The strike’s strong ethnic character can be seen in sheer numbers: of the workers who responded to the strike call in November 1909, Jewish workers made up about 90 percent. Only 6 percent (two thousand) were Italians, although they made up nearly a third of the labor force. The Jewish makeup of the strike manifested itself in a dramatic mass meeting at Cooper Union (November 22, 1909) that began the first strike: thousands of raised hands and hoarse voices took the old Jewish oath, swearing that

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if they would break their pledge to strike, “may this hand wither from the arm I raise!”29 Despite many immigrants’ impressions that the strike was an intraJewish affair, the socialist press was quick to celebrate interethnic solidarity. When the shirtwaist makers strike broke out, the Forverts victoriously declared that among those who joined it were many of “pure Yankee” stock. Despite the expectations of many employers, the paper announced, Italian workers also walked out with their Jewish coworkers. The socialist English-language New York Call informed its readers that Italians were among the most active picketers. Yet even those publications soon communicated a different reality: The Forverts reported on a shop in Newark where twenty-five Jewish girls joined the strike, but the remaining seventy-five, “mostly Italian and German girls” continued to work. At a shop on Bleecker Street, Italian strikebreakers cried out, “Sheenies!” at the pickets before attacking them. The New York Call mentioned the special efforts made to prevail on the Italian dressmakers to refrain from scabbing. Socialist Antonio Cavello and trade unionist Publio Mazella were sent to the hall on East Fourth Street (where the few Italian women who did strike would assemble) to prevent them from returning to work.30 Numerous reports, accounts, and memoirs illustrate that the socialist press’s triumphalist tone about alleged interethnic unity was out of step with the widespread frustration of Jewish immigrants. Jewish workers believed that their Gentile coworkers did not share—at best—the Jewish level of commitment and self-sacrifice, and were willing to betray the common cause. Italians, the second-largest group in New York’s needle trades, were repeatedly looked down on as being volatile and untrustworthy. During the 1909 shirtwaist makers’ strike, an outside observer noted that the Jewish girls feared that the Italian girls would scab, and that was the main reason preventing a wide-scale strike beforehand. Jewish strikers bemoaned, “It’s always hardest to get the Americans to strike.” ILGWU organizer Pearl Halpern remembered that while Jews were more acquainted with the labor movement, Italians “just . . . didn’t want to organize.” She maintained that Italians and others scabbed and were very different from the Jewish workers, who “built the union.” Louis Painkin, who was also active in the union (Local 10), claimed that “Italians were very bad work [sic].” Ida Seltzer, who came to New York from Byelorussia in 1910 and worked alongside Italians at a nonunion Brooklyn shop, got the impression that Italian girls did not like unions, were willing to work for cheap, and were in general “dumb.” Berl Baum, who began working at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in 1906, remembered that “all” nationalities (he mentioned Italians, Greeks, and

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Poles) scabbed, but Jews refused to do so. The WTUL’s gently worded observation (1911) that Jewish workers realized “for the first time” that “the American or Italian workers would not respond to the same sort of appeals as the [Jewish] Russian people” was followed by an admission that Jewish girls thought American and Italian girls were “hopeless” when it came to concerted action.31 Some Jewish socialists believed that Italians’ purported passivity was partially derived from their religiosity and Catholic background. The general secretary of Arbeter Ring, Benyomen Faygnboym, argued in 1903 that where religion and moralizing were stronger—“especially in Italy”— socialism was weaker and there was more “drunkenness, murder, thievery, brawls” and crime in general. Louis Hollander of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America wrote in 1916 that a few years back “it was impossible to talk to” Italian women in the shops, because “dark superstitions reigned over their minds” and the employers could safely assume that they had an Italian “reserve army of scabs.” Menashe Tsinkin, a garment worker who wrote short autobiographical sketches, described what he saw as the negative infl uence of Catholicism: an Italian coworker called Margie used to come to the shop on Mondays looking “as if she is still in another world. In a world of church, crosses, burning wax candles, hypnotic organ music.” Imbued with that spirit, she hated all unbelievers, “and especially Jews” who were not only Christ killers, but also heretics and radicals. As the week progressed, Margie would talk and joke with the other girls and help a Jewish tailor, and on Fridays she was “a sweet girl . . . another Margie.” Tsinkin wished that she would not go to church on Sundays and that “the priest would not damage her and hand us again a wicked, hard, Monday Margie.”32 The general image of Italians contributed to the continued reluctance among some Jewish immigrants to live “too close” to the offspring of il bel paese. In 1913 Abraham Rosenberg explained that real estate values on the East Side had declined because of the in-migration of Greeks and Italians: “It is true that real estate has become cheaper . . . on account of the emigration of Italians and Greeks, and all kinds of nationalities, and the Jewish people who used to live there, of course, have to run away on account of that. . . . A Jew is not safe with his life on Cherry Street. . . . Take the entire district from Lincoln Street up to the East River, there is nothing but Italians there. No Jew wants to live there.” Nonetheless, Rosenberg was quick to add that those Italians were “the lowest element of Italians,” and not union men. Mrs. R. F. Schwartz of the Young Women’s Hebrew Association (YWHA) had worked at a women’s club on Market and Monroe Streets and noted in 1916 that as the Jews pushed out the Irish, “the Greeks and Italians are pushing out the Jews.”33

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Still, antagonism was not the only characteristic of Jewish-Italian relations at work. The same Ida Seltzer who had called her Italian coworkers “dumb,” moved to another shop, where “the Italian girls were nicer than the Jewish girls.” Seltzer befriended them and invited a couple of the Italian women to her wedding. Louis Hollander, who in 1916 complained about Italians’ superstitions, also commented that Italians were “the pride of our organization” and ready “for the greatest struggle” to improve their conditions. Hollander wrote that Jewish locals frequently debated what to do with the Italians—the prevalent view was that they could have been dedicated to the union precisely like the Jews, had they received “enlightening” education. Cooperation between Jews and Italians in the garment industry became stronger, especially after the big strikes of 1913. In 1914, the Yiddish organ of the ILGWU, Naye post (the New post), put on a pedestal the Italian workers of a certain shop, since “their unity is really admirable” and they served as a model for other workers. Opinions like Hollander’s and others incontrovertibly revealed both a certain paternalism toward Italians as well as union leaders’ proclivity for heralding workers’ solidarity. But they show a budding appreciation for Italians as combative comrades as well. As time passed, interethnic friction tended to soften somewhat. In some cases it would lead to fruitful cooperation.34 For their part, garment manufacturers, most of whom were Jewish, were quick to exploit ethnic divisions by spreading rumors that Jewish workers did not want to work alongside Italians. At least in one case, in 1910, a Jewish employer in New York City published an ad in Italian papers claiming that all the Jewish workers had left his shop because they refused to work with Italians. A reader from Mount Vernon, New York, wrote in 1910 to the Forverts that a local Jewish manufacturer of shirtwaists brought an Italian priest to his factory. The cleric warned some fifty Italian workers that striking with the “no good” Jews would send them to hell. A Jewish foreman at a garment shop on Bleecker Street reportedly agitated Italian strikebreakers to attack the Jewish picketers. Organizer Clara Lemlich wrote in 1912 that she attempted to organize a strike but failed after management duped the Italian girls, telling them that the Jewish girls were striking because they hated Italians and did not want to work in the same shop with them. Hence during the “uprising of the twenty thousand” the Forverts openly blamed Jewish bosses for encouraging antisemitism.35 Italian immigrants’ initial reluctance to join their striking Jewish coworkers had to do with a number of factors, like the plans of many to return to Italy, making them more interested in holding on to employment rather than building unions; the opposition of the Italian prominenti (elites) and Catholic clergy to the unions; the refusal of some Italian

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families to allow their daughters to go without a chaperone on picket duty or attend other strike activities; and the complaints of Italians leaders that Jewish officers of locals (at least in the ILGWU) neither sympathized nor understood the Italian workers. Numerous locals held their meetings in Yiddish, and Italian workers refused to attend them. But even after the 1910 strike, when Italian sections were established in various locals across the city, Italian leaders remained discontented; they demanded the use of English in all committee, executive board, and joint board meetings, and proportional representation of Italians at all union conventions, boards, and committees. In 1912 the ILGWU’s (predominantly Jewish) joint board rejected those demands, and some of its members accused the Italians of scabbing and ignoring union principles. The ILGWU convention in 1912 acknowledged, “Uneasiness prevails” between Italians and Jews, and “Italians are sensitive to pride.” The attitude of Jewish labor leaders and rank-and-file workers had undeniably added to Italians’ early lack of enthusiasm about Jewish-led unions.36 As Jewish workers contrasted their own class consciousness and militancy with the values and behavior of non-Jews, they believed they were the real builders of the socialist and radical labor movement in America (sometimes acknowledging the role of the Germans). According to the Lithuanian-born Sam Liptzin, who immigrated to New York at age sixteen (1909) and became an organizer for the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America, Jewish immigrants were those who taught and encouraged “the so-called ‘Yankees’” to unionize. Labor activist and journalist Harry Lang expressed that belief as well: “Not only in sheer numbers, but also in cultural weight were the Jewish immigrants the most important element in the needle trades. . . . The Jewish immigrants set the tone; the other national groups followed.”37 Although Jewish devotion to militant trade unionism was ideologically motivated and genuine, the labor movement also offered immigrant Jews the opportunity for upward mobility (as Tammany and the Catholic Church did for Irish Americans). The image of non-Jewish workers was consequently often oversimplified to a degree that enabled Jewish labor organizers and radicals to construct a powerful ethnic self-image that rationalized Jewish control over the garment unions.38 That selfperception tended to assign a set of traits to Gentile workers, one that bore a resemblance to the ways Jewish society in Eastern Europe related to the peasantry or other low-class non-Jews. The Perceived Shortcomings of Gentile Womanhood The emphasis that many immigrant Jews had eagerly put on their own class consciousness and militancy had a significant gender dimension.

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Much has been written about the emergence of a new kind of womanhood among young, single, Jewish female workers and their radical subculture.39 Yet one must understand that the construction of such identity was typically brought about through a distinct perspective that fused Jewish and working-class sensibilities in determining the boundaries of suitable female behavior. Thinking about only “men, dances, and dates” or about oneself, being “slow” or “dumb,” and having a general lack of social awareness were more often than not attributed to Gentile workers.40 The impatience of Jewish women with their non-Jewish coworkers was closely related to what they perceived as the backwardness and egoism of the latter. Jewish women’s reference to American or Italian workers’ supposed lack of civilization resembled Abraham Cahan’s 1910 juxtaposition of Jewish and Gentile workers.41 Between 1910 and 1912 Mary Van Kleeck conducted a study of the artificial flowers industry in New York, interviewing dozens of Italian and Jewish girls who worked in that trade. The conclusions were that the Italian girl was more interested in craftsmanship “or in her own wages,” but the Jewish girl had a sense of social responsibility and displayed an “admirable public spirit.” Jewish girls tried to organize women in the trade in 1907 but failed. After the success of the shirtwaist makers in 1910, they tried again, but as one Jewish woman bitterly remarked, many girls, “especially the Americans,” were not interested in joining—“they think only of themselves.” Referring to the Italian women, the Jewish woman said, “If they were more civilized, they wouldn’t take such low pay. But they go without hats and gloves and umbrellas.” Another Jewish worker said that her Italian coworkers “work like horses,” but “they don’t stick up for their prices.” The owner of a large factory in the trade admitted that he preferred to hire Italians because “they are more tractable.”42 The dissatisfaction with Gentile workers found its way into the writings of Lithuanian-born Pauline M. Newman, the first female organizer for the ILGWU, who met many obstacles to organizing workers in Philadelphia. In 1912 Newman wrote in exasperation about the union, “They don’t understand the difference between the Jewish girl and the Gentile girl.” Two years later Newman wrote in the ILGWU organ, “That they [non-Jewish women] are always the last ones to realize the benefit of organization is an old story.” Although the Jewish class-conscious selfdefinition was neither fixed nor exclusive and though there were surely many Jewish working-class girls who never adhered to radical precepts, characteristics like complacency, indifference, and egoism were usually ascribed to Gentiles. Jewish women believed that Gentile women were indifferent to unions at best, and were willing to be used as scabs. The secretary of the WTUL in New York, Helen Marot, alluded in 1910

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to the dismay of Jewish women when American workers joined the strikebreakers.43 While that powerful ethnic self-image was realistic to a large extent, it was exaggerated and romanticized. Even as most Jewish women backed the strikes, their support was typically circumscribed by personal goals and tastes. Jewish women hardly stayed aloof from “men, dances, and dates”; when the Jewish girls in the artificial flower makers’ industry tried to organize other workers, they encountered a lack of interest also among the Jewish workers. Some of those women were about to get married and leave the trade altogether, so they wanted to secure maximal employment until then. Moreover, there were unquestionably Jewish strikebreakers, like a young woman by the name of Rosa Rabinowitz, who in 1909 reportedly attacked a Jewish picket in East Harlem, hit her, and broke her glasses. Others, like dressmaker Ida Richter, were “afraid to go out on strike,” afraid of being clubbed by hostile police officers and intimidated by the vicious thugs and prostitutes (many of them Jewish) whom employers hired to attack pickets and defend strikebreakers.44 Urban reformers, middle-class citizens’ groups and women’s organizations had played an important role in aiding the garment workers’ struggles, especially when female workers were involved, as in the 1909–1910 shirtwaist makers’ strike and the strike of white goods, wrapper, and kimono workers in early 1913. Especially conspicuous were the so-called Mink Brigade or high-society ladies, a group of wealthy women, like Anne Morgan (niece of bank magnate J. P. Morgan) and Helen Taft (daughter of the president), who donated money to the strike fund and organized protest meetings. The WTUL was particularly instrumental in rousing public sympathy for the hardship of female workers and there was unparalleled cooperation between middle-class reformers like sisters Mary and Margaret Dreier and Helen Marot, and immigrant clothing workers such as Rose Schneiderman and Pauline Newman.45 Reminiscent of the disenchantment discussed in previous chapters, closer acquaintance with Yankee, middle- and upper-class women contributed to some disillusionment with their character. On the one hand, strikers were grateful to those who stood by them and provided material support. But on the other, the way female Jewish workers viewed their American allies was fraught with suspicion and doubts. Bodies like the WTUL focused on feminist interests, while for most Jewish women ethnic and class loyalty continued to be a more compelling principle than cross-ethnic gender solidarity. Socialists were distrustful of what the Forverts called “millionaire women” and their motives in helping women’s strikes, which might endanger working-class unity. In 1909 the paper warned the strikers not to put their hopes and trust in those women or to

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display submissiveness in their dealings with the upper-class ladies. The socioeconomic discrepancy between Jewish workers and middle-class women had frustrated Jewish organizers. Pauline Newman, who became disillusioned with the WTUL, wrote in 1912 that she felt that “keeping sweet all the time and pleading for aid from the ‘dear ladies’ and ministers” was “simply sickening.”46 The aggravation of Jewish activists was linked to the nativist bias manifested by several WTUL members in New York toward immigrant Jewish workers. The WTUL annual report of 1910–1911 concluded that unlike Jewish workers, who counted on “spasmodic” action, the American trade union movement had “an Anglo Saxon tenacity to hold on to what is once gained.” WTUL’s Helen Marot claimed that the league should devote itself entirely to organizing native-born women and that “quick resentment is characteristic of the Russian Jewish factory worker.” By early 1912 the New York WTUL decided to drop its East Side work and concentrate on American-born women. That decision enraged Schneiderman and Newman; though the two were disappointed in Jewish unions (Newman wrote in 1910, “As a movement, they never will amount to any thing”), they were committed to organizing Jewish women and felt betrayed. In 1914 Schneiderman ran against Melinda Scott (an antiimmigration enthusiast) for the WTUL presidency and lost by a margin of four votes. The result prompted Newman to write her that she lost “on the ground that you were a socialist, a Jewes [sic] and one interested in suffrage.”47 De Facto and De Jure Jewish Distinctiveness For the bulk of Jewish workers in the years after the mass strikes of 1909–1910, the terms Jewish and labor, or true trade unionism (meaning radical/socialist, as opposed to the bread-and-butter unionism of the AFL) were not just closely associated, but nearly fused. The salience of ethnicity was further fortified, chiefly in the apparel trades, following the “Great Revolt.” Even though that strike included a sizeable minority of Italians, it was still seen as a Jewish strike. Avrom Lesin boasted that the strike did not feature the disarray that usually occurs in big strikes “even among the disciplined, cold-blooded Yankees.” Jewish workers rarely tried to exclude non-Jews qua non-Jews from predominantly Jewish unions or organizations. Nevertheless, at times both practical and ideological considerations meant, in effect, separation between Jews and non-Jews. In late 1911 the Arbeter Ring’s organ, Der fraynd (the Friend), discussed the possibility of accepting Gentile members to the fraternal order. The monthly noted that in many branches this question caused confl icts, but the question was about practices and not principles,

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maintained the unnamed writer (probably the editor B. Hoffman, known as Tsivyen): “in principle it is undisputable” that “Christians could certainly be admitted to the Arbeter Ring and should be admitted,” but “is that always practical?” The writer added that the thorniest issue was language: “Yiddish must remain the language of the branch,” even where Italians, Poles, Lithuanians, or other members had joined the order. And anyway, the essay concluded, even if we would accept Gentile members, “it would not be worthwhile for them, the Christians.”48 That Jewish de facto distinctiveness was not limited to the Arbeter Ring. The Socialist Party in New York in those years had to deal with complaints against the Yiddish-speaking branches. A Yiddish branch in Harlem was “interfering in their [Harlem English-speaking branch] agitation” and arranged a meeting that clashed with the other branch’s meeting’s time and place. In 1912 the New York Socialist Party’s executive committee reprimanded a Jewish member who asked to be transferred to a Yiddish-speaking branch, reminding him that the Yiddish branches were intended only for members who could not speak English. In early 1915 Lazar Kling, a Jewish socialist, complained that Yiddish-speaking socialist workers did not integrate into the general socialist institutions, and if they did try, they left them after a short while. Similar grievances appeared elsewhere: an exchange of letters published in 1914 in the Message, the organ of Local 25 (ILGWU), revealed that Jewish workers felt that the American branch of the union was inhospitable and in any case “dull.” One Jewish woman reiterated the common theme that “the Christian girls .  .  . were not so quick to understand the cause as the Jewish girls,” and another Jewish reader supported the separation of Jewish and Gentile branches.49 Occasionally the pronounced Jewish character of labor institutions made non-Jews appear to be intruders or latecomers at best who were not entitled to the same rights as those—namely Jews—who sacrificed so much to establish those institutions. Jewish socialist leader Yankev Salutsky remarked that Jewish workers looked at certain unions and Arbeter Ring’s branches as their combined cultural center, debate club, and “social philosophy yeshiva.” While it was understood that an Italian or a Polish representative should be included, that understanding was not always elevated to the status of a principle. Meyer Kushner, active in Local 9 of the ILGWU, remembered that in 1911 and 1912 the Italians in his local demanded a separate Italian local, “because they can’t speak Yiddish, and some can’t even speak English.” Kushner argued that the Italian leader who led those who demanded the separate local was somebody that “today you’d call ‘a regular fascist.’” Since non-Jews were often seen as outsiders—both because they were not Jews and because they did not

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share the main group’s values—any ideological deviation by them was hardly welcome. At the ILGWU convention in 1914, President Abraham Rosenberg suggested that Italian leaders were syndicalists and that they leave the union for the Industrial Workers of the World.50 That Jewishness had become synonymous with radical trade unionism and socialism for many immigrant Jews was obvious by the early 1910s. Socialist journalist and longtime manager of the Forverts, Adolph Held, recounted what Jewish socialists in the 1900s used to say about a Gentile who joined the Socialist Party, “Well, he is probably a Jew somewhere.” Walter H. Bartholomew, who in 1913 became the chief clerk of New York’s Dress and Waist Manufacturers’ Association, was known for his understanding of workers in the trade and ardent advocacy of collective bargaining. Thus the Jewish workers nicknamed him the “yidisher goy” ( Jewish Gentile), since he embodied a set of ideological precepts that entitled him to be “Jewish.” The poet and novelist Harry Roskolenko, who grew up on the East Side in the 1910s, asked his immigrant father whether he would vote for a socialist who was not Jewish. His father “looked puzzled—then said no.” Roskolenko recalled that the Irish or Poles he knew “never talked about socialism. . . . It seemed to be a specially Jewish subject.” IWW and socialist agitator Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, who was born to Irish parents and grew up in the Bronx in the 1900s, told how Americanized young Jews asked her in amazement, “You’re an American and you believe that [socialism] too?”51 Labor leaders like John A. Dyche personified the unique fusion of militant trade unionism and Jewish immigrants’ cultural milieu. Although not a socialist, Dyche served as the ILGWU’s general secretary-treasurer between 1904 and 1914 and was part and parcel of the Jewish labor movement. Dyche had become an advocate of the pragmatic, bread-and-butter unionism the AFL represented. Thus the Jewish workers called Dyche “the Jewish Gompers.” It mattered little that the British-born Gompers was Jewish by birth—he was not part of the Yiddish milieu of the bavegung (movement) and was perceived as an outsider with what one worker called “the Gentile trades.”52 The fact that radical, secular Jewishness became one and the same with class consciousness only increased respect for and enchantment with Gentiles who were socialists, or at least committed to the cause of labor. Eugene V. Debs was perhaps the most outstanding example: during the 1904 presidential campaign, a soapbox socialist agitator cried out in Yiddish before an eager crowd that Jews should vote for Debs, “because he’s our messiah.” A Yiddish-speaking socialist remembered how immigrant Jews admired the blue-eyed, old-stock leader: “Deps, Deps, they called him. . . . His words made men cry even when they were not fully

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understood” and added that his mother would “worry about his health.” The famous Bundist leader Borekh Charney Vladeck (the longtime manager of the Forverts and a leading figure in Jewish socialism) said about Jewish socialists: “They had respect and admiration for radicals of their own race. But they worshipped Debs.”53 On a more local level, the support for Algernon Lee paralleled that of Debs. In 1917 Lee successfully ran for New York City alderman from a Jewish district and during his political career was closely associated with New York Jewish socialism. Vladeck wrote about him, “You could almost forget . . . that he is not a Jew . . . [he was] our good Jew.” Another non-Jewish socialist, the American journalist Charles Edward Russell, ran for New York State governor on the Socialist ticket in 1912. According to Abraham Cahan, Russell was “beloved” by Jews. The fact that Russell was “a Christian, and a ‘true Yankee’ to boot, had given him a special charm in Jewish eyes.” Because being a real socialist increasingly meant being a Jew, the appeal of Gentile socialists was only magnified. The fascination was particularly strong when the person was a “true American” (like Debs, Lee, and Russell) and not German, as often was the case in the 1880s and 1890s.54 Still, the identification of garment unions with Jews was sometimes nearly tantamount to ignoring the rest. The fire that broke out on March 25, 1911, on the upper floors of the nonunion Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, on the edge of Washington Square, snuffed out the lives of 146 people, mostly young Jewish and Italian women, and left more disfigured. The disaster shocked Jewish immigrant neighborhoods and brought about deep grief, scenes of hysteria, heated demonstrations, and a funeral procession of tens of thousands who passed solemnly along the streets of the East Side. Some Orthodox Jews mumbled that the wrath of God had descended upon the parents who had sent their daughters to work on the holy Sabbath. But most people pointed fingers at the employers (though one of them lost his wife and two sons in the fire).55 Approximately 30 percent of the workforce in the Triangle factory were Italians in 1911, and dozens of them perished in the fire. The conservative Tageblat mentioned the Italian families when it described the heartrending scenes at the morgue, where “Yiddish mixed with Italian. Though very different from one another, both languages express in the same second the same pain, the same heartbreak.”56 Stressing class rather than ethnicity, the Forverts barely mentioned the Italians in the days after the fire, besides noting that one of the unidentified victims had an “Italian-looking face.” Another socialist Yiddish paper did refer directly to the Italians: Nachman Syrkin covered the funeral procession for the labor Zionist weekly, Yidisher kemfer, which was well regarded for its high

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literary standards. After reporting on the masses that marched in a pouring rain, Syrkin commented, “As you know, a large number of the victims in the dreadful Triangle tragedy were Italian. Where are the thousands of Italian workers? Everywhere only Jewish, Jewish faces . . . and the heart rejoices, and something of a pride emerges and embraces the soul.”57 The fact Jews were the mainstay of socialism and radical trade unionism in New York City in those years, in addition to their autonomous Yiddish sphere, kept them detached from other workers. That situation disturbed those who sought to integrate better Jewish workers into the general American labor movement. Following the 1913 May Day celebration in New York, John Dyche observed that the workers’ day had become “quite a Jewish holiday”: “With the exception of a few hundred stranded Italians, the Gentiles in this demonstration were conspicuous by their absence.” But Dyche was more concerned by the lack of desire on behalf of Jewish workers to express solidarity with organized workers of other nationalities. He criticized the poor Jewish representation at the Central Federated Union of New York City, “where the American, German and various other nationalities are represented.” How was it, Dyche wondered, that Jewish trade unionists, “who are ready to shout from the house tops their feeling of solidarity with the workers across the ocean keep aloof from the trade unionists in the city where they live?”58 Dyche’s observation reflected the mixture of ethnic, linguistic, and cultural differences that was amplified by the ideological gap that made many Jewish workers distrustful of the more conservative, non-Jewish trade unionists. The Creation of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America and the Beginnings of Jewish-Italian Rapprochement Such distrust was strongly felt among Jewish workers in the men’s clothing industry, who were organized in the New York–based Brotherhood of Tailors, an affiliate of the United Garment Workers of America (UGWA). Considerable antagonism had existed since the 1890s between the more radical immigrant Jewish membership and the conservative officers of UGWA, as immigrant tailors felt that the parent union neglected them and even sabotaged their organization. Although many of those officers were Jewish, they were in the main German or American-born Jews, who believed in bread-and-butter unionism and had little sympathy for the Yiddish-speaking workers. Matters came to a head in February 1913, when the UGWA’s national officers announced the settlement of a two-month strike of about fifty thousand tailors without even consulting the strikers. The Brotherhood of Tailors decided to continue the strike, as a young, stocky lawyer by the name of Fiorello H. La Guardia had helped to bail out many of the strikers. The strike continued for several more weeks

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and destroyed what remained of the confidence the tailors had in the UGWA.59 At the 1914 UGWA convention in Nashville (a location selected to hinder many New York and Chicago delegates from showing up), the union barred 105 delegates and disenfranchised the delegates of the New York locals. The unseated representatives and their allies reconvened in a nearby hotel and declared that this was the legal convention of the UGWA. After the AFL refused to recognize the new leadership, the insurgents met in December 1914 in New York and founded the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America.60 The secession of mostly immigrant tailors from their parent union did not neatly follow ethnic lines. Among the seceding faction were many Italians and members of other nationalities, while UGWA’s officials included Jews. Two Jewish UGWA organizers, B. Schweitzer and Ephraim Kaufman (the former a German Jew and the latter Americanborn, of German-Jewish parents), argued that union president Thomas A. Rickert and his fellow non-Jewish union leaders had “always been friends of Jews.” But the leaders of the tailors and the Yiddish papers presented the issue as “a struggle between Jews and Gentiles.” Joseph Schlossberg, secretary of the New York United Brotherhood of Tailors and later general secretary of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America (ACWA), provided a more nuanced description: the UGWA was made up of German workers (including Jews), who viewed Jews and Italians as radicals and “troublemakers” and were afraid of them. The militancy of the Yiddish-speaking tailors and their ethnicity were closely connected, as in previous strikes. But in the formation of the ACWA they worked closely with Italian workers (and to a lesser degree with members of other nationalities) and managed to form a stable union.61 Undoubtedly, Jewish union members would continue to voice their frustration over the Italians’ unwillingness to join the union (or walkouts). In 1915 ACWA organizer Louis Feldman wrote from Rochester, New York, that the Jews, Poles, and Lithuanians were ready to strike, but the Italians remained aloof and were “the harder nut to crack.” Socialist (and future New York State Assembly member) Abraham I. Shiplacoff displayed his discontent with the Italian tailors’ passivity in 1916, asking rhetorically, “Where are the Italian tailors today . . . who were even more embittered [against UGWA] than the Jewish workers?”62 Despite enduring interethnic friction, the union exhibited increased intergroup organization. By early 1915 Schlossberg was able to complain in private, “There is an exasperatingly treacherous element here [Boston] among the strikers,” yet acknowledged, “among the Jews more than the Italians.” In 1919 a New York member of the ACWA Joint Board, David Wolf, argued that in the previous four years Italian organizers and newspapers

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had managed “to educate Italians in the value of labor organization.” Whereas the image of Gentile workers did not change overnight and interrelations did not become harmonious, the years after 1914 would witness a pattern of widening collaboration between immigrant Jews and other ethnicities (especially Italians) not only in the ACWA, but in the ILGWU and other trades as well.63

An old joke has it that the definition of a Jew is someone who speaks Yiddish, is a socialist, and was born in Poland. While most Jewish immigrants were not socialists, the solidification of powerful labor unions in the garment trades and the rising strength of socialism among Jewish immigrants in New York between 1909 and 1914 had a profound effect on the emergence of class-conscious (and in many cases outright radical) secular Jewish identity, which was intimately tied to militant trade unionism and Yiddish culture. The Jewish men and women who were part of that culture had developed a self-image that recast the concept of Jewish chosenness in an alternative and secularized form, and viewed left-wing Jews as the spearhead in the messianic struggle for a better world. Furthermore, in those years there was an increasing infl uence of various syntheses between socialism and Jewish nationalism. These movements were determined to preserve Jewish distinctiveness and affirmed the existence of separate Jewish institutions. The labor movement served as an arena of closer acquaintance with Americans. The American labor movement’s mixture of nativism and craft protectionism helps to explain the aloofness of Jewish labor organizations from the AFL’s central body in New York. It mattered little that some of di amerikaner were actually Irish Americans, German Americans, or even Jews; Yiddish-speaking socialists and trade unionists in the 1910s saw them an intolerant American organization that tried to make them “bow their heads.” It was not just linked to some American workers’ refusal to join strikes: even when Yankees directly backed Jewish strikers, as the “high-society ladies” did, the latent nativism among some of them, their focus on feminist interests, and their privileged background estranged them from most Jewish female workers. In the latter’s construction of womanhood, ethnic and class loyalty continued to be a more compelling principle than cross-ethnic gender solidarity. Nevertheless, the image of Gentiles in the Jewish labor movement was far from only negative. In spite of intergroup suspicions and contempt, the shops, strikes, and union locals served as a crucial meeting place between Jewish and Italian workers. At certain junctures as well as on a daily basis, shared experiences and a growing appreciation of Italian

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coworkers would mitigate the impact of Jewish chosenness and lingering suspicions toward the Italians. Combined with the shared interest in struggling against nativism, the labor movement formed an early precursor of a stronger intergroup cooperation. At the same time, the scope of that embryonic interethnic teamwork should not be overstated.64 The attitudes described above toward Gentile coworkers as well as the frequent power struggles between Jews and nonJews in the needle trades would continue to hamper far-reaching intergroup cooperation. The unreserved secularism of most Jewish socialists and trade unionists does not mean there were no infl uences carried by traditional Jewish life and values over to radicalism. Rather than attributing those ideological positions to “Judaism secularized,” one should look at the nexus between ethnic-communal approaches and the multifaceted images of non-Jews, and their role in the ways immigrant Jews understood themselves and their environment.65 Hailing from communities where the distinction between Jews and Gentiles were embedded in daily practices, it was easy for immigrant Jews to simplify complex industrial conditions into a generalized ethnic matrix that had cast present coworkers in older images of non-Jews: an Italian seamstress was depicted as a devout peasant girl, while a non-Jewish lawyer became a porets. By 1914 older conceptions of Gentiles were reawakened in stronger ways. The outbreak of World War I that year would test the strength of the immigrant Jewish population. The crises that erupted in that period and its aftermath would witness some of the most dramatic shifts in the way New York Jews viewed not only their compatriots but also people from other nations.

6

“The ‘Green’ Italian Pays the Same Good Taxes as the 14-Karat Yankee” The War in Europe and the B e g i n n i n g s o f R e o r i e n tat i o n t o wa r d C e rta i n M i n o r i t y G r o u p s, 1 9 14 – 1 9 1 7

In late October 1917, as many national groups were clamoring for independence in war-torn Europe, the League for Small and Subject Nationalities opened its conference in New York City. The league included representatives from some twenty nations that had sent immigrants to the United States and was formed to awaken American public opinion to the oppression of those nations and other groups in Europe—whether Albanians, Armenians, Bohemians, or Jews (who were represented by three Zionist delegates). The league also aimed to work toward a postwar accord that would ensure equal rights for those peoples and the right for cultural or political self-determination. A few days before the conference began, the Varhayt contrasted the organization of other national groups in America and American Jews, who remained divided on whether to found an American Jewish congress: “What a difference! With them [other groups] you do not hear about confl icts, dissonances, or any hindrances.” Unlike American Jews, “tiny nationalities organized . . . without noise, without hotheadedness, without bitter schism.”1 The period between the outbreak of World War I in Europe ( July 1914) and America’s entry to war (April 1917) placed numerous domestic challenges before American Jews that had a significant effect on their attitudes at home toward non-Jews.2 The news about the horrors that befell Eastern European Jewry and the need to work for an immediate relief for one’s family members engulfed nearly every Jewish immigrant in New York. At that time of crisis, America witnessed increasing suspicions toward “hyphenated” Americans, demands for “pure Americanism,” and pressure to curb immigration, which had put “real” Americans in a less favorable light. It was not only the anti-immigration atmosphere that found its way to the center of America’s political arena, which affected 126

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the image of the American; as Jewish immigrants came into closer contact with Americans, more unfavorable impressions of the Yankee appeared. Yiddish-speaking Jews increasingly attributed to Americans some of the negative characteristics that Eastern European Jewish society frequently ascribed to Gentiles in general: hatred of Jews, intolerance, and even brutality. In previous years such traits were typically associated with other groups, whereas the Yankee was more of an abstract idealization. But by the mid-1910s such attitude had become much harder to maintain—more than breeding contempt, familiarity bred wariness. As the circumstances dictated better cooperation with other immigrant groups against the nativist tide, the atrocities against Eastern European Jews strengthened Jewish nationalism. Still, there was a certain bipolarity that characterized the nationalist rise. Alongside circumspection toward Gentiles, nationalists wished to emulate other nationalities, which seemed more united and resolved than Jews. While much of the Jewish resentment was directed at Slavic nations, usually seen as the main culprit in Jewish suffering, Jewish nationalists also viewed other peoples (including Slavs) as a standard of normalcy, to which Jews ought to aspire. Any analysis that deals with an elusive theme like imagery cannot assume that the changes were unequivocal or all-encompassing. The aspiration to look and behave like an American hardly disappeared (though there was more awareness of its costs). But by the war years the hyperbole regarding the Americans’ benevolence began to be replaced by more realistic assessments of the social and political currents. By the same token, the process of gradual improvement in the image of other groups was fraught with suspicion and ambivalence. Even where the relationship with a group was not burdened with the circumstances in Europe (as with Blacks or Italians), reservations would linger. The Multifaceted Images of African Americans Until World War I contacts between Jews and Blacks in New York City remained rather sporadic. Prior to 1914 the Yiddish press had regularly condemned discrimination and prejudice against Blacks and highlighted the similarities between the situation of Jews in Europe and Blacks in America. News items and editorials applied terms like “pogrom” and “blood libel” when covering race riots and lynching (the word lynch was quickly absorbed into Yiddish), and white assailants were often described as bloodthirsty pogromists. Jewish socialists and anarchists frequently related to the plight of “our Black brothers.” In August 1900, following a race riot in the Tenderloin district, the Yiddish newspapers expressed an uncharacteristic agreement with each other, attacking the racism that underlay the violence. The Tageblat thought the riot was “a sad sign

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for Jews,” while the anarchist Fraye arbeter shtime (Free voice of labor) mocked the “white man’s burden,” according to which the “unfortunate whites” must “civilize the savages, the Blacks,” by assaulting them.3 Six years later the Tageblat lambasted the bigoted Senator Ben Tillman, comparing his racism to a “Russian police officer, or a pogrom agitator,” and blamed “those barbarians, those fanatics . . . the antisemites, the anti-Negroes, and all ‘antis.’” Before he ran for Congress in Harlem on its ticket in 1912, Isaac A. Hourwich privately confessed that he had initial doubts about Roosevelt’s Progressive Party because it took a “reactionary attitude” concerning African Americans that “shocked” him. The Tog (the Day) did not hesitate to chastise southern Jews for their attitude toward African Americans; a reporter for that daily, H. Levin, traveled to the Mississippi Valley in 1916 and berated what he saw as southern Jews’ racism; the Jewish merchant in the South, he wrote, “makes a living of the Negro, but liking the Negro—no.”4 Such expressions of identification and sympathy notwithstanding, Jewish immigrants also viewed Blacks with trepidation. In October 1904 some two thousand enraged Jewish parents protested against a plan to send Jewish pupils from overcrowded schools on the East Side to the West Side, whose population, cautioned the Forverts, was “incited by antisemitism,” and “children drink like adults.” Other commentators were more specific in pointing out “the danger.” Abraham Fromenson warned that the children would be sent to a school on West Forty-sixth Street, “a street infested with the dirtiest rabble, the scum of the colored race.” Even the cautious Yidishe velt reminded its readers that the proposed plan would send Jewish children into “a Negro neighborhood, not far from the Tenderloin [district],” where they would face “Negroes and painted-up hussies.”5 Other portrayals of Blacks were hardly more gracious. In 1895 the Yiddish play Tsvishn indianer (Among Indians), by the critic and journalist Khonen-Yankev Minikes, was performed in New York. In addition to rendering an Indian chief as a “cannibal,” it featured a Black field hand by the name of Dixon who spoke broken English, appeared idiotic, and performed minstrel show tunes with other Black field hands. In the early 1910s the explorer, poet, and pioneer of Yiddish journalism in America, Getsil Zelikovitsh, referred to the common term “coon song” when he called the song “Alexander’s Ragtime Band,” by fellow Russian Jew Irving Berlin, “a piece of worthless coon nonsense.” Negative mentions of Blacks were especially acute when it came to perceived anti-Jewish violence. In 1909 four Black men were lynched in Mississippi after they were suspected of robbing and murdering a Jewish peddler. Both the Tageblat and the Morgen zhurnal reported that the peddler was well known and liked by the white farmers. When his body was found, the farmers

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“understood immediately that was the work of Negroes. They knew that none of the whites could have committed such a gruesome murder.”6 It was yet a different lynching that deeply shook American Jews. In 1913 Leo Frank, an Atlanta Jew (who was raised in Brooklyn) was arrested and found guilty of the murder of Mary Phagan, a young white girl (not yet fourteen years old), who was his employee at a pencil factory he supervised and partly owned. In what was seen as a precedent in the South, the court admitted the testimony of a Black janitor, Jim Conley, against his white employer (Frank). The governor of Georgia, John Slaton, commuted Frank’s death sentence to life in prison; following this, a group of men from Phagan’s hometown snatched Frank from his prison cell on August 16, 1915, and hanged him from a tree.7 As the body of Leo Frank made its way to his parents’ home in Brooklyn, an estimated crowd of twenty thousand Jews flocked to Cooper Union to protest the lynching. The crowd wept throughout Joseph Barondess’s speech as he cried out that Mendel Beilis (who was falsely accused in Russia in 1911 of murdering a young boy for “ritual purposes”) was freed and Alfred Dreyfus rehabilitated; “but here, in America, an innocent Jew was seized from prison and torn to pieces.” Ten-year-old Re’uven Grossman, who attended the meeting, wrote that Barondess stated that “bad people” had lynched Leo Frank, “and when the people heard that they all bowed their heads and you could feel the mortal dread in the hall.” A week after the killing a reader wrote sarcastically to the Forverts that Jews should not expect that “the good Christian would shed a crocodile tear over Jewish pain.”8 One interpretation sees the Frank case as a starting point for alliance building between Blacks and Jews in America. According to that analysis, the lynching was a wake-up call for Jewish leaders, who were shocked to see that an established Jewish businessman was more vulnerable than a Black janitor. Not only did the murderous wickedness of lynching in general dawn on those leaders; they began to see that Jews and Blacks shared a history of oppression and marginalization and that as long as Blacks were lynched, disenfranchised, and discriminated against, American Jews were not safe either.9 Yet in the period following Frank’s murder there were no immediate signs of Jewish kinship with Blacks. The Yiddish intelligentsia’s conception of civility and barbarity—in part infl uenced by prevailing notions of racial hierarchy in American society—was evident in its depiction of Blacks. When attacking Frank’s murderers and their “barbarian customs of former slaveholders,” the Forverts likened them to “the savage tribes of Africa,” who “always do the same when they catch a stranger and prepare to roast and eat him.” The left-leaning weekly Bronzvil un east nu york

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progres (Brownsville and East New York progress) wrote that Frank was found guilty because he was a Jew, and determined that the “savage mob” of Georgia in its cruelty exceeded the “savage tribes of Africa,” since the former “pretend to be civilized.”10 Furthermore, the Frank affair was the first incident (that drew national attention) in which the needs of Blacks and Jews seemed to have been in direct confl ict. Conley’s testimony was a key factor in the prosecution’s case, while Frank’s legal team hoped to make the most of the southern racial divide by employing overtly racist language: one of Frank’s attorneys referred to Conley as a “dirty, filthy, black, drunken, lying nigger.” Many Jews believed that Conley was the real murderer, who heaped lies about Frank to exculpate himself. The Anglo-Jewish press across the country widely reprinted editorials from various American newspapers that described the janitor as a “depraved negro [sic]” or “black human animal.” Abraham Cahan, in Atlanta to cover the trial, enlightened his readers on how the “sly” Conley convinced the white jury: Blacks had “fantasy power,” and “talent for music and poetry”; hence their lies might seem plausible.11 If one looks for the roots of a nascent coalition between Jews and Blacks, the Frank case in itself did not seem to have an immediate and major impact on the images of Blacks. Cahan’s approach had reverberated in radical circles. The socialist leader Borekh Charney Vladeck traveled across the South in 1911, and his impressions conveyed the ambivalence of the socialist intelligentsia, which was dedicated to social equality but associated various races with differing levels of development. While Vladeck condemned the abysmal abuse of Blacks (“They are treated worse than the Jews in the worst periods of the Middle Ages”), he noted that a Jewish grocer resided in Atlanta’s Black section, not informed of the centrality of racial propriety. The grocer’s children were “under the infl uence of the Black Street, which is still half-savage and barbaric.” The Varhayt communicated a similar picture that year, when it described how non-Jews enjoyed Passover. On the streets of New York you could see “a ragged Negro child and a dirty Irish rascal crack the hard Jewish matzo between their teeth.” How did they obtain it? “They begged that matzo from a couple of Jewish children, whom they beat up until recently.” The Black child on the street not only was seen as less developed, but also signified—like the Irish boy—the embodiment of a Gentile essence, which stood in sharp contrast to all things Jewish.12 The dualism exhibited by Jewish commentators with respect to Blacks represented the complicated attitudes of the Jewish public. As with the attitudes of immigrant Jews toward other groups, there was a gap between the image of Blacks as a similarly oppressed minority and

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a reality fraught with prejudice and suspicions. Unlike Italian or Slavic immigrants, Jews rarely worked as common laborers; thus there was barely any job competition between them and Blacks. Before 1920 the numbers of African Americans in New York’s garment industry remained very low. Jewish immigrants who ventured outside the heavily populated Jewish neighborhoods in New York had much less compunction about trading with African Americans or residing next to them than most Americans. Jews remained an identifiable minority within the Black section of Harlem (north of 130th Street and west of Park Avenue) throughout the 1910s. Although their numbers began to decline after the massive infl ux of southern Blacks into Harlem during World War I, by 1920 Jews made up nearly the entire white population in that district. Moreover, as Jews in Eastern Europe were used to trading with people of different backgrounds, they did not view it as dishonorable to live in a Black neighborhood to make a living. Mary Ovington, a cofounder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), observed that Jewish and Italian immigrants proved to be more amicable toward their Black neighbors than the more belligerent Irish.13 Jewish perceptions of Blacks, however, were much knottier than what the preceding suggests. While Jewish immigrants were indeed often oblivious to white America’s racial etiquette, Blacks did look different to them. Most Yiddish-speaking immigrants had never seen Africans in real life before they reached America. For many a newcomer Blacks seemed exotic and eerie. When Sam Carasik arrived in Baltimore in 1906 from Bobroysk, he saw many Black people. Carasik told his friends that one of the Black men looked like a “polished boot.” Hebrew educator Zvi Scharfstein, who later became a professor of education at the Jewish Theological Seminary, arrived in New York in 1914; on his third day in America, as he and his wife were walking down the Bowery, between “red-faced, blue-nosed, and potbellied Irishmen” and Chinese “whose faces seemed as if they were frozen,” they also saw African Americans. “It was the first time we saw Black people,” he wrote. “Beforehand we saw them only in books and newspapers’ illustrations. Now they actually passed by us, showing their white teeth and pouting their thick lips, whose strong redness lit their faces’ blackness. With each encounter or brushing elbows against them—my heart quivered.” A similar impression was written by a more famous immigrant who also arrived in New York in 1914. The renowned Yiddish writer Sholem Aleichem described how one of his most famous characters, Motl, first saw Blacks on the subway: “Crude creatures. Frightfully thick lips. Big white teeth and white fingernails.”14 Thus one cannot assume that it was only external infl uences—namely, the prevalent conceptions of racial differences in the surrounding society,

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augmented by the common representations of Blacks in popular minstrel shows and “coon songs”—that caused African Americans to appear outlandish to immigrant Jews. Images of peasants were interwoven in the way many immigrants perceived African Americans, especially migrants from the South, with all the ensuing negative traits. That was definitely the opinion of the Morgen zhurnal’s editor, Peter Wiernik, who wrote in 1902 that “the Russians . . . are so much below everything we know here that we would have to go to the illiterate Southern negro for a familiar example of their mental capacity.” In addition, class discrepancy sometimes sharpened the image of Blacks as the low-class Gentiles that Jews had dealt with in Eastern Europe. The physician and economist Isaac M. Rubinow wrote in 1902 how the emerging immigrant middle class aspired to reside in the new buildings, “with an elevator and a ‘nigger boy’ on the stoop.” Future activist in the civil rights movement Rabbi Israel Goldstein, who was in his teens in New York in the 1910s, reminisced that Jews probably “sinned” less against Blacks than other Americans. But many Jewish proprietors looked down on the “shvartses,” and even if they were nice to their Black servants or chauffeurs, their “contempt” still showed through.15 Most important, for Yiddish-speaking Jews the appearance of African American was immediately recognizable as non-Jewish. Groups of African Americans who called themselves “Black Jews” appeared in Harlem in about 1915, but at that time Jewish immigrants scarcely knew about them and if they did, they regarded them as Gentiles. During World War I young Harry Roskolenko told his immigrant mother that there were “Negro Jews” in Harlem; “she was astonished at first and later insisted that I had invented them.” When he asked her what she would do if her daughter married a Negro Jew, “she slapped my face and that ended my sociological explorations.” Groups of African Americans who considered themselves Jewish told a Jewish writer in 1924 that they wanted to live among “the other Jews,” but the latter did not want to intermingle with them.16 The complex attitude of Eastern European Jews toward African Americans, in which identification coexisted with distance, manifested itself in residential patterns: whereas immigrant Jews in New York were more willing than most New Yorkers to live near Blacks, they still had their reservations. Jewish landlords were concerned that their property would be devalued if Blacks would settle in or near it. An African American newspaper, New York Age, complained in 1908–1909 that the property owners’ West Side Improvement Association, an organization formed (among other reasons) to bar Black encroachment in West Harlem, was “composed in the main of Jews,” among them East Side banker Meyer

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Yarmulovsky. Jewish residents did not always welcome Black neighbors, as a study of turn-of-the-century East Harlem revealed. The researcher remarked, “The mutual hatred of the Jew and negro is hearty. Once they separate, they never meet again.” The Yiddish journalist and former labor organizer Menakhem-Mendel Tsipin traveled to Detroit in 1914 to write about Jewish life there. Although the two groups rarely socialized, he was surprised that Jews and Blacks lived “in very close proximity,” which “I have never seen before.” Tsipin’s description suggests that while Jews indeed lived alongside Blacks in New York in the 1910s, propinquity between the two groups was still a noteworthy phenomenon for a New York Jew.17 There were hints of an attitudinal change toward Blacks in the mid1910s, though the actual signs would appear mostly after 1920. Mounting interest in the lives of Blacks and sympathy for their suffering was evident by 1918 among both intellectuals and their readership. It was palpable in Yoysef Opatoshu’s blood-curdling story “Lynching” (1915), which graphically describes a white mob lynching a young Black boy (though a “Yankee” appeals for the boy’s life). In 1917 that sympathy was also clear in the heartrending report by playwright Peretz Hirshbein of a white crowd in Alabama that amused itself by forcing a Black man to eat watermelon before hanging him.18 Anger about white racism was expressed in a 1916 letter by a Brooklyn reader, Fannie Jacobs, to the New York Call, protesting against “Coney Island fun,” wherein white revelers were invited to take aim and “hit the coon, three shots for a nickel.” In 1918 a Yiddish reader by the name of Y. Meltzer commended Blacks, asking “Weren’t they the first to protest the pogroms?” adding that Blacks were the Jews’ “best friends” in America. Jewish unions began making inroads into the incipient Black constituency in the garment industry, as a small group of African Americans (most notably A. Philip Randolph) in New York City began working with Jewish socialists, such as during Morris Hillquit’s mayoral campaign in 1917.19 The root cause of the burgeoning improvement in the image of African Americans had less to do with Frank’s lynching in and of itself. It had more to do with a broader transformation that occurred during the war in the way immigrant Jews viewed Americans as well as other minorities, including Blacks.20 The Outbreak of the Great War in Europe In 1914 the thoughts, prayers, and anger of most New York Jews had turned eastward, across the Atlantic. With the start of World War I and the almost instant news about Jewish sufferings in the eastern war zone and in Palestine, American Jews established several relief agencies, most

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notably the Joint Distribution Committee, to aid the devastated communities. The ominous newspaper reports from Europe were filled with the names of many immigrants’ towns and cities of origin, and the misery was the lot of their parents, siblings, or offspring. Numerous landsmanshaftn, synagogues, and societies organized benefits and bazaars, providing not only monetary assistance but also hundreds of volunteers to help with solicitations and collections.21 News about the Russian advance into Galicia and Bukovina (in the winter months of 1914–1915) intensified the anxiety of Jewish immigrants, as piecemeal reports about the atrocities committed by Nicholas’s soldiers constantly appeared in the Yiddish press—scorched-earth withdrawals, kidnappings, looting, torture, rape, and sadistic savagery. Furthermore, claiming they were removing a disloyal population from the frontline, the Russians initiated a series of massive expulsions of hundreds of thousands of Jews in the western regions of Russia, ordering them to leave their homes, often at twelve hours’ notice. As profound worry over the fate of relatives spread, so did the fever-pitch activity of relief work and protest meetings against Russian cruelty.22 Amid the reports of Russian brutality, the majority of immigrant Jews supported the Germans and Austrians. That sentiment had less to do with pro-German feelings per se (or against the Western Allies for that matter), and more with prewar hatred of the czarist regime. Poet Morris Rosenfeld wrote in 1915, “The bleeding of Russia rejoices my heart / May the Devil do to her / What she did unto me.” The Tageblat explained that Jews backed Germany “because Russia bathes in Jewish blood,” while the Varhayt reminded its readers that Russia “remains and will remain an antisemitic country.” The Morgen zhurnal argued that even though antisemitism was well developed in Germany, “You still cannot deny that the German is better that the Russian in that regard.” Louis Friedman, the father-in-law of Benjamin Koenigsberg (a key lay figure in New York’s Jewish Orthodoxy), wrote in 1915 to the Globe and Commercial Advertiser that “even a cannibal” would have had mercy on defenseless women and children, but the Russians did not. Terms like “sober Russia” or “cultured, enlightened Russia,” Friedman concluded, “would make a horse laugh.”23 On top of most immigrant Jews’ deep loathing for the Russian regime, there were those who emigrated from the Habsburg Empire (particularly Hungary, Galicia, and Bukovina); they were typically enthusiastic Austrian patriots, and especially admired Emperor Franz Joseph, who was considered a protector of the Jews. Helen Weinstein, who grew up in Kraków at the turn of the century, recalled how local Jews were dedicated to the emperor and feared that after his death they would

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be left to the mercy of the “very antisemitic” Poles. Yiddish journalist Khone Gotesfeld, who also grew up in Galicia, remembered how Jews would bless the “great friend of Jews” (the emperor) and believed that evil decrees came from local Polish authorities. Reporters who went to the Hungarian-Galician quarter around New York’s East Houston Street wrote of prayers for the well-being of the Austrian emperor, curses against “Fonye,” and a march down Second Avenue in support of Austria. Whether one’s motivation had to do more with loyalty to Franz Joseph than with hatred to the czar, the end result was that most immigrants were disposed toward Austria and Germany.24 An openly pro-Entente (Allies) position—which was seen as proRussian—was tremendously unpopular, as demonstrated in the case of the Varhayt’s founder and editor, Louis E. Miller. In August 1914 Miller wrote three editorials that not only backed the Allies, but also called on American Jews to actively assist them. The popular paper’s sales immediately plummeted by about fifty thousand copies (close to a half its daily circulation) following a spontaneous boycott. In dozens of Galician and Hungarian synagogues and landsmanshaftn the “pro-Fonye” Varhayt was pilloried as enraged readers snatched copies from newsstands and fl ung them into the gutter. A few thousand immigrants participated in protest demonstrations in front the Varhayt building on East Broadway. While the other Yiddish dailies gloated, the Varhayt’s owners struggled to regain their popularity, and by January 1915 they ousted Miller from the newspaper he had founded in 1905. Miller’s subsequent journalistic ventures were far less successful, and his waning career revealed Jewish sensibilities and convictions: for nearly a decade the Varhayt functioned as Tammany’s organ prior to election campaigns, and that stance did not prevent it from reaching a circulation of almost one hundred thousand by 1914. But three editorials that were deemed to defend the hated Russian government left Miller’s career in ruins.25 Many of the attacks in the Yiddish press were not aimed merely at the czarist regime. Slavic peoples in general were portrayed at times as backward and bloodthirsty. The descriptions of Slavs by immigrant observers and memoirists illustrate how older Jewish images of peasant folk were blended with the fashionable, racial language of the period. The Tageblat (probably one of the two coeditors, Leon Zolotkof or Gedaliah Bublik) explained to its readers that the Slavs were “a wild, barbaric and inferior race” that cohabited Europe together with the “Latin race” and the “Teutonic race,” which was “much more important” than the Latin race. While the last two races did a lot for “humanity and progress,” the editorial wondered, “what have the Russians, the Poles, the Bulgarians, and the Serbs done for civilization?” and warned that “a victory for the Slavs

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means a deathblow for science, for democracy, for liberal ideas.”26 One of the fiercest critics of Russians and Slavs in general was the pro-German writer Shmuel M. Melamed. A former yeshiva student from Lithuania who studied in Germany, Melamed came to America in 1914 and became a prolific writer in a host of German and later American newspapers, the Yiddish and Hebrew press, and was active in the Zionist movement. The post-Miller Varhayt was more than happy to win back its readership with Melamed’s articles on how the cultivated Germans must defeat the “people of the steppes” and the “Asiatic” Russians.27 The position of the Jewish radical intelligentsia in New York was more ambivalent. Many of this group were immersed in Russian culture, admired Russian literature, and had close relations with like-minded Russian revolutionaries. Labor firebrand Elizabeth Hasanovitz exemplified that approach when she wrote, “How hateful the word Russia sounded,” but hastened to explain, “Not as a country, but as an autocratic government, I hated it. The country itself is very dear to me.” The overall tendency, nonetheless, leaned toward an anti-Russian sentiment. Some Jewish socialists’ stance was also linked to their appreciation of the prowar German socialists. But more important, like other immigrants, New York’s radicals read (or at least heard) the reports in the Yiddish and German press about the Cossacks’ ferocity, hoping that Germany would save Eastern European Jews from the Russian paws. Abraham Cahan’s proGerman attitude and image of Slavs resembled that of his conservative rivals: with the onset of war, Cahan enlightened his readers that although each Slavic nation has its own language and customs, “they are all very similar to one another.” Cahan added, “In truth, the Germanic peoples are more advanced, stronger and more energetic than the Slavs.” A week later Cahan argued that “all civilized people sympathize with Germany, every victorious battle against Russia is a source of joy.” In April 1915 the Forverts showed a cartoon of a blood-dripping, vicious-looking bear, identified as “Russia,” trampling on dying women and babies.28 There were several Jewish left-wingers, however, like socialists Louis Boudin and Karl Fornberg and anarchists Shoel Yanovsky and Emma Goldman, who were not swept along by the anti-Russian wave. They argued that radicals should be against any capitalist war and wondered how freethinkers could favor Prussian despotism. A handful of Jewish socialists, like the writer and former secretary of the United Hebrew Trades (UHT) Yankev Milkh, the journalist M. Baranov, and socialist Zionist leaders Ber Borokhov and Nachman Syrkin went beyond neutrality and openly supported the Allies. In early 1916 historian Elias Cherikover warned against the “Russo-phobia” on the Jewish street and claimed that American Jews were antagonizing the “better element” in

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Figure 6.1 “Russia! The black bear tramples over the murdered, tormented Jewish men, women, and children and satisfies itself with their flesh, and quenches its thirst with their blood . . .” Jewish Daily Forward, 1915. Courtesy of the Dorot Jewish Division at the New York Public Library.

Russia. A.  Litvak (pen name of Chaim-Yankl Helfand), a leading figure in the Jewish Socialist Federation (the Socialist Party’s Yiddish-speaking section, established in 1912), voiced a parallel critique and lambasted what he called “anti-Slavism”: “No, there is no more antisemitism in the nature of the Slavic race than in the nature of the Germanic race.” Litvak cautioned, “We begin to look on people amongst whom we live and work as wolves, as inferior creatures.”29 Still, the pro-Allies or neutralists’ perception of the warring sides was laden with ambiguity as well. Deeply rooted in Russian politics and culture (even more than most left-wing intellectuals), neutralist Chaim

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Figure 6.2 Abraham Cahan: “In truth, the Germanic peoples are more advanced, stronger, and more energetic than the Slavs.” Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

Zhitlovsky wrote in November 1914 that if the war were only between Russia and Germany, “we would all be on Germany’s side.” He stated that the war pitted “a European constitution against Asiatic despotism,” and personal freedom against “barbarian oppression.” But since siding with Germany meant backing “the militaristic lash” and its war was waged also against the French Republic and the English democracy, he chose neutrality.30 To be sure, the Austrian and especially German armies in the east were hardly the benevolent liberators praised in the Yiddish and German press: forced labor and confiscated foodstuff and livestock had often marked the trail of the advancing or retreating Germans. Yet the German military usually maintained order and prevented the outbreak of random violence. Yiddish linguist Hirsh Abramovitsh recalled how the Germans treated the Jews somewhat better than the Slavic peasants, “because Germans and Jews could understand each other better.” The German Information Bureau in New York was very effective in communicating information about Russian atrocities to the Jewish and general press, and the German War Press Authority allowed Jewish journalists

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(like Abraham Cahan) into German-occupied areas in Poland, Lithuania, and Byelorussia; their reports mostly extolled the Germans as saviors.31 During the spring and summer months of 1915 the Germans drove back the Russian army, not only regaining Austrian Galicia, but also conquering the large Jewish centers in Warsaw, Bialystok, and Kovno. As Jewish commentators in New York struggled to exceed one another in celebrating the German victories, a Yiddish tune at the Clinton Theater joyfully related how the Germans invited a cowardly Czar Nicholas, aher gey (come here), to give him a long-overdue thrashing. On a more serious note, Abraham Cahan spoke at a socialist meeting in Carnegie Hall upon his return from Eastern Europe; he attacked the Russians and declared, “The German of today is a better man than he ever was.” The Forverts was positive toward German rule in Warsaw and showed a picture of a Hasidic rebbe in Lodz under the humorous caption: “Now he is a daytsh” (Hasidim were bitter opponents of the maskilim, who were often called “daytshn”). Cleverly marrying a familiar Jewish type to the new occupiers, the Forverts relayed to its readers a homey, soothing image of Germans, one that was diametrically opposed to that of the bloodthirsty Russian/Cossack. In 1916 a Jewish dentist on Suffolk Street, Dr. B. Schwartz, published an ad titled “Germany strikes all the enemies of the Jews,” which claimed that “God sent Germany to punish Russia and Romania” for their cruelty toward Jews.32 The conditions of war and the sheer ruthlessness of the czarist army reestablished (at least temporarily) the image of Germans as carriers of a higher and more benevolent culture, as opposed to Russian brutality. Over Here: The War and the Images of Different Groups in New York The representations of Germans reflected not only the pro–Central Powers disposition of most Jewish immigrants in New York, but also their wide cooperation with German American groups. In April 1915 more than thirty Jewish newspapers and periodicals joined hundreds of foreignlanguage newspapers in an appeal (financed at least partly by the German Information Bureau) against sending munitions to nations at war. That appeal corresponded to the German embargo campaign in America that tried to curb the shipment of munitions and foodstuff to the Allies. In the same month the Jewish labor movement (UHT and ILGWU), with the pro-German elements of the AFL in New York, cosponsored a meeting at Cooper Union (among the speakers were socialists Meyer London and New York State Assembly member Abraham Shiplacoff ), to consider a general strike in the arms and food-producing industries. Two months later the Jewish Socialist Federation, the New York branch of the

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Socialist Party, Jacob Schiff, and Samuel Untermyer (a wealthy attorney associated with Tammany) joined the United German Societies of New York City in sponsoring a mass peace meeting at Madison Square Garden that called on the United States to impose a trade and arms embargo on the Entente. To that one should add the tendency of the Yiddish press (at least before America entered the war) to laud the loyalty and honesty of German Americans.33 Past animosities were not forgotten, but the circumstances of war seemed to trump them, at least for the time being. In early 1915 the Varhayt printed an anonymous feuilleton that illustrated both the enduring Jewish suspicion toward Gotham’s Germans and the changes caused by the war. The writer remarked, “Who if not the Brooklyn daytshukes [a pejorative for Germans]” used to pull the beards of Jews and aboard the East New York cars “imitated the [Jewish] women and girls of Brownsville, cussed and insulted.” But since the onset of the war, one could find no “two other races that would live so peacefully, truly sleep under one blanket, as the Jews and Germans.” The writer noted that Yiddish was a factor in that rapprochement: since “the German has never loved his German language as now, the Yiddish language sounds to him so familiar, so Germanic.”34 The horrors of World War I deeply affected the image of other groups in America as well, namely, Slavs. The war was not the first time that anti-Jewish violence abroad left its mark on the way Jewish immigrants viewed other Eastern European groups in America. Following the pogroms in Russia (1903–1906) a Jewish visitor to the Catskill Mountains complained to the Forverts in 1908 that many katsapes (a derisive term for Russians) and Poles were employed as waiters, drivers, and dishwashers at the hotels and boardinghouses in that area. The man, who identified himself only as “Yisroeli,” asked why the Jewish owners could not employ Jews in their stead: “Some of those Russians had surely knocked against a pavement the head of more than one Jewish child.” The visitor claimed that many other guests also voiced their disapproval of the employment of Russians, and a few, in protest, even left the boardinghouse where he was staying. The next day the Forverts hurried to deplore such “chauvinistic” feelings among Jews and claimed that essentially “anti-katsapism” was not different from antisemitism.35 New York Jews did not encounter Eastern European immigrants only at the Catskills; tens of thousands of Poles, Lithuanians, Ukrainians, and Romanians had settled in New York City by the first decade of the twentieth century, though their numbers remained relatively low (in comparison with the Germans, Irish, Italians, and Jews). Some of them formed

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small enclaves in heavily populated Jewish neighborhoods, ghettos within ghettos among people whose language they knew. The Varhayt explained in 1911 that it was easier for Jewish immigrants to deal with “the familiar Gentile than with an Irishman or an Italian.” But that familiarity did not necessarily mean high esteem and contacts facilitated the persistence of unkind images from the Old World. Yiddish poet and journalist Judd L. Teller, who grew up on the East Side after the Great War, wrote that the local Poles and Ukrainians shuttled between saloons and “smelled of incense, vodka, and vomit.” But since they were outnumbered and dependent on Jews for their livelihood, usually being employed as janitors, handymen, shabbes goyim, or sweepers in the garment industry, those immigrants were “too humbled .  .  . to erupt even when drunk.” Harry Roskolenko remembered running into “a few mustached drunk Poles” and “some fighting, bellowing Russians.” Yiddish newspapers buttressed that image in their occasional descriptions of what they saw as the superstitions and violent temper of Slavs in America; in its report on a fight that broke out at a Polish wedding in Brownsville in 1916, one Yiddish weekly commented, “Our Polish countrymen in America cannot do without a war, so even at a wedding there must be one.”36 Jewish antagonism in America, therefore, was not directed only at Russia: Romania, with its anti-Jewish policies and violence, was reviled time and again in various Jewish sources as the “refuse of nations” and “Amalek land,” while American Jewish leaders appealed to the U.S. government to protest Romania’s mistreatment of Jews. In 1917 Elias Cherikover offered a succinct characterization of the situation of Jews in Romania: “It’s worse than Russia.”37 But during World War I much of the Jewish attention and anger were directed toward Poland. As war broke out the anti-Jewish boycott in Poland continued, and some Poles began circulating false rumors that Jews were German spies, thus aggravating the brutality of the Russian military toward the Jewish population. Yiddish folklorist and playwright S. An-ski (Shloyme Zaynvl Rapoport), who traveled with the Russian army throughout Poland, remarked that “poisonous slander had penetrated every . . . stratum of the Polish people.” When the Russians expelled tens of thousands of Jews, cheering Poles stood alongside the roads, telling Russian soldiers, “May God protect you from Germans and zhids [kikes],” and some Poles participated in anti-Jewish violence.38 Such news was widely disseminated by Jewish emissaries from Europe and in the Yiddish papers. In January 1915 Zionist leader Shmaryahu Levin published an article in the New York Times in which he accused the Poles of “treachery and duplicity,” and for the murder of more than a thousand

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Jews and the expulsion of tens of thousands. Ukrainian-born ShmuelZvi Zetser, a critic who translated to the Yiddish classical rabbinic texts, dissected the roots of Polish antisemitism in 1916 and characterized the Poles as people who had “the greatest measure of . . . vain, foolish arrogance.” Y. D. Berkovitch, the editor of the Zionist weekly Ha-toren (the Mast), and Sholem Aleichem’s son-in-law, expressed a similar view, writing that same year, “If there is a people in the world, which has shown us its despicable cruelty, all of its wild rage . . . it is the Polish people.” A Jewish representative of the Polish National Committee, Arthur Hausner, arrived in New York in 1915 and participated in a mass meeting at Cooper Union, where he called on American Jews to support Poland’s independence: he was booed off the platform as many in the audience ran up to the stage, shaking their fists and shouting insults. There was not much tolerance on New York’s Jewish street for Jewish defenders of the Poles.39 Events in Europe also provoked rising frictions between Jews and Polish Americans. An event that received much coverage in the Yiddish newspapers was the strike of thousands of Standard Oil workers at Bayonne, New Jersey (October 1916). Many of the workers were Slavic immigrants, and at one point rioting strikers took hold of the city, looted stores (a few of which were owned by Jews), and damaged property.40 Avrom (Abe) Goldberg, a gifted writer and charismatic speaker (“a dark, tiny man with fiery eyes and curly hair” in the words of a contemporary), who was active in the Zionist movement and edited its organ, Dos yidishe folk (the Jewish people), wrote about the disturbances in Bayonne, noting that it showed that “recently in America appeared . . . a population whose antisemitism lives in its blood, and educates its children in that spirit.” Goldberg believed that the overt antisemitism of Slavic immigrants might serve as a catalyst for awakening the latent anti-Jewish feeling among Americans, because “real Americans are also not greatly in love with Jews.” The Tog reported on Bayonne Jews’ fear of a pogrom and used the similarity between the name Bayonne and a Yiddish word, boyan (hoodlum), to propose, “The Poles in Bayonne apparently forgot where they are, it seems to them they are not in Bayonne, America, but in their old country of hoodlums, where you can have a pogrom against Jews anytime.”41 A Jewish resident of Bayonne (and a self-described radical), who claimed there was actually no strike, but rather a pogrom against Jewish property: “The Poles—kith and kin—walked around with revolvers in their pockets, threatening the Jews.  .  .  . The guilty party is not the police but only the Polish strikers, who remember the order in Russia and Poland: beginning with a revolution, and ending with a pogrom.” The Tageblat featured a caricature titled “A Russian pogromist goes astray

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in America.” In it, a policeman grabs a mustached man (described in fact as a Pole) who is holding a rock and leads him to prison, remonstrating, “Say, America isn’t Russia.” Even the anarchist Fraye arbeter shtime, which blamed the police and Standard Oil for the riots and violence, mentioned the “ignorant peasants” (i.e., strikers) who attacked Jewish stores.42 Although those voices on the whole condemned John D. Rockefeller and his company’s treatment of its workers, the portrayal of the strikers reflected both the persistence of Old World imagery of peasants and recent anxieties about a spillover of wartime anti-Jewish violence, brought over to America by Slavic (especially Polish) immigrants.

Figure 6.3 Caption: “A Russian pogromist goes astray in America.” The police officer says to the “Polish hooligan,” “Say, America isn’t Russia” and points toward prison. The sign in the background reads “Bayonne” and the name “Standard Oil” appears on the ship. Jewish Daily News, 1916 (uncredited cartoonist). Courtesy of the Dorot Jewish Division at the New York Public Library.

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The Changing Perceptions of Yankees and the Defense of Other Minorities If the preceding seems to suggest an unequivocal acrimony toward all things Slavic, however, Jewish attitudes proved to be more complex. The period between 1914 and 1917 witnessed increasing nativist suspicions toward “hyphenated Americans,” who allegedly had divided loyalties between their former countries and America. The national mood, in which former president Theodore Roosevelt promoted the motto “America for Americans,” increased pressure coming from advocates of immigration restrictions to enact a literacy test as a means to curtail immigration. Congress finally passed such as measure in 1917, overriding President Woodrow Wilson’s veto.43 Most Jewish immigrants did not read nativist tracts like Edward A. Ross’s The Old World in the New (1914), which pilloried Jews for their “love of money” and “poor physique,” or Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race (1916), which heaped scorn on the Polish Jew with his “dwarf stature [and] peculiar mentality.”44 But the general environment was clear and apt to deepen the disillusionment with the Yankee’s character. In 1913, a Dr. M. Nathanzon wrote a letter to a Hebrew journal in which he declared, “The real ‘Yankee’ type is .  .  . totally alien to me,” adding that Yankee life lacked substance. The journalist A. Voliner (pen name of Eliezer Landoy) in 1915 ridiculed the Americans for being proud of their “true-blooded” lineage; they proved their pedigree by showing that “their grandfathers had the honor to graze the first pigs on American soil.” That same year the organ of the movement for an American Jewish congress, Der yidisher kongres (the Jewish Congress), fused the image of the American with the more general image of the Jew-baiting Gentile, claiming that current antisemitism in America was an imminent danger, since “The best of Gentiles is an antisemite at heart.”45 Growing contacts with Americans carried with them disappointments as well. As more and more Jews of Eastern European background entered institutions of higher education, they often encountered an overt hostility that predated the anti-Jewish quotas of the 1920s. In 1913 Hyman Isaac Jacobson, a cofounder of the Jewish fraternity Sigma Alpha Mu, whose membership was mostly made up of the children of Yiddish-speaking immigrants, argued for the existence of separate Jewish fraternities: “But if what we are doing will bring anti-Semitism, let it come! We doubt whether the ill-feeling toward the Jew in American colleges can be much increased.” Speaking at a meeting of the New York University Philosophical Society in 1914, Brooklyn rabbi Alexander Lyons charged that Jewish students were “persecuted” in the city’s colleges, and

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compared the situation to that of Russia. Unpleasant experiences were in store for those who chose activities that were less refined than learning. When a young immigrant called Moyshe Vaysman moved to Waterbury, Connecticut, in 1915 he watched a basketball game between teams from the YMCA and YMHA. “Seated between the Gentiles,” he heard them shouting, “Kill the Jew!” Vaysman felt “broken” and those shouts “rang in my ears for a long time.”46 At the same time, a significant attitudinal realignment with other minority groups in America was in the making. The unflattering images of Slavs notwithstanding, in the crucial struggle to keep America’s gates open, even Eastern European immigrants became potential allies. While the American Jewish Committee usually carried out the lobbying against immigration restriction in Washington, the issue touched virtually every corner of immigrant Jewish life. Preoccupation with bringing over the rest of the family and the widespread devastation that descended on Jews in war-ravaged Eastern Europe made Jewish immigrants’ alarm about restriction ever more urgent. The understanding of the importance of cooperating with other groups was hardly new: since the introduction of the Dillingham Bill in 1906, Jews had worked in tandem with other groups in organizations like the National Liberal Immigration League, the League of Foreign-Born Citizens, the Peoples of America Society, and the American Association of Foreign Language Newspaper Editors. In January 1912, with Jewish groups predominating, representatives of German, Italian, Polish, and other Eastern European groups came to Washington to attend the hearings of the House Immigration Committee.47 The abysmal conditions in wartime Europe made the struggle against immigration restriction increasingly pressing, necessitating the defense of other groups. When the bricklayers’ union demanded in 1914 that subway contractors in New York City fire all workers who were not naturalized, the Varhayt railed against the union, claiming that immigrants performed the most backbreaking jobs, adding, “The ‘green’ Italian pays the same good taxes as the 14-karat Yankee.” The daily predicted that such anti-immigrant incitement could easily turn against Jews as well. When in January 1915 President Wilson invited both supporters and opponents of immigration restriction to present their views at the White House, even Slav-baiter Shmuel Melamed, who attended the meeting, had something kind to say: the Polish representative spoke after the Jewish delegation, and they exhibited “Slavic sentimentalism—but more sincere and more naive than the Jewish ‘politicians.’”48 The effort to keep immigration free and support the national rights of small nations in postwar Eastern Europe brought together Jewish, Bohemian, Polish, Ukrainian, and other delegates to a February 1916

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hearing of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs. As a representative of the Polish National Defense Committee was describing the situation in Poland, Congressman Meyer London encouraged him to elaborate on how the Poles were oppressed under Russian rule.49 Still, there were some who thought Jews were not cooperating enough with other groups. Although asserting that a literacy test “would damage Italians and Slavs much more,” the Zionist Yidishe folk argued (1915) that Jews should campaign together with them, because “a reactionary mood reigns now over our country,” and “where the reaction rages is not the best atmosphere for Jews.” A year later the Tog criticized those American Jews who alleged that the “yellow races” should take care of themselves; restriction was an economic question, so it would affect everyone. Labor organizer Avrom Hershkovitch of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America (ACWA) lamented that the Jewish labor movement turned the issue of restriction into a Jewish issue: as the law would bar both Christians and Jews, “instead of going hand-in-hand with the Christian organizations to strengthen our campaign against immigration restriction, we turned it into a Jewish issue, and the whole world thinks that only we are interested in keeping America’s doors open.”50 Despite Hershkovitch’s complaint, Jewish garment unions in those years had actually improved their collaboration with non-Jewish coworkers; in New York City those were mainly Italians. Undoubtedly some Jewish workers and organizers still grumbled that their Italian colleagues refused to strike, while Italians demanded to be represented in all negotiations and to form their own locals.51 But the two main ethnic groups in New York’s apparel industry learned not only to coexist but also to appreciate each other. The ACWA was formed as an alliance of mostly Jews and Italians against the national leaders of the United Garment Workers of America (UGWA). In early 1915, manufacturers of men’s clothing in New York carried out a lockout together with the UGWA to break the new union. Jewish and Italian workers came together in their successful strike against their employers and erstwhile union and won recognition for their union.52 At the same time, in the International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union (ILGWU), Italians held most leadership spots in the dressmaker local by the end of 1915. In January 1916, on the nationwide Jewish War Relief Day, Jewish workers were elated by their Italian coworkers’ willingness to help European Jews. In an unrelated development, a month later the ILGWU chartered its first Italian local, number 48. As if to convey Jewish workers’ outreach toward their Italian comrades, in 1916 the ILGWU’s bilingual organ published a short story by the Yiddish writer Alter Epshteyn, called “Avanti” (Forward). Epshteyn, a Bundist activist in

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Lithuania before coming to America in 1908, depicts in his story a Jewish employee working in a shop alongside an Italian. The large, red-faced Italian always seems ready to attack someone and has an expression of a “wild, animal dullness.” But he turns out to be a gentle soul who repairs the Jew’s sewing machine. Not knowing how to thank him, the Jew calls out the only word he knows in Italian: “Avanti!” That excites the burly Italian, who repeats it as he hugs his new comrade.53 Regardless of whether the exhortation of such naive socialist literature was effective, Jewish immigrants did try to assist other workers in their struggle. In the fall of 1916 the city’s transit workers, most of Irish and German background, went on strike. From the beginning the Jewish labor movement was committed to helping the strikers. Thousands of Jewish commuters identified with the Forverts’s call and refrained from riding “scab cars” operated by the Interborough Rapid Transit Company. Dozens of Jewish socialist women across downtown Manhattan, Harlem, and the Bronx handed out thousands of leaflets, exhorting the public not to use any trains driven by strikebreakers. The UHT announced it was ready for a general strike in solidarity with the transit workers. The ACWA warned its members that if they rode “scab cars” and were injured, the union would not provide any health benefits. In East Harlem, Jewish crowds, including many women, besieged trolleys and hauled out the strikebreaking crews. Despite such mobilization, by October the transit strike collapsed.54 Analyzing the failure of that strike, Abraham Cahan harked back to a common theme in Jewish labor circles, declaring, “If other union people were as devoted as the Jewish ones, the strike would have been won”; there were eight hundred thousand unionized workers in New York City, but “only Jewish and a small number of other workers (mainly Germans) showed true loyalty,” whereas “the other union people remained hardened” and “calmly” used scab cars. Cahan’s criticism echoed the experience of children’s books author and socialist Zionist journalist Leon Elbe (nom de plume of Leyb Baseyn). Covering the 1916 May Day parade at Union Square, Elbe wrote, “I looked for Gentiles, but it was hard to find them. A cluster of Germans, a cluster of Poles, a cluster Hungarians, a cluster Italians,” and a single Irish socialist. But even those groups included many Jews, apart from the Italians. Elbe was disappointed by the lack of Americans: “True Americans, Yankees . . . were out of sight. Where are they?” Although he probably did not know it, Elbe was reiterating the exasperation of the ILGWU’s general secretary, John Dyche, three years earlier that May Day had by and large become “quite a Jewish holiday.”55 The theme of cooperation (or rather, its lack) with other groups was brought even closer to home when food riots erupted, predominantly in

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New York’s Jewish neighborhoods, in February and March 1917. Soaring food prices led thousands of Jewish immigrant women to vent their anger initially against mainly Jewish street peddlers. In addition to overturning their pushcarts and drenching their contents in kerosene, the women established the Mothers’ League against High Price, demonstrated in front of City Hall, and organized mass meetings. After a few weeks of an effective consumer boycott (especially of onions, potatoes, and meat), prices started to go down.56 Although the food crisis was a general American problem, Jewish observers were quick to point out that nowhere was the protest stronger than in Jewish quarters. In one of his columns, Yiddish journalist A.  Litvin (pseudonym of Shmuel Hurvitz), reported that during the demonstrations the streets of the East Side were filled with small groups of people who usually gathered around a speaker (often a woman), nodding in agreement. One of those speakers, an eloquent young woman, said in Yiddish, “We Russian suffragists have achieved this [the strike], the whole movement. If you would go in all the markets and streets here, in Brooklyn, and in Brownsville, you won’t find a single Yankee. What do they understand, those dummies. The husband got a two-dollar raise per week, it is ‘prosperity’ for that moron wife of his.” Probably referring to older immigrant groups, the speaker continued to mock “Yankee” women, who barely cooked; for whom “a chewing gum is enough”; and who focused on powdering their faces and then said, “Jack, come on to the movies.”57 Such criticism of American women and their supposedly distorted sense of class and womanhood, however, did not remove the need to cooperate with other New Yorkers (such as the neighboring Italians) in an effort to stem rising food prices. As Nachman Syrkin attended a rally of the Mothers’ League at Rutgers Square, a Jewish man told him that nothing would change as long as only Jews protested: “As long as the Gentiles keep silent, like the Italians a couple of blocks away, who pay the high prices,” Jews would not be able to achieve much. A. Voliner expressed a similar opinion, asking, “Where is the Christian, American woman?” Noting that non-Jewish women were scarcely seen among the protestors on the streets or at City Hall, Voliner stated, “In the best case one could achieve almost nothing by a purely East Sider or Jewish movement.”58 A Nation Like All Nations: The Movement for an American Jewish Congress Although the more positive perceptions of other immigrant groups and calls for broader cooperation with them surely was partly self-serving, they did indicate a genuine transformation in the way Jews viewed

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those groups. Between 1914 and 1917 several developments significantly reshaped the images of those groups. Beginning in 1914 the appeal of Zionism and other forms of Jewish nationalism had immensely increased. While sharpening Jewish distinctiveness, Zionism repeatedly advocated that Jews follow the example of different peoples, their national movements, and their purported achievements. The conduct of other groups in America became to a large degree a yardstick against which Jewish shortcomings were excoriated. Prior to 1914 the Zionist movement in America remained relatively small, as organizational weakness and internal divisions plagued the movement. The British-born Jacob De Haas, secretary of the Federation of American Zionists (FAZ, formed in 1898), attested in 1904 to the rift between New York’s Yiddish-speaking Zionists and the FAZ leadership, writing, “For several years . . . the name ‘New York Zionist’ became a stench in the nostrils of the Zionists” elsewhere. On the eve of the war, FAZ included a little over twelve thousand duespaying members. The Kehillah’s first secretary and Zionist activist Bernard G. Richards quipped once that he met the person who made up the “Zionist masses” in a café on Grand Street.59 The growth of Jewish nationalism after the war broke out, the collective effort to help war-stricken Jews abroad, and the opportunity to realize the Zionist dream in Palestine would turn Zionism into a mass movement. With the establishment of the Zionist Organization of America in 1918, it had close to 150,000 members. The role played by Louis D. Brandeis was of note. A successful progressive attorney and valued advisor to Woodrow Wilson, Brandeis came in close contact with Yiddishspeaking immigrants when he served on the arbitration board that produced the Protocol of Peace in the garment industry. Fusing Zionism and progressive Americanism, he put to rest the charge that a Jew could not be both a Zionist and a loyal American.60 Still, the emerging Zionism of the 1910s conceived Jews not merely as Americans, but as members of a nation in a country made up of nations. Brandeis was infl uenced by the ideas of Silesian-born Jewish scholar Horace M. Kallen, who rejected the melting pot idea in favor of a “commonwealth of national cultures,” or what he would later call cultural pluralism. Kallen envisioned pluralism of autonomous nationalities, since one “cannot change his grandfather.” Kallen wrote, “An Irishman is always an Irishman, a Jew always a Jew.”61 American Zionism formulated a way for American Jews to understand themselves as one group in the American national mosaic. Moreover, the struggle to establish an American Jewish congress and secure minority rights in postwar Europe exemplifies how Zionists and other nationalists often measured Jewish achievements and failures in relation to other groups. It is true that well before 1914 various Jewish public figures saw

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Jews as faltering, whereas various groups or Gentiles in general served as a benchmark of normalcy; Jewish nationalists habitually alleged that Jews fell short of non-Jews in various respects, whether physical strength, willpower, or national dignity. Writing from the left corner of Jewish politics, the organ of Poalei Zion looked up to the healthy self-defense instinct of other groups (such as German Americans) in fighting the machinations of immigration officials as it lambasted the timid Jewish leadership (“slaves” and “mayufes”). Poet Morris Rosenfeld complained in 1910 that whenever traditional Jews heard about prizefighters they spat at the shkotsim. The Yiddish papers had no sports sections, Rosenfeld argued, because Jews were inspired only by “weakness and disease” (the poet ignored the existence of Jewish prizefighters, some of whom had taken Irish names). Sounding a similar note, Dovid Hermalin claimed that because Jews had neglected physical activity, they were “more prone to nerve ailments” than non-Jews.62 Unlike those earlier critical assessments, however, the outbreak of World War I and the immediate crisis of Eastern European Jewry politicized much of the Jewish self-critique and its view of other groups as role models. The movement to establish an American Jewish congress reflected that politicization: it sought to form a democratic assembly representing all American Jewry and became a major force in American Jewish life during and after the war.63 There was a certain bipolarity that characterized the movement: amid the war’s anti-Jewish brutalities in Europe and growing nativism at home, advocates of the congress claimed that Jews must rely only upon themselves and unite. But at the same time, those proponents were envious of other national groups in America, who were also in the process of organizing national representative bodies for a postwar reorganization of Europe. The initiators of the congress movement were to a large extent socialist nationalists (above all Poalei Zion). Together with other Jewish nationalists, they tended to perceive other peoples as “nationally healthy,” while accusing their Jewish opponents of being fearful (the patrician American Jewish Committee [AJC]), or of being “cosmopolitan” (internationalist socialists, based in the Jewish Socialist Federation, the UHT, and the Forverts). Overall, the congress movement received substantial support among the Jewish masses. Polish-born Israel Friedlaender, a professor of biblical literature at the Jewish Theological Seminary and active in the Zionist movement, explained in 1915 to Zionist leaders that the congress was also a psychological necessity: Jews “wish to say ‘oy’” and one should give them a chance to do so.64 At the core of the constant nationalist recriminations was the longing for normalcy, to be like all other nations, which had informed Jewish

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nationalism since the late nineteenth century. Chaim Zhitlovsky, the Diaspora nationalist and a key initiator of the congress movement, manifested that desire in late 1914, calling Jews to “live like all the other nations.” He went on, “Take any nation you wish .  .  . and you would understand .  .  . why we have a right to look at it with burning envy.” While Zhitlovsky envied other nations’ “normal life” (language, territorial concentration), others admired the humbler achievements of various groups. After the 1914 elections, a Brownsville Yiddish weekly chastised New York Jews for failing to be a united force “like the Irish, Italians or Germans, to whom one must take off his hat and treat them with respect.” Other Yiddish commentators reported in dismay that the city’s Germans and Poles exceeded the Jews by far in raising money for their war victims in Europe.65 AJC leaders like Jacob Schiff and Louis Marshall, well aware of the antihyphenated mood in the country, warned that non-Jews might interpret the congress idea as Jewish disloyalty and separatism. In 1915 Schiff wrote to Judah Magnes, “We shall witness in this country an antiSemitism which does not now exist.” As bad news continued to pour in from Europe, heated debates about an American Jewish congress touched growing circles. Congress proponents founded their own journal, Der yidisher kongres, and organized mass rallies. Their cause benefited much from the arrival (1914–1915) of several leaders who backed their movement and drew large audiences to their talks: among these individuals were Ber Borokhov, mentioned earlier; Pinkhes Rutenberg, a veteran revolutionary in Russia and recent convert to Zionism and a chief advocate of a Jewish legion to fight with the Allies and liberate Palestine; and future prime minister and president of Israel, David Ben-Gurion and Yitzchak Ben-Zvi, respectively, who were expelled from Palestine by the Turkish authorities.66 In the midst of a deep intra-Jewish rift, Jewish nationalists pointed with appreciation to the national stance of other peoples. In August 1915 Borokhov complained that a few hundred thousand Montenegrins (parenthetically, Slavic) had more political infl uence than 13 million Jews, “because the Montenegrins do not depend on assimilation and on progress of all humanity, but on their own meager forces.” A week later Rutenberg contended, “We Jews have built up socialism, but we have also poisoned it with our cosmopolitanism. All European socialists .  .  . have become patriots. Only the Jewish socialists . . . have remained true to cosmopolitanism.” And if other nations had the healthy instinct of cultivating their own garden first, where did that leave the Jews? As head of the Kehillah and a member of the AJC, Magnes conducted a frustrating search for common ground between the AJC and congress supporters; in 1915 he

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wrote to Schiff in exasperation, “We are a sick, individualistic people, unused to self-discipline and unable to co-ordinate our activities.”67 As the internal discord and squabbling surfaced and hampered the materialization of a congress, nationalists exhorted Jews to emulate other groups in America. In 1915 educator and journalist Yoel Entin, who was a member of Poalei Zion and active in the congress movement, attacked Jewish leaders who were terrified if, God forbid “the Americans would say we are not patriotic enough.” Entin praised Irish Americans, who showed national unity with their brothers and sisters in Ireland, as did Hungarians and Armenians with their countries. Polish Americans “had openly conducted a national campaign for Poland” and they “even asked President Wilson . . . to help recover Poland” after the war. German Americans received the highest praise from Entin, because “their [German] nationalism knows no boundaries,” but at the same time, they are “always good American patriots and have quickly naturalized.” Likewise, before the national election in 1916, the Tog extolled the way “both the Germans and the Irish” used their political vote to help “their national brethren in Europe.” But timid Jewish leaders thought Jews should be “holier than the Pope.”68 News that the Irish and Ruthenians (Ukrainians) in America—whose images were typically of low-status Gentiles—were forming national bodies further highlighted Jewish disunity and foot-dragging about their congress. In early 1916 Avrom Goldberg wrote an editorial in the Yidishe folk titled “They and We,” in which he played on the gap between images held by Jews and those groups’ achievements: “These Ruthenians are simple people, peasants with a peasant head, cannot quibble and split hairs, [yet] they behaved like sensible people with healthy souls.” Goldberg also hailed the Irish in America, who did not postpone convening their representative body until after the war, because “they have no fear that perhaps someone would find a blemish in their patriotism.” Goldberg sardonically observed, “The Irish are not a people with twothousand-year culture, they had given the world no God or faith . . . but they have not been in exile as long as we have. That is why they behave so directly, so natural.” Elias Cherikover articulated a similar analogy when he described the national history of the Ukrainians and the Irish, and their movements in the United States: “We [Jews] are excellent theoreticians, grand hair-splitters . . . we do nothing, while they are very simple people, and without further theorizing they get down to work.” In a different piece (1916) the historian stated that the leaders of Russian Jewry did not possess the national determination of the “Polish, Latvian, and Lithuanian leaders.”69

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In the political sphere, a number of leading Democrats like Judge Aaron J. Levy (Democratic leader in the New York State Assembly), Congressman Henry Goldfogle, Leon Sanders, and the new Supreme Court Justice (nominated in January 1916) Louis Brandeis were closely associated with the congress movement since its inception. The fact that some of the movement’s prominent figures were connected to Tammany did little to damage it. Quite the opposite, on the Jewish street those Democrats were the champions of democratization and open politics, mirroring the American progressive zeitgeist, with its demand for popular participation and primary elections.70 The constellation around the congress movement demonstrates that the connection between political machines and reforms was not necessarily antagonistic. As in the Varhayt and Miller episode, though Tammany’s Jewish votes were overall declining in those years, Jewish immigrants were less hostile to Tammany than some scholars have assumed.71 The congress movement’s adversaries managed to delay its opening, also because of America’s entry into the war and the fear, expressed by Marshall, that “it might antagonize the American people.” Finally, in June 1917 more than 125,000 Jews in New York (some 335,000 nationwide) cast their ballots in the election for an American Jewish Congress, which convened in Philadelphia in December 1918 (though not as a permanent body, as many of its advocates had hoped).72 Perhaps most appealing to Jewish immigrants in the Democratic Party was the public persona of Woodrow Wilson. While the growing xenophobia and intolerance on the part of old-stock Americans had surely dimmed the positive image of Yankees in the eyes of many immigrants in those years, Wilson had touched a chord with Jews. To a public attracted by appeals to justice and morality, Wilson’s lofty idealism seemed ennobling. Jewish support was also anchored in the president’s actions; by 1916 Wilson’s record included his first veto against the literacy test, the appointment of Brandeis to the Supreme Court, the dedication of January 27, 1916, as Jewish War Relief Day, his interest in the congress movement, his domestic reform program, and the fact that “he kept us out of war.” Socialist journalist Dovid Shub recalled the keenness with which Jewish immigrants related to Wilson, and how many reformist socialists, who were not affiliated with the Socialist Party, became Wilson supporters, among them Isaac A. Hourwich. The Forverts astonishingly reported in 1916 that Wilson supported the railroad workers against their employers, although “he is from Tammany’s party.” When Wilson made his famous “Peace without Victory” address in January 1917, the Yiddish press unanimously lauded him. Tsivyen wrote warmly of Wilson after the president

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called for equal rights for Jews, among others, in the countries where they lived. At a time of menacing nativism, a looming war, and disillusionment with the Yankee, it was a real comfort for Jewish immigrants that the White House was occupied by a man who seemed to embody the noble characteristics of the American.73

Less than three years elapsed between the onset of war in Europe and the U.S. declaration of war on Germany, but during that taxing time the beginning of an attitudinal realignment was noticeable among New York’s immigrant Jews that foreshadowed the political and cultural trajectories of American Jews in future years. On the one hand, the cauldron of events abroad and at home led to a growing disenchantment with the character of Yankees and rising hostility toward certain immigrant groups, namely, the Slavs and especially the Poles. On the other hand, there was nascent amelioration in the image of other groups, such as African Americans and Italians. That development would lay the foundation for a transition from self-defense to the defense of others. Rather than explaining these changes through isolated cases, like the Leo Frank case, one should moor this embryonic realignment to the wartime suffering of European Jewry, mounting nativism, and the struggle against immigration restriction, which required better cooperation with others in similar circumstances. The years 1914–1917 witnessed the precursors of a reorientation toward enhanced collaboration with other minorities in America, chiefly Blacks and Italians. One should not assume that expediency alone brought about such a transformation.74 The abovementioned authentic expressions of Jewish identification with fellow sufferers cannot be explained only as a cold, calculated, give-andtake relationship with other minorities. The binary conceptualization of friendship versus self-interest has clouded many scholars’ understanding of intergroup relations in America.75 As the crisis abroad and prejudice at home heightened, so too grew the longing for normalcy, to be ke-khol ha-goyim, that had informed Jewish nationalism since the late nineteenth century. The strengthening of Jewish nationalism in America amplified in turn the perception that other peoples (even the maligned Slavs) were “healthy,” and their conduct became to a large degree a gauge of Jewish shortcomings. Nationalists used the image of the normal Gentile as a powerful countermeasure against a cautious Jewish leadership that feared Gentiles’ wrath. Let us indeed act like Gentiles, argued the nationalists, and work for our own people without fear. Interestingly, as the atrocities in Eastern Europe rekindled the image of peasants/Slavs as violent antisemites, the debate

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about an American Jewish Congress echoed a positive aspect in Yiddish folklore about healthy small nations (read, peasants): they were portrayed as down-to-earth, no-nonsense people, whose directness and simplicity were not corrupted in comparison with the tortuous ways, casuistry, and nervousness among Jews. The pattern by which Jews were looking at other groups as role models of better political mobilization and organization is a reversal of the received wisdom, which emphasizes how American Jews are well organized as a political lobby. But in the mass-immigration period (and the American Jewish Congress episode is a clear example), Jews often looked enviously at other minorities as the exemplary paradigm for organization and assertiveness. President Wilson’s address before Congress on April 2, 1917, and his call to make the world “safe for democracy,” seemed to dwarf previous challenges in American Jewish life. The U.S. entry into the war deepened some of the tendencies that were apparent before 1917. If the three years that had passed were a pressure cooker, in April 1917 the heat was turned up, and Jewish immigrants, together with other hyphenated Americans, were about to undergo a tougher testing period.

7

“What the American Can Do in His Anger” World War I and the Red Scare, 1917–1920

In the early 1930s, the historian Fredrick Lewis Allen wrote that as the 1920s began, “all over the country Jews felt that a barrier had fallen between them and the Gentiles.” The Zionist Yiddish writer Leon Elbe could not have read Allen’s book, but in early 1920 he, too, gloomily depicted what he called “the partition” between Jews and Gentiles in America: “The Jew remains even here in America, even the third and fourth generation and on, a separate being.” Elbe ridiculed Jews who dreamed of assimilation, but “for the Gentiles it is a nightmare.  .  .  . Socially they cannot so much as bear the Jew.  .  .  . Can’t you see here in America how the Gentiles flee from the streets where Jews come en masse?” Although hardly sharing Elbe’s political convictions, the socialist Hillel Rogoff pessimistically recounted that he heard from all sides that “you can’t recognize America.” Rogoff lamented that anyone living in the United States “for more than five years” could not know his or her country anymore: “Nowhere has chauvinistic patriotism assumed such a wild character as in America.”1 The period 1917–1920 threw New York Jewry into a whirlwind of challenges, while a succession of events at home and abroad strained Jewish relations with certain other groups. The vicissitudes of those trying years, which witnessed the unprecedented mass murder of Jews in Eastern Europe and a rising tide of xenophobia and antiradical frenzy in postwar America, had directly affected the images of Americans and other groups. International events like the campaign for minority rights at the Paris Peace Conference were interwoven with local events in New York City and had a significant role in shaping the political and cultural trajectories of American Jews in the years to come. As Jewish immigrants increasingly regarded Italians and Blacks as fellow sufferers in a society that seemed to have grown more intolerant, the representations of those groups had improved (though not reversed). In Jewish eyes, those minorities were emerging as potential allies that would help in the struggle against America’s inequities. Although many Jewish immigrants 156

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were hardly enamored with Italians and African Americans, the developing rapprochement and cooperation would have an important effect in transforming American politics during the Great Depression and the New Deal period.2 Concomitantly, in a process that had begun earlier, Yankees and Slavic immigrant groups assumed more menacing features. Despite their profound political divisions, immigrant Jews tended to agree on the increasingly ominous signs within American society. The strain of nativism that underlay the Red Scare, the singling out of minorities, the deportation of aliens, and limits on freedom of speech all signaled the immediacy of the trials ahead. Between 1917 and 1920 closer contacts with “real” Americans (which by that time included the offspring of Central and Western European immigrants) rendered their idealization all but impossible. Through different institutions and aspects of life—such as the draft, politics, schools and universities, and the labor movement—the growing acquaintance with Americans had led to disillusionment. That impression was especially acute at a period when intolerance toward foreigners was rising in America. Unlike the 1880s or 1890s, one could not blame other groups and absolve old-stock Americans from responsibility to the country’s failings. The horrendous situation in Eastern Europe further complicated the situation, as angry and anxious immigrants were invoking Old World imagery of “murderous Slavs,” in particular with regard to Poles and Ukrainians; though hardly on the same scale or with the same ramifications, the simultaneous rise of antisemitism on both sides of the Atlantic had sometimes cast Americans as part of an unspecified, antagonistic Gentile world. The March Revolution, American Entry into the War, and the Question of Loyalty When word of the czar’s abdication and arrest were received in New York by mid-March 1917, initial disbelief soon turned to ecstasy. The demise of a hateful regime, seen as the Jews’ bitterest tormentor, was welcomed with parades, merriment, and cries of “Long live the Russian Revolution!” On the streets of the East Side people embraced one another, happily crying and laughing. Radical and conservative papers alike celebrated the revolution, including the Morgen zhurnal, which had asserted only a month earlier, “The simple Slav knows nothing of the dreams of the cultured revolutionist.” In the second half of March different Jewish societies across the city celebrated the revolution: some twenty thousand celebrants gathered in Madison Square Garden, shouted and danced in the aisles as socialist leaders like Abraham Cahan, Morris Hillquit, Jacob Panken, and B. Vladeck praised the revolution in their beloved Matushka

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Rossiya (Mother Russia). After the meeting, the cheerful crowd mixed with the theater crowd on Second Avenue and thousands marched to Rutgers Square to continue the festivities. The euphoria brought about an instant reversal in attitudes toward the belligerents on the Jewish street: negatives references to Russians all but vanished, while pro-German utterances (considerably curtailed by America’s involvement in the war) drastically decreased.3 The reawakened affection for all things Russian was clearly shown during a visit by the Russian Commission. This group of notables toured America to gain support for the new government, and when they arrived in New York in July 1917, crowds welcomed them passionately outside the Henry Street Settlement House. At a Madison Square Garden rally for the commission Cahan said that half a million Russian Jews in America still considered themselves Russians and looked upon Russia as their “Fatherland.” Cahan’s speech infuriated the editor of the American Jewish Chronicle, Shmuel Melamed, who called such remarks “untrue” and “unwise.” Melamed wrote that Russian Jews in America were first and last Americans and ominously added, “A political hyphen is always a dangerous thing.” Melamed was not the only observer who feared Jewish immigrants would appear more loyal to their old country than to America, which had given them liberty and equality. Already in March the Varhayt had cried out, “Stop the Russian Hysteria!” and reminded “all those who are dancing now on Hester Street” that “the Anglo-Saxon race is the freest and most democratic” not because of revolutions but thanks to the development of centuries-long traditions. The daily was worried that all the celebrations might make “a very bad impression on our American neighbors.” The enthusiasm did not translate into a massive return migration to Russia: in 1917 only 864 Jews and 7,557 Russian nationals (many of whom were probably also Jews) left the United States.4 By the spring and summer months of 1917 the question of loyalty became more acute as America entered the war and began full-scale conscription. The divide between supporters and opponents of war became the deepest schism within New York Jewry in 1917. The patrician AJC, the Americanized middle class, Zionists (with some exceptions, like Judah Magnes and most of Poalei Zion), the New York Kehillah, most fraternal orders, and an important minority among Jewish socialists came out for the war. Shortly before America declared war on Germany, the Jewish League of American Patriots ( JLAP) was organized. It included almost all the editors of the nonradical Yiddish and Anglo-Jewish periodicals, together with corporate lawyer Samuel Untermyer and Tammany’s Judge Aaron J. Levy. The aim of JLAP was “arousing our men and

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women . . . to the patriotic duty of enlisting in the army,” and propagating “pro-American” and anti-German sentiments on the Jewish street. After the Socialist Party adopted a strong antiwar stance in its conference at St. Louis in April 1917, pro-war socialists left the party. In July 1917 the AFL founded the American Alliance for Labor and Democracy (AALD), headed by Robert Maisel, a Jewish journalist associated with organized labor. The AALD included non-Jewish pro-war socialists like John Spargo, William English Walling, and James G. Phelps-Stokes, as well as Jews like Joseph Barondess, William Edlin, Henry L. Slobodin, and Nachman Syrkin. Those Jewish members and others (like popular Yiddish journalist Dovid Hermalin) formed the Jewish Socialist League as a branch of the AALD to work among Jewish immigrants. Such diverse supporters of the war as Louis Marshall, Stephen S. Wise, William Edlin, Louis Miller, and M. Baranov called on fellow Jews (in Baranov’s words) to “act as Americans, not as foreigners.” In July 1917 Miller warned, “The American people view us with distrust and many Americans claim openly . . . that we are traitors.”5 On the other side, nevertheless, adamantly opposed to the war, stood the majority of the powerful Jewish labor movement—the Forverts, UHT, the Jewish Socialist Federation, the Jewish-led garment unions, Poalei Zion, many branches of the Arbeter Ring, and anarchists. Jewish labor circles participated in organizing the People’s Council for Democracy and Peace, which became central in the opposition to the war in New York and elsewhere. Both the ILGWU and the ACWA refused to sanction “no-strike” pledges. At the New York convention of the Arbeter Ring (May 1917) William Edlin tried to speak in favor of the war, but was quickly shouted down by angry delegates. Herts Burgin blamed pro-war socialists for trying to cast “Jewish and German” socialists as traitors, while Isaac A. Hourwich expressed his bitterness: “True Americans are allowed to be for or against the war,” but Jews “feel like second-class citizens even here in America.”6 The ominous potential of the situation was brought closer to home by the provocations of the antisemitic demagogue Russell Dunne. Dunne, an Irish immigrant and former priest, was active especially in Brooklyn and achieved notoriety for his soapbox rants against the “kikes.” In August 1917 Dunne and his followers assembled in Madison Square, where great numbers of Jews, among them many soldiers, also showed up, and fights broke out between them and Dunne’s supporters. The Yiddish journalist and poet Yoel Slonim, who attended the event and participated in the ensuing fight, recalled that Dunne’s crowd “were mostly Irish . . . [and] many were drunk.” As the police arrested more Jews than Dunne’s men, the agitator was able to escape, but was identified later by

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Slonim and others and charged with inciting a riot. Dunne was sentenced to one month’s hard labor, mostly as a result of the testimonies of the Varhayt’s Irving Weinzweig and Judge Leonard A. Snitkin, a Russian Jew associated with Tammany, who served on the municipal court. After the trial, two of Dunne’s men followed Snitkin and severely beat him at the court’s corridor.7 The hundreds who attended Dunne’s rally and trial were a representative sample of local Jewry—soldiers, blue-collar workers, students, and professionals. But Dunne’s tirades also showed how a more virulent form of antisemitism began to emerge as part of a larger trend that fused bigotry with feverish wartime patriotism. In the fall of 1917 Jewish storekeepers in South Brooklyn complained that Dunne’s followers were constantly threatening them. Dunne continued his anti-Jewish agitation and his Common Cause Society attacked Jewish candidates in the 1917 election. Maybe some of Gotham’s Jews took cold comfort from the fact that Dunne and his disciples were in the main “Irisher” and not “Yankees,” or that the Friends of Irish Freedom rebuked Dunne. But the looming environment of intolerance and fervent nationalism was all-American and could not be attributed only to the Irish.8 Alarm over the changing character of American society was far from baseless. As wartime hysteria engulfed the country, more and more Americans rallied against symbols of foreignness, Germans being the main object of animosity. While a crusade against all things German got under way and sauerkraut became “liberty cabbage,” scholars dissected the inbred depravity of the German, and shocked audiences watched motion pictures about the barbarities of the “Hun.” Muckraker George Creel headed the government’s propaganda machine, the Committee on Public Information, which among other activities dispatched seventy-five thousand “Four-Minute Men” across the country to whip up enthusiasm for the war through four minutes of oratorical bombardment before any available audience. The suspicion of anything German was directed also at German Jews, despite the latter’s nearly frantic attempts to show they were “one-hundred percent Americans.”9 Undeniably, wartime patriotism carried with it a spirit of fraternity and great promise for immigrant Jews and not just dangers, and many were swept away by it. Poet Morris Rosenfeld sang to America, “Thy wish is holy, thy command / I deem as writ by God’s own hand.” Being part of American society, Yiddish-speaking Jews were infl uenced by the anti-German environment, and a drastic change of position in the nonradical Yiddish press, from pro-German to pro-Allied, was clear. The surrounding atmosphere against the “Hun” just added to other developments that harmed the image of Germans in Jewish eyes; after the czar

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was toppled, Russian Jews had no reason to support authoritarian Germany against their former home country, which emancipated its Jewish population. Further, reports came from Eastern Europe about deteriorating economic conditions under German occupation, leading to hunger and smuggling and subsequent punitive measures from the Germans against local Jewish communities. Already before America entered the war, the Tog had critically scrutinized the German character, noting that Germans “are too much in love with themselves.” Yiddish writer Tashrak (pseudonym of Yisroel Zevin) penned a humorous sketch in March 1917 on how all things German fell from grace in the eyes of New York Jews: lodge members refused to talk Germanized Yiddish anymore at their meetings, and German Jews pretended to be Litvakes.10 Jewish radicals watched the anti-German hysteria with apprehension, knowing that the epithet German could be easily applied to other anti-war immigrants in the American public mind. But after the March revolution, Jewish socialists began to lose their sympathy for Germany and the far-reaching change in the image of Germans permeated also the circles that objected to America’s entry into the war. A friend of the infl uential socialist journalist Tsivyen described him as “in love with German culture.” Nonetheless, by August 1917, that very Tsivyen wrote about the “barbaric, bloodthirsty Germans that have to be wiped from the face of the earth so humanity may live in peace.” The Forverts remarked about a German American New Yorker who expressed anti-Jewish views, “Apparently he found it impossible to express truly his German patriotism without it [antisemitism].”11 One of the chief symbols of patriotism and loyalty was conscription. Jewish leaders repeatedly urged fellow Jews to register for the draft in great enough numbers that would refute slanderers like Dunne. Although Jewish neighborhoods quickly met their full quota of soldiers, Jews drew most denigration as “slackers.” Amid this atmosphere different voices expressed growing concern that the press was focusing on Jews as the main slackers. Yoel Entin was angry at the English-language papers, which used “sly and vile means” to “stab [Jews] in the back” and then “pretend as if they do not know,” since “the Yankee is very skillful in such tricks.” Entin lamented that the American press refused to acknowledge how “Jews are on average physically weaker, more anemic and less developed than the Yankee or the other non-Jew.” The educator believed that “the American intelligentsia is no less unkind to us than the intelligentsia in other countries.” The Varhayt wondered why the local papers “do not send reporters to the non-Jewish districts and send their ‘write-ups’ from there,” and argued that “the marriage-license bureaus in greater New York are full with Americans, Italians, Irish and Poles as well, but in our

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‘impartial’ papers it seems that only Jewish couples go there” (in order to evade the draft).12 The increasing intolerance toward opponents of war reverberated in the nervousness of Jewish dignitaries and their forewarnings to their constituents. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis cautioned his colleagues at a closed meeting of the Zionist leadership in August 1917: “I think there is a very strong reason to fear that the pacifistic attitude of the Jews is exposing us to a danger . . . of an anti-Semitic movement. My own mail has an indication of that. . . . I cannot help feeling myself that the pacifistic attitude of some Jews is a danger to all Jews, and some form of a pogrom would not be at all unlikely.” Such trepidation was evident in the words of Socialist congressman Meyer London: though an opponent of the war, he believed that once it was declared, continued resistance was “essentially wrong and immoral in a democracy like the United States” and paid no heed when the party called on him to introduce a bill for the repeal of the Conscription Law. Like Brandeis, London was afraid Jews would be smeared as traitors. In September 1917 he met with Jewish socialists in New York and reportedly asked them “with tears in his eyes” to stop their dangerous antiwar propaganda, or “expect the most dangerous pogroms.”13 It is noteworthy that although Jews on both sides of the chasm fiercely disagreed about the war, domestic and world politics, and what policy was best for their constituents, their underlying assumptions paradoxically coincided. Both sides were divided over how to deal with the challenges of extreme patriotism; while pro-war advocates warned that opposition to the war would brand all Jews as traitors and might inflame a strong wave of antisemitism, antiwar proponents argued that resistance to the war was the only way to block a reactionary upsurge that spelled anti-Jewish hostility. Jews in both camps perceived the surrounding American society as increasingly intimidating.14 A Brave New World: The Balfour Declaration and the Bolshevik Revolution In the first week of November 1917 two major events abroad captured Jewish attention and engendered their exhilaration, seeming to many to be the birth pangs of a new world. These events were the Balfour Declaration and the Bolshevik Revolution. On November 2, 1917, Arthur  J. Balfour, Britain’s foreign minister, announced that his government supported “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.” The declaration, coupled with the dramatic conquest of Jerusalem by the British a few weeks later, led to a euphoric outpouring in various quarters of New York Jewry. As Zionist societies and orders

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celebrated these developments, the Yidisher kemfer announced, “It is here .  .  . salvation is not just a word.” The orthodox Agudas ha-Rabonim (Union of Orthodox Rabbis of the United States and Canada) rejoiced, as did the radical Independent Arbeter Ring order, which decided to espouse Zionism. The socialist Tsukunft, which under Avrom Lesin’s editorship had become more approving of Jewish nationalism, published a short article by Sholem Ash titled “The Triumph”; Ash interpreted the declaration as a “great repentance by the Christian world for eighteen hundred years of Christian sin and injustice.” As Zionist membership swelled, the messianic prospect of fulfilling an almost-two-thousand-year-old promise touched even the unlikeliest corners of American Jewish life.15 With the elation of most Yiddish papers (besides the anti-Zionist Forverts, which did not comment on the declaration for two weeks before criticizing it), Britain’s popularity rose sharply. Jewish commentators extolled the virtues of the British colonial system, while the shared language and culture, and the wartime alliance of Britons and Americans enabled those observers to put them under the same rubric of “AngloSaxon” kindness. The American Jewish Chronicle maintained that “AngloSaxon peoples” were the only ones in the world that made use of the “Jewish genius” and allowed Jews to be “free.” The weekly linked the contributions of a few “noble Gentiles” to the Jewish war relief with a larger pattern of Anglo-Saxon generosity. The Yidishe folk was impressed by the sympathy of “the real Americans,” who had more respect for Zionism than many alienated or assimilated Jews. Nonetheless, two years later, this Zionist newspaper would convey a grimmer feeling about those very “real Americans.”16 While the Balfour Declaration immensely increased Jewish support for the Allies’ cause, the ramifications of the Bolshevik Revolution complicated American Jews’ situation. Jewish leaders quickly became aware of the widespread association of Jews with Bolshevism in American society. Such linkage was made in late 1917, and by 1918 the New York Exporters Review claimed, “The majority of East Side (New York) Jews are ‘bolshevists.’” Although initially these voices were weaker than during the postwar panic, the word Bolshevik was quickly identified with treason. Jewish leaders hastened to deny such charges. As early as November 1917 journalist and writer Herman Bernstein deplored the reports that Jews were the main backers of the new regime in Russia, calling them “antisemitic propaganda.” Bernstein added that Bolsheviks like Trotsky were “not Jews in the real sense of the word.” The president of the Educational Alliance, Judge Samuel Greenbaum, warned in March 1918, “Our race has been sullied” by the few Jews who wanted to imitate the government of “darkened Russia.” But those accusations and

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rebuffs were merely precursors of the nativist torrent after 1918 that tied Jews to communism, anarchism, Wobblism, and anything that had to do with wild-eyed, shaggy Russians seeking to bring down the American way of life.17 Unlike with the March Revolution, many New York Jews responded to the Bolshevik takeover of Petrograd with hesitation and distrust. Some even gloated about the turmoil in Russia. Writing in his Bronx apartment four days after the revolution, Hebraist and Zionist critic Re’uven Brainin praised Leon Trotsky’s talents and recalled that only a few months earlier the Bolshevik leader had lived nearby, in the neighborhood. Brainin’s thoughts about the revolution led him to bitter musings that unwittingly and ironically anticipated the rantings of antisemites like Henry Ford, who viewed Bolshevism as a Jewish plot. Brainin wrote, “If Leon Trotsky and his Jewish friends who now head the Russian government shall destroy Russia—it would be the revenge of the Jewish people on their tormentors, persecutors, haters and also slaughterers of yesterday. The dog—deserves his stick. Until yesterday the Russians ravaged our people, tormented our daughters, tore our children to pieces. . . . Today, maybe the Trotskys and the Goldbergs will destroy their country.” Yankev Magidov believed that his editor, the conservative Peter Wiernik, with “his antipathy to all things Russian,” was actually pro-Bolshevik, since “Russia does not deserve a better government.”18 Despite initial reservations about the Bolsheviks on the part of many Jewish socialists and Bundists, as the years 1918 and 1919 progressed those circles became more and more pro-Soviet; the revolution generated messianic fervor among Jewish radicals (and some of their non-Jewish comrades as well), promising a brave new world and the rise of a classless humanity. When the Soviets signed in March 1918 a humiliating separate peace treaty with Germany at Brest-Litovsk, where they ceded vast territories to the Central Powers, most Americans saw it as a Bolshevik betrayal of the Allies. Jewish radicals, in contrast, saw it as German belligerence that emphasized the vulnerability of the young Soviet regime. By 1919 Cahan forbade criticism of the Soviet Union in the Forverts.19 For most socialists, those circumstances led to a reversal in their position toward the war. Preservation of revolutionary Russia became the main priority, and Wilson’s “capitalistic” war was suddenly an imperative. Even the most pro-German Jewish radical of yesteryear no longer saw the Germans as a bulwark of civilization against the Slavs, but rather as those culpable for the outbursts of anti-Jewish violence and dire food shortages in Eastern Europe. A Jewish organizer of the Structural Iron Workers in New York, Sol Broad, said, “There was a friction between the Jews and the German-Austrian element because the Jews favored the war

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after the Brest-Litovsk Treaty. The German-Austrian element has been somewhat antisemitic.” By February 1918 William Edlin privately claimed that “everybody” on the East Side was becoming anti-German, and that transformation was especially noticeable among Jewish socialists. A week later Adolph Germer, the German American secretary of the Socialist Party, wrote to Morris Hillquit that “95% of their [Jewish] membership have changed front” and support the war against Germany.20 In less than four years the vicissitudes of war had largely reversed the attitude of New York Jews toward Germany, the Entente, and Russia. The hopes that were ignited by the Balfour Declaration and the Bolshevik Revolution added to the promise of Wilsonian idealism. But the turnabout did not apply to all. As the level of anti-Jewish violence in Eastern Europe drastically grew immediately after the war, animosity and anger toward the “Slavs” deepened. Intensification of the Slav’s Image of Brutality By 1918 the most compelling reason for many Jewish immigrants to wish for a Bolshevik victory was quite simple. Although Red Army units occasionally assaulted Jewish communities as well, the Communists were often the only force that stood between Jews and violent death. In the civil war that wreaked havoc from late 1917 on across the former Pale of Settlement (especially in Ukraine), Reds fought Whites, Poles fought Ukrainians, Poles fought Bolsheviks, and Ukrainians fought among themselves. Hence a vicious circle was set in motion as Jews were accused of being pro-Bolshevik and were attacked and murdered in the tens of thousands. This persecution had the effect of turning them pro-Bolshevik for the sake of survival, and their allegiance served to justify further mass murder of Jews. White (counterrevolutionary) armies, Polish forces, Ukrainian nationalists under Semyon Petlyura, and marauding bands of peasants and Cossacks attacked hundreds of Jewish communities, massacring unarmed, noncombatant Jewish families. Famed Russian Jewish writer Isaac Babel, who traveled with a Red Army cavalry unit as a war correspondent, saw “naked seventy-year-old men with their skulls bashed in and tiny children with their fingers hacked off.”21 But since most Americans probably believed the Whites were in the right, and President Wilson sent some fifteen thousand American troops to Russia to help them, many Jewish immigrants found themselves in a bind. On the one hand, most were not Bolsheviks and wholeheartedly backed the war and loathed the “Teutons.” Nonradical Jews (and also some radicals) hailed Wilson and the American intervention. AntiBolsheviks like Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, poet Morris Rosenfeld, and anarchist Shoel Yanovsky constantly attacked the Communists and warned

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fellow Jews that to back the Soviet regime as unpopular foreigners was practically dangerous, morally wrong, and ungrateful toward America.22 On the other hand, in spite of the exhortations, quite a few immigrant Jews continued to view the Red Army as savior of the Jews. Author Upton Sinclair surely exaggerated when he wrote in early 1919, “According to the point of view of the Russian Jews of Hester Street . . . American soldiers are shooting down their fathers, their sons, their brothers in Northern Russia and Siberia.” Although this was hyperbolic, a situation in which American troops were fighting alongside the anti-Jewish and murderous forces of the Whites probably did leave a bad taste in the mouths of many an immigrant. As a drive for American military intervention began in the spring of 1918, numerous individuals and members of committees poured into the offices of the Forverts and other radical newspapers on the East Side, demanding concrete efforts against such plans. Jewish immigrants also participated in anti-intervention rallies and signed petitions to that effect.23 Against that backdrop a few branches of the Arbeter Ring and half a dozen landsmanshaftn collected money to cover the legal expenses for the defense of six anarchist Jewish immigrants who were arrested in August 1918 for distributing leaflets against the American intervention in Russia. One, Jacob Schwartz, was beaten by the police and died in prison. Four of the defendants—Jacob Abrams, Hyman Lachovsky, Samuel Lipman, and Mollie Steimer—were sentenced to long prison terms, but were eventually deported to Russia in 1921.24 The radicals’ defense of the young Soviet Union did not mean that older, enduring images of the Russian people vanished. Bundist writer Vladimir Kosovsky (pen name of Nokhem-Mendel Levinson) described in the Tsukunft in 1919 how Red Army units also initiated pogroms. Yet the editor, Avrom Lesin, hastened to defend the Soviets, as he revealed his perception of the Russian masses. Lesin commented below Kosovsky’s article, “Naturally, nobody could believe that under the effect of the Bolshevik regime the Russian people would be transformed from pogromists to angels in a couple of months.” By early 1919 the Socialist Party in New York acknowledged the tension between Jews and the Russians and Ukrainians in the party, and in one branch it became “impossible to create harmony and peace” between those groups.25 Russians were not seen as the only or even chief culprits in shedding Jewish blood. As New York Jews celebrated the Armistice with other Americans, both the Yiddish and the American press carried ghastly reports about the horrors that befell Jews in Poland, Romania, and Ukraine. Descriptions of the bodies of pregnant women ripped open, of eyes gouged out and infants murdered in their sleep, brought to new heights Jewish resentment of the Eastern European nations involved in

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the atrocities. The growing anger toward “Slavs” and especially Poles began already earlier, and Jewish antagonism intensified as more news arrived. In 1917 the Tageblat cautioned, “The antisemitism which is engraved in every Pole remains the same wherever he emigrates to.” The events in Poland came more quickly to the public’s attention in the West than those in Ukraine and added to the escalation of tensions over the antiJewish boycott and violence in Poland during the war. Furthermore, Poles in America were far more conspicuous than Ukrainians or Romanians with their campaigning for Polish independence during the war and for Polish territorial demands in the postwar Paris Peace Conference. The American Citizens’ Committee of Polish Birth and Descent charged that American Jews were besmirching the people of Poland by spreading “lies” about pogroms. The Polish Citizens’ Committee of Cleveland noted threateningly that the American Jewish “position” might “force local disturbances.”26 Jewish leaders like Louis Marshall of the AJC and Julian W. Mack of the Zionist Organization of America were quick to state in November 1918 that they strongly “deny that the Jews are in any way unfriendly to Polish independence.” Yet speakers, like Sholem Ash, at a mass meeting organized by the Jewish unions at Madison Square Garden a few days later lambasted Poles as antisemites. The flood of livid condemnations by Jewish writers only grew stronger with news about pogroms in Vilna and Pinsk in the spring of 1919. The Yiddish poet and essayist Aren Glanz wrote a scathing indictment of Polish and Ukrainian “national characteristic,” claiming that Jews were “intrinsically incapable” of committing “unspeakable massacres like the Poles and Ukrainians.” Glanz argued, “The Slavs are the most backward people . . . The soul of the Slavs . . . is dark, a bleak night.”27 Such images became ubiquitous. As thousands of Polish Americans volunteered to join General Józef Haller’s army, which fought against the Bolsheviks (1919–1920), they reportedly “cut off the ears, lips, and noses” of local Jews. One Saul Rosen of Forsyth Street, who visited Poland after the war, told, “with tears in his eyes,” of a Pole’s snatching a Jewish toddler from his mother on a train and throwing the child out the window. The satirical weekly Groyser kundes (Big stick) published a caricature by cartoonist Lola (Leon Israel) with the caption “How he looks without the mask,” showing a frightening “Polish pogromist” gripping a blooddrenched knife between his teeth while holding a mask of a human face bearing the slogan “Free Poland.” The Tog conveyed a similar idea in a caricature that showed a Pole with a blood-stained knife climbing stairs covered with the bodies of babies, women, and old men; the caption reads “The Polish road to freedom.”28

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Figure 7.1 Caption: “How he looks without the mask.” On the mask is the slogan “Free Poland,” and on the hat is written “Polish pogromist.” Big Stick, 1919. The cartoonist is Lola (Leon Israel). Courtesy of the Dorot Jewish Division at the New York Public Library.

Slavs were not always attacked as a whole; some compared the new Poland to the new republic of Czechoslovakia. The Morgen zhurnal argued that “Bohemia” was the only Slavic country that gave “a spark of hope” in its early existence and extolled Czech leader Thomas G. Masaryk. The Tog wrote, “Two Slavic peoples, both liberated from a long period of oppression, but one nation rose in its freedom and the other

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sank deeply.” In spite of some persecution in Czechoslovakia, “the Czech leaders and the Czech people in general did not stoop to systematic pogroms as the Poles did. . . . The Czech could sometimes see the Jew as a brother in bondage, and the Pole—never.”29 Reminiscent of the mass protest against pogroms fourteen years earlier, hundreds of thousands of New York Jews took to the streets to show their anger and frustration in two separate days of mass parades and demonstrations against the continued slaughter of Jews in Eastern Europe. The first day, May 21, 1919, focused on Poland. After noontime nearly all Jewish workers left their shops, and Jewish children their classrooms, to take part in one of the dozens of marches and rallies across the city. Wearing black armbands and carrying banners in Yiddish and English, many protestors marched toward Madison Square Garden, where approximately two hundred thousand people milled outside the hall where a protest meeting was being held. At the meeting Hirsh Masliansky cried out to a weeping audience, “How many of you should mourn your slaughtered fathers, mothers, sisters, and brothers?” Other speakers emphasized the presence of Jewish soldiers in the crowd; they fought for the liberty of Eastern European nations, which were now murdering Jews. On the day of the protest, writing in the Forverts, its front page framed in black, Avrom Lesin blamed “those Poles, those murderers of old men, of women, of children.” On November 24, 1919, New York Jews observed a “day of mourning” to mark the unrelenting murder of Jews in Ukraine: more than half a million Jews in Greater New York left their workplace as a somber procession of twenty-five thousand men, women, and children, representing hundreds of Jewish societies and organizations, marched from different boroughs to a rally at Carnegie Hall.30 By the spring of 1919 Polish American societies and newspapers strengthened their agitation against Jewish “enemies” that “deprecate” all Poles. The Yiddish papers reported that Poles in New England and Newark were following the example of Warsaw, Lodz, and other cities in Poland and boycotting Jewish businesses. The Tog repeatedly warned that Polish Americans were conducting a campaign not only to deny the pogroms but also “to poison the American public opinion against us.” Yiddish humorist Aren D. Egoz, writer of the serialized adventures of a female streetcar conductor called Khashke, portrayed how Poles tried to bully the Jewish passengers on her car, but “since the Bronx is a Jewish country, a second Brownsville,” the Poles were a minority and decided instead to boycott her car. As “our fellow Jews, thank God, are not absent from all cars,” the Poles had to go on foot.31 As contemporary events in Poland like the massacres and boycott buttressed negative stereotypes, there was Jewish apprehension that

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Polish Americans were introducing violent antisemitism, boycott, and incitement to a country that was relatively free of them. While a Polish American paper complained in 1919 that Jews assaulted Poles on the East Side, the American Hebrew reported in 1919 on a Jewish carpenter in Queens who was beaten up by two Poles. The paper “quoted” what the Poles at the Flushing Court allegedly said to each other: “It’s obvious we may do as we like with the Jews. . . . We needn’t fear any punishment.” In 1920 Dovid Hermalin wrote, “Recently we have received many letters from shops where Jews and Poles work together. That leads everywhere to quarrels and fights between the two groups.” Hermalin published a letter by a mechanic who charged that because of “two Jew-hating Poles” he had to leave his job. Hermalin believed that in addition to the anti-Jewish boycott and incitement, Poles “would have made pogroms against Jews in America, had they felt strong enough, and did not fear Uncle Sam.”32 The severity of the pogroms in Eastern Europe and the highly visible campaign for an independent Poland by Polish Americans had accelerated the transfer of older images of the potentially brutal and volatile Slavic peasantry into the urban setting of America. Jewish anger was not aimed solely at the Poles. Ukrainians were not considered to be better, and Lesin’s remark about the Russian masses was a telling example of how a prevalent mindset affected those who sought to transcend it. Finally, the Jewish-Polish friction demonstrates that one cannot infer from the growing identification with some minorities (such as Blacks and Italians) that the same situation existed in relations with other minorities, which had a very different context. Heightened Alarm and Disillusionment with the American’s Character Hermalin’s implication that America would safeguard Jews from antisemitism brought over by Polish immigrants reflected the older image of the Yankee. But Hermalin exhibited his own uncertainty. A few days after writing about the “great and noble heart of the American people,” Hermalin cautioned American Jews, “You ought to know that even here in America the Gentiles are not strongly enamored with Jews. Naturally, the local Gentiles are simply angels in comparison to the ‘noble’ Russians and the ‘progressive’ Poles. But still they do not love us very much.”33 The changing perception of the American character was not out of step with ominous indications that emerged during the war and particularly in its aftermath. Yearning for national conformity, shaken by a wave of labor strife, and fearful of Bolshevik subversion, more and more Americans linked Bolshevism or other forms of radicalism with treason and viewed them as synonymous with Jews. Such an attitude was

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expressed in periodicals like the Anti-Bolshevist, which debuted in Brooklyn in September 1918; its editor wrote, “Bolshevism is a Jewish scheme to despoil Christians of their property.” In 1918 the nativist American Defense Society sponsored a book by William T. Hornaday that alleged, “Russian-Jew [sic] anarchists” were the “worst cobras that ever found shelter under the American hearthstone.”34 These feelings intensified after the Armistice on November 11, 1918, as events rapidly unfolded: a series of strikes, numbering more than five hundred in New York City alone throughout 1919; panic following bomb scares and actual bombings targeting state officials across the country in the spring of 1919; the creation by the New York State legislature of the Joint Legislative Committee to Investigate Subversive Activities (the Lusk Committee), which conducted a series of raids on the offices of the Soviet government, the Rand School, the headquarters of left-wing socialists, and the Industrial Workers of the World; attacks by soldiers, sailors, and members of arch-patriotic organizations on the Russian People’s House (on East Fifteenth Street) in March and on May Day, 1919, as well as on socialist parades and meetings across town; and the anticommunist Palmer Raids, launched in late 1919 and early 1920 by Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, in which thousands were arrested and roughed up and which resulted in the deportation of nearly 850 aliens.35 It is hard to overestimate the effect that this worrying succession of events had on New York Jewry. If anxiety about the atrocities in Eastern Europe, the Red Scare at home, and the postwar housing shortage were not enough, a more malevolent approach toward Jews in different quarters of the Empire City was unmistakable. The practice of downtown employment agencies to specify “Christians only” or that “no Hebrew need apply” and army contractors who rebuffed Jewish applicants prompted Max Pine, secretary of the UHT, to declare in late 1917 that his organization would combat such prejudice. In the closing months of 1918 the AJC and the Yiddish papers received dozens of letters from Jewish veterans and workers who complained that they suffered discrimination; two shipyard workers from Brooklyn, Jacob Kornbleit and Jacob Goldenberg, wrote to Louis Marshall that they had been fired, “although that [sic] Germans and all kinds of nationalities are working without being molested.” Three other New York Jews, carpenters by profession, protested that they were turned down for government jobs after saying they were Russian-born.36 Soon after the Armistice, the Tog’s editor, William Edlin, and the president of the Young Israel synagogue, Harry G. Fromberg, conveyed to the AJC the complaints they had received from many Jews describing how U.S. employment offices in New York City discriminated against them. The American Hebrew lambasted Jewish employers (“being

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doormats for any Gentile”) who refrained from employing Jews to please their “Christian” customers. When they did obtain employment, Jews often encountered abuse and contempt—when future Tammanyite Louis Eisenstein took a break at his job at the post office in 1919, a foreman called him “a Jew shirker.”37 The loud clamor for “100 percent Americanism” in those years from a spectrum of ultrapatriotic organizations, city and state officials, and the federal government reinforced the impression that Americans were changing—and not for the better. Various American Jewish agencies and organizations were (often obsessively) engaged in Americanizing the newcomers long beforehand. The new spirit of “Americanism,” however, increasingly meant also stifl ing dissent and nativism; Leon Elbe bemoaned that until that time, “Americanization went on amicably,” but now “the air is so stuffed with Americanization that you could suffocate,” and it “endangers our existence here as Jews.” Israel Friedlaender (who was murdered in Ukraine in 1920 while distributing relief money) warned at a 1919 meeting of the Educational Alliance’s board of trustees, “The immigrant will lose this love [for America] if Americans try to make him do as they say.”38 Echoing that view, B. Vladeck remarked in 1919 that “in the past hundred years such open or latent hatred—or suspicion at best—toward immigrants in America was never as dominant as it is today. . . . It would have been unnatural to expect that the masses in America would be more generous, more tolerant, and more conscious than the masses in England or France.” Responding to nativist accusations about the newcomers’ purportedly deficient mental ability and moral fi ber, Vladeck wrote that in terms of “literature, art, and [cultural] tradition, many immigrants stand higher than the average American masses.” By 1919, one found it very difficult to put the character of Americans on a pedestal. But not less important was Vladeck’s suggestion that Jews faced the same problems as other immigrants and that the struggle was not against antisemitism but a more general form of nativism.39 It became indeed harder to view Yankees through rose-tinted glasses, as American public opinion seemed bent on closing America’s gates to thousands of Eastern European Jews, who were scrambling to flee starvation and violence. An official from the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS) wrote to Louis Marshall, “Since the war this country has been flooded with anti-Jewish propaganda and the bogey raised that every Jew wants to come to the United States.” In May 1919 the Groyser kundes featured a cartoon by Lola, showing an elderly bearded Jew standing on the brink of an abyss, attacked by three mythological Furies (representing Poland, Ukraine, and Romania), as the bayonets of “immigration laws”

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prevent him from moving. The Jew clenches his fists and says, “And my sons spilled their blood to make the world safe for democracy!” Writing in November 1919, Yoel Entin noted the “spread of the false accusation that Jews are all Bolsheviks,” adding, “A bitter hatred against Jews is taking root.” Entin claimed, “Wherever you go in [various] American circles, even in the truly liberal ones, they foam at the mouth when talking about Jews.” Isaac A. Hourwich, who already in 1913 had called on American Jews to recognize that anti-Jewish prejudice was “part of a whole social tendency,” wrote six years later, “That there are many antisemites in America . . . is no news for a long time.”40 The emergence of a more threatening and oppressive image of the American had an effect on those who were swept up in the wartime Wilsonian idealism. The infl uential Zionist editor Abe Goldberg, who by the end of 1918 lauded the American “free spirit,” fairness, and greatness (in comparison to Europe), was much more pessimistic a year later, sensing “an anxious mood” among American Jews. Goldberg contended that the Poles in America were constantly inciting trouble against Jews, but noted, “The Americans can also commit a bloodbath when dealing with foreigners. . . . What the American can do in his anger against a foreign race can be clearly seen in the South,” where hot-blooded Americans “raged against their innocent .  .  . old neighbors, whose only crime was their dark skin.” Yoel Entin also warned that “dark clouds” were forming on the American Jewish horizon: there were immigration restrictions, suspicion, and a hatred of the foreigner “as a Bolshevist and a bomber,” while Jews stood “as lonely as before.”41 The association of Jews with radicalism/Bolshevism at a time of mounting intolerance alarmed Jewish leaders, communal workers, and intellectuals. The antiradical Jewish Committee of New York, backed by the Educational Alliance; the nonradical Yiddish dailies; and figures like Joseph Barondess and Abraham H. Fromenson pressed New York Jews in 1919 not to vote for the Socialists. The committee published a “serious warning,” saying “we must not throw on American Jewry the heavy burden, which already cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of our brothers and sisters in East and Central Europe. . . . Let the Irish vote for the Socialist ticket if they decide so, let the Gentile quarters of New York walk under the red flag if they wish . . . but don’t let them [Socialists] cast the burden on the Jews of the East Side, of Brownsville, Bronx, Williamsburg.” Similarly, the Morgen zhurnal beseeched New York Jews to “let the green Germans of Milwaukee the ‘honor’” of electing a Socialist to Congress, since “they certainly have more reasons to be against America.”42 While sharply divided over political and ideological allegiance, left-wing, liberal, and conservative Jews largely concurred that the

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Figure 7.2 “Whither?” Caption: “And my sons spilled their blood to make the world safe for democracy!” The three Furies are described as (left to right) Poland, Ukraine, and Romania. The bayonets read “anti-immigration laws.” The cartoonist is Lola (Leon Israel). Big Stick, 1919. Courtesy of the Dorot Jewish Division at the New York Public Library.

ultrapatriotic wave carried thinly veiled xenophobic and anti-Jewish enmity. From the left, Karl Fornberg derided the “unfounded hysteria” of numerous Americans in relation to immigrants and wrote that during the war, “the East Side distinguished itself as dedicated and enthusiastic far better than many from the genuine Yankee quarters.” The feeling of a red hysteria did not deter the organ of the Arbeter Ring, which evoked

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Old World imagery in its announcement in December 1919 that the order would defend its members against “any hooligan” who might try to disrupt legal activities: “We are not helpless sissies who go down on their knees before the porets and dance to his tune.” Another Socialist, A. Voliner, determined that antiradical panic in America was aimed at other minorities as well, as it created “a deep chasm between the native-born and the immigrant, between the real and non-real Americans, between the nonJew . . . and the Jew.” Voliner wrote that Jews in Poland and Russia envy the “prouder, more secure American Jew,” but in America, this Jew “is often both a zhid [kike] and a Bolshevik . . . and something worse: he is an immigrant, a foreigner.” After the New York State Legislature expelled five Socialist assembly members (three of whom were Jewish) in January 1920, the Groyser kundes sneered, “The Gentiles have a new thing: the trial against the five Socialists in Albany.43 Nonradical Jews in New York joined their radical rivals to deplore the repressive measures and atmosphere. Republican congressman Isaac Siegel and Tammany-associated Samuel Untermyer protested against the antisemitic tones in the Bolshevik scare. The Tog despondently reprinted a page from the Anti-Bolshevist (Brooklyn) to demonstrate how antiJewish propaganda from Europe was permeating the American public opinion. The editor, William Edlin, attacked “certain Americans” who exploited the Bolshevik scare to fight against immigration: “Hadn’t it [panic] existed, they would have invented it.” Later Edlin specifically mentioned nativists like New York State senator Clayton R. Lusk, “who sees the immigrant as an inferior creature that should improve his criminal characteristics.” Even conservatives like the AJC’s Cyrus Adler and Louis Marshall opposed what Adler called a pervasive “hunting attitude.”44 As Marshall and the AJC were desperately trying to show that the charge of “Judeo-bolshevism” was bogus, in July 1919 Yiddish journalist Reuben Fink reported on a new movie, The Volcano, which featured guest appearances by Governor Al Smith and Assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin D. Roosevelt. The movie dealt with themes like the Great War, espionage, and revolution; Fink wrote that while non-Jews were portrayed as patriotic and noble, Jews were pictured not only as physically repugnant—with big noses and ludicrous gestures—but also as Bolsheviks and treacherous. Fink urged his readers to protest against lies that made Jews “scapegoats” and cautioned that the movie might set a “dangerous precedent.” Less than a year later, when Henry Ford’s newspaper, the Dearborn Independent, instigated its antisemitic campaign, Fink’s forewarning seemed prescient.45 As intolerance and antisemitism in America seemed to intensify, some Jewish commentators linked them to events in Europe and judged

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Americans to be undistinguishable from the larger Gentile world, which appeared intent on harming Jews. After the bombings of June 2, 1919, Orthodox journalist Ephraim Caplan prayed that no Jews were involved, because the American public would conclude that all Jews were terrorists: “The non-Jewish world has two norms. . . . A Gentile is not responsible for the evil actions of another.” When it came to Jews, Caplan explained to his readers, “before and after all, the world wants to see our blood.” Writing in the same vein, a newly arrived immigrant in New York, the leading Yiddish critic Shmuel Niger (born Shmuel Charney) also did not see any distinction between Americans and other Gentiles. In an article, “The New False Accusation” (1920), Niger referred to a united anti-Jewish front, made up of Americans and others; those who believed in the czarist forgery known as The Protocols of the Elders of Zion “and all kinds of other documents” reflected “their [the accusers’] experience and their psychology: they imagine that we do what they would have done if they were in our place. . . . Had they been silent if people had tormented them as they do to us? . . . Hence they cannot imagine that we do not have a thirst for revenge, no thirst for paying death for death.”46 The impression that Jews faced a hostile Gentile world, which included many, if not most, Americans, led to a short-lived and abortive initiative that anticipated a similar (and successful) attempt in the 1930s. In the fall of 1920 a group of well-known, mostly immigrant Orthodox and Zionist New York Jews campaigned for the organization of a World Jewish Congress. The life and soul of that plan was the son of popular writer N. M. Shaykevitsh, playwright and lawyer Abraham S. Schomer (who urged the formation of such a congress as early as 1906). Figures who backed his proposal included Orthodox Zionists like Rabbi Meyer Berlin, Hirsh Masliansky, Benjamin Koenigsberg, and Joseph I. Bluestone; socialist Zionists such as Yankev Marinoff (editor of the Groyser kundes) and Borekh Tsukerman; general Zionists like Re’uven Brainin, Shmuel Margoshes, and Leo Wolfson; Yiddish journalists like Ephraim Caplan, Louis Miller, and Getsil Zelikovitsh; the social reformer and former secretary of the National Council of Jewish Women, Sadie American; the selfmade entrepreneur Harry Fischel; and a few Jewish judges. In the new organization’s foundation letter Schomer warned, “At no time in history has the danger to the Jew, everywhere, been so great. the whole world seems to be against us .  .  . indifference will sooner or later spell our destruction.” Eventually the plan failed, not only because of the opposition of the cautious AJC, but also because most American Zionists preferred to work on a permanent American Jewish Congress. The detractors of the idea did not dispute that grave danger for Jews existed, but they believed that such a congress, in the words of philanthropist

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Nathan Straus, “would be considered by the anti-Semites as a proof . . . that the Jews are aiming at world dominion.”47 Educational Encounters Disillusionment with “real” Americans touched the hallowed American institution of the public school. In 1917 there was one issue that attested to the dissatisfaction with this respectable American institution and readiness to struggle against it: the proposed Gary Plan. The plan was a Progressive Era initiative to extend the school day to include laboratories, workshops, and recreational facilities. The system was introduced to some New York City schools in 1915 and endorsed by Mayor John P. Mitchel, whereas Tammany and the Socialists opposed it. Jewish immigrants found the plan especially troubling. Parents saw the system as vocational rather than academic and feared it might hamper their children’s chances to obtain higher education and close the doors of opportunity. Orthodox Jews were dismayed that in places where the system was implemented (certain Bronx schools), Christian clergy were able to teach religion classes to the children with the approval of the principals. A prolonged school day also jeopardized the little time pupils had in the afternoon or evening hours for Jewish education. Moreover, many pupils worked after school to help their families or to save for future studies, and the plan was a threat to these goals. In October 1917 schoolchildren in the city’s Jewish neighborhoods led a series of aggressive demonstrations against the Gary Plan, which engulfed mainly the thirty-two Gary schools in Harlem, the Bronx, Brownsville, and Williamsburg. For ten days thousands of pupils, with their milling parents’ active encouragement, marched with socialist banners, called for a general strike, smashed school windows, and clashed with the police. Demonstrations broke out in high schools, which to some extent protested against military training that was made obligatory by a new state law. Most of the boys who were arrested were Jewish.48 As soapbox orators warned parents of the ramification of the proposed system, Jewish critics of the Gary Plan referred to its midwestern origins. Yoel Entin, a leading advocate for national secular Jewish schools, asked how a system from a “small company town, of Polish and Slavic residents, of mothers who work in the factory together with the men” could be transplanted in New York. It is noteworthy that Entin contrasted Gary with New York City because of the latter’s diverse character, which made it a “free, American-Irish-German-Jewish .  .  . city.” Viewing the system as a threat to Jewish culture, another supporter of secular Yiddish schools, Tsivyen, hit a Jewish raw nerve in his assertion that the Gary Plan “actually institutes religious instruction in New York’s [public] schools.”

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Tsivyen charged, “The Gary system gives an outstanding opportunity for Christian ministers to spread religious teaching” and even “use them [public schools] as their parish schools.”49 The large-scale protest demonstrated skepticism toward a foremost symbol of American benevolence and opportunity. It did not develop in a vacuum, as Jewish teachers, pupils, and parents became increasingly aware of an anti-Jewish bias in the city’s education system. In 1917 schoolteacher Sarah Kristol-Breslau described the tortuous process that Jewish teachers underwent in New York City: in the oral exam required for a teaching license the board of examiners would “prove” to the Jewish examinee that “his manners are somewhat unpleasant . . . or his accent is imperfect, or his fingernails are not clean.” If the candidates (typically young Jewish women) did pass the exam, they would be sent to the worst schools in the toughest neighborhoods, since the superintendents wanted to push them out of the profession. When in school, the “good, IrishCatholic principal” would send them to the class of the “adolescent, wild, retarded” pupils, where the pupils might pull out a knife to frighten the new teacher. Kristol-Breslau lamented that Jews’ long history of persecution made them very competent but also “submissive.” That backdrop in addition to the public protest over the Gary Plan led Yiddish poet Yitskhok Blum in October 1917 to juxtapose two kinds of female teachers: the Jewish and the “Yankee.” Blum wrote that the Jewish teacher was “pretty,” was dedicated to her work, and had “a Jewish heart.” He determined, “No, she is no cold-blooded Yankee teacher, who speaks automatically and indicates the time like a clock.”50 In a climate of swelling arch-patriotic fervor, the association of Eastern European Jews with radicalism led to what many Jews thought was an anti-Jewish witch hunt at the city schools. In November 1917, superintendent John L. Tildsley questioned twenty teachers, most of them Jewish, from DeWitt Clinton High School (at Tenth Avenue and Fifty-ninth Street) about their political views, resulting in the dismissal of three Jewish teachers because of their antiwar opinions. This action was followed by public outcry; board of education member Joseph Barondess called the procedure a “lynching,” and John Dewey called it “an Inquisition.” Such protests, however, did not stop Tildsley from asking the principals of twenty-four high schools across the city to submit the names of teachers who were suspected of holding unpatriotic views.51 The Forverts argued that Tildsley questioned non-Jewish teachers just to show that “the investigation was not directed only at Jews” and believed that the case showed how “considerable antisemitism reigns in the school system,” and “it is much more difficult for Jewish students to get a position in schools.” In 1918 Jewish teachers depicted the

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atmosphere in the city’s schools; one, Isaac Rosengarten, wrote that Jewish teachers encountered anti-Jewish bigotry “everywhere” among fellow teachers. He mentioned a board of education member who said he hoped to see all Russian Jews “back in Russia.” Another (unnamed) teacher, who, unlike Rosengarten, wrote in Yiddish, was much more outspoken: “Senior school officials have always frowned upon the infiltration of Jewish teachers into public and high schools. . . . It is not uncommon that female Christian teachers show [their] antisemitism toward the children and their Jewish colleagues. . . . The hatred toward our young people is very widespread.”52 The situation seemed to worsen after the war. As the Lusk Committee investigated hundreds of Gotham’s teachers, many of them Jewish, teacher dismissals became more frequent. One teacher was fired because his student, sixteen-year-old Hyman Herman, criticized in a paper American intervention in Russia and called the United States “a country far from democratic (and daily proving itself to be such).” After the board of education proposed denying graduation diplomas to students who exhibited even mild sympathy with radicalism or Bolshevism, William Edlin asked acerbically, “What will be next? Denying diplomas to students who don’t believe in the Immaculate Conception?” The left-wing orientation of a large segment of Jewish teachers and students tended to alarm administrators. As xenophobic and anti-Jewish prejudice were often enmeshed in the antiradical crusade, nonradical Jews also sensed that the campaign was at least as much against Jews as against the Reds.53 Jewish immigrants and their children did not find higher education more hospitable in those years. It was hardly accidental that the increase in American antisemitism coincided with the gradual movement of American Jews into the middle class.54 The more personal contact with Americans on campus in the late 1910s also helped to dispel the Yankee’s idealized image. Prior to the institution of formal quotas in the early 1920s, a climate of intolerance had already prevailed in many colleges and universities in the Northeast. The problem was not acute at the City College of New York (CCNY), where Jewish students constituted nearly 80 percent of the student body by 1918. That proportion led to the joke that the abbreviation CCNY stood for “College of the Circumcised Citizens of New York.” But at other universities, both in New York City and elsewhere in the East, Jewish students (whether immigrants or first-generation American-born) faced hostility. At Rutgers College nonJewish students strongly opposed a Jewish fraternity, and the effort of Jewish students to secure recognition for their organization, the Campus Club, met with firm opposition from the undergraduate body and the administration. After a crowd of non-Jewish students disrupted a meeting

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of the Campus Club in November 1917, one of their leaders reportedly said, “We don’t want Rutgers College to become a second New York University.” In 1920 an anonymous letter to the Rutgers student newspaper concluded that the college believed that “everything should be done to discourage Jews from coming to Rutgers.”55 The state of affairs at “Jewish” New York University was not much better. About a hundred Jewish students were placed under arrest at the Student Training Camp in December 1918 on disobedience charges brought by a drill sergeant. A subsequent investigation, found the sergeant guilty of insulting the Jewish students and he was ordered to apologize. But the real problem was Jewish-Gentile relations on campus. By 1920 the newly expanded campus on Washington Square had a Jewish enrollment of 93 percent (surpassing tuition-free CCNY and Hunter College). Yoel Slonim, who in 1919 portrayed the “bitter struggle between Jewish and Christian students at New York University,” argued, “In no university the hatred of the Christian students against the Jews is so developed, so polluted as in New York University.” Although a majority among students, Jews were systematically excluded from holding official positions in the student body. Slonim recounted Jewish students’ resentment, which peaked in June 1919, when the non-Jewish members of the student body held a “Christians only” meeting and enacted voting restrictions that in effect disenfranchised Jewish students. Jewish students remained deeply resentful, since the university would rule in favor of the “Christian students . . . whether they [were] right or not.” By 1920, Jewish students at New York University, like those at Columbia, Harvard, and the Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute, found an often unfriendly body of students and an unsympathetic administration, which defined their very presence as “the Jewish problem.”56 With the image of Americans stained, immigrant Jews looked elsewhere: there were signs of somewhat improved perceptions of other minorities, namely Italians and Blacks.57 Unlike the case with Poles or other Eastern European immigrants, relations between Yiddish-speaking Jews and African Americans or Italians were not burdened by Old World patterns (with their charged past or dire present).58 Seeking Potential Allies: Italians and Blacks In 1916 writer Celia Silbert reported that whereas in the past intermarriage occurred more often between Jews and Irish than between Jews and other ethnicities, the situation had changed: “The intermarriages of today are more often contracted between Jews and Italians,” mostly between Jewish women and Italian men. Silbert asked the opinion of the city’s Marriage License Bureau, where a Jewish interpreter made

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“the conservative estimate of twenty-five [marriages] annually” between Jewish women and Italian men. Silbert argued that this tendency was strongest among working-class women, who worked beside Italians and therefore had developed “like temperaments, similar inclinations and tendencies.” Yet some female Jewish teachers and office assistants also married Italians, and one young woman told Silbert that she “preferred to marry an Italian rather than a ‘kike,’ an uncouth, unlettered Jew.” In her analysis of what she saw as a trend, Silbert wrote, “the Italian youth is the mental equal of the Jewess.” Ultimately, intermarriage derived from a complex set of reasons and remained a fairly isolated phenomenon even among American-born Jews in New York.59 Whatever the causal connection between mixed marriage and improved images may be (if any), by the late 1910s representations of Italians had improved to some extent. One of the main arenas where that change toward Italians was noticeable was the Jewish labor movement, even when it was being torn apart between Communists and “right-wingers” (social-democrats).60 Although manifestations of Jewish chosenness did not disappear, a growing rapprochement between Jewish and Italian garment workers was especially evident in contrast to the relations between the Jewish unions and the AFL: those were lukewarm (at best) before 1917 and were further tested afterward, adding to the bitterness of Jewish unionists. To begin with, the AFL’s anti-immigration stance alienated most Jewish workers. Beyond immigration there was a feeling that while the Jewish unions were loyal to the cause of labor, other unions were indifferent or too conservative. Lucy Robins Lang, who was active in anarchist and labor circles, came to New York City in late 1917 to mobilize Jewish union support for the jailed California labor leader Tom Mooney. Although the UHT agreed to help her, Lang noted the disheartened tone of its secretary, Max Pine: “Are there no non-Jews in the world that you have to come to us? .  .  . If I were rotting in jail, would Mooney put himself out for me? No, only we of the East Side risk our necks for every Tom, Dick, and Harry.” A Jewish observer at the AFL convention in St. Paul in June 1918 reported that “only the Jewish unions” fought against the federation’s conservative policy. He also distinguished between “us Jews . . . the [Jewish] labor movement, that is,” and the other unions (that actually had a Jewish membership). As one contemporary labor researcher, David J. Saposs, succinctly wrote in 1919, the Jewish unions “have never accepted the A. F. of L. as their leaders.”61 In 1918–1919 Saposs conducted numerous interviews with Jewish and non-Jewish labor organizers and leaders that reflected not only the frostiness between Jewish and predominantly non-Jewish unions, but also the emerging closeness of Jewish and Italian workers. Gentile organizers

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talked about Jewish immigrants as “troublesome,” “argumentative,” and “clannish.” J. H. Conway, secretary of the Retail Clerks International, claimed, Jews “do not seem to Americanize, are dishonest and bluffers,” while another union organizer called Jews “a wild bunch.”62 For their part, Jewish labor organizers and socialists regarded American union officials as expressing a “hostile attitude” toward Jews. Hyman Schoolman, secretary of the Cloak Makers Joint Council, said that because “Jews .  .  . stand for certain ideals,” they became “repulsive to the Gentiles.” Michael B. Newman, who represented Local 1 of the Bookbinders Union in New York City, stated in 1919 that Jewish workers were “suspicious toward non-Jewish union officials, believing that they may betray them.” That year the secretary of ACWA, Joseph Schlossberg, said that American trade unionists “do not understand the immigrant worker, regard him as ignorant and unworthy of being consulted.” Moreover, American unions offered “nothing spiritual or idealistic” and “autocratic methods.” Those views were echoed in the impression of socialist M. Baranov: “even now, when they are starting to become [class] conscious, you will find more appetite than ideals among the real Americans.”63 Against that backdrop the improved image of Italians was significant. Undeniably, Jewish youths still knew that wandering into Little Italy or Italian Harlem might end in a fight. Furthermore, lingering doubts echoed in the words of the ILGWU vice-president Fannie Cohn that “Italian traditions” hindered the organization of Italian workers. As the number of Jewish workers in the garment industry began to decline after the war, the Jewish union leadership failed to reflect that demographic change, something that did not contribute to intergroup affinity.64 Those facts show that the assertions of certain historians and labor leaders about “a remarkable solidarity” or “harmonious historic relationship” were overstated: a change was evident, yet as it often happens in human relations, it was neither immediate nor total.65 One of the leaders of the ACWA, David Wolf, described how “the Italians stood loyally for fourteen weeks” in the strike the ACWA organized in New York for a forty-four-hour week (winter 1918–1919). There was some racial hatred in the union, Wolf contended, “but not on the part of the Italian or Jew. The Americans of German descent still bear hostility towards the Jew; the Poles also have some antisemitic feeling.” Even organizers of the UGWA, who resented the “radicalism” of Jews and Italians, acknowledged the cooperation and amity between the two groups. Outside the needle trades, Sol Broad mentioned not only the antisemitism of the “German-Austrian element” in the Structural Iron Workers’ Union, but also that “the Italians are also radical and stick with the Jews.” Sam Liptzin, who served as an organizer for the ACWA, also

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recalled the closer relations between Jews and Italians after World War I. By 1920 the two Italian locals were among the largest within the ILGWU, and those locals joined Jewish locals in condemning American intervention in the Russian civil war.66 At a time of slaughter abroad and nativism at home, Italian workers donated their dinner money for the Jewish war-sufferers relief effort and were seen as allies against bigotry. Writing about the protest day in May 1919 against the pogroms in Poland, Hebrew and Yiddish educator and essayist Shimshen Erdberg described his surprise when he saw a closed Italian store on the Bowery; the middle-aged Italian storekeeper told him, “For Jews, kill, Pole kill Jews, I keep close, I too, sure,” and then “made a fist.” Erdberg wrote that many workers told him that their Italian coworkers decided to join their march: “We work together with Jews, it’s good [to work] with them, when they protest, so should we.”67 The gradually improved image of Italians was connected to the larger postwar milieu, when Jewish immigrants recognized that the nativist upsurge, while antisemitic, also threatened other minorities in the American society. The aforesaid labor organizers, as well as the intellectuals mentioned above, like Karl Fornberg, B. Vladeck, Abe Goldberg, A. Voliner, and William Edlin (to name but a few), understood that Jews would have greater ability to defend themselves if they did not stand alone but cooperated with other minorities and “foreigners” to combat intolerance. As UHT organizer Hyman Schneid said in 1918, many American unions “deliberately neglect the Jews, not because they are Jews but because they are foreigners.” Jewish labor organizers had rich experience working with other minorities; by 1919, more than 40 percent of all workers in the so-called Jewish unions were non-Jews.68 An equivalent change occurred in relation to a group with which immigrant Jews in New York had relatively little contact before the 1910s—African Americans. By 1920 more Jews lived in close proximity to African Americans in New York than those of a decade before. Although their numbers began to decline after the massive infl ux of southern Blacks into Harlem during World War I, Jews made up nearly the entire white population in the Black section of Harlem. That year the Tog featured a report on the “remarkable growth of the Negro colony in New York,” emphasizing that among Harlem Blacks there was “a considerable number of artists, singers, musicians, lawyers, physicians, and other professionals.” Jews remained more willing than other groups to reside alongside Blacks; whereas the postwar Jewish exodus out of Harlem coincided with the arrival of Black migrants, it also had to do with the dynamics of the physical decay of the neighborhood and the upward mobility of formerly poor immigrants.69

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It is incontestable that Jewish immigrants continued to harbor prejudices against Blacks (as against the Italians). In 1921 The Tageblat reported on the robbery and murder of a Jewish landlord in Harlem by two Black youths, and that “a group of Negroes” did not help the dying man, but instead “went through his pockets” and stole his money. Well into the 1920s former New Yorker Rabbi Max Raisin, who wrote “I bow before Blacks in respect,” also penned, “Negroes must not be likened to Jews. They never wrote a bible, did not give prophets and messiahs to the world.” Raisin also commented, “Only white trash will agree to marry Blacks.”70 While the change in the image of Blacks was not complete, by the late 1910s it was noticeable. Yiddish papers had protested against lynching and racial hatred earlier, yet once again it was the convergence of events in Europe and America of 1918–1920 that prompted Jewish observers to highlight the historic parallels: Blacks in America were seen as America’s Jews, the most despised and oppressed group in the population, and therefore Jews had a unique ability to understand their problems. The Forverts stressed that the African American “serves as a scapegoat like the Jew in Poland and Ukraine; hence we Jews can so deeply sympathize with him,” since “we Jews know to what racial hatred can lead.” After the “red summer of 1919,” when race riots erupted across the country, most notably in Washington, DC, and Chicago, many articles underscored the parallels between them and the pogroms in Eastern Europe.71 Emphasizing Jewish and Black similarities, A. S. Zaks wrote that the “same reasons” led to the violence against Jews in Europe and Blacks in America and the two minorities should respond in the same way: “The remedy against pogroms is not lobbyism, or beggar politics but force, an eye for an eye.” Zaks equated the mentality of white Americans with that of the Eastern European nations—they all had a “master mentality” that awakened the “meanest instincts and bloody passions.” Still, Zaks criticized southern Blacks, because their “servile obedience to the whites did not dissipate. . . . Negroes regard themselves as inferior, ugly creatures.” Surely one can discern a certain paternalism in Zaks’s dissection of African Americans’ shortcomings, yet his criticism was directed at Jews as well. More important, he saw Jews and Blacks as two similarly persecuted minorities that should vigorously defend themselves.72 As with Italians, in a society that looked ever more menacing, Blacks sometimes seemed like a ray of hope. Covering the day of protest against the pogroms in Poland (May 1919), Yiddish journalist Shmuel Kremer met non-Jewish workers who joined their Jewish colleagues’ march. The Odessa-born writer saw Italian workers, but his attention was drawn to

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the young Black women: “It is pleasant yet odd to see Black women in the march of Jewish protestors.” Kremer wrote that one of the Black women told him, “The dirty Poles lynch the Jews. The Jewish girls threw away their work and organized a protest. I also threw away the work, I also want to protest.” As with Erdberg’s Italian storekeeper, there is no telling whether Kremer actually met that Black woman and whether he quoted her more or less accurately. But such examples reflected the changing images of those groups and how they were increasingly perceived as allies against a common threat.73 By 1920 the emerging image of African Americans not only conveyed the identification of Yiddish writers with their predicament, but also underscored Blacks’ positive traits. An organizer for the ACWA, S. Drobkin, praised Black strikers, “whose eyes glistened with the fire of enthusiasm and faith in their just cause.” Yiddish journalist Shmuel Blum, who came from Byelorussia in 1909 and by 1920 was studying at the University of South Carolina, illustrated the harsh treatment of Blacks in the South, recounting how Blacks performed backbreaking jobs, only to be called “lazy” by the local whites. Blum argued that despite the profound misery of Jews, “we [Jews] still have hope,” but “the Negroes’ sufferings are deeper and graver, and without any hope.” In an editorial remark on Blum’s essay, Lesin wrote that one could believe what a white teacher said about Black pupils “exactly as you could believe what a Pole says about Jews.”74 The growing sympathy toward Italians and Blacks was closely tied to the pressures and anxieties of the war and the Red Scare period. Although one should not romanticize Jewish perceptions of those groups and rather acknowledge the lingering ambiguities, it would be wrong to assume that the changes were motivated only by self-interest. The images of Italians and Blacks signaled the emergence of a new Jewish awareness that saw those groups as fellow minorities, whose shared conditions and interests might help to form a better defense against the acts of a prejudiced majority. Defending Minority Rights There was another factor linked to expressions of stronger affinity by Jewish immigrants with some minorities: the growing popularity of the concept of minorities’ rights among American Jews. Contemporary observers pointed out the central role that Jews in general and American Jews in particular played at the Paris Peace Conference. An unfriendly commentator, the Irish journalist E. J. Dillon, wrote that during the conference, “the real infl uences behind the Anglo-Saxon peoples were

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Semitic” and “henceforth the world will be governed by the Anglo-Saxon peoples, who, in turn, are swayed by their Jewish elements.” A less hostile observer wrote that in Paris in 1921, “There was one race which had ardent, persistent, and infl uential friends”—the Jews, whose delegates worked hard “to watch over the interests of their race.”75 Such portrayals assumed a joint and powerful Jewish front, but the Jewish delegates at the conference were divided between East and West, nationalists and antinationalists. Back in America, the anguish and frustration of Jewish immigrants rose as they faced daily reports of the massacres in their hometowns without being able to offer effective assistance. After the American Jewish Congress convened in Philadelphia (December 1918), it decided to send a delegation to the Paris peace talks. The delegation was split between a majority that supported national rights for Jews in Eastern Europe, and the AJC delegates (namely, Louis Marshall and Cyrus Adler), who opposed it and pushed for individual rights. Still, they managed to struggle together for Jewish rights in Palestine and Eastern and Central Europe’s emerging countries. Their effort ultimately entailed a defense of the rights of other nations and sought a way to safeguard minority rights in general.76 Proponents of “cultural pluralism” in America (like Brandeis and Kallen) understood very well that American Jews could not demand “national rights” like Polish or Romanian Jews, and that ideas of Diaspora nationalists like Zhitlovsky, Hourwich, or Schomer were inapplicable in America. Nevertheless, the topic of minorities’ rights generated a fiery debate within wide circles. The belief that American Jews should have a permanent body that would represent them as a minority had become widespread by 1920. The New York delegation to the American Jewish Congress brought together different figures like Tammany’s Aaron J. Levy, Hebraist Re’uven Brainin, socialist Zionists Yoel Entin and Borekh Tsukerman, and pro-Wilson socialists Henry Slobodin and William Edlin. In May 1920 the delegation demanded that the American Jewish Congress would remain permanent. William Edlin argued that the “Gentile world” had created the circumstances that “necessitates” such a congress. Their demand failed because of the fierce opposition of the patrician AJC, which feared that such a permanent body would be seen as Jewish separatism. Stephen S. Wise would breathe new life into the congress two years later. The confl uence of events abroad and in America helps to explain how immigrant Jews came around to understand themselves and negotiate their condition as a minority that had a stake in cooperating with other minorities. By the time America curbed immigration (in 1924), therefore, it was almost natural for Yiddish essayist Y. L. Dalidansky to view America as “two hostile camps, an aristocratic

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and intolerant majority, which seeks to have all the rights and privileges only for itself, and an embittered minority, which fights for its rights.”77

One should not exaggerate the effects of the disenchantment with the American; the number of Jews who left New York for the Soviet Union or Palestine was negligible and Gotham’s Jews remained completely aware of the sea of difference between their situation and fellow Jews in Poland or Russia. Likewise, the improvement in the images of Italians or Blacks was never unequivocal. Yet at a time of gradual disillusionment with old-stock Americans, growing appreciation of those two groups signaled a new chapter in American Jewish history, when other minorities were seen as part of a potential joint interminority front that would struggle against America’s intolerance. In time such cooperation would have an important effect on the American political scene.

Epilogue S e l f - I m ag e a n d I t s L i m i tat i o n s

In 1930 German-born Jewish social worker and sociologist Bruno Lasker suggested themes for the study of Jewish-Gentile relations. Among them was a list of questions for an opinion test, in which several statements about Gentiles were made. The respondents were to write down how often they heard them, and whether they were justified. Among the statements were “1. They [Gentiles] are dumb-headed (not mentally quick). 2. They tend to be violent. . . . 4. They are immoderate and do things to excess. For example, drinking. . . . 6. The Anglo-Saxon and German types particularly are cold and restrained. . . . 11. Gentiles waste too much time on games and athletics.” Lasker, who worked at the Henry Street Settlement and knew well the city’s Jewish population, hastened to clarify, “It is not known that a single person holds all or even a majority of the statements contained,” yet it is unlikely that he conjured such expressions out of thin air. Nearly two decades later, a young non-Jewish woman, Wayne Clark, who socialized mostly with acculturated Jews, reported encountering a similar attitude among her Jewish friends and acquaintances: the nucleus of the Gentile is believed to be “his omnipresent anti-Semitism. . . . It is rooted so deeply in him. . . . Like his libido, it acts in every situation,” while his intellect is a “primitive mechanism” and therefore is “prey to unselective acceptance of racial nonsense, [and] adolescent entertainment (sports, club activities, tasteless group affinities).”1 Seeking to explicate and substantiate their left-of-center positions, many American Jews have reiterated a beguiling narrative: they depict their moral and political devotion as flowing from a reservoir of religious values or historical experience. Conveniently anchoring current preferences and needs to a hallowed (though overstated if not largely imaginary) tradition has helped to weave Jewish identity and liberalism into an indivisible amalgamation.2 From a current vantage point, after so much has been written about the American Jewish attachment to liberal or radical politics, the reorientation of Jewish immigrants toward certain minority groups after World War I seems self-explanatory. But Jewish immigrants did not bring with them any essential inclination to identify with various ethnic groups. If anything, Jews in Eastern Europe tended 188

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to hold in higher esteem those whom they saw as carriers of the more advanced cultures, while the specific cultures of the different peoples surrounding them had little appeal; occasionally Jews were downright contemptuous of them. In their interaction with non-Jews in New York, Jewish immigrants often reverted to the categories and archetypes known to them: jeering Irish youths or Italian strikebreakers were comfortably cast as the lowstatus Gentiles in Eastern Europe, whereas “Yankees” were perceived as the bearers of a higher, nobler culture. Thus one should rethink the claim according to which Jews identify “with people more marginalized than themselves”: a much more prevailing historical pattern was that Jews tended to identify “up” rather than “down.”3 More often than not Jews aligned themselves with the central authorities, which protected them from mob attacks, and many communities relied on Gentile rulers for their livelihood as well. Acquaintance with the languages of the central government or those spoken across broader areas assured better chances to conduct business or just eke out a living. Yet the Jewish attraction to modern, advanced cultures was genuine and not only the result of instrumental reasons. Late nineteenth-century Jews wanted to transform themselves into Russians, Poles, and Germans, not Belorussians, Latvians, Lithuanians, or Ukrainians. By the same token, the claim about a “common bond” between Jews and the Irish should be taken with a grain of salt.4 The Jewish turn toward more cooperation with other minorities in the 1910s was circumstantial and in any case incomplete; the budding empathy with the New World’s low-status Gentile groups was anything but natural for immigrant Jews, a bit of American exceptionalism in and of itself. The situation in New York City, where Jewish immigrants resided among various ethnicities and had little contact with Yankees in the early years after emigration, enabled the endurance of bifurcated images of Gentiles. The image of “real” Americans shared some of the optimistic assumptions that modernizing Jews had about the upper echelons of non-Jewish society in Europe and showed at least a partial acceptance of racial conceptions that had put Anglo-Saxons at the helm of human progress. At the same time, real-life neighbors were frequently seen as carrying the negative traits, like violence and volatility, that were generally associated with low-status non-Jews. The changing perceptions of Yankees should be understood in the context of the Jewish encounter with modernity. The dynamics of those contacts in New York were not unlike those in Eastern Europe, where idealization was often followed by disenchantment, once concrete relations were formed.5 The close proximity of other immigrant groups in New York City helped to delay the

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disillusionment process and to attribute the negative sides of American urban life to them. The existence of widespread, generalized images of Gentiles should not obscure their elasticity and variation. The ways Jewish immigrants distinguished between different groups and strata, and had different sets of attitudes toward them, demonstrate the complexity of the category “Gentile”—it is not as if Jewish immigrants cowered amid a seamless, hostile non-Jewish world, feeling their “insecure place in the worldwide Gentile environment.”6 The pattern vis-à-vis “Yankees” was quite the opposite: because the set of characteristics attributed to Americans was so flattering, and the drive to Americanize and imitate them was so strong, some forms of distress and disappointment followed.7 A few concurrent developments—the emergence of American nativism, the changing makeup of Jewish immigration, the strengthening of Jewish nationalism, and growing contacts with Americans—led to increased willingness to assign more responsibility to Yankees, rather than pointing the finger at the Irish, Poles, or Italians. In a sense, those developments pushed Jewish immigrants toward more cooperation with (and better appreciation of ) groups with which Jews had no essential inclination to cooperate or had any previous liking. What, then, were the practical consequences of that trajectory of disillusionment? The emergence of more menacing images of Americans, and the improvement in the perceptions of Italian Americans and Blacks—trends that accelerated during the Great War and the Red Scare—signaled the origins of the transition from a strategy of selfdefense to the defense of others. That transition, which preceded the New Deal and the overwhelming Jewish alignment with the Democratic Party, was linked to a growing awareness that Jews had a stake in defending other minorities and cooperating with them as the only workable buffer against the potential capriciousness and bigotry of the majority.8 Marshall Sklare, the dean of American Jewish sociology, has commented that “Jewish political behavior must be viewed in the context of Jewish-Gentile relations.”9 While there was no monocausal relationship between political behavior and Jewish conceptions of Gentiles, the images of non-Jews were inseparable from the set of responses to events, ideologies, and movements that shaped Jewish immigrant life in New York City. The perceptions of non-Jews served as potent and protean tools in intra-Jewish debates, where the contending sides used the set of images pertaining to the “Gentile world” in general, or different groups, as a way to promote their agendas. Although pursuing various ends, they all invoked specific assumptions about the character of Gentiles and their behavior, and what the ensuing practical consequences of that behavior

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might be. In Jewish political culture, with its alarmism and vigilance regarding any developments in the surrounding majority, the perceptions of Gentiles were (and arguably are) deeply entrenched and infl uential in the political realm. That alarmism probably contributed to the fact that relations between American Jews and other minorities would hardly become harmonious. But in any case, the shift in Jewish attitudes from self-defense to the defense of other groups had implications for the development of American liberalism. As Philip Gleason has shown, the term minority as a designation for a subgroup in a population did not really enter American political discourse before the late 1920s. The only individuals to use the term in that sense before then were American Jews, who played an important role in urging protection for minorities at the Paris Peace Conference. By looking at the changing images of Gentiles, I have traced how immigrant Jews began to apply that term to groups with which they had common interests. Only after the Paris Conference did the term minority began to designate a population subgroup, and even then only in regard to European national groups. Throughout the 1920s American Jews were the most vocal proponents of protections for minorities in Europe; in 1927 American Jewish organizations were the main force behind the Minority Rights Congress in Zurich, which urged (to no avail) the League of Nations to enforce the National Minority Rights clauses that most Eastern European countries refused to enact. Randolph Bourne proved to be prophetic when he wrote in 1916 that American Jews were the precursors of “what other nationals have to make to-day” in terms of living as both Americans and a national minority.10 Several scholars have demonstrated that by the 1930s American Jews were at the forefront of “social reform and minority rights.” In those years the term minority was being popularized and applied to groups within American society, and by the time of the New Deal, minorities had become the key term used in discussing intergroup relations in America. In 1932 the director of the Social Science Research Council, Donald Young, published his book American Minority Peoples, in which he suggested that the phrase American minorities, and minority peoples were synonymous with race as it was used then. In 1935 Progressive Education dedicated a special issue to the problems of minorities, and in 1938 the federal government issued a pamphlet that echoed what some Yiddish commentators had argued twenty years earlier: “There is no such person as a native American. We are all immigrants.” By no means out of altruistic motivation, Jewish immigrants played a major role in creating the vocabulary and putting up a central pillar of twentieth-century American liberalism: the recognition and defense of minorities.11

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Furthermore, an intriguing dualism arose toward those different minorities: while Jewish observers often expressed caution and even hostility toward some of the other immigrant groups, they also saw them as role models in the political sense. The characteristics attributed to those groups were earthiness, simplicity, and practicality, or in a nutshell, normalcy. Those images were applied to the political sphere; during the struggle against Williams’s regulations at Ellis Island or the campaign to establish an American Jewish Congress, Jews looked enviously at other peoples’ supposed national pride. That envy cut across lines of political and social demarcation. Other minorities also seemed to have a braver leadership than the “cowardly” Jewish leaders (fumed the nationalists), did not suffer from traitors who informed on their own people or tried to convert them (thundered the orthodox), or had a stronger and more class-conscious working class rather than the Jewish superstitious and parochial masses (sighed the socialists). Looking up to various groups as political role models runs counter to conventional wisdom. More than a few American figures, like President Benjamin Harrison (1891) and future president Herbert Hoover (1923) lauded American Jews for their level of organization and philanthropic activities. Such assessments grew stronger after World War II and the establishment of the state of Israel, when American Jews were often seen as the most organized, effective, and self-confident political lobby in the United States. Some commentators have even entertained conspiratorial speculations, suggesting that this lobby is the real mover and shaker behind American foreign policy.12 But during the period of mass immigration, the different groups that established their own national bodies (like the Irish, the Ukrainians, and others) or struggled against strict immigration officials and kept their national pride even at times of war (like the Germans) served as the paradigm of political mobilization and assertiveness for a range of Jewish nationalists. That aspect exemplifies the complex images of Gentiles among Jewish immigrants, where antipathy and attraction frequently coexisted. Jewish empathy and growing cooperation with Italians and Blacks came amid what John Higham has called the “Tribal Twenties” with their crop of bigotry; apart from Henry Ford’s anti-Jewish campaign, by the early 1920s immigration restrictions, university quotas, “Christians only” employment advertisements, residential restrictions, and social exclusion were a fact of life. Growing up in the Bronx in the 1920s, Ruth Gay recalled that exclusion from clubs and restaurants was a remote concern, but occupational and educational restrictions were what Jews found “most galling.” No less infuriating, probably, were the posters plastered

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on many walls at New York University’s campus in 1923, saying, “Scurvy kikes are not wanted.”13 Under those conditions more empathy and cooperation with African Americans and Italians were more likely. Although most Jews who were active in civil rights organizations were not immigrants, several prominent Eastern European Jews like Henry Moskowitz and Jacob Billikopf were active in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). In the Yiddish press, the tendency to equate antisemitism and anti-Black racism that began in the 1910s grew stronger in the interwar period; Yiddish papers stressed the parallels between the Jewish and the Black historical experience, fiercely attacked white racism, and trumpeted Black achievements. As Black workers increasingly entered New York’s needle trades, Jewish trade unionists organized them, departing from the exclusionary practices of most American unions. Moreover, Jewish unions assisted in the establishment of Black unions, like A. Phillip Randolph’s Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters.14 As a result of New York City’s employment and residential patterns, Jewish contacts with Italian Americans were closer and more intensive than those with Blacks. As they were becoming the majority in the city’s garment industry in the interwar years and living beside Jews in Brooklyn and the Bronx, fraternization between the groups grew. As the trial of the two Italian anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti proceeded, not only radicals identified with the “good shoemaker” and the “poor fish peddler.” By the time the two were executed in 1927 many immigrants had participated in protest rallies, while Yiddish poets championed their cause. As the 1930s were drawing to an end and New York Jews felt under attack by anti-Jewish groups like the German-American Bund and the largely Irish Christian Front, several Italian American leaders in New York rejected Mussolini’s antisemitic decrees and protested the persecution of Jews in Italy. In 1939 the American Sons of Italy Grand Lodge set up a Bureau of Good-Will between Italian and Jews in America to “promote brotherhood.”15 To avoid exaggerating or romanticizing the relationship between Jews and Blacks or Italians in the interwar period, it is important to acknowledge the hostile episodes that occurred in those years. Warsawborn writer Kate Simon, who grew up in the Tremont section of the Bronx in the 1920s, recalled how Jews and southern Italians “clung to one another” and that “Italians were really sort of Jewish, anyhow.” But she also remembered that her father “complained about the nigger sweeper in the factory who talked back to him .  .  . complained about the Italian who reeked of garlic and almost suffocated him in the train.”

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While immigrant Jews probably recognized that Jews, Blacks, and Italians shared many of the problems and enemies of the time, by the mid1930s they were threatened by the antisemitic rhetoric of Black agitators like Sufi Abdul Hamid (whom Jews dubbed “Black Hitler”), Ira Kemp, and Arthur Reid. As the Jewish presence in Harlem declined to mostly landlords and storeowners, Black radicals attacked Jews as exploiters, as Hamid called for a “jihad” against them. After a campaign to boycott stores that did not employ Blacks, in March 1935 a race riot erupted in Harlem, in which African American rioters damaged more than two hundred Jewish-owned stores. Still, Jewish attitudes toward Blacks should not be understood as only responses to perceived or real threats. At the Bronx’s notorious “slave markets” many Jewish homemakers engaged Black domestic workers at park benches or on street corners, sometimes offering them extremely low pay. An awareness of a common interest in and empathy toward the plight of Blacks in general did not always translate into sympathy with nonabstract Black women or men.16 Although usually not reaching that level of tension, the Jewish relationship with Italians was not the bed of roses described in later recollections. Whereas the sense of chosenness about labor’s cause had declined among Jewish organizers and workers (together with their overall numbers in the garment industry), ethnic considerations repeatedly trumped class unity. Despite dwindling numbers in the garment unions, Jewish leaders sought to preserve their control by segregating Italian locals. As early as 1924 trade unionist and Yiddish writer Harry Lang lamented, “Christian masses are flowing into the ‘Jewish trades’” and “tear off the unions from their Jewish roots,” although “they, the Gentiles, came to the Jews, not we to them.” Irving R. Stuart, who interviewed dozens of ILGWU workers and organizers in the early 1940s, discovered that many Jewish workers treated the Italians (and other workers) as interlopers who destroyed the old group solidarity and were docile in their dealings with employers.17 For their part, Italian garment workers and painters complained in 1938–1939 that they were denied work because of Jewish prejudice. Moreover, Fascism did cast its shadow: a study prepared for the AJC in November 1938 reported that fewer New York Jews were shopping at Italian-owned stores in reaction to Fascist Italy’s antisemitic decrees.18 Undeniably, the relationship of Jews with other groups did not become harmonious or make up a “rainbow coalition.” But the fact that ambivalence remained should not obscure the mental change that enabled the transition from self-defense to the defense of other minorities, despite the vicissitudes of urban friction. The multifaceted ups and downs in relations of Jews with other groups underscore the importance of better incorporating the international

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dimension into the history of the city’s Jews. Events overseas were central not only to the construction of American Jewish identity but also to interethnic interactions. Events in Poland during and after the war strained Jewish-Polish relationship and exacerbated Old World imagery and distrust. Relations between New York’s Jews and “daytshukes” were perhaps more ambivalent, but that connection, too, was continually shaped by German political antisemitism in the Vaterland or by Germany’s wartime conduct toward Jews. That pattern would recur in the 1930s and 1940s; the rise of Italian Fascism and German Nazism, coupled with the emergence of the predominantly Irish American Christian Front intensified Jewish confl ict with those groups.19 The encounter of immigrant Jews with Gentile Americans of different stripes raises questions that are also valid for second-generation New York Jews. Some historians have depicted the 1920s as a period of “optimism and cultural regeneration” coupled with tremendous economic and social mobility. Yet the confidence seen in writings about the interwar period often reflects the aspirations of the second generation more than their actual status. Did that second generation feel “at home in America” when seeing the ubiquitous “Christians only” ads? Were the offspring of Jewish immigrants so different from their parents or did they also think—in the words of Alfred Kazin, born and raised in Brooklyn— that beyond their ethnic enclave “was the strange world of Gentiles, all of them with flaxen hair, who hated Jews”? To what extent was the ethnicity of American-born Jewish New Yorkers shaped not only by the Jewish character of the neighborhood, but also by interethnic confl ict that reproduced some of the very images held by their immigrant parents? Moreover, the immigration generation did not vanish in the interwar period, nor did the Jewish working class. To what degree did the judgments, values, and beliefs that are at the center of this study continue to inform Jewish life in the neighborhoods that were “a Jewish turf ” of both immigrants and the American-born?20 The path of increasing disenchantment and unease over heightened nativism in America would have implications further down the road. A good deal—much of it accusatory or defensive—has been written about American Jews’ responses to the rise of Nazism abroad and the apex of domestic antisemitism before and during World War II.21 A useful way to understand American Jewish actions at the time would be to examine closely what Jacob Katz has called “the picture which Jews held to be an accurate representation of the religion, nature, and morality of the Gentile world.” Although Katz had medieval Jewish society in mind, his approach is applicable to American Jews in the 1930s. Just as in the era of mass immigration, Jewish actions were heavily infl uenced and

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encumbered by Jews’ set of expectations of the surrounding non-Jewish society, whether Irish adherents of Father Charles E. Coughlin; members of the Nazi German-American Bund; or the WASP supporters of far-right agitators like W. Dudley Pelley, Gerald L. K. Smith, and Gerald Winrod.22 Under such circumstances, Jewish enthusiasm for Franklin D. Roosevelt would seem inevitable.23 Still, the passionate Jewish support for Roosevelt was linked not only to his policies, but also to his patrician identity. Time and again the appeal of true-blooded American public figures—from William Randolph Hearst through William Sulzer and Eugene Debs to Woodrow Wilson—ignited Jewish ardor. Draped in lofty rhetoric about morality and justice, these politicians embodied the enlightened Gentile leader, the Franz Josephs of the New World. Former mayor of New York Ed Koch shrewdly remarked about his fellow American Jews, “They love to vote for someone whom they consider to be an FDR, a WASP with power and money who they think loves them.” Despite the substantial Jewish backing of Al Smith as “a symbol of embattled minorities,” it is telling how to a public attracted by elevated, old-stock figures, FDR’s aristocratic charm trumped the attributes of the plebeian Smith.24 In their transition from self-defense to the defense of others, Jewish immigrants devised—though not necessarily in a conscious way—an all-purpose solution for a Jewish problem. For many acculturating Jews in Europe, liberalism and Marxism offered a universal way to solve the Jewish predicament, but unlike in Europe, Jews in America were neither the most visible minority nor the most despised one. The conceptualization of minorities and their place in American society enabled immigrant Jews to tackle the problem of an ominous intolerant majority not as an isolated “Jewish problem,” but as a general issue that concerned other groups as well. As the question of majority-minorities relations, and not Jewish-Gentile relations, became prevalent, it allowed American Jews to construct an identity that fused self-interest and a genuine belief that Jews were struggling for others. Yet ultimately the legacy of universalizing specific Jewish problems carried the seeds of later frustrations, especially in Jewish-Black relations.25 The painful realization that in their relation to Jews, Americans had more in common with other Gentiles than previously thought, led to some forms of rapprochement with other groups. But since then American Jews have frequently mistaken the circumstantial for the essential and formulated a narrative that befitted their interests and tastes. That self-congratulatory story emphasized universal values (in either religious or secularized forms) that purportedly predisposed Jews to identify with the downtrodden, espouse equal rights for all, and fight for social justice,

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qualities that appeal to contemporary students of Jewish life, too. In that complacent tale, the particular and parochial in Jewish history were shunned in favor of the more exciting transcultural hybridity, liminal space, and heterogeneity. If mentioned at all, the more particularistic sides are usually the targets of moralizing.26 Rather than blaming Jewish immigrants for not adhering to the criteria of turn-of-the-twenty-firstcentury American liberalism, engagement with the particularistic dimensions of Jewish history has still much to teach us.

A Note on Methodology and Sources Any study of group attitudes should take into account that while the concepts and sensibilities of a group are never monolithic or static, the nature and degree of variance are fixed by the cultural milieu within which they arose. As class, place of origin, political orientation, and gender (not to mention personal interests or idiosyncrasies) surely informed how immigrant Jews perceived their non-Jewish surroundings, certain attitudinal lines of relating to Gentiles were common regardless of those differences.1 This is a study of images, not from a “history of ideas” perspective, but images in action: how they were advocated and applied by journalists, social workers, educators, intellectuals, poets, rabbis, trade unionists, and activists from across the political spectrum, as well as “ordinary” Jews.2 I am less interested in iconography and visual portrayal, though caricatures from the Yiddish press are examined.3 Image is defined here as the oral or written expression of an observation about non-Jews (whether Gentiles in general or different ethnicities), their characteristics, and conduct. The verbal articulation is communicated either by the historical subject (a person who recounts what he or she has thought and done, sometimes after a period of time) or by an intermediary who relays it. I concentrate on oral and written representations, which are the main manifestation of perceptions accessible to historical analysis, exploring what one historian called the “baggage” of “superstitions, prejudices, fears, cultural patterns.” The term image is generally used interchangeably with stereotype. Although the latter carries a somewhat more negative connotation, several scholars have disputed the popular view that stereotypes are “wrong” by conducting empirical research on the accuracy of social stereotypes.4 Although perceptions are usually not constructed as an exact reflection of social relations, they nevertheless convey a core of actuality. When Eastern European Jews idealized the image of the American or described the Irish in New York as anti-Jewish ruffians or viewed their Italian coworkers in the garment industry as “scabs,” there was undoubtedly a great deal of generalization and imagination. But those images were not entirely invented; they were usually linked to a specific set of social conditions. Late nineteenth-century America was a much freer and more egalitarian place for Jews than was czarist Russia; New York’s Irish 199

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toughs did harass Jewish peddlers and pedestrians, and manufacturers did employ many Italian immigrants as strikebreakers in the garment industry. Under those circumstances the developing imagery indeed distorted and reordered reality but was rarely completely invented.5 Since the “common” people tended to leave behind no paper trail, revealing the “inner terrain” of the immigrants is indeed a challenging undertaking.6 All the same, those who did not necessarily leave behind written documentation are represented, too. Beyond the numerous oral histories and records of memoirists, immigrants’ attitudes are explored also through the Jewish throngs on the East Side who jeered at missionaries, hurled at them rotten fruit and eggs, and spat at them; the hundreds of thousands of Jews who filled the city’s streets in protest against Polish and Ukrainian anti-Jewish violence; the diary of a ten-year-old-boy who attended a mass meeting after the lynching of Leo Frank; and a dentist’s advertisement—all these sources are used to uncover the beliefs and feelings of wide circles of the Jewish immigrant population.7 My sources include hundreds of unpublished and published oral history accounts, memoirs, and autobiographies; items from the Yiddish and Hebrew press; important events that drew thousands of people; the private and public correspondence of dozens of individuals who represented the political gamut among Jewish immigrants; the files and reports of various organizations and associations; Yiddish folklore; and literary works from the period. It is also important to bear in mind that the journalists, social workers, educators, intellectuals, poets, political activists, rabbis, and trade unionists mentioned earlier were scarcely a detached elite. Many still worked as shirtmakers, bakers, peddlers, storekeepers, or melamdim (religious teachers). They were members of societies, lodges, synagogues, unions, and informal social circles that were populated by the bulk of Jewish immigrants. Furthermore, numerous immigrants under discussion have remained virtually unknown thus far, like the Hebrew and Yiddish educator Shimshen Erdberg, the essayist and translator Avner Tanenboym, the garment workers Ida Seltzer and Menashe Tsinkin, and the orthodox writer Ephraim Caplan (to name but a few). Apart from these individuals, many memoirists whose invaluable but often unpublished recollections are made use of were in no way members of the elite.8 Since memoirs constitute an important source, one should recognize their challenging nature. Several writers have already pointed out that besides an ideological agenda, lapses of memory haunt memoirs and other testimony of older people, and often a retrospective twist is given in order to relay a larger meaning. Later events and currents tend to creep into texts that recount earlier periods: Nazism clouded recollections

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201

about Germans that related to the 1890s or 1900s, and the widespread pogroms in Ukraine after World War I have surely darkened in some reminiscences the original image of Gentiles decades earlier.9 Such qualifications notwithstanding, those recollections remain an indispensable source. Jewish immigrants from different localities, whose political allegiance, background, and cultural tastes were sharply divided, still expressed in numerous memoirs common impressions and outlooks concerning Gentiles in general or specific groups. Their mindset frequently corresponded to the sensibilities communicated in contemporary sources and demonstrates the relevance of later reminiscences, and how later events usually had the effect of deepening stereotypes rather than overturning them.10 The Yiddish press is another vital source. By the late nineteenth century it was already becoming a significant force among Jewish immigrants, exerting considerable infl uence on the burgeoning settlements of Yiddish-speakers in America. Yiddish newspapers offered an avenue to power and constituted new communal authorities that had to be taken into account. Typically feisty, parochial, and avidly partisan, Yiddish newspapers represented the wide spectrum of political opinions held by Eastern European Jews before and after the turn of the twentieth century—Orthodox, conservative, Zionist, liberal, anarchist, socialist, and later communist (categories that were not always mutually exclusive).11 For Jewish immigrants, Yiddish papers (regardless of ideological color) were frequently the most accessible and authoritative source of information and guidance; the papers interpreted America for immigrants, introducing American history, civics, language, and manners, while often paying tribute to admired American political figures. A journalist who observed Jewish life in New York, Hutchins Hapgood, concluded in 1902 that the Yiddish press had largely displaced the rabbi as the teacher of the people. No less important, the Yiddish papers served as a public forum for the immigrants, not only for writing letters, but also for the committees of workers who came to the papers’ offices to announce a mass meeting or a strike, or to report that their Gentile coworkers had assaulted them; or as a member of a Brooklyn synagogue did, to warn other Jews about the borough’s streetcar conductors, who were “either antisemites or corrupt pigs.” The Yiddish press was not only central to the formation of the immigrants’ public opinion, but also functioned as the agora—the market square—where people would gather (sometimes literally) and argue.12 The language of many of the sources is crucial in bringing to light common attitudes. Much has been written about the emergence of a thriving Yiddish culture in New York, manifested in the press, the theater,

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literature, lectures, and the Jewish labor movement.13 Yiddish, and for that matter the less popular Hebrew, served as a medium for frank intraJewish debates. Although there were some open discussions about nonJews in English-language sources, Yiddish and Hebrew allowed a much freer, richer, more nuanced, and more acerbic language when referring not only to Gentiles but also to Jewish shortcomings. Jewish anxieties often demarcated the contours of the discourse in texts that were accessible to Gentiles.14 Recent years have seen a surfeit of works concerned with the “Other” or “otherness.” As Ronald Schechter has justly noted, after reading much of the literature devoted to the theme of the Other, one gets the impression that one Other is as good as the next. This capitalized Other often suggests an unvarying or essentialist otherness that ultimately encompasses all examples. But such a construction is historically inaccurate. To assume that Eastern European Jews viewed Ukrainian peasants, Polish landlords, and Russian state officials as the same Other, or that after emigration they perceived Yankees, Irish, Italians, and Blacks as a monolithic entity, would obscure rather than clarify the multifaceted Jewish attitudes toward Gentiles. Whereas in the period under discussion a more general image of Gentiles was definitely present, it coexisted with differentiated and nuanced perceptions of various groups.15

Notes Abbreviations ACWA

Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America

AH

American Hebrew

AJA

American Jewish Archives (Cincinnati)

AJAJ

American Jewish Archives Journal

AJAC

American Jewish Autobiographies Collection (YIVO)

AJH

American Jewish History, formerly AJHQ and PAJHS

AJHQ

American Jewish Historical Quarterly

AJHS

American Jewish Historical Society (New York City)

AJYB

American Jewish Year Book

AYGB

Amerikaner yidishe geshikhte be’al-pey (YIVO) (American Jewish Oral History) (interviews with Jewish labor organizers)

Bronzvil

Bronzvil un east nu york progres (Brownsville and East New York progress)

CAHJP

Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People ( Jerusalem)

Call

New York Call

CUOHROC

Columbia University Oral History Research Office Collection

Dorot

The Dorot Jewish Division at the New York Public Library

FAS

Di fraye arbeter shtime (the Free voice of labor)

GK

Der groyser kundes (the Big stick)

HIAS

Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society

IFA

Israeli Folktale Archive (Haifa University)

ILGWU

International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union

JNUL

Jewish National and University Library ( Jerusalem)

JSS

Jewish Social Studies

JTS

Archives of the Jewish Theological Seminary

Kheel

Kheel Center for Industrial and Labor Relations (Cornell University)

MZ

Morgen zhurnal (Morning journal)

203

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Notes to Pages 1–2

NYC-ILHP

NYC Immigrant Labor History Project (Tamiment–New York University)

NYPL

Manuscript and Archives Division at the New York Public Library

NYT

New York Times

PAJHS

Publications of the American Jewish Historical Society

Sun

New York Sun

Tamiment

Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives (New York University)

Tribune

New York Tribune

USSNY

University Settlement Society of New York

WSHS

Wisconsin State Historical Society

WTUL

Women’s Trade Union League

WWOHL-AJC

William Wiener Oral History Library of the American Jewish Committee (Dorot)

YIVO

Institute for Jewish Research (New York City)

YAJSS

YIVO Annual of Jewish Social Science

YT

Yidishes tageblat ( Jewish daily news)

Introduction 1. Morris Raphael Cohen, A Dreamer’s Journey (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1949), 27, 219. On Cohen, see Irving Howe, with the assistance of Kenneth Libo, World of Our Fathers (1976; repr., New York: Schocken, 1989), 283–286. See also Michael Gold, Jews without Money (London: Noel Douglas, 1930), 165–175. 2. An example of the differentiation between Jews and Gentiles appears in Talmud Bavli, Yevamot, 61a. Many other examples can be found under the entry “Gentile,” in Shlomo Yosef Zevin and Meyer Berlin, eds., Entsiklopediyah Talmudit, 26 vols. ( Jerusalem: Entsiklopediyah Talmudit, 1956–1999), 5:286–366. Jacob Katz, Exclusiveness and Tolerance: Studies in Jewish-Gentile Relations in Medieval and Modern Times (New York: Oxford University Press, 1961), 24–47. Michael Walzer, Menachem Lorberbaum, Noam J. Zohar, and Ari Ackerman, eds., Membership, vol. 2 of The Jewish Political Tradition, 2 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 445–513. Naomi W. Cohen, introduction to Essential Papers on Jewish-Christian Relations in the United States, ed. Naomi W. Cohen (New York: New York University Press, 1990), 1–2. Arnold M. Eisen, The Chosen People in America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983), 17–19. The place of Gentiles in Jewish law is also discussed in chap. 1. 3. Some of the antisemitic claims are cited above. For popular literature, see Leo Rosten, The Joys of Yiddish (New York: Pocket Books, 1968), 141–142. A more eloquent book is by Michael Wex, Born to Kvetch: Yiddish Language and Culture in All of Its Modes

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(New York: Harper Perennial, 2006), especially 66–67, 86. For a critique of such literature, see Ruth R. Wisse, “Ups and Downs of Yiddish in America,” in Yiddish in America: Essays on Yiddish Culture in the Golden Land, ed. Edward S. Shapiro (Scranton: University of Scranton Press, 2008), 10–11. An example of popular references to “goyim” appeared recently in Ethan and Joel Coen’s movie A Serious Man (2009). 4. Lawrence H. Fuchs, The Political Behavior of American Jews (Glencoe, IL: The Free Press, 1956), 41–62, 121–130, 177–185. Henry L. Feingold, Lest Memory Cease: Finding Meaning in the American Jewish Past (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1996), 34–52. See the position of Reform rabbi Isaac S. Moses of Chicago, Year Book of the Central Conference of American Rabbis (1895/1896): 82. Eisen, Chosen People, 50–72. Milton Konvitz, Judaism and the American Idea (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978). The argument about the purported presence of Judaic prophetic universalism at the core of Jewish radicalism appears in Moses Rischin, The Promised City: New York Jews, 1870–1914 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962), 166. Gerald Sorin, The Prophetic Minority: American Jewish Immigrant Radicals, 1880–1920 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), ix, 163. Karen Brodkin, How Jews Became White Folks and What That Says about Race in America (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1998), 109. 5. Good overviews and critiques of the various possible sources of Jewish liberalism and radicalism in America are in Charles S. Liebman and Steven M. Cohen, Two Worlds of Judaism: The Israeli and American Experiences (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), 96–99, 109–114. Michael Walzer, “Liberalism and the Jews: Historical Affinities, Contemporary Necessities,” Studies in Contemporary Jewry 11 (1995): 3–10. William Spinrad, “Explaining American-Jewish Liberalism: Another Attempt,” Contemporary Jewry 11 (1990): 107–119. Ira N. Forman, “The Politics of Minority Consciousness: The Historical Voting Behavior of American Jews,” in Jews in American Politics, ed. L. Sandy Maisel (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001), 141–160. Marc Dollinger, Quest for Inclusion: Jews and Liberalism in Modern America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 7, 229–230n5–6. Arthur Liebman, Jews and the Left (New York: John Wiley, 1979), 4–11. Cf. Norman Podhoretz, Why Are Jews Liberals? (New York: Doubleday, 2009), 280–290. 6. Michael Alexander, Jazz Age Jews (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 8, 181–182. 7. Critique of those generalizations is offered by Charles S. Liebman, The Ambivalent American Jew: Politics, Religion, and Family in American Jewish Life (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1973), 135–159; Steven M. Cohen, American Modernity and Jewish Identity (New York: Tavistock, 1983), 135–139; Stuart Svonkin, Jews against Prejudice: American Jews and the Fight for Civil Liberties (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 6–7. See also Lila Corwin Berman, Speaking of Jews: Rabbis, Intellectuals, and the Creation of an American Public Identity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 125, 173. 8. The standard work on pluralism and minorities is Milton M. Gordon’s Assimilation in American Life: The Role of Race, Religion, and National Origins (New York: Oxford

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University Press, 1964), 132–159. John Higham, Send These to Me: Jews and Other Immigrants in Urban America (New York: Atheneum, 1975), 196–230. Hasia R. Diner, In the Almost Promised Land: American Jews and Blacks, 1915–1935 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1977), 149–154, 203–230. Unlike Diner, David Levering Lewis has argued that Jewish-Black cooperation occurred mainly between the elites: “Parallels and Divergences: Assimilationist Strategies of Afro-American and Jewish Elites from 1910 to the Early 1930s,” Journal of American History 71 (1984): 543–564. Lizabeth Cohen, Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919–1939 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 47–48. On interethnic cooperation in general, see Richard Weiss, “Ethnicity and Reform: Minorities and the Ambience of the Depression Years,” Journal of American History 66 (1979): 566–585. 9. Philip Gleason has argued that American Jews helped to introduce the term minority as a key term for intergroup relations in the interwar period, in Speaking of Diversity: Language and Ethnicity in Twentieth-Century America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 92–93. Carole Fink, Defending the Rights of Others: The Great Powers, the Jews, and International Minority Protection, 1878–1938 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 193–235. Oscar I. Janowsky, The Jews and Minority Rights, 1898–1919 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1933), 264–309. 10. Mary McCune has stressed the importance of international events in the construction of American Jewish identity, in “The Whole Wide World without Limits”: International Relief, Gender Politics, and American Jewish Women, 1893–1930 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2005), 4–5, 187–188. See also Rebecca Kobrin, Jewish Bialystok and Its Diaspora (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), 5–9. 11. On the “normalization” of Jews, see Anita Shapira, “Anti-Semitism and Zionism,” Modern Judaism 15 (1995): 215–232. Shmuel Almog, “Normalizatsya ve-‘or la-goyim batsiyonut,” in Ra’ayon ha-bechirah be-yisrael u-va’amim, ed. Shmuel Almog and Michael Hed ( Jerusalem: Zalman Shazar, 1991), 292–293. Michael Stanislawski, Zionism and the Fin de Siècle: Cosmopolitanism and Nationalism from Nordau to Jabotinsky (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 91–97. Oz Almog, The Sabra: The Creation of the New Jew, trans. Haim Watzman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 73–137. 12. Ben Halpern, “America Is Different,” in The Jew in American Society, ed. Marshall Sklare (New York: Behrman, 1974), 69–89. Jonathan D. Sarna, “America Is Different?” Midstream 28 (1982): 63–64. Werner J. Cahnman, Jews and Gentiles: A Historical Sociology of Their Relations (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2004), 183–184. On an exceptional official anti-Jewish policy, see Stephen V. Ash, “Civil War Exodus: The Jews and Grant’s General Order No. 11,” Historian 44 (1982): 505–523. 13. The historians are Benjamin Nathans, Beyond the Pale: The Jewish Encounter with Late Imperial Russia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 13–14; Steven J. Zipperstein, Imagining Russian Jewry: Memory, History (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1999), 88–105; and Ronald Schechter, Obstinate Hebrews: Representations of Jews in France, 1715–1815 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 1–5.

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14. On Pfefferkorn, see Sander L. Gilman, Jewish Self-Hatred: Anti-Semitism and the Hidden Language of the Jews (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 33–42. On Brafman, see John Doyle Klier, Imperial Russia’s Jewish Question, 1855–1881 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 263–283. On Eisenmenger, see Jacob Katz, From Prejudice to Destruction: Anti-Semitism, 1700–1933 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980), 13–22. 15. See Treitschke’s 1879 article “Unsere Aussichten,” reprinted in Der Berliner Antisemitismusstreit, ed. Walter Boelich (Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 1965), 9. Antisemitism did not fail to permeate academic disciplines like religious studies; see, for example, Alfred Bertholet, Die Stellung der Israeliten und der Juden zu dem Fremden (Leipzig: Mohr, 1896), 336–349. See also Elliot Horowitz, Reckless Rites: Purim and the Legacy of Jewish Violence (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 14–15. 16. Katz, Exclusiveness and Tolerance, 106–113. Israel Jacob Yuval, Two Nations in Your Womb: Perceptions of Jews and Christians in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 135–204. David Berger, The Jewish-Christian Debate in the High Middle Ages: A Critical Edition of the “Nizzahon Vetus” with an Introduction, Translation, and Commentary (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1979), 16–37. Hyam Maccoby, ed., Judaism on Trial: Jewish-Christian Disputations in the Middle Ages (Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1982), 11–17. 17. Katz, Exclusiveness and Tolerance, 169–176, 194–196 (Mendelssohn is quoted at 170). The Braunschweig and Pittsburgh resolutions are quoted in the Year Book of the Central Conference of American Rabbis (1890/1891): 82, 121. Kaufman Kohler, Jewish Theology Systematically and Historically Considered (1918; repr., New York: Ktav, 1968), 8, 48–51, 396–397. An example of Jewish religious apologetics is Martin A. Meyer, Jew and Non-Jew (Cincinnati: Union of American Hebrew Congregations, n.d.), 8–14. Michael A. Meyer, Response to Modernity: A History of the Reform Movement in Judaism, 2nd ed. (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1995), 10–72, 132–138, 264–276. David Sorkin, The Transformation of German Jewry, 1780–1840 (1987; repr., Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1999), 41–78. John Murray Cuddihy, The Ordeal of Civility: Freud, Marx, Levi-Strauss, and the Jewish Struggle with Modernity, 2nd ed. (Boston: Beacon, 1987), 225–238. 18. Moshe Rosman has noted that Jewish attitudes toward non-Jews “have not received much scholarly attention”: How Jewish Is Jewish History? (Oxford, UK: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2007), 143–144. 19. As Eli Lederhendler has aptly noted, the very titles of books about New York Jews are laden with positive verbal cues—promise, rise, and home”: New York Jews and the Decline of Urban Ethnicity, 1950–1970 (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2001), 10–11. Lederhendler refers to Rischin, Promised City. Hyman B. Grinstein, The Rise of the Jewish Community of New York, 1654–1860 (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1945). Deborah Dash Moore, At Home in America: Second Generation New York Jews (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981). Deborah Dash Moore, “At Home in America? Revisiting the Second Generation,” Journal of American Ethnic History 25 (2006): 156–168.

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See also Gerald Sorin, A Time for Building: The Third Migration, 1880–1920 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 236–241. Beth S. Wenger, New York Jews and the Great Depression: Uncertain Promise (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996). Lloyd P. Gartner, “Contemporary Historians of New York Jewry,” in Contemporary Jewry: Studies in Honor of Moshe Davis, ed. Geoffrey Wigoder ( Jerusalem: Institute of Contemporary Jewry, Hebrew University, 1984), 109–128. 20. Lederhendler, New York Jews, 11–12, 203. Eli Lederhendler, “The New Filiopietism; or, Toward a New History of Jewish Immigration to America,” AJH 93 (2007): 1–20. Tony Michels, A Fire in Their Hearts: Yiddish Socialists in New York (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 19–20, 220–228, 254–259. Eric L. Goldstein, The Price of Whiteness: Jews, Race, and American Identity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 2–4. 21. Ronald Bayor, Neighbors in Confl ict: The Irish, Germans, Jews, and Italians of New York City, 1929–1941 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978). John F. Stack Jr., International Confl ict in an American City: Boston’s Irish, Italians, and Jews, 1935–1944 (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1979). Thomas Kessner, The Golden Door: Italian and Jewish Immigrant Mobility in New York City, 1880–1915 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977). Joshua M. Zeitz, White Ethnic New York: Jews, Catholics, and the Shaping of Postwar Politics (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007). Rudolf Glanz, Jew and Irish: Historical Group Relations and Immigration (New York: By the author, 1966). Rudolf Glanz, Jew and Italian: Historical Group Relations and the New Immigration (New York: Ktav, 1971). Jack Nusan Porter, “Ukrainian-Jewish Relations Yesterday and Today,” Journal of Ethnic Studies 11 (1984): 117–123. Scott Cline, “Jewish-Ethnic Interactions: A Bibliographical Essay,” AJH 77 (1987): 135–154. 22. One can mention here only a fraction of the studies on Black-Jewish relations: Murray Friedman, What Went Wrong: The Creation and Collapse of the Black-Jewish Alliance (New York: The Free Press, 1995). A different approach can be seen in Herbert Hill, “Black-Jewish Confl ict in the Labor Context: Race, Jobs, and Institutional Power,” in African Americans and Jews in the Twentieth Century, ed. V. P. Franklin, Nancy L. Grant, Harold M. Kletnick, and Genna Rae NcNeil (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1998), 264–292. See also Steven Hertzberg, Strangers within the Gate City: The Jews of Atlanta, 1845–1915 (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1978), 181–215. Maurianne Adams and John Bracey, eds., Strangers and Neighbors: Relations between Blacks and Jews in the United States (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999). A succinct historiographical discussion is in Cheryl Lynn Greenberg, Troubling the Waters: Black-Jewish Relations in the American Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 2–7. 23. Ewa Morawska, Insecure Prosperity: Small-Town Jews in Industrial America, 1890– 1940 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 15–17, 24–25, 40–44, 243–244. Ewa Morawska, “A Replica of the ‘Old-Country’ Relationship in the Ethnic Niche: East European Jews and Gentiles in Small-Town Western Pennsylvania, 1880s–1930s,” AJH 77 (1987): 27–86. Hasia R. Diner, “Between Words and Deeds: Jews and Blacks in America,

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1880–1935,” in Struggles in the Promised Land: Toward a History of Black-Jewish Relations in the United States, ed. Jack Salzman and Cornel West (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 87–106. Hasia R. Diner, “Drawn Together by Self-Interest: Jewish Representation of Race and Race Relations in the Early Twentieth Century,” in African Americans and Jews, ed. Franklin et al., 27–39. See also Jonathan B. Krasner, “Representations of Self and Other in American Jewish History and Social Studies Schoolbooks” (PhD diss., Brandeis University, 2002). 24. Among the different writers—a socialist Yiddish writer in the 1930s, a Polishborn rabbi in the 1940s, anthropologists in the 1950s, and a present-day historian—who treated the subject are (respectively) Daniel Leybl, “Der ‘goy’ in der yidisher literatur,” Fir (Tel Aviv), Sept. 1932, 13–15; Avrom Yehoshua Heschel, Der mizrakh-eropeyisher yid (New York: Schocken, 1946), 7–8; Mark Zborowski and Elizabeth Herzog, Life Is with People: The Culture of the Shtetl (1952; repr., New York: Schocken, 1967), 66–67, 151–158 (despite its flaws, this study is still useful); and Matthew Frye Jacobson, Special Sorrows: The Diasporic Imagination of Irish, Polish, and Jewish Immigrants in the United States (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 98–101. See also Louis Wirth, The Ghetto (1928; repr., Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956), 117–130. William Pencak, Jews and Gentiles in Early America (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005), 19–81. 25. Katz, Exclusiveness and Tolerance, xiv–xv, 24–47, 169–176. Jacob Katz, The “Shabbes Goy”: A Study in Halakhic Flexibility, trans. Yoel Lerner (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1989). Israel Bartal, “Non-Jews and Gentile Society in East European Hebrew and Yiddish Literature, 1856–1914,” Polin 4 (1989): 53–69. Gershon David Hundert, Jews in Poland-Lithuania in the Eighteenth Century: A Genealogy of Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004). Gershon David Hundert, “Re(de)fining Modernity in Jewish History,” in Rethinking European Jewish History, ed. Jeremy Cohen and Moshe Rosman (London: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2008), 133–145. M. J. Rosman, “A Minority Views the Majority: Jewish Attitudes toward the Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth and Interaction with Poles,” Polin 4 (1989): 31–41. David G. Roskies, Against the Apocalypse: Responses to Catastrophes in Modern Jewish Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), 163–172. 26. An excellent overview of the topic is in Gary Gerstle, “Liberty, Coercion, and the Making of Americans,” Journal of American History 84 (1997): 524–558. John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860–1925 (1955; new ed., New York: Atheneum, 1978), 97–105, 136–144, 186–193, 234–263. Todd J. Pfannestiel, Rethinking the Red Scare: The Lusk Committee and New York’s Crusade Against Radicalism, 1919–1923 (New York: Routledge, 2003), 123–133. Noah Pickus, True Faith and Allegiance: Immigration and American Civic Nationalism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 3–4, 107–123. Cecilia Elizabeth O’Leary, To Die For: The Paradox of American Nationalism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 220–245. Gianfausto Rosoli, “From ‘Promised Land’ to ‘Bitter Land’: Italian Migrants and the Transformation of a Myth,” in Distant Magnets: Expectations and Realities in the Immigrant Experience, 1840–1930, ed. Dirk Hoerder

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and Horst Roessler (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1993), 222–240. Ewa Morawska, “From Myth to Reality: America in the Eyes of East European Peasant Migrant Laborers,” in Distant Magnets, ed. Hoerder and Roessler, 241–263. 27. On the image of the country America, see Eli Lederhendler, “America: A Vision in a Jewish Mirror,” in Jewish Responses to Modernity: New Voices in America and Eastern Europe (New York: New York University Press, 1994), 104–139. Ruth R. Wisse, “Jewish Writers on the New Diaspora,” in The Americanization of the Jews, ed. Robert M. Seltzer and Norman J. Cohen (New York: New York University Press, 1995), 60–78. 28. On Schiff ’s attitude toward non-Jewish society, see Naomi W. Cohen, Jacob H. Schiff: A Study in American Jewish Leadership (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1999), 48–55. On Fromenson’s career, see AJYB 5665 (1904/1905): 99–100. Jeffrey S. Gurock, American Jewish Orthodoxy in Historical Perspective (Hoboken, NJ: Ktav, 1996), 181–199. 29. Hasia R. Diner has challenged the distinction between Central European (“German”) and Eastern European (“Russian”) Jews, in The Jews of the United States, 1654 to 2000 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 80–95. Eric L. Goldstein, “The Great Wave: Eastern European Jewish Immigration to the United States, 1880–1924,” in The Columbia History of Jews and Judaism in America, ed. Marc Lee Raphael (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 71–73. 30. On the emancipation of Jews in Western and Central Europe, see Steven Lowenstein, “The Pace of Modernization of German Jewry in the Nineteenth Century,” Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook (1976): 41–56. Reinhard Ruruep, “Jewish Emancipation and Bourgeois Society,” Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook (1969): 67–91. Uri R. Kaufmann, “The Jewish Fight for Emancipation in France and Germany” and Ulrich Wyrwa, “Comment,” in Jewish Emancipation Reconsidered, ed. Michael Brenner, Vicki Caron, and Uri R. Kaufmann (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck; London: Leo Baeck Institute, 2003), 79–92. 31. Ezra Mendelsohn has efficiently sketched in the Jewish political spectrum of 1880–1940, especially in Eastern Europe, in On Modern Jewish Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 3–63, 127–140. Jonathan Frankel, Prophecy and Politics: Socialism, Nationalism, and the Russian Jews, 1862–1917 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 49–51, 171–257. Salo W. Baron, Modern Nationalism and Religion (New York: Harper, 1947), 215–248. Ben Halpern and Jehuda Reinharz, Zionism and the Creation of a New Society (1998; repr., Hanover: University Press of New England, 2000), 9–13. Simon M. Dubnov, History of the Jews in Russia and Poland: From the Earliest Times until the Present Day, trans. Israel Friedlaender, 3 vols. (Philadelphia, Jewish Publication Society, 1918), 2:111–112, 324–333. See chap. 1 for a more detailed discussion. 32. Charles S. Bernheimer, “Elements of the Jewish Population in the U.S.,” in The Russian Jew in the United States, ed. Charles S. Bernheimer (Philadelphia: John C. Winston, 1905), 13. Hasia R. Diner, “Before the Promised City: Eastern European Jews in America before 1880,” in An Inventory of Promises: Essays on American Jewish History in

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Honor of Moses Rischin, ed. Jeffrey S. Gurock and Marc Lee Raphael (New York: Carlson, 1995), 43–62. Simon Kuznets, “Immigration of Russian Jews to the United States: Background and Structure,” Perspectives in American History 9 (1975): 41–43. Steven Lowenstein, “The Shifting Boundaries between Eastern and Western Jewry” JSS 4 (1997): 60–78. Rudolf Glanz, “Vanguard to the Russians: The Poseners in America,” YAJSS 18 (1983): 1–38. Robert Perlman, Bridging Three Worlds: Hungarian-Jewish Americans, 1848–1918 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1991), 135–142. 33. Union leader Bernard Vaynshteyn described Hungarian Jews in New York of the 1880s as “Yahudim,” who spoke German—Di yidishe yunyons in amerike (New York: Fareynigte yidishe geverkshaftn, 1929), 311. I. A. Beneqvit, Durkhgelebt un durkhgetrakht, 2 vols. (New York: Kultur federatsye, 1934), 2:75–79. On Polish Jews who tried to pass as German Jews in California, see Norton B. Stern and William M. Kramer, “What’s the Matter with Warsaw?” AJAJ 37 (1985): 301–304. 34. Walter Laidlaw, ed., Population of the City of New York, 1890–1930 (New York: Cities Census Committee, 1932), 275, 289. Samuel Joseph, Jewish Immigration to the United States (1914; repr., New York: Arno, 1969), 149, 159–161. Jewish Communal Register of New York City, 1917–1918 (New York: Kehillah, Jewish Community of New York, 1918), 81–90. Arthur A. Goren, New York Jews and the Quest for Community: The Kehillah Experiment, 1908–1922 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1970), 17–18. Sorin, Time for Building, 70–71. Moses Rischin, “Toward the Onomastics of the Great New York Ghetto: How the Lower East Side Got Its Name,” in Remembering the Lower East Side: American Jewish Reflections, ed. Hasia R. Diner, Jeffrey Shandler, and Beth S. Wenger (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), 13–27. 35. Ha-shiloach 4 ( July–Dec. 1898): 468. Moses Rischin mentioned the “megashtetl on the Hudson” in “The Megashtetl/Cosmopolis: New York Jewish History Comes of Age,” Studies in Contemporary Jewry 15 (1999): 171. Lloyd P. Gartner, “Metropolis and Periphery in American Jewry,” Studies in Contemporary Jewry 1 (1984): 342. Cf. Lee Shai Weissbach, Jewish Life in Small-Town America: A History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005). 36. John D. Klier, “Emigration Mania in Late Imperial Russia: Legend and Reality,” in Patterns of Migration, 1850–1914, ed. Aubrey Newman and Stephen W. Massil (London: Jewish Historical Society of England, 1996), 21–29. 37. Jonathan Frankel has convincingly argued that 1881 signaled a watershed in “The Crisis of 1881–2 as a Turning Point in Modern Jewish History,” in The Legacy of Jewish Migration: 1881 and Its Impact, ed. David Berger (New York: Brooklyn College Press, 1983), 9–22. Examples of the treatment of the Red Scare are in Sorin, Time for Building, 238; Henry L. Feingold, A Time for Searching: Entering the Mainstream, 1920–1945 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 6–7; Wenger, New York Jews, 2. 38. Immigration statistics are in “A Reader in the Demography of American Jews,” AJYB 77 (1977): 319. Ira Glazier, ed., Migration from the Russian Empire: Lists of Passengers

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Arriving at U.S. Ports, 6 vols. (Baltimore: Genealogical, 1997), 3:viii–ix, xv–xvi. Evyatar Friesel, “The Age of Optimism in American Judaism, 1900–1920,” in A Bicentennial Festschrift for Jacob Rader Marcus, ed. Bertram Wallace Korn (Waltham, MA: American Jewish Historical Society; New York: Ktav, 1976), 131–155. For an excellent overview of progressivism, see Daniel T. Rodgers, “In Search of Progressivism,” Reviews in American History 10 (1982): 113–132. On the relation between progressivism and nativism, see Robert F. Zeidel, Immigrants, Progressives, and Exclusion Politics: The Dillingham Commission, 1900–1927 (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2004). Cf. Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform: From Bryan to F.D.R. (1955; repr., New York: Vintage, 1961), 176–186.

chapter 1 — “Never Before Have Gentiles Hated Jews So Much” 1. Avrom Ber Gotlober, Zikhronot u-masa’aot, ed. Re’uven Goldberg, 2 vols. ( Jerusalem: Bialik, 1976), 1:114–115. Gotlober published his memoirs in the late 1870s. Avrom Lesin, Geklibene verk: Zikhroynes un bilder (New York: Cyco, 1954), 24. See also Velvel Ze’ev Lef kovitsh, “Der mark zuntik,” in Bobroysk: Yizker-bukh far bobroysker kehille un umgegent, ed. Yehuda Slutsky, 2 vols. (Tel Aviv: Tarbut ve-chinukh, 1967), 1:638–640. 2. Israel Bartal, “Ha-lo yehudim ve-chevratam be-sifrut ivrit ve-yidish be-mizrach eropa bein ha-shanim 1856–1914” (PhD diss., Hebrew University, Jerusalem, 1980), 4–5; Israel Bartal, “The Image of Germany and German Jewry in East European Jewish Society during the 19th Century,” in Danzig, between East and West: Aspects of Modern Jewish History, ed. Isadore Twersky (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), 3–17; Roskies, Against the Apocalypse, 163–172; David G. Roskies, The Jewish Search for a Usable Past (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 45–46. Roskies mentions the linguistic dimension of that bifurcation, whereby Jews negotiated with the outside world in “High Goyish or Low Goyish.” 3. Maimonides, Mishneh Torah ( Jerusalem: Rabbi Kook Institute, 1957), “Madah,” chaps. 7, 9, 11–12. The entry “Gentile,” in Entsiklopediyah Talmudit, 5:363–364 (on Talmudic assumptions about the “Gentile character,” including the breast milk issue). Katz, Exclusiveness and Tolerance, 24–47; Eisen, Chosen People, 17–19; Menachem Kellner, “Choseness, Not Chauvinism: Maimonides on the Chosen People,” in A People Apart: Chosenness and Ritual in Jewish Philosophical Thought, ed. Daniel H. Frank (Albany: State University of New York University Press, 1993), 55–56; Yuval, Two Nations, 92–109, 132, 283. Chaim Tchernowitz, Toledoth ha-halakhah, 4 vols. (New York: Jubilee Committee, 1945), 1:255–305; Steven D. Fraada, “Navigating the Anomalous: Non-Jews at the Intersection of Early Rabbinic Law and Narrative,” in The Other in Jewish Thought and History: Constructions of Jewish Culture and Identity, ed. Laurence J. Silberstein and Robert L. Cohn (New York: New York University Press, 1994), 145–165. 4. Antony Polonsky, “Introduction: The Shtetl; Myth and Reality,” Polin 17 (2004): 5–10; Gershon Hundert, “The Implications of Jewish Economic Activities for ChristianJewish Relations in the Polish Commonwealth,” in The Jews in Poland, ed. Chimen Abramsky, Maciej Jachimczyk, and Antony Polonsky (Oxford, UK: Basil Blackwell,

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1986), 55–63; Shalom Muhlstein, “At the Market,” in From a Ruined Garden, ed. Jack Kugelmass and Jonathan Boyarin (New York: Schocken, 1983), 30–31. A vivid description of market days is in the memoir of Galician-born Louis Borgenicht, The Happiest Man: The Life of Louis Borgenicht as Told to Harold Friedman (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1942), 42–43. Walter P. Zenner, “Middlemen Minority Theories and the Jews: Historical Survey and Assessment,” Working Papers in Yiddish and East European Jewish Studies 31 (1978): 1–30; Samuel Kassow, “Shtetl,” in The YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe, ed. Gershon Hundert (New Haven: YIVO and Yale University Press, 2008) 2:1732–1736; Eva Hoffman, Shtetl: The Life and Death of a Small Town and the World of Polish Jews (New York: Houghton Miffl in, 1997), 73–109. 5. The most illuminating studies of Jewish folklore are in Yiddish. The quotes are from I. L. Cahan, Der yid: Vegn zikh un vegn andere in zayne shprikhverter un rednsortn (New York: YIVO, 1933), 25–32; Nakhum Stutchkov, Der oytser fun der yidisher shprakh (New York: YIVO, 1950), 167–168; Yudl Mark, “A zamlung volksfarglaykhen,” Yidishe sprakh 5 (1945): 99–140; Amos Funkenstein, “The Dialectics of Assimilation,” JSS 1 (1995): 1–13. See also B. Borokhov, “Di oyfgaben fun der yidisher filologye,” in Der pinkes, ed. Sh. Niger (Vilna: B. A. Kletskin, 1912–1913), 11; Dov Sadan, Ka’arat tsimukim (Tel Aviv: Mordecai Newman, 1952), 395–411; Ignatz Bernshteyn, Yudishe shprikhverter un rednsarten (1908; repr., Wiesbaden, Germany: Fourier, 1988), 53; Chaim Schwartzboym, “Yisrael ve-umot ha-olam be-aspaklariyat ha-folklor,” Yeda-am 15 (1971): 56–61. 6. The Israeli Folktale Archive (IFA) has many examples of such accounts. See Fishl Sidr, Sipurey-am me-borislav, ed. Otto Schinzler (Haifa: IFA, 1968), 23–27; Shmuel Zanvel Pipe, Sipurey-am me-sanuk, ed. Dov Noy (Haifa: IFA, 1967), 20–21. See also story 2787 (IFA), told by a Galician Jew to Moshe Soyfer Federman, and story 5409 (IFA). See also the story by Dvora Fus in Folktales of the Jews, ed. Dan Ben-Amos, Dov Noy, and Ellen Frankel, 2 vols. (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 2007), 2:229–230; S. An-ski, “Der yidisher folks-gayst un zayn shafung,” in Gezamlte shriftn, 15 vols. (Warsaw: Farlag An-ski, 1925), 15:23–24. The image of Jews among their Slavic neighbors is analyzed in Olga Belova, “The Stereotype of the ‘Other’ within Folk Culture,” East European Jewish Affairs 37 (2007): 341–345. 7. I. A. Beneqvit, Durkhgelebt, 1:104–105; Cohen, Dreamer’s Journey, 27–28, 219. See also the recollection of Zionist thinker Ahad ha’am (Asher Ginzberg) in Kol kitvey Ahad Ha’am (Tel Aviv: Dvir, 1953), 467 (Hebrew pagination); Max Weinreich, History of the Yiddish Language, trans. Joshua A. Fishman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 193–194; Bartal, “Ha-lo yehudim,” 257–259. A popular history of the Jewish immigrant experience in America has mistakenly translated goyim as “strangers”—Neil W. Cowan and Ruth Schwartz Cowan, Our Parents’ Lives: The Americanization of Eastern European Jews (New York: Basic, 1989), 13. 8. Shmuel Feiner, “Towards a Historical Definition of the Haskalah,” in New Perspectives on the Haskalah, ed. David Sorkin and Shmuel Feiner (London: Littman Library, 2001), 184–220. Immanuel Etkes, “Immanent Factors and External Infl uences in the

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Development of the Haskalah Movement in Russia,” in Toward Modernity: The European Jewish Model, ed. Jacob Katz (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Press, 1987), 13–32. Israel Zinberg, A History of Jewish Literature, 12 vols. (Cincinnati and New York: Hebrew Union College Press and Ktav, 1977–1978), 10:30–33; 11:95–99, 171–174. On the infl uence of Galician immigrants in Odessa, see Steven J. Zipperstein, The Jews of Odessa: A Cultural History, 1794–1881 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1986), 40–46, 57–58. Raphael Mahler, “Hasidism and the Jewish Enlightenment,” in Essential Papers on Hasidism, ed. Gershon D. Hundert (New York: New York University Press, 1990), 401–429. 9. All the dates are given according the Gregorian calendar. Ha-magid, Oct. 16, 1861, 260. Kol mevaser, May 17, 1866, 265–266; Dec. 4, 1862, 82. A comprehensive study of Tsederboym’s Yiddish paper is E. R. Malachi, “Der kol mevaser un zayn redaktor,” in Der pinkes far forshung fun der yidisher literatur un prese, ed. Shlomo Bikl (New York: Altveltlekhen yidishn kultur congress, 1965), 49–121; Alexander Orbach, New Voices of Russian Jewry: A Study of the Russian-Jewish Press of Odessa in the Era of the Great Reforms, 1860–1871 (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1980), 54–71, 108–123; Salo W. Baron, The Russian Jew under Tsars and Soviets, 2nd ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1976), 112–113. 10. Meyer Kushner, Lebn un kamf fun a kloakmakher (New York: Published by a committee from local 9, International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union, 1960), 56. Avrom Pinkhes Unger, Mayn heymshtetl strykov (New York: Arbeter Ring, 1957), 49–50. See also Borekh Tsukerman, Zikhroynes, 3 vols. (New York: Yidisher kemfer, 1962), 1:22–23, 47–48; I. J. Singer, Fun a velt vos iz nishto mer (New York: Matones, 1946), 208; Yoysef Rolnik, Zikhroynes (New York: With the help of the David Ignatoff Fund, 1954), 33, 19. One can hardly mention all the memoirs where those basic images appear: the “Mohilev carpenter,” AJAC, 83:2; S. Schreibman, AJAC, 154:8–9; Morris Goldovsky, Fun vayten amol un haynt: Mayne 60 yor lebn un kamf in der arbeter bavegung (New York: Published by a Committee, 1959), 15; Shneyer Yafe, Epizodn fun mayn lebn (Boston: By the author, 1953), 24. Cf. Yoysef Margoshes, Erinerungen fun mayn lebn (New York: Max Mayzel Farlag, 1936), 179–186, 232. See also Yuri Slezkine, The Jewish Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 26–27. 11. Hirsh Abramovitsh, “Onvayzungen un bamerkungen,” Yidishe shprakh 12 (1952): 122–123; Alexander Harkavy, Yidish-english-hebreyisher verterbukh (1928; repr., Amherst, MA: National Yiddish Book Center, 1999), 365; Stutchkov, Der oytser, 214. See the negative portrayal of Polish and Lithuanian peasants aboard a ship to America in Yudisher emigrant, Jan. 28, 1909, 10; Avraham Drori, “Mukraya-Kaligurka,” He-avar 19 (1972): 231. 12. Rosman, “Minority Views the Majority,” 37–38. Katz, Exclusiveness and Tolerance, 55–63. Hundert, “Implications of Jewish Economic Activities,” 55–56. On Jewish attitudes toward Christian clergy and symbols, see Tsukerman, Zikhroynes, 1:47–48. Mary Antin, The Promised Land (1912; new ed., New York: Penguin, 1997), 8–9. See the interview with Fannie Shapiro (a pseudonym) about running around barefoot like a shikse, and the priest’s hatred toward Jews, in Sydelle Kramer and Jenny Masur, eds., Jewish Grandmothers (Boston: Beacon, 1976), 3–6.

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13. The quotes are in Mark, “A zamlung volksfarglaykhen,” 102–103, 113. Singer, Fun a velt, 38, 48–50, 72, 179, 205–224. Philip Zausner, Unvarnished: The Autobiography of a Union Leader (New York: Brotherhood, 1941), 23. On Jewish sexual mores as compared with those of Gentiles, see Yudishes folks-blat, Jan. 5, 1882, 197. See the story “Zalman goy” by M. D. Brandshteter, Ha-shiloach 1 (Oct. 1896–Mar. 1897): 48, 122. See also the story by the classic Yiddish writer Sholem Aleichem, “Dos meserl” (The Pocketknife), in Ale verk fun Sholem Aleichem, 28 vols. (New York: Sholem Aleichem folksfond oysgabe, 1925), 7:14–18. In some situations sheygets meant “smart aleck.” 14. Cahan, Der yid, 25–32; Stutchkov, Der oytser, 167–168; Bernshteyn, Yudishe shprikhverter un rednsarten, 53; Israel Steinberg, Mi-ma’ayan ha-khokhma shel am israel (Tel Aviv: I. L. Peretz, 1962), 80–81. Naymanovitz’s piece appeared in Varshoyer yudishe tsaytung, May 3, 1867, 138. See also the image of peasants in the autobiography of Maurice Hindus, Green Worlds: An Informal Chronicle (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1947), 70. About the later aspiration to be like all other nations, see Anita Shapira, Yehudim chadashim, yehudim yeshanim (Tel Aviv: Am oved, 1997), 155–174; Almog, Sabra, 76–79; David Biale, Power and Powerlessness in Jewish History (New York: Schocken, 1986), 130–133. 15. Chaim Zhitlovsky, Zikhroynes fun mayn lebn, 3 vols. (New York: Zhitlovsky’s Jubilee Committee, 1935), 1:120–121; Mordecai Gorelik, WWOHL-AJC, 8. See the 1908 report from Vilna by A. Litvin on Christian maids in Jewish households, Forverts, Oct. 26, 1908, 4. Such a character is described in the memoir of Yiddish linguist Alexander Harkavy, Prakim me-chayay (New York: Hebrew, 1935), 6–7; Bessie Moskowitz, AJAC, 50:2–3; Singer, Fun a velt, 53; Rolnik, Zikhroynes, 16; Tuvya Bruk, “Goyim ke-yehudim,” Yeda-am 8 (1962): 84. Jacob Katz, The “Shabbes goy”: A Study in Halakhic Flexibility, trans. Yoel Lerner (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1989). On Jewish adoption of their neighbors’ customs, clothing, and foods in Bessarabia, see Eliahu Feldman, introduction to Pinkas ha-kehilot Romania, ed. Theodore Lavi and Jean Ancel, 2 vols. ( Jerusalem: Yad Va-shem, 1980) 2:297. 16. A very positive depiction of Polish nobles is in the Hebrew novel Ayit tsavua (The hypocrite) (1858–1864) by Avraham Mapu, in Kol kitvey avraham mapu (Tel Aviv: Dvir, 1955), 373–376 (Hebrew pagination). Israel Bartal, “The Porets and the Arendar: The Depiction of Poles in Jewish Literature,” Polish Review 32 (1987): 357–359. Rosman, “Jewish Perceptions,” 19–27. Murray Jay Rosman, The Lords’ Jews: Magnate-Jewish Relations in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth during the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), ix–xi, 206–212. Hundert, Jews in Poland-Lithuania, 38–44. Cahnman, Jews and Gentiles, 80–85. 17. Yekhezkel Kotik, Mayne zikhroynes, 2 vols. (Warsaw: A. Gitlin, 1913), 1:10–14, 20. David Assaf, ed., Journey to a Nineteenth-Century Shtetl: The Memoirs of Yekhezkel Kotik (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2002), 78–79, 114–115. The story with the dog is by Shoshana Goldenberg from Lithuania, story 913 (IFA). The story of the green fabric is by Dvora Lipkind-Fus, who heard it from her mother in a shtetl near Vilna (translated into the Hebrew by Israel Rosenthal), account 652 (IFA). See also accounts 291, 331, 688, 714, 773, 1913, 4340 (IFA). A late eighteenth-century portrayal of pritsim as ignorant and

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immoral is by Solomon Maimon, An Autobiography, trans. from the German by J. Clark Murray (1888; repr., Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001), 81. See the stories about pritsim in Abraham Katz’s folktales, Yeda-am 2 (1953): 61–64; and David Rubin, Yeda-am 14 (1969): 80. 18. Khone Shmeruk, “Mayufes: A Window on Polish-Jewish Relations,” Polin 10 (1997): 273–286; Yehoash and Chaim Spivak, Yidish verterbukh (1911; repr., New York: Veker, 1926), 142–143; Harkavy, Yidish-english-hebreyisher verterbukh, 292. See also Beneqvit, Durkhgelebt, 1:307–308, 345; Zhitlovsky, Zikhroynes fun mayn lebn, 1:163; Bartal, “Porets,” 359–364. On Polish-Jews relations and the 1863 rebellion, see Theodore R. Weeks, “Poles, Jews, and Russians, 1863–1914: The Death of the Ideal of Assimilation in the Kingdom of Poland,” Polin 12 (1999): 243–245. 19. See, for instance, the distinction between the Polish lord, Ukrainian peasantry, and a Russian colonel in Mordkhe Spektor, Mayn lebn, 3 vols. (Warsaw: Achisefer, 1927), 1:50–51, 67; 2:51–63. Bartal, “Non-Jews and Gentile Society,” 53–69. 20. Nathans, Beyond the Pale, 60–69. On the decline of rural economy and the impoverishment of Jews in Russia resulting from those changes, see Arcadius Kahan, Essays in Jewish Social and Economic History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 1–69. On Galicia, see Raphael Mahler, “The Economic Background of Jewish Emigration from Galicia to the United States,” YAJSS 7 (1952): 255–267; Klaus Hoedl, Vom Shtetl an die Lower East Side (Vienna: Boehlau, 1991), 23–34. 21. Margoshes, Erinerungen, 81; Rolnik, Zikhroynes, 109; see also Ha-tsefirah, May 8, 1862, 102. Kohn is quoted in Zinberg, History of Jewish Literature, 10:106. Shmuel Werses, Hakitsa ami: Sifrut ha-haskalah be-i’dan ha-modernizatsya ( Jerusalem: Magnes, 2001), 269–270; Michael Stanislawski, Tsar Nicholas I and the Jews: The Transformation of Jewish Society in Russia, 1825–1855 (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1983), 45, 60, 115; Yehuda Slutsky, Ha-‘itonut ha-yehudit-rusit ba-mea ha-tsha-esre ( Jerusalem: Bialik, 1970), 15–18; Rachel Mankin, “‘Daytshn, polanim oa ostrim’: Dilemat ha-zehut shel yehudei galitsia (1848–1851),” Zion 68 (2003): 223–262. 22. See the report of the Hebrew critic A. Y. Paperna from Warsaw, Ha-karmel, Mar. 5, 1868, 35; Kol mevaser, Nov. 19, 1870, 343; Aleichem, “Dos meserl,” 14, 30; Bartal, “Image of Germany,” 3–17; Shlomo Yosef Zevin, Sipurei Chasidim (Tel Aviv: Avraham Tsiyoni, 1955), 427. The Ger Rebbe defended German Jews before his disciples despite their infidelity—Louis I. Newman, ed., trans., in collaboration with Samuel Spitz, The Hasidic Anthology: Tales and Teachings of the Hasidim (New York: Bloch, 1944), 290. To be sure, in Hasidic tales, the Hasidim got the better of the blasphemous daytsh—see I. L. Cahan, ed., Yidisher folklor (Vilna: YIVO, 1938) 5:267–271. On Hasidic resistance to Germanization in Galicia, see Mahler, “Hasidism,” 412–415. On the German culture’s infl uence in Russia, see Klier, Imperial Russia’s Jewish Question, 106, 154–156. 23. Kol mevaser, Nov. 19, 1870, 343. Zhitlovsky, Zikhroynes fun mayn lebn, 1:160–1. Avraham Ya’akov Paperna, Kol ha-ktavim, ed. Israel Zmora (Tel Aviv: Machbarot le-sifrut, 1952),

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318–319. Shmaryahu Levin, Me-zichronot chayai, trans. Z. Vislevsky, 4 vols. (Tel Aviv: Dvir, 1935), 3:15–16. There were many other examples—see Borgenicht, Happiest Man, 305; Abraham Cahan, Bleter fun mayn lebn (New York: Forverts, 1926) 1:156; Spektor, Mayn lebn, 2:5. 24. Ha-magid, Mar. 2, 1881, 69 (the weekly came out in Germany, but its readership was mostly made of Jews in Russia). Ha-tsefirah, July 26, 1881, 217. Sept. 4, 1883, 260. See also Ha-tsefirah, Jan. 11, 1881, 3. Ha-tsefirah, Mar. 18, 1884, 75. Future Zionist leader Nachum Sokolov made an interesting comparison between the sophistication of German antisemitism and “Slavic” brutality—Ha-tsefirah, Jan. 3, 1882, 397. See also Hamelits, Nov. 30, 1886, 1934. On the context of the Tiszaeszlár affair, see Hillel J. Kieval, “Neighbors, Strangers, Readers: The Village and the City in Jewish-Gentile Confl ict at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century,” Jewish Studies Quarterly 12 (2005): 61–79. Peter Pultzer, The Rise of Political Anti-Semitism in Germany and Austria, rev. ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 47–57, 72–119. 25. Pamela Nadell, “The Journey to America by Steam: The Jews of Eastern Europe in Transition,” AJH 71 (1981): 269–284. Zosa Szajkowski, “Sufferings of Jewish Emigrants to America in Transit through Germany,” JSS 39 (1977): 105–116 (Nathan is quoted at 107). Lloyd P. Gartner, “Jewish Migrants en Route from Europe to North America: Traditions and Realities,” Jewish History 1 (1986): 49–67. Gur Alroey, Ha-mahapecha ha-shketah: Ha-hagirah ha-yehudit me-haimperiya ha-rusit, 1875–1924 ( Jerusalem: Zalman Shazar, 2008), 150–191. Jack Wertheimer, Unwelcome Strangers: East European Jews in Imperial Germany (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 50–51, 176–181. Steven Aschheim, Brothers and Strangers: The East European Jew in German and German Jewish Consciousness, 1800–1923 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982), 3–62. 26. Antin, Promised Land, 138–139. Meyer Weisgal, So Far: An Autobiography (New York: Random House, 1971), 19. See also the memoir of Pauline Notkoff, Voices from Ellis Island (Library of Congress), 27:6. Minnie Goldstein’s account is in Jocelyn Cohen and Daniel Soyer, eds., trans., My Future Is in America: Autobiographies of Eastern European Jewish Immigrants (New York: New York University Press, in conjunction with the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, 2006), 25–26. Goldstein’s experience is very similar to that of an anonymous Jew almost twenty years later: see Yudisher emigrant, May 28, 1912, 6. 27. Cahan, Bleter, 2:51–52; Beneqvit, Durkhgelebt, 2:15–17; Y. Kopelov, Amol in amerike (Warsaw: Brzoza, 1928), 15–18; Isaac Donen, AJAC, 100:23. Numerous memoirs conveyed similar experiences; see Harkavy, Prakim, 37–38; Gregory Weinstein, The Ardent Eighties: Reminiscences of an Interesting Decade (New York: International Press, 1928), 13–14; Boris D. Bogen, Born a Jew (New York: Macmillan, 1930), 32–34; Joseph Isaac Bluestone, “Memoirs of J. I. Bluestone,” in Joseph Isaac Bluestone Papers (AJHS), box 1 (not in a folder), 31–36; S. J. Levy, AJAC, 32:29. 28. B. Vaynshteyn, Fertsik yor in der yidisher arbeter bavegung (New York: Veker, 1924), 15–16. Cohen and Soyer, My Future, 27–28. Ha-tsefirah, Nov. 5, 1891, 942. The second letter was quoted in Yudisher emigrant, Nov. 27, 1908, 12–13. One can mention only a

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handful of similar examples: Ha-magid, Sept. 4, 1884, 301; Yudisher emigrant, Nov. 18, 1907; A. Berlow (Vorleb), AJAC, 70:36–38; Bluestone, “Memoirs,” 36. 29. On the dreaded cantonist (juvenile recruits) recruit system, see the memoir of the popular poet and wedding bard Elikum Tsunzer—Mordkhe Schaechter, ed., Elikum Tsunzer verk: Kritishe oysgabe, 2 vols. (New York: YIVO, 1964), 2:673–683. On the continued fear of conscription more than twenty years after the cantonist system was abolished, see Spektor, Mayn lebn, 3:10–18. A few examples of recruits’ songs are in Cahan, Yidisher folklor, 5:63–66. Memoirs and songs are in Eliahu Cherikover, “He-hamon hayehudi, ha-maskilim, ve-hamemshalah bi-yemei nikolai I,” Zion 4 (1939): 152–156. On other names for Russians, see Noyekh Prilutski, Noyekh prilutski’s zamlbikher far yidishn folklor, filologye un kulturgeshikhte 2 vols. (Warsaw: Nayer farlag, 1912), 1:21, 69. A different etymology for yovn is in Nachum Cohen, “Al motsao shel ha-kinuy fonye,” Yeda-am 10 (1964): 19. Another derogatory name for Russians was Katsap (a Ukrainian and Polish reference to unshaven Russians who look like “goat[s]”). Olga Litvak, Conscription and the Search for Modern Russian Jewry (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 13–41; Stanislawski, Tsar Nicholas, 13–34, 185–186. 30. Zhitlovsky, Zikhroynes fun mayn lebn, 1:160–161, 166–167. His father exhibited a much more positive attitude toward Poles, but Zhitlovsky admitted that Jewish folklore had a much more bitter approach toward Poles. On Zhitlozsky’s path in the Russian revolutionary movement and Jewish socialism, see Frankel, Prophecy and Politics, 258–287. The maskil’s letter appeared in Ha-tsefirah, Feb. 3, 1875, 34–35. Yafe, Epizodn, 26. 31. Some of the most obsequious praise for Nicholas I is quoted in Zeev Ivianski, Mahapecha ve-teror (Tel Aviv: Yair, 1989), 44. A later example is in S. Y. Fuenn’s Vilna weekly, Ha-karmel, Apr. 28, 1865, 189. On Jews and the state, see Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, “The Lisbon Massacre of 1506 and the Royal Image in the Shebet Yehudah,” Hebrew Union College Annual Supplements 1 (1976): xi–xii; Eli Lederhendler, The Road to Modern Jewish Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 12–21; Immanuel Etkes, “Teudah be-yisrael—beyn tmurah le-masoret” in Yitschak Ber Levinson, Teudah be-yisrael (1828; repr., Jerusalem: Zalman Shazar, 1977), 4–5; Stanislawski, Tsar Nicholas, 120; Ismar Schorsch, From Text to Context: The Turn to History in Modern Judaism (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1994), 118–132. 32. Levin is quoted in Nathans, Beyond the Pale, 53–54. Aksenfeld is quoted in Zinberg, History of Jewish Literature, 11:138. Kol mevaser, Nov. 20, 1862, 50–51. Feb. 2, 1865, 52–54; Apr. 12, 1866, 189–190. Bartal, “Ha-lo yehudim,” 15–46. See also Dan Miron, A Traveler Disguised (New York: Schocken, 1973), 53–56. 33. Sion is quoted in Orbach, New Voices, 49–50. Kol mevaser, Nov. 20, 1862, 50–51; Aug. 17, 1865, 467; Ha-melits, Oct. 26, 1865, 584–585. See also a Russifier’s image of Poles in Lev Levanda, Der poylisher magnat, trans. P. Halpern (1885; Warsaw: Tsentral, n.d.), 8–10, 30–32. See also the comparison between Poles and Ukrainians by Galician maskil David Y. Zilberbush, Ha-shachar 10 (1880): 255–257. John-Paul Himka, “UkrainianJewish Antagonism in the Galician Countryside during the Late Nineteenth Century,”

Notes to Pages 26–28

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Ukrainian-Jewish Relations in Historical Perspective, ed. Howard Aster and Peter J. Potichnyj (Edmonton: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, 1988), 111–158. 34. M. Vintshevsky, Erinerungen (Moscow: Shul un bukh, 1926), 9. Letter from Liberman to Valerian Smirnov, Nov. 23, 1876, in Kalman Marmor, ed., Aren Libermans briv (New York: YIVO, 1951), 81–82. Zundelevich is quoted in Gregor Aronson, “Ideological Trends among Russian Jews,” in Russian Jewry (1860–1917), ed. Jacob Frumkin, Gregor Aronson, and Alexis Goldweiser (New York: Thomas Yoseloff, 1966), 147n2. Mark Kiel, “The Jewish Narodnik,” Judaism 19 (1970): 295–310. Israel Bartal, “Bein haskalah radikalit le-sotsyalism yehudi,” in Ha-dat ve-hachayim: Tnua’at ha-haskalah ha-yehudit be-mizrach eropa, ed. Immanuel Etkes ( Jerusalem: Zalman Shazar, 1993), 328–335. 35. Kol mevaser, May 23, 1868, 165; Sept. 30, 1869, 235 (the reader signed only as Sh. A. K.). Yehuda Leib Gordon, Kitvey Yehuda Leib Gordon: Shira (1884; repr., Tel Aviv: Dvir, 1956), 17, 27 (Hebrew pagination). See the distinction of S. Y. Fuenn between true and false Haskalah in Ha-karmel, Apr. 1868, 49–50. Shmuel Feiner, “Ha-ma’avak ba-haskalah ha-mezuyefet ve-gvuloteyha shel ha-modernizatsia ha-yehudit,” in MiVilna li-yerushalayim: Mekhkarim be-toldoteihem ve-tarbutam shel yehudei mizrakh eyropa mugashim le-profesor Shmuel Werses, ed. David Assaf, Israel Bartal, Avner Holtzman, and Chava Turniasky ( Jerusalem: Magnes, 2002), 3–23. Michael Stanislawski, For Whom Do I Toil? Judah Leib Gordon and the Crisis of Russian Jewry (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 146–150, 172–173. 36. The quote about the “benevolent society” appeared in Salo W. Baron, Modern Nationalism, 222. Levanda’s article appeared also in Ha-karmel, Feb. 26, 1866, 303–305. Brian Horowitz, “A Jewish Russifier in Despair: Lev Levanda’s Polish Question,” Polin 17 (2004): 297–298. Letter from Liberman to Valerian Smirnov (Nov. 23, 1876), in Marmor, Aren Libermans briv, 81–82. Lederhendler, Road to Modern Jewish Politics, 142–144. Zipperstein, Jews of Odessa, 114–128, 133–134. 37. See Liberman’s letter in Marmor, Aren Libermans briv, 81–82. See Perets Smolenskin’s ironic feuilleton on Jews and non-Jewish enlightenment, in Kol sifrey perets ben moshe smolenskin (Vilna: Katznelboygen, 1905) 4:28–29. Yehalel is quoted in Zvia Nardi, “Tmurot be-tnua’at ha-haskalah be-rusia be-shnot ha-shishim ve-hashive’em shel hamea ha-19,” Ha-dat ve-hachayim, ed. Etkes, 321–322. On the growing Judeophobia of both liberals and conservatives in Russia, see Klier, Imperial Russia’s Jewish Question, 370–449. 38. The historian is Hans Rogger, “Conclusion and Overview,” in Pogroms: AntiJewish Violence in Modern Russian History, ed. John D. Klier and Shlomo Lambroza (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 314. The historian who has convincingly argued that the pogroms were a watershed in Russian-Jewish history is Frankel, “Crisis of 1881–2,” 9–22; Frankel, Prophecy and Politics, 49–51. See also Slutsky, ‘Itonut, 121–122, 313; Steven M. Berk, Year of Crisis, Year of Hope: Russian Jewry and the Pogroms of 1881–1882 (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1987). Historians who have qualified that periodization are Lederhendler, Road to Modern Jewish Politics, 146–153; Nathans, Beyond the Pale, 8–9; and Stanislawski, For Whom Do I Toil?, 146–147.

220

Notes to Pages 28–30

39. On the harsh effects of the May Laws, see the letters sent by Jews from different parts of the Pale, in Yudishes folks-blat, June 1, 1882, 318–321. See also the memoir of Anna Rosenthal, in Elias Cherikover, Avrom Menes, Frants Kursky, and Avrom Rozin, eds., Di yidishe sotsyalistishe bavegung biz der grindung fun ‘bund’ (Vilna: YIVO, 1939), 421. Michael Aronson, “The Anti-Jewish Pogroms in Russia in 1881,” in Pogroms, ed. Klier and Lambroza, 44–61; Alexander Orbach, “The Development of the Russian Jewish Community, 1881–1903,” in Pogroms, ed. Klier and Lambroza, 137–163. 40. Yudishes folks-blat, June 1, 1882, 297; Jan. 5, 1882, 197; Jan. 19, 1882, 9. See also Ha-tsefirah, May 24, 1881, 147. Israel Kloyzner, “Ha-praot be-rusia be-reshit shnot ha-shmonim be-shira uve-sipur,” He-avar 9 (1962): 7–15. 41. Khisin’s diary is quoted in Frankel, Prophecy and Politics, 92. Bogen, Born a Jew, 5, 13–21. Cf. Cahan, Bleter, 1:434–435. See the account of a socialist Jew, Pavel B. Axelrod, in Lucy S. Dawidowicz, ed., The Golden Tradition: Jewish Life and Thought in Eastern Europe (Boston: Beacon, 1967), 405–410. Chaim Zhitlovsky insightfully remarked that antisemitism posed a problem for radical and assimilated Jews, while traditional Jews viewed it with philosophical calm: “The Gentile beats up the Jew? That’s why he is a Gentile”: Gezamlte shriftn, 15 vols. (Warsaw: Brzoza, 1929), 6: 196–197. Erich Haberer, “Cosmopolitanism, Antisemitism, and Populism: A Reappraisal of the Russian and Jewish Response to the Pogroms of 1881–2,” in Pogroms, ed. Klier and Lambroza, 98–134. Steven Cassedy, “Russian-Jewish Intellectuals Confront the Pogroms of 1881: The Example of Razsvet,” Jewish Quarterly Review 84 (1993/1994): 129–152. 42. Lilienblum’s first quote is in Yudishes folks-blat, Dec. 22, 1881, 163. The second is in Ha-melits, Apr. 20, 1883, 442. Pinsker’s writings are in Arthur Hertzberg, ed., The Zionist Idea: A Historical Analysis and Reader, rev. ed. (New York: Atheneum, 1973), 148, 154–155, 181–198. Smolenskin’s words were an editorial response to a letter by Shmuel Leib Tsitron, Ha-shachar 11 (1882): 20. On Pinsker and Lilienblum’s infl uence, see Frankel, Prophecy and Politics, 85–90, 116–117. Kiel, “Jewish Narodnik,” 303–305. 43. The Romanian Jew’s letter appeared in Ha-magid, June 7, 1859, 88. See also Hamagid, Oct. 7, 1874, 348; Ha-tsefirah, Feb. 8, 1887, 2–3. The letter ( July 5, 1900) from the Zionist society to the Jewish Colonization Association’s London office is in JCA/LON (CAHJP), folder 192/1. Berger’s undated letter (seems to be from around 1900) is in JCA/LON (CAHJP), folder 192/1. See many other letters in that folder and folder 189/3. M. E. Ravage, An American in the Making: The Life Story of an Immigrant (1917; repr., New York: Dover, 1971), 34–56. On “Amalek,” see Yochanan Tversky, “Kinuyey ‘amim,” Yedaam 9/10 (1953): 119. Ze’ev Shlomo Arnon, Mered ha-tsoa’adim: Yehudey Romanya ba-meah ha-tshaesre uve-reshit ha-meah ha-esrim ( Jerusalem: Mass, 1995), 105–107, 220–222. Yoysef Kisman, Shtudyes tsu der geshikhte fun rumenishe yidn in 19ten un onheyb 20ten yorhindert (New York: YIVO, 1944), 26–33. Lloyd P. Gartner, “Roumania, America, and World Jewry: Consul Peixotto in Bucharest, 1870–1876,” AJHQ 58 (1968): 25–117. 44. The letter from Kissin to Vladeck ( July 29, 1909) is in the B. Vladeck Papers (Tamiment), box 16, folder “Early correspondence, 1907–1910.” Brenner’s first quote is

Notes to Pages 30–34

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in “Ha’arachat atsmenu bi-shloshet ha-krakhim,” in Kol kitvey Y. Ch. Brenner, 9 vols. (Tel Aviv: Shtibl, 1936), 7:249. See his portrayal of Russians and Poles in “Mi-kan u-mikan,” in Kol kitvey Y. Ch. Brenner, 4:123, 128–129. Shapira, “Anti-Semitism and Zionism,” 215–232; Almog, “Normalizatsya,” 292–293. One can mention only a fraction of the literature that deals with the “New Jew”: Stanislawski, Zionism and the Fin de Siècle, 91–97; Michael Berkowitz, Zionist Culture and West European Jewry before the First World War (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Almog, Sabra, 73–137; George L. Mosse, Confronting the Nation: Jewish and Western Nationalism (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1993), 140–142, 164–173. 45. Smolenskin wrote in Ha-shachar 11 (1882): 136, 196, 6. Tsiyon, Nov. 1896, 51 (italics added). Cf. Ahad Ha’am’s position (1898), Kol kitvey, 150 (Hebrew pagination). 46. On the Am oylem movement, see the memoirs of Yisroel Iser Katsovitch, Zekhtsik yor lebn (New York: Mayzel, 1919), 210–218; Harkavy, Prakim, 34–36; Cahan, Bleter, 1:505–509; 2:36–45, 86–87; Weinstein, Ardent Eighties, 21–22. See also Abraham Menes, “The Am Oylem Movement,” YAJSS 4 (1949): 9–33. 47. Yidisher arbeter 1 (1896): 9–10, 24, 30–31, 36–37. Veker, Apr. 1899, 3–4. On the Bund and its relation to Jewish nationalism, see K. Frumin, “Der ‘Bund’ un zayne kegner,” Tsukunft, June 1903, 9–17; July 1903, 13–19; Yankev Milkh, “Di natsionale programe fun ‘bund,’” Tsukunft, May 1904, 26–32. John (Yoysef ) Mill, Tsukunft, Feb. 1918, 117–120. For a thorough discussion of the Bund and its ideology, see Frankel, Prophecy and Politics, 171–257, 275– 278. Henry J. Tobias, The Jewish Bund in Russia: From Its Origins to 1905 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1972), 160–175, 248–255. Moshe Mishkinsky, “Regional Factors in the Formation of the Jewish Labor Movement in Czarist Russia,” YAJSS 14 (1969): 27–52. 48. Yafe, Epizodn, 89–90. Chaim Zhitlovsky, “Der biterer emes,” in Gezamlte shriftn, 6:217–218 (italics added). See also the memoir of Hillel Katz-Blum in Cherikover et al., Yidishe sotsyalistishe bavegung, 350; and the account of Bund member Avrom Pinkhes Unger, Mayn heymshtetl strykov, 49–50. On the extent to which the notion of Jewish solidarity continued to hold sway over the Jewish working class of the 1890s, see Ezra Mendelsohn, Class Struggle in the Pale: The Formative Years of the Jewish Workers’ Movement in Tsarist Russia (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 104–110. On the attempt of Jewish socialists to assuage Jewish workers’ general distrust of Gentiles, see Joshua D. Zimmerman, Poles, Jews, and the Politics of Nationality: The Bund and Polish Socialist Party in Late Tsarist Russia, 1892–1914 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004), 128–130. 49. Bartal, “Non-Jews and Gentile Society,” 56. David Biale, “A Journey between Worlds,” in Cultures of the Jews: A New History, ed. David Biale (New York: Schocken, 2002), 839–840. Kuznets, “Immigration of Russian Jews,” 73–76.

chapter 2 — “Lovers of Man” 1. Shomer, Di farkerte velt, 5 vols. (New York: Katzenelbogen, 1897), 1:14–15. 2:11. 5:6, 17–18. On America in Shomer’s writings, see Israel Bartal, “Amerika shel ma’ala:

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artsot ha-brit ke-idial u-khemofet le-yehudey mizrach eropa ba-meah ha-19,” in Be’ikvot Kolumbus: Amerika 1492–1992, ed. Miriam Eliav-Feldon ( Jerusalem: Zalman Shazar, 1996), 521. On Shomer’s career, see Sofi Grace-Pollack, “Shomer ha-publizist,” Chulyot 9 (2005): 161–195; Alyssa Quint, “‘Yiddish Literature for the Masses?’ A Reconsideration of Who Read What in Jewish Eastern Europe,” AJS Review 29 (2005): 61–89. 2. The quote is from Ha-yom (St. Petersburg), July 6, 1886, quoted in Joel S. Geffen, “America in the First European Hebrew Daily Newspaper: Ha-yom (1886–1888),” AJHQ 51 (1962): 157. Jacob Kabakoff, “The View from the Old World: East European Jewish Perspectives,” in Americanization of the Jews, ed. Seltzer and Cohen, 41–59. Jonathan Sarna, ed., trans., People Walk on Their Heads: Moses Weinberger’s Jews and Judaism in New York (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1982). Menachem Blondheim, “Ha-rabanut ha-ortodoxit megala et amerika,” in Be-‘ikvot Kolumbus, ed. Eliav-Feldon, 486–490. Bartal, “Amerika,” 511–522. Cf. Judith Zabarenko, “The Negative Image of America in the Russian-Language Jewish Press, 1881–1910,” AJH 75 (1986): 267–279. Kimmy Caplan, Ortodoxya ba-olam ha-khadash: Rabanim ve-darshanut be-amerika, 1881–1924 ( Jerusalem: Zalman Shazar, 2002), 222–227; Arthur Hertzberg, “‘Treifene Medine’: Learned Opposition to Emigration to the United States,” in Proceedings of the Eighth World Congress of Jewish Studies, Panel Sessions-Jewish History ( Jerusalem: World Union of Jewish Studies, 1984), 7–30; Gurock, American Jewish Orthodoxy, 208–218. 3. Lederhendler, “America,” 104–139; Eleanor Gordon Mlotek, “America in East European Yiddish Folksong,” in The Field of Yiddish, ed. Uriel Weinreich (New York: Linguistic Circle of New York, 1954), 179–195. Israel Davidson, Parody in Jewish Literature (1907; repr., New York: AMS, 1966), 98–101—he noted how much of the criticism was aimed at American Jews. See also Shlomo Noble, “The Image of the American Jew in Hebrew and Yiddish Literature,” YAJSS 9 (1954): 83–108. 4. Gotlober, Zikhronot 2:15–17. Zalmen Reyzin, “‘Antdekung fun amerike’ in yidish,” YIVO bleter 5 (1933): 29–40. S. Niger Charney, “America in the Works of I. M. Dick (1814–1893),” YAJSS 9 (1954): 63. 5. Kol mevaser, Oct. 23, 1862, 1; May 4, 1865, 237. Ha-melits, May 22, 1862, 492 (italics added). Malachi, “Der kol mevaser un zayn redaktor,” 64. See also the reference to the emancipated slaves by Henry (Zvi) Gersoni, who came to America from Vilna, in Ha-melits, Feb. 12, 1883, 135. On the famine in Lithuania (1867–1869) and the cholera epidemic in Poland (1869) as the beginning of substantial Jewish immigration from Eastern Europe to America, see Salo W. Baron, Steeled by Adversity: Essays and Addresses on American Jewish Life (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1971), 276–277. 6. Israel Joseph Benjamin, Three Years in America, trans. Charles Reznikoff (1862; Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1956); on American Indians, see 2:103–105, 113, 216; on Germans, see 1:48, 154, 248; on American women, see 1:89–91. On the dissemination of his writings in maskilic circles, see Mendele Moykher-Sforim [S. Y. Abramovitsh], Masoes benyomen ha-shlishi (Travels of Benjamin the Third) (1878), in Geklibene verk, 5 vols. (New York: YKUF, 1946) 2:161–162. On European travelers’ accounts

Notes to Pages 37–39

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about American Indians, see Gary C. Stein, “‘And the Strife Never Ends’: Indian-White Hostility as Seen by European Travelers in America, 1800–1860,” Ethnohistory 20 (1973): 173–187. Harry Liebersohn, Aristocratic Encounters: European Travelers and North American Indians (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 7. Ha-magid, July 31, 1872, 344; July 13, 1870, 210–211. Vidaver and Eisenstein wrote (respectively) in Ha-tsefirah, Jan. 4, 1881, 397–398; Mar. 11, 1879, 70–71. On Eisenstein, see Lloyd P. Gartner, “From New York to Miedzyrecz: Immigrant Letters of Judah David Eisenstein, 1878–1886,” AJHQ 52 (1963): 234–243; Gurock, American Jewish Orthodoxy, 110–113. On the thesis that American Indians were the offspring of the lost ten tribes, see David S. Katz, “Israel in America: The Wanderings of the Lost Ten Tribes from ‘Mikveigh Yisrael’ to Timothy McVeigh,” in The Jews and the Expansion of Europe to the West, 1450–1800, ed. Paolo Bernardini and Norman Fiering (New York: Berghahn, 2001), 107–122. 8. Benjamin, Three Years in America, 1:278–282. Ha-magid, Mar. 10, 1874, 93; Oct. 3, 1878, 311. Other references appear afterward. Rudolf Glanz, “Jews and Chinese in America,” in Studies in Judaica Americana (New York: Ktav, 1970), 314–329. On the anti-Chinese movement and the Chinese Exclusion of 1882, see Roger Daniels, Not Like Us: Immigrants and Minorities in America, 1890–1924 (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1997), 3–19. 9. Dik is quoted in Niger Charney, “America in the Works of I. M. Dick,” 69. Ephraim Lissitsky, Eleh toldot adam ( Jerusalem: Bialik, n.d.), 82. One can mention only a few of the admiring references to Lincoln: Ha-magid, May 3, 1865, 131; Ha-melits, Jan. 18, 1865, 4; Ha-tsefirah, July 22, 1874, 17. Buchalter wrote in Ha-tsefirah, Mar. 25, 1889, 247. On Buchalter, see Zalmen Reyzin, Leksikon fun der yidisher literature, prese un filologye, 4 vols. (Vilna: Kletzkin, 1929), 1:239–240. See the praise of Yekaterinoslav Hebrew writer Shimon Yehuda Stanislavsky for President Andrew Johnson, in Ha-karmel, Jan. 26, 1866, 295–296. 10. Ha-karmel, Nov. 26, 1864, 34–35. See also Ha-karmel, Feb. 24, 1865, 138. On the German-language Ben-Chananja, see www.compactmemory.de. Bernstein wrote in Ha-magid, June 29, 1870, 196; July 13, 1870, 212; May 24, 1871, 166. On his career, see Y. Khaykin, Yidishe bleter in amerike (New York: Published by the author, 1946), 52–53. See Ha-tsefirah, Jan. 3, 1887, 3; June 21, 1876, 181. Shaul Pinchas Rabinovitsh (Shefer) also relayed that image, in Ha-tsefirah, Aug. 16, 1881, 249. Gersoni wrote in Ha-melits, Feb. 12, 1883, 137 (italics added). The image of a tolerant American appeared also in Avrum Goldfaden and Y. Y. Linetsky’s paper (Lemberg), Yisrulik, Dec. 23, 1875, 7. Sanford Ragins, “The Image of America in Two East European Hebrew Periodicals,” AJAJ 17 (1965): 146–148. Nachum Sokolov wrote admiring words about the Americans in Ha-tsefirah, Dec. 30, 1895, 1115. Cf. Harvey A. Richman, “The Image of America in the European Hebrew Periodicals of the Nineteenth Century (until 1880)” (PhD diss., University of Texas–Austin, 1971), 158–202. 11. Allgemeine Zeitung des Judenthums, Mar. 28, 1865, 202 (italics added). Hans Otto Horch, “Le-toldotav shel ha-Allgemeine Zeitung des Judenthums,” Kesher 5 (1989): 12–20. Ha-magid, Feb. 1, 1865, 36 (“sons of Haman” appears in that piece). On Vidaver, see

224

Notes to Pages 39–42

Morris B. Margolies, “The American Career of Rabbi Henry Vidaver,” Western States Jewish Historical Quarterly 16 (1983): 30–43. 12. Ha-tsefirah, July 15, 1884, 210 (italics added); July 29, 1884, 224. Stephen S. Wise recalled how Blaine’s speech stirred him as a ten-year-old: Challenging Years: The Autobiography of Stephen Wise (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1949), 4–5. On the immigrant groups in America, see also Ha-melits, Feb. 20, 1885, 180; Ha-tsefirah, Jan. 10, 1882, 5. 13. Shapira wrote in Ha-melits, May 23, 1882, 347 (italics added). Smolenskin expressed a similar pessimistic note in Ha-shachar 11 (1882): 21, 352. See the comparison Eisenstein made in He-aseef (1886) between Irish, German, and “Yankee” customers and their relation to the Jewish peddler, reprinted in Eisenstein, Otsar zikhronotay (New York: By the author, 1929), 205–206. Voskhod reported in 1889 about the antisemitism of a German firm in New York, cited in Slutsky, ‘Itonut, 236–237. See also Joel S. Geffen, “Whither: To Palestine or to America in the Pages of the Russian Hebrew Press Ha-Melitz and Ha-Yom, 1880–1890,” AJHQ 59 (1969): 197–198. 14. Ha-magid published many columns in 1882 that advised against Jewish immigrating to America—May 3, 1882, 139; May 22, 1882, 160; June 14, 1882, 184; July 12, 1882, 219– 220; Aug. 2, 1882, 243–244 (where the writer bemoaned that European Jews “believe the lie that the Christians in America harbor no hatred toward the Jews”); Nov. 1, 1882, 341. Objection to immigration was expressed also in Ha-melits, Dec. 6, 1881, 920–922; Jan. 12, 1882, 9–10. Rabinovitsh wrote in Ha-tsefirah, Aug. 16, 1881, 249. Geffen, “Whither,” 179–200. Kabakoff, “View from the Old World,” 45–47. Lilienblum’s letter was published in the Yudishes folks-blat, Mar. 16, 1882, 131–132. A similar perception appears in Ha-magid, Feb. 1, 1882, 34. Israel Klausner, Be-hit’orer am ( Jerusalem: Zionist Library, 1962), 105–142. Loeher and other writers are quoted in Rudolf Glanz, Studies in Judaica Americana (New York: Ktav, 1970), 330–357. 15. The quote from Eisenstein’s 1886 article was reprinted in Eisenstein, Otsar zikhronotay, 203. Ha-tsefirah, Apr. 25, 1882, 113–114; Ha-tsefirah, May 9, 1882, 125. Other examples of Eisenstein’s laudations of the American character (and even a defense of demeaning caricatures of Jews in the American press) are in Ha-melits, Oct. 10, 1882, 742; Dec. 12, 1882, 921–922. Eisenstein, Otsar zikhronotay, 7–9. On the origin of the term Yankee, see Michael Quinion, Port Out, Starboard Home, and Other Language Myths (London: Penguin, 2004), 275–277. 16. Eisenstein, Otsar zikhronotay, 43. Kramer wrote in Ha-magid, Jan. 14, 1880, 22. Zvi Falk Vidaver’s report is very similar to those two—Ha-tsefirah, Aug. 1, 1877, 229. That was essentially the impression of the Allgemeine Zeitung des Judenthums, too—July 17, 1877, 460; July 24, 1877, 478; Sept. 9, 1879, 577–578. Naomi W. Cohen, “Antisemitism in the Gilded Age: The Jewish View,” JSS 41 (1979): 187–210. Hasia R. Diner, A Time for Gathering: The Second Migration, 1820–1880 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 191–193. 17. See the letters by Nachum Grayev in the Yudishes folks-blat, Dec. 1, 1881, 120–121; Jan. 5, 1882, 202. See also the letter of Hebraist Hillel Malachovsky (Pittsburgh) in

Notes to Pages 42–44

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Ha-melits, Sept. 10, 1886, 1329–1330, where he argued that Americans looked down at Jewish immigrants as “gypsies.” 18. Soloveitchik is quoted in Meyer Berlin, Fun volozhin biz yerushalayim, 2 vols. (New York: Oriom, 1933), 2:249–250. Spektor and other rabbis are quoted in Caplan, Ortodoxya, 82–86. Lucy Robins Lang, Tomorrow Is Beautiful (New York: Macmillan, 1948), 12. The criticism aimed at the lack of observance appeared also in America itself; see Noble, “Image of the American Jew,” 83–108; Blondheim, “Ha-rabanut,” 488–489, 498. Memoirists noted that the lack of observance in America affected the country’s image in Eastern Europe: Aaron Cohen, AJAC, 108:18; M. Hevelin, AJAC, 21:8. The Yiddish poet Aliza Greenblatt remembered that her mother said, “Who goes to America? Only a thief or a Sibirnik,” Baym fenster fun a lebn (New York: By the author, 1966), 27. Hertzberg, “‘Treifene Medine,’” 7–30. See Milton Himmelfarb’s quip in Charles S. Liebman, “Orthodoxy in American Jewish Life,” AJYB 66 (1965): 29n18. 19. Gartner, “From New York to Miedzyrecz,” 243. Herts Burgin, Di geshikhte fun der yidisher arbeter bavegung in amerike, rusland un england (New York: Fareynikte yidishe geverkshaftn, 1915), 69–70. Eisenstein reprinted his letter in his Otsar zikhronotay, 10 (italics added). Yudishes folks-blat, Nov. 23, 1882, 678; Jan. 19, 1882, 11. Only a few memoirs can be mentioned here: Solomon Horowitz, who mentioned the “advertisement,” AJAC, 120:14–16; Lena Friedman, AJAC, 157:12–13; Vaynshteyn, Fertsik yor, 12. Cf. the letter from the popular Zionist orator Hirsh Masliansky to a relative in Slutsk, July 12, 1897, in Hirsh Masliansky Papers ( JNUL), folder 225. See the letter from Leib Zeman to his father in Poland (Dec. 21, 1891) in Josephine Wtulich, ed., Writing Home: Immigrants in Brazil and the United States, 1890–1891 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 464. Alroey, Ha-mahapecha, 87–101. 20. Rachel Feignberg-Imri, “Pirkey Lyuban,” He-avar 7 (1960): 162. Gertrude Yellin, Voices from Ellis Island (Library of Congress), 144:2–3. On the impression made by Jews who visited or returned to Eastern Europe, see Yisroel Kerdman, AJAC, 105:4; Joseph Sternberg, AJAC, 164:6; Ravage, American, 5–21; Sholem Ash, Onkel Moses: Roman in dray teyln (New York: Forverts, 1918), 30–34. On Sholem Aleichem’s song, see Mlotek, “America in East European Yiddish Folksong,” 184–186. Cf. Sholem Aleichem’s story “Berl ayzik,” reprinted in Pakn Treger 49 (2005): 33–35. Khone Shmeruk, “Sholem Aleichem and America,” YIVO Annual 20 (1991): 211–238. 21. George M. Price, “The Russian Jews in America,” trans. Leo Shpall, PAJHS 47 (1957): 101–110; PAJHS 48 (1958): 46, 53–54, 124–125 (italics added). On Price’s career, see AJYB 5665 (1904/1905): 166. On the Voskhod’s editors and readership, see Slutsky, ‘Itonut, 142–169. 22. Price, “Russian Jews in America,” 53–54, 125. See also Philip Krantz, “Di khinesishe frage,” Tsukunft, Mar. 1902, 17–19. On the opposition of socialist leaders to Chinese immigration, see Richard Iton, Solidarity Blues: Race, Culture, and the American Left (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 100–102. See also chap. 3.

226

Notes to Pages 45–47

23. Isaac Max Rubinow, “The Jewish Question in New York City, 1902–1903,” trans. Leo Shpall, PAJHS 49 (1959): 99, 104–106, 109–114, 133–134 (italics added). On Rubinow, see AJYB 5665 (1904/1905): 178. Labor Zionist writer A. S. Waldstein made a similar argument about “the Yankees” in Ha-shiloach 12 ( July–Dec. 1903): 262–263; Ha-shiloach 13 ( Jan.–June 1904): 267–268. Cf. Zabarenko, “Negative Image,” 267–279. 24. Monty Noam Penkower, “The Kishinev Pogrom of 1903: A Turning Point in Jewish History,” Modern Judaism 24 (2004): 187–225. Shlomo Lambroza, “Pogroms of 1903–1906,” in Pogroms, ed. Klier and Lambroza, 191–247. On the pogroms in Odessa and Bialistok (respectively), see the Fraynd (St. Petersburg), Nov. 13, 1905, 2–3. Dos lebn, June 21, 1906, 1. See Hillel Katz-Blum’s memoir in Cherikover et al., Yidishe sotsyalistishe bavegung, 367–368. Tsukerman, Zikhroynes, 1:89–90. The future socialist Louis Waldman remembered that in 1905 some peasants wanted to protect his father, an innkeeper, from the attackers—Labor Lawyer (New York: E. P. Dulton, 1944), 12. Reyzin’s sketch was published in the Fraynd, May 5, 1903, 2. Dubnov is quoted in Frankel, Prophecy and Politics, 136. 25. On the Fraynd’s beginning, character, and popularity, see Chaim Dov Hurvitz, “Unzer ershte teglikhe tsaytung,” in Der pinkes, ed. Niger, 243–264 (including circulation figures). Sarah Abrevaya Stein, Making Jews Modern: The Yiddish and Ladino Press in the Russian and Ottoman Empires (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004), 23–54, 85–122. Her comment on the paper’s impact is at 229n83. D. Druk, Tsu der geshikhte der yudisher prese in rusland un poylen (Warsaw: N.p., 1920), 25–32. Gorin wrote in the Fraynd, Feb. 1, 1904, 1; Jan. 25, 1904, 3. See also Dos lebn, Apr. 23, 1906, 1; because of legal problems with the Russian censors, the Fraynd had to change its name to Dos lebn for about six months in 1906. 26. Fraynd, Jan. 29, 1903, 1; Sept. 14, 1903, 2–3; Sept. 16, 1903, 2–3; Oct. 21, 1903, 3–4 (italics added); Oct. 23, 1903, 2–3. It is interesting that when Yiddish writers presented Jewish characters that criticized America’s shortcomings, the critique showed their own narrow-mindedness—see the short piece by Dovid Pinsky, Fraynd, Feb. 13, 1903, 2–3, where a man complains about Jews riding bicycle in America: “It’s not a Jewish thing”; and the piece by Leon Kobrin, Dos lebn, July 30, 1906, 2–3. 27. Fraynd, Nov. 26, 1903, 3. Alexandrov was one a pioneer of Yiddishism in America—see Zalmen Reyzin, “Fun dem yivo-oytser,” YIVO bleter 5 (1933): 137–151. 28. Fraynd, Mar. 24, 1903, 2; Dec. 24, 1903, 1–2 (italics added). It is conceivable that Ragoler was the pen name of either Alexandrov or Gorin. Cf. Gorin’s report July 1, 1906, 2–3. Williams became the champion of anti-immigration advocates—see the letter from Russell Bellamy ( July 12, 1909) and Madison Grant ( July 16, 1909) to Williams, William Williams Papers (NYPL), box 2. Thomas M. Pitkin, Keepers of the Gate: A History of Ellis Island (New York: New York University Press, 1975), 40–64. See above about the Jewish protests against Williams in 1909. 29. Fraynd, June 14, 1903, 2–3; Nov. 30, 1905, 1. Cyrus Adler, ed., The Voice of America on Kishineff (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1904), 112–147. Philip Ernest

Notes to Pages 48–50

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Schoenberg, “The American Reaction to the Kishinev Pogrom of 1903,” AJHQ 63 (1974): 262–283. Susanne Marten-Finnis, “Outrage in Many Tongues: The Bund’s Response to the Kishinev Pogrom,” East European Jewish Affairs 33 (2003): 60–66. 30. Nomberg wrote his report for the Warsaw paper Haynt. His report also appeared in Yudisher emigrant, Mar. 14, 1912, 4–5. The second observer is Dr. S. Bruk, in ibid., May 1, 1908, 12. Vincent J. Cannato, American Passage: The History of Ellis Island (New York: HarperCollins, 2009), 57–69. 31. Isidore David Passow, “Immigrants’ Image of America, as Reflected in Memoirs and Autobiographies,” Gratz College Annual of Jewish Studies 1 (1972): 97–106. The observer was Edward A. Steiner, Outlook, Nov. 1, 1902, 528–529. Robert Leslie’s account is in Jeff Kisseloff, You Must Remember This: An Oral History of Manhattan from the 1890s to World War II (San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1989), 16. The “machinery” quote is also by Edward A. Steiner, On the Trail of the Immigrant (New York: Fleming H. Revell, 1906), 72. Richter’s account is in Kramer and Masur, Jewish Grandmothers, 128–129. On the confusion and examinations, see also the report of D. Davidovitsh in Tsukunft, Feb. 1909, 101; and the memoir of Benjamin Antin, The Gentleman from 22nd (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1927), 16. Shmuelevitsh is cited in Mark Slobin, Tenement Songs: The Popular Music of the Jewish Immigrants (1982; repr., Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996), 156. On that comedian, see E. Shulman, Geshikhte fun der yidisher literatur in amerike (New York: I. V. Biderman, 1943), 151–155. 32. Forverts, Mar. 18, 1910, cited in Howe, World of Our Fathers, 45. Domnitz’s story is in Cohen and Soyer, My Future, 138–139. Zausner, Unvarnished, 30. Irving Chait, Voices from Ellis Island (Library of Congress), 116:14, 17. Charles Lehrer, Voices from Ellis Island (Library of Congress), 24:12. Joseph Ehrlich, a HIAS agent, portrayed the American official as a straightforward, no-nonsense person—Yidisher immigrant, Nov. 1908, 3. Yidisher immigrant was widely circulated in Eastern Europe—Mark Wischnitzer, Visas to Freedom: The History of HIAS (New York: World, 1956), 42, 70. 33. Michael Gold wrote that every tenement home was a Plymouth Rock, in Jews without Money, 75. Hasia Diner used the term “American Jewish Plymouth Rock” in Lower East Side Memories: A Jewish Place in America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 7–8. Levey is cited in Ande Manners, Poor Cousins (New York: Coward, McCann, and Geoghegan, 1972), 59. “Wild Asiatic” is quoted in Rischin, Promised City, 97. Boris Tomashevsky, Mayn lebns-geshikhte (New York: Trio, 1937), 76–78. 34. On the ethnic succession in New York, see 61st Congress, 3rd Session, Reports of the Immigration Commission, 41 vols. (1911; repr., New York: Arno, 1970), 26:164–165. Stanley Nadel, Little Germany: Ethnicity, Religion, and Class in New York City, 1845–1880 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990), 161–162. Diner, Lower East Side Memories, 42–44. Mario Maffi, Gateway to the Promised Land: Ethnic Cultures on New York’s Lower East Side (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1994), 67–68. 35. The observer is Judd L. Teller, who wrote a lively depiction of regional differences in Strangers and Natives: The Evolution of the American Jew from 1921 to the Present

228

Notes to Pages 50–53

(New York: Delacorte, 1968), 4–9; Interview with Hyman Glick, tape I-58, NYC-ILHP. The mother’s letter is in Forverts, Feb. 8, 1906, 5. See also Forverts, Nov. 3, 1906, 5. Isaac Metzker, ed., A Bintel Brief: Sixty Years of Letters from the Lower East Side to the Jewish Daily Forward (New York: Schocken, 1971), 58–59. The Galician is quoted in Daniel Soyer, Jewish Immigrant Associations and American Identity in New York, 1880–1939 (1997; repr., Detroit: Wayne State University, 2001), 147. Ravage, American, 87–89 (quotes in the original). Perlman, Bridging Three Worlds, 135–142. Jacob A. Riis, How the Other Half Lives: Studies among the Tenements of New York (1890; repr., New York: Dover, 1971), 19–25. Rischin, Promised City, 76–79. 36. Dovid Edelshtat, “Der shnayder,” in Amerike in yidishn vort: Antologye, ed. Nakhman Mayzel (New York: Ykuf, 1955), 120. Tsunzer’s poem is in Amerike in yidishn vort, ed. Mayzel 34–37. Tsunzer’s arch-patriotic poems about America are in his Ale verk, 3 vols. (New York: Aba Katsenelenboygen, 1920), 1:256–261, 285. Gorin wrote in the Fraynd, Feb. 1, 1904, 1. Hyman Plumka mentioned the prostitutes in AJAC, 19:8. Morris Rosenfeld, “Der svetshap,” Shriftn fun Morris Rosenfeld, 6 vols. (New York: Literarishn ferlag, 1908), 1:51. One can mention only a handful of examples of the initial disappointment with America: Katsovitch, Zekhtsik yor lebn, 219–225. See the letter from America in the Yudishes folks-blat, (St. Petersburg), Feb. 9, 1882. Weinstein, Ardent Eighties, 18–19. Miriam Blaustein, ed., Memoirs of David Blaustein (1913; repr., New York: Arno, 1975), 153, 158–159, 167.

chapter 3 — “In Goodness They Even Exceed the English” 1. Tsukunft, Oct. 1896, 459–460 (italics added). A personal impression of Miller is in Leon Kobrin, Mayne fuftsik yor in amerike (New York: YKUF, 1966), 108–114. On the history and character of the Tsukunft, see Zrubavel (Yankev Vitkin), “Etapn in der Tsukunft,” Tsukunft, Nov.–Dec. 1962, 429–434. 2. On America as a malleable concept, see Lederhendler, “America,” 104–139. On the Irish and Americanization, see James R. Barrett and David R. Roediger, “The Irish and the ‘Americanization’ of the ‘New Immigrants’ in the Streets and in the Churches of the Urban United States, 1900–1930,” Journal of American Ethnic History 24 (2005): 4–33. 3. Yankev Magidov, Der shpigl fun der ist sayd (New York: By the author, 1923), 21–22. Already in 1917 the writer A. Vohliner (pen name of Eliezer Landau) sarcastically wondered, “Where are the Gentiles?”—Tog, Mar. 27, 1917, 5. Cf. the memoirs of Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan, who recollected having very little contact with Gentiles when he was growing up in New York of the 1890s—WWOHL-AJC, 46. On Magidov’s career, see Shmuel Niger and Yankev Shatsky, eds., Leksikon fun der nayer yidisher literatur, 8 vols. (New York: Altveltlekhen yidishn kultur kongress, 1956–1981), 5:389–390. 4. Zalmen Yoffeh, “The Passing of the East Side,” Menorah Journal (1929): 266, 271 (italics added). Samuel Chotzinoff, A Lost Paradise: Early Reminiscences (New York: Knopf, 1955), 85–86. See also the biting irony of Mordecai Yahalomshtein toward Gentiles in his letter from New York in Ha-melits, Sept. 1, 1884, 1078.

Notes to Pages 54–55

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5. Shoel Yanovsky, Ershte yorn fun yidishn frayhaytlekhen sotzialism (New York: Fraye arbeter shtime, 1948), 51–52. Abraham Cahan, The Rise of David Levinsky (1917; repr., New York: Harper & Row, 1960), 176. That theme appears in numerous memoirs: Khone Gotesfeld, Vos ikh gedenk fun mayn lebn (New York: Fareynikte galitsyaner yidn in amerike, 1960), 190–191; Marie Ganz, Rebels: Into Anarchy and Out Again (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1920), 17; Ravage, American, 78–80, 101–105. Andrew R. Heinze, Adapting to Abundance: Jewish Immigrants, Mass Consumption, and the Search for American Identity (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 89–91. Jenna Weissman Joselit, A Perfect Fit: Clothes, Character, and the Promise of America (New York: Metropolitan, 2001), 92–93, 116–119, 181–186. 6. Nu-yorker yudishe folkstsaytung, July 2, 1886, 1. Abraham Kotlyor, Derekh erets hakhadasha (Warsaw: Shapiro, 1898), 10. Davidson, Parody in Jewish Literature, 78–80. See the differentiation between Americans and immigrant groups in America in Ha-magid, May 19, 1887, 151; Shulamit, Dec. 6, 1889, 1; Yidishe gazetn, Aug. 9, 1895, 1; Abend-blat, Sept. 26, 1896, 1; Tsukunft, Aug. 1896, 3. On Shur, see Niger and Shatsky, Leksikon, 8:602. On the folktsaytung, see Khaykin, Yidishe bleter, 59–62. See also Russell A. Kazal, Becoming Old Stock: The Paradox of German-American Identity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 120–123. 7. Cohen, Dreamer’s Journey, 98. 8. Lillian Wald, The House on Henry Street (New York: Holt, 1915), 1–25. Wald is also quoted in Howe, World of Our Fathers, 121–122, 400–401. The immigrant’s recollection and similar others are quoted in Harry P. Kraus, The Settlement House Movement in New York City, 1886–1914 (New York: Arno, 1980), 235–237. Dovid M. Hermalin, Zhurnalistishe shriftn (New York: Hebrew Publishing, 1912), 70–74. Christine Stansell, American Moderns: Bohemian New York and the Creation of a New Century (New York: Henry Holt, 2000), 60–64. 9. Letter from Paul Abelson to Mr. Mamberg, June 6, 1906, Paul Abelson Papers (AJA), box 5, folder 5. James B. Reynolds, Report for the Year 1900, USSNY Papers (WSHS), series 3, 13. Jacob Gordin wrote “The Yiddish Stage,” Report for the Year 1901, USSNY Papers (WSHS), series 3, 29 (quotes in the original). An example of various settlement activities are in the Report of the Year’s Work (Dec. 1894), USSNY Papers (WSHS), series 3, 12–18. Blaustein, Memoirs, 219–20. Cahan, Bleter, 3:276–278. Henry Moskowitz, “The University Settlement: Its Infl uence in Communal Life,” Jewish Social Service Quarterly 2 (1926): 251–258. 10. Konrad Bercovici, It’s the Gypsy in Me (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1941), 53–54. Lincoln Steffens, The Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens (1931; repr., New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1958), 244. Cahan, Bleter, 4:73–74. Steven Cassedy, To the Other Shore: The Russian Intellectuals Who Came to America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 110–113. Stansell, American Moderns, 22–25. Louis Filler, Crusaders for American Liberalism (1939; new ed., Yellow Springs, OH: Antioch, 1950), 117–118. On the USSNY (formerly called the Neighborhood Guild), see Mina Carson, Settlement Folk: Social

230

Notes to Pages 55–58

Thought and the American Settlement Movement, 1885–1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 36–37. 11. The memoir of Harris Rubin is in Uri D. Herscher, ed., The East European Jewish Experience in America (Cincinnati: American Jewish Archives, 1983), 34–36. Hindus, Green Worlds, 120–121, 141–142, 301–304. See also Edward A. Steiner, From Alien to Citizen: The Story of My Life in America (New York: Fleming H. Revell, 1914), 83. 12. Kopelov, Amol in amerike, 82–84, 94, 299–300. The image of Yankees as being more shrewd than Jews was apparently common among previous Jewish immigrants in America—see Glanz, Studies in Judaica Americana, 331–335. On many immigrants’ route through Britain, see Gartner, “Jewish Migrants,” 49–67. 13. Rose Cohen, Out of the Shadow (1918; repr., Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), 234–242. Zolotkof wrote in the YT, Sept. 8, 1898, 2. On his career, see Niger and Shatsky, Leksikon, 3:525–527. The Tageblat’s circulation is given in Y. Khaykin, Yidishe bleter, 110– 111. A lower estimate appears in N. Goldberg, “Di yidishe prese in di fareynikte Shtatn 1900–1940,” YIVO bleter 18 (1941): 138–139. 14. E. R. Malachi, “Der baginen fun der yidisher prese in amerike,” in Pinkes far der farshung fun der yidisher literatur un prese, ed. Chaim Boaz (New York: Congress for Jewish Culture, 1972), 253–293. Shmuel Niger, “Yiddish Culture,” in The Jewish People, Past and Present, 4 vols. (New York: Jewish Encyclopedia Handbooks, 1955), 4:273–274. For an insightful characterization of Sarasohn, see Victor Greene, “Becoming American: The Role of Ethnic Leaders,” in The Ethnic Frontier: Essays in the History of Group Survival in Chicago and the Midwest, ed. Peter d’A. Jones and Melvin G. Holli (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1977), 167–169. Paley’s character and sensationalism (and short-lived conversion) are described in Khaykin, Yidishe bleter, 104–110, 114–120. 15. Yidishe gazetn, June 11, 1897, 5. For the link between economic progress, civilization, and the American character, see also William Edlin Papers (YIVO), folder 29. YT, Oct. 11, 1898, 4; Nov. 1, 1899, 4. The paper attacked its rival, the Abend-blat, which dared to hint that Dreyfus was guilty—YT, July 22, 1898, 4. See also Myra Kelly, Wards of Liberty (New York: McClure, 1907), 33. The labor and women right’s activist Rose Schneiderman remembered the interest in the Dreyfus affair and how she avidly read about it—Rose Schneiderman with Lucy Goldthwaite, All for One (New York: Paul Eriksson, 1967), 40. On the reactions to the Dreyfus affair in America, see Egal Feldman, The Dreyfus Affair and the American Consciousness, 1895–1906 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1981). 16. Harkavy wrote in Ha-tsefirah, Apr. 8, 1888, 3. Pfeffer wrote in YT, Sept. 2, 1902, 4. See the editorial in YT, Nov. 10, 1899, 4. Ludwig Max Goldberger, Das Land der unbegrenzten Moeglichkeiten: Beobachtungen ueber das Wirtschaftsleben der Vereingten Staaten von Amerika (Berlin: F. Fontane, 1903). On Pfefer’s career, see Niger and Shatsky, Leksikon, 7:203. 17. Blaustein made the statement at an address in Chicago (Memoirs, 161, 164, 169–170). See also Bernard G. Richards, “The Attitude of Jews Towards Jewish Fiction,” Reader,

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Nov. 1902, 45–46; YT, July 16, 1899, 4. Zeff ’s speech appears in Ha-techiya, June 29, 1900, 4. Marnin Feinstein, American Zionism, 1884–1904 (New York: Herzl Press, 1965), 164–171, 198–208, 230–231. See the account of a street cleaning department on Jewish behavior toward Gentile authority in Report For the Year 1897, USSNY Papers (WSHS), 23. 18. Gottheil’s letter is cited in Feinstein, American Zionism, 198. See also YT, Feb. 12, 1899, 4. 19. Gershon Rosenzweig, Masekhet amareka min talmud yankai (New York: Ginzberg, 1892), 6 and unpaginated introduction. Shimon Yitskhak Halevy Finkelstein, Bikurey anavim (Chicago: Meytes, 1899), 10. Cf. his opinion about Gentiles in general, 45. In 1887 Rabbi Moses Weinberger wrote a scathing attack on Jewish life in New York—see Sarna, People Walk on Their Heads, 43–45, 94–97. 20. Bernard Gorin, Di geshikhte fun yidishn teyater, 2 vols. (New York: Literarishe ferlag, 1918), 1:21–27, 150–203. 2:41–86. Tomashevsky, Mayn lebns-geshikhte, 270–271, 332. Nina Warnke, “The Child Who Wouldn’t Grow Up: Yiddish Theater and Its Critics,” in Yiddish Theater: New Approaches, ed. Joel Berkowitz (Oxford: Littman, 2003), 201–216. Faina Burko, “The American Yiddish Theater and Its Audience before World War I,” in Legacy, ed. Berger, 85–96. David S. Lifson, The Yiddish Theater in America (New York: Thomas Yoseloff, 1965), 44–51. Hutchins Hapgood, The Spirit of the Ghetto (1902; repr., New York: Schocken, 1965), 118–135. 21. Yankev Shatsky, ed., Arkhiv far der geshikhte fun yidishn teyater (Vilna: YIVO, 1930), 446–449. See Gordin’s explanation about The Pogrom in Arbeter tsaytung, Apr. 15, 1892, 1. Tsilli Adler, Tsilli Adler dertseylt, 2 vols. (New York: Tsilli Adler Bukh-Komitet, 1959), 1:143–164; Abend-blat, May 2, 1898, 3. Gorin, Geshikhte, 2:82–141; Zalmen Zilbertsvayg, Lexikon fun yidishn teyater, 6 vols. (New York: Elisheva, 1931–1969), 1:392–461, 591–606; USSNY, Report for the Year 1899, 17–18; David Pinsky, “The Yiddish Theater,” Jewish Communal Register of New York City, 1917–1918, 572–577; Cahan, Bleter, 2:382–395; Lulla Rosenfeld, Bright Star of Exile: Jacob Adler and the Yiddish Theater (New York: Thomas Crowell, 1977), 229–231, 261–263; Jacobson, Special Sorrows, 87–92. 22. Blumenfeld wrote in Ha-magid, May 19, 1887, 152. Cahan’s report is in Moses Rischin, ed., Grandma Never Lived in America: The New Journalism of Abraham Cahan (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), 7–8, 27–28. Nachum Sokolov also linked Spain to the Inquisition period—Ha-tsefirah, Aug. 8, 1898, 893; Ha-melits, May 17, 1898, 6 (volunteers); May 23, 1898, 2–3 (Fleischmann’s quote). See also Ha-melits, June 5, 1898, 3; June 8, 1898, 5. 23. The editorial that mentioned shipbuilding appeared in YT, June 5, 1898, 4. July 29, 1898, 4 (McKinley’s peace plan). See also the cartoon with Admiral William T. Sampson as the biblical hero Samson YT, July 5, 1898, 1. See also YT, Apr. 4, 1898, 4; Apr. 12, 1898, 4; and June 2, 1898, 2. NYT, May 1, 1898, 3. Goldfaden and Tomashevsky are quoted in Fred Somkin, “Zion’s Harp by the East River: Jewish-American Popular Songs in Columbus’s Golden Land, 1890–1914,” Perspectives in American History 2 (1985): 206. Cf. Abend-blat, Feb. 16, 1899, 4.

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Notes to Pages 61–63

24. Faygnboym wrote in Tsukunft, May 1894, 38–43. Morris Hillquit, Loose Leaves from a Busy Life (New York: Rand School, 1934), 17. Letter from Emma Goldman to Meyer Shapiro, Aug. 19, 1908, in Emma Goldman: A Documentary History of the American Years, ed. Candace Falk, 2 vols. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 2:66, 357–358. Liebman, Jews and the Left, 596–599. C. Bezalel Sherman, The Jew within American Society: A Study in Ethnic Individuality (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1961), 162–171. Marlene P. Terwilliger, “Jews and Italians and the Socialist Party, New York City 1901–1917” (PhD diss., Union Graduate School, 1977), 53–54. Howe, World of Our Fathers, 291, 523. 25. Abend-blat, Nov. 26, 1896, 4; Forverts, July 4, 1900, 4; Oct. 4, 1900, 4; Oct. 24, 1900, 4. Cf. Forverts, May 30, 1899, 2. The socialist Abend-blat, Sept. 9, 1896, 4, was also disappointed that American workers cheered William Jennings Bryan at an election speeches in Chicago. Louis E. Miller wrote in the Tsukunft, Dec. 1896, 22–24. 26. There are many examples for that; see the “Reminiscences of Joseph Schlossberg” ( June 2, 1965), CUOHROC, 21–22. Louis Miller made a sardonic reference to the provincialism of immigrant Jews, in Tsukunft, Apr. 1892, 16–17. See Morris Hillquit’s description of the Jewish workers, Loose Leaves, 17, 30. Cahan, Bleter, 2:82–83. See also socialist leader Jacob Panken’s remark about the “less cultured” Jewish immigrants— Jacob Panken Papers (WSHS), box 1, folder 5. 27. Tsukunft, Dec. 1896, 571–572; Feb. 1897, 104–105; Oct. 1896, 459–460. Faygnboym also wrote in the Tsukunft, Jan. 1897, 11–16; May 1897, 232–233. The question of socialism’s relative weakness in the United States is still disputed among historians: Eric Foner, “Why Is There No Socialism in the United States?” History Workshop Journal 17 (1984): 57–80; Sean Wilenz, “Against Exceptionalism: Class Consciousness and the American Labor Movement, 1790–1920,” International Labor and Working Class History 26 (1984): 1–24. Cf. Nick Salvatore, “Response to Sean Wilenz,” ibid., 27–29. Seymour Martin Lipset and Gary Marks, It Didn’t Happen Here: Why Socialism Failed in the United States (New York: W. W. Norton, 2000). 28. Forverts, Nov. 4, 1899, 2; Oct. 30, 1900, 4; Nov. 2, 1900, 1. See also Abraham Cahan’s article, Abend-blat, Oct. 22, 1896, 4. 29. Abend-blat, Oct. 1, 1896, 2; Oct. 2, 1896, 2; Oct. 8, 1896, 2. Rischin, Grandma Never Lived in America, xvii–xlii. On nineteenth-century schools in New England, see Carl F. Kaestle, Pillars of the Republic: Common Schools and American Society, 1780–1860 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1983), 159–163, 182–185. 30. Charles S. Bernheimer, ed., The Russian Jew in the United States (Philadelphia: John C. Winston, 1905), 408. 31. YT, June 12, 1899, 8; Apr. 17, 1900, 8; Forverts, Oct. 28, 1899, 4; Nov. 4, 1899, 4. On the way popular magazine depicted Jews, see Puck, July 30, 1879; Harley Erdman, Staging the Jew: The Performance of an American Ethnicity (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1997), 68–71. James H. Dormon, “European Immigrants/Ethnic Theater in Gilded Age

Notes to Pages 63–65

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New York: Reflections of Mentalities,” in Immigration to New York, ed. William Pencak, Selma C. Berrol, and Randall M. Miller (New York: New-York Historical Society, 1991), 148–171. 32. Yidishe gazetn, Feb. 9, 1900, 1. On Tanenboym’s career, see in Niger and Shatsky, Lexikon, 4:25–27. See also Charles H. Parkhurst, Our Fight Against Tammany (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1895), 3–4, 202–213. 33. Tanenboym’s essay is in YT, Nov. 25, 1898, 5. Baranov wrote in Tsukunft, Jan. 1896, 11–12. See also the Abend-blat, Feb. 1, 1899, 2; May 9, 1898, 2; July 21, 1898, 2; Feb. 16, 1899, 4. Philip Krantz argued that the more developed nations would swallow the primitive ones in Vos heist a natsyon? Zaynen di yidn a natsyon? (New York: International Library, 1903), 24–27. See Magidov’s report about America’s indigenous peoples, in Tsukunft, Feb. 1895, 16–20. Goldstein, Price of Whiteness, 11–31, 79–88. Higham, Strangers, 9–11, 87–96, 131–157. 34. The memoirist identified himself as A. Berlow (Vorleb), AJAC, 70:43. Y. Gittelson, AYGB, box 2, 3; Cohen, Out of the Shadow, 104–107; I. A. Beneqvit, Durkhgelebt, 2:45–47. Laidlaw, Population of the City of New York, 275, 289. Ira Rosenwaike, Population History of New York City (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1972), 87, 123. C. Morris Horowitz and Lawrence J. Kaplan, The Jewish Population of New York City, 1900–1975 (New York: Federation of Jewish Philanthropies, 1959), 14–15. 35. On a huge street fight between Jewish butchers and “loafers” in early 1900, see Yidishe gazetn, Jan. 19, 1900, 6. Konrad Bercovici, “The Black Blocks of Manhattan,” Harper’s Magazine, Oct. 1924, 614–615. Harry Lang, “A Few Recollections,” Workmen’s Circle Branch 2, Thirtieth Anniversary Journal (New York: Workmen’s Circle, 1929), 29–33. Jeffrey S. Gurock, When Harlem Was Jewish (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979), 49–50. Samuel P. Abelow, History of Brooklyn Jewry (New York: Scheba, 1937), 12–13. Alter Landesman, Brownsville: The Birth, Development, and Passing of a Jewish Community in New York (New York: Bloch, 1969), 58–60. 36. YT, Apr. 24, 1899, 1; May 1, 1899, 2; Sun, Apr. 25, 1899, 6. Street violence sometimes targeted Jewish businesses—see NYT, Nov. 26, 1893, 12. On the ubiquity of street gangs in New York, see Herbert Asbury, The Gangs of New York: An Informal History of the Underworld (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1928), 264. 37. The Irish “sport” comment is by James F. Richardson, The New York Police: Colonial Times to 1901 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), 166–168. On the Madison Street fight, see YT, Aug. 28, 1900, 4. Frank Moss, American Metropolis: From Knickerbocker Days to the Present Time, 3 vols. (New York: Collier, 1897), 3:240–241. Hasia R. Diner, Erin’s Daughters in America: Irish Immigrant Women in the Nineteenth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983), 45–46, 59–69, 110–114. Barrett and Roediger, “Irish and the ‘Americanization,’” 7–11. Bayor, Neighbors in Confl ict, 3–4. Lawrence McCaffrey, “Looking Forward and Looking Back,” in The New York Irish, ed. Ronald H. Bayor and Timothy J. Meagher (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 229–230.

234

Notes to Pages 66–68

38. Max [Mordecai Z.] Raisin, Dapim me-pinkaso shel rabi (New York: Shulsinger, 1941), 167–168. The following is a partial list of memoirists who described violent and hostile Irish: A. Berlow’s (Vorleb) unpublished account mentioned the loathsomeness of beards and sidelocks to Irish toughs, in AJAC, 70:43–44; Sam Shershevsky, AJAC, 131:29; Gittelson, AYGB, box 2, 3; Adolph Held, AYGB, box 2, 5; Samuel H. Friedman, WWOHLAJC, 7; Mordecai Gorelik, WWOHL-AJC, 21–22. On Jackson Street Park, see Mordechai Danzis, Eygen likht (New York: By the author, 1954), 26–27; YT, Sept. 11, 1900, 4. Thomas Jesse Jones, The Sociology of a New York City Block (New York: Columbia University Press, 1904), 12, 15, 64. Dovid Shub, Fun di amolike yorn (New York: Cyco, 1970), 84. Cf. Harry Golden, The Right Time: An Autobiography (G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1969), 41, 102–103. 39. Zvi Hirsh Masliansky, Masliansky’s droshes fir shabosim un yon-toyvim, 2 vols. (New York: Hebrew, 1915), 1:187. Cahan wrote in the Arbeter tsaytung, July 25, 1890, 4. Tsiyony wrote in the YT, Oct. 19, 1899, 4, 7. On the chutzpa of the Irish conductor, see Getsil Zelikovitsh, Geklibene shriftn (New York: Yubileum komitet, 1913), 42; Yidishe gazetn, May 4, 1900, 18. On the image of Irish police officers in shund (trashy) literature, see John Paley’s novel Di shvartze khevre oder nu york bay tog un bay nakht (New York: Hebrew, n.d.), 38–46. See also the character of the rude Irish janitor in a publication of Workmen’s Circle, branch 465 Lovitcher yubileum (1910–1930) (Dorot), 10–11. 40. Kopelov, Amol in amerike, 157, 164 (italics added). Bukansky edited the Yidishe velt, where his essay appeared on July 4, 1902, 4. Bukansky’s anger was aimed at a planned census of the local Jewish population. See the complaint of a Jewish worker about an Irish coworker—in Forverts, May 27, 1899, 2. I. Raboy, Mayn lebn, 2 vols. (New York: Ykuf, 1947), 2:244. Steiner, From Alien to Citizen, 65–66. Steiner’s antagonism was probably related to an early incident, when an Irishman tripped him up on top of a cattle train and gave him a twisted leg (207–208). Deborah Dwork, “Health Conditions of Immigrant Jews on the Lower East Side of New York, 1880–1914,” Medical History 25 (1981): 1–18. 41. Tsunzer’s comments are reprinted in Tsunzer, Ale verk, 2:205–206. Incidentally, “an Irishman” assaulted Tsunzer at the Jackson Street Park ten years later—YT, Sept. 11, 1900, 4. Jastrow is cited in Naomi W. Cohen, Encounter with Emancipation: The German Jews in the United States, 1830–1914 (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1984), 228. In 1898 the lobbyist Simon Wolf repeated that idea, saying that antisemitism in America “is of foreign origin”—YT, Apr. 3, 1898, 8. 42. Yidishe gazetn, June 13, 1902, 4. YT, July 27, 1902, 4. John J. Appel, “Betzemer: A Nineteenth-Century Cognomen for the Irish,” American Speech 38 (1963): 307–308; 39 (1964): 236–237. Glanz, Jew and Irish, 97–98. For the image of the Irish in New York’s popular entertainment, see Robert W. Snyder, The Voice of the City: Vaudeville and Popular Culture in New York (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 110–114. 43. The story’s Yiddish title is “Oysgenikhtert,” Maccabaean (1901), 41–44. The Tageblat gloated at the misery of a Jewish man who married a non-Jewish woman and suffered her abuse in YT, Mar. 15, 1899, 1; Mar. 16, 1899, 4. See the account of Levi Glas about a Jewish-Irish couple (circa 1898) in AYGB, box 2, 20.

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44. Statistics on teachers’ ethnicity are in Reports of the Immigration Commission, 29:132–133. Louis Eisenstein with Elliot Rosenberg, A Stripe of Tammany’s Tiger (New York: Robert Speller & Sons, 1966), 6. Ruth Jacknow Markowitz, My Daughter, the Teacher: Jewish Teachers in the New York City Schools (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1993), 2, 11. McCaffrey, “Looking Forward,” 230–231. 45. Chaimsohn’s letter appeared in Ha-tsefirah, Apr. 23, 1886, 5–6. Yoffeh, “Passing,” 271 (italics added). Golden, Right Time, 45, 47. Cf. J. R. Schwartz, Orchard Street (New York: Comet Press, 1960), 50, 58. Stephen 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), 123–134, 191–195. Kelly, Wards of Liberty, 24. Selma Cantor Berrol, Immigrants at School, New York City, 1898–1914 (New York: Arno Press, 1978), 51–52, 119–122. Selma Cantor Berrol, “School Days on the Lower East Side: The Italian and Jewish Experience,” New York History 57 (1976): 201–213. 46. Golden, preface to Hapgood, Spirit of the Ghetto, ix. Golden, Right Time, 41, 102–103. The Sun is cited in Glanz, Jew and Irish, 102–103. Heywood Broun and George Britt, Christians Only: A Study in Prejudice (New York: Vanguard Press, 1931), 69–70. On mixed marriages, see Julius Drachsler, Democracy and Assimilation: The Blending of the Immigrant Heritage in America (New York: Macmillan, 1920), 124–128. Cohen, Out of the Shadow, 105, 242. Maurice Fishberg, Jews, Race, and Environment (1911; repr., New Brunswick: Transaction, 2006), 222–223, 517–518. On Jewish-Irish mixed marriages, see Varhayt, July 1, 1909, 1; July 6, 1909, 1; American Jewish Chronicle, Aug. 18, 1916, 456. Robert A. Woods, ed., Americans in Progress: A Settlement Study (1903; repr., New York: Arno, 1970), 67. Wald, House on Henry Street, 21–23. Diner, Erin’s Daughters, 50–51. Riv-Ellen Prell, Fighting to Become Americans: Assimilation and the Trouble between Jewish Women and Jewish Men (Boston: Beacon, 1999), 67–77. 47. Commendations of the Irish appeared in Yidishe gazetn, Aug. 9, 1895, 1; May 16, 1902, 4; YT, July 21, 1898, 4. See, for example, the play Irish Eyes by Abraham Schomer, Abraham Schomer Papers (YIVO), folder 77 (undated), with its very positive depiction of Irish policemen. The stories about Sullivan are quoted in Thomas M. Henderson, Tammany Hall and the New Immigrants: The Progressive Years (New York: Arno, 1976), 4, 10. Eisenstein, Stripe of Tammany’s Tiger, 17–19. Chris McNickle, To Be Mayor of New York: Ethnic Politics in the City (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 13–17, 22. Daniel Czitrom, “Underworlds and Underdogs: Big Tim Sullivan and Metropolitan Politics in New York, 1889–1913,” Journal of American History 78 (1991): 550–551. Cf. Fuchs, Political Behavior, 51. 48. The historian is Khaykin, Yidishe bleter, 243. “Split sides” is in Magidov, Shpigl, 21–22. On Polish Jews who tried to pass as German Jews (in California), see Stern and Kramer, “What’s the Matter with Warsaw?,” 301–304. Borgenicht, Happiest Man, 305. Schur’s letter to Yosef Yehuda Leib Sosnitz (Mar. 31, 1892) is printed in E. R. Malachi, ed., Igrot sofrim (New York: Dr. Shmuel Miller’s Publication, 1931), 120–121 (Yechezkel Sarasohn insulted him). On Schur, see Jacob Kabakoff, “The Role of Wolf Schur as

236

Notes to Pages 70–72

Hebraist and Zionist,” Essays in American Jewish History (Cincinnati: American Jewish Archives, 1958), ed. Jacob R. Marcus, 425–456. Harkavy, Prakim, 37–38. Diner, “Before the Promised City,” 43–62. 49. B. Hoffman (Tsivyen), Fuftzik yor kloakmakher yunyon, 1886–1936 (New York: Cloak Operators Union Local 117, 1936), 24–25. Yoysef Kahan, Di Yidish-anarkhistishe bavegung in amerike (Philadelphia: Radical Library, Workmen’s Circle, 1945), 34–40. Grinstein, Rise of the Jewish Community, 31–33. Ronald Sanders, The Lower East Side Jews: An Immigrant Generation (formerly titled The Downtown Jews in 1969; corrected edition published in 1987; repr., Mineola, NY: Dover, 1999), 46–47, 75–79. Nadel, Little Germany, 68–69, 99–103, 161. Glanz, Studies in Judaica Americana, 122–151. 50. Fraynd, Mar. 1911, 117–118. Parlamentarishe ruls vi tsu firen mitingen fun yunyons, lodzhen, un andere faraynen (New York: Arbeter tsaytung, 1891), 3–5. See Borekh Rivkin, “Di sotsiale role fun di landsmanshaftn,” in Di yidishe landsmanshaftn fun nu york (New York: Yiddish Writers’ Union, 1938), ed. I. E. Rontsh, 68–108. Soyer, Immigrant Associations, 30, 38, 48–81, 204–205. Nathan M. Kaganoff, “The Jewish Landsmanshaftn in New York City in the Period Preceding World War I,” AJH 76 (1986): 56–66. Cf. Michael R. Weisser, A Brotherhood of Memory: Jewish Landsmanshaftn in the New World (New York: Basic, 1985). Hoedl, Vom Shtetl, 175–182. On similar societies among non-Jewish immigrants, see John Bodnar, The Transplanted: A History of Immigration in Urban America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), 120–130. 51. Samuel Gompers, Seventy Years of Life and Labor (New York: Dutton, 1925), 47, 69–71. Cahan, Bleter, 2:256. Vaynshteyn, Fertsik yor, 78–80. Hartmut Keil, “German Working-Class Radicalism after the Civil War,” in The German-American Encounter: Confl ict and Cooperation between Two Cultures 1800–2000, ed. Frank Trommler and Elliot Shore (New York: Berghahn, 2001), 37–48. Stanley Nadel, “From the Barricades of Paris to the Streets of New York: German Artisans and the European Roots of American Labor Radicalism,” Labor History 30 (1989): 47–75. Morris U. Schappes, “The Political Origins of the United Hebrew Trades,” Journal of Ethnic Studies 5 (1977): 13–41. Michels, Fire in Their Hearts, 41–49. 52. Emma Goldman, Living My Life, 2 vols. (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1931), 1:34–40. Beneqvit, Durkhgelebt, 2:74. Vaynshteyn, Fertsik yor, 56, 78–79, 90. Vaynshteyn, Yidishe yunyons, 427–428. Magidov, Shpigl, 21–22. Cahan, Bleter, 2:87–90. Yanovsky, Ershte yorn, 83–85, 92–95. Chaim Leyb Vaynberg, Fertzik yor in kamf far sotzialer bafrayung (Los Angeles: Vaynberg bukh komitet, 1952), 24–26. Paul Avrich, Anarchist Portraits (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), 178–182. Carl Wittke, The German-Language Press in America (Frankfort: University of Kentucky Press, 1957), 112, 173–174. 53. Bluestone, “Memoirs,” 54. The other German landlord’s story is in Unger, Mayn heymshtetl strykov, 240–241. Kopelov, Amol in amerike, 133–135, 157, 163–164. See the report of Yehuda Buchalter about German immigrants’ beer drinking in Ha-tsefirah, Oct. 21, 1884, 317. On the displacement of German workers in the garment industry, see U.S. Census Bureau, Populations (1880), 754, 759; (1890), 2, table 109. U.S. Industrial

Notes to Pages 72–77

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Commission, Report of the Industrial Commission, 19 vols. (Washington DC: Government Printing Office, 1901), 14:83. Judith Greenfeld, “The Role of the Jews in the Development of the Clothing Industry,” YIVO Annual 2–3 (1947–48): 180–204. 54. Vaynshteyn, Fertsik yor, 505–507. Sam Carasik, AJAC, 173:60, 64–65. See also the Yiddish play by Yankev Ter, Der amerikaner arbeter, in Natur un lebn (New York: Baron, 1898), 25–28. On Jewish responses to the visit of Hermann Ahlwardt, a German antisemitic agitator, see Yidishe gazetn, Nov. 29, 1895, 1; Dec. 6, 1895, 17; Dec. 13, 1895, 4, 17; Dec. 20, 1895, 5; Abend-blat, Dec. 6, 1895, 1; Dec. 16, 1895, 1. See also the reports in Haivry, Nov. 22, 1895 (not paginated); Ha-tsefirah, Dec. 26, 1895, 1100–1101; Jan. 2, 1896, 1131; Jan. 3, 1896, 1134; Jan. 7, 1896, 1145. 55. Eisenstein, Otsar zikhronotay, 79, 98. Ha-techiya, Feb. 23, 1900, 7. Kotlyor, Derekh, 10. Asbury, Gangs of New York, 233. 56. Hillquit, Loose Leaves, 41. Beneqvit, Durkhgelebt, 2:74. YT, June 12, 1899, 8 (Fromenson quote: italics added). Tomashevsky, Mayn lebns-geshikhte, 99, 239. Jones, Sociology of a New York City Block, 15. Schlossberg, CUOHROC, 9–13. Cf. a letter by Wilhelmina Wiebusch (1884) to her family in Germany about her work as a housemaid for a Jewish family in Brooklyn, in Walter D. Kamphoefner, Wolfgang Helbich, and Ulrika Sommer, eds., News from the Land of Freedom: German Immigrants Write Home, trans. Susan Carter Vogel (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), 595–596. 57. Hapgood, Spirit of the Ghetto, 3. Orthodox journalist Gedaliah Bublik came to a similar conclusion, in Min ha-meitsar (New York: By the author, 1923), 19–23. See Abraham Cahan’s distinction between genuine Americans and the American-born offspring of immigrants, in Tsukunft, Aug. 1896, 3; Forverts, Oct. 4, 1900, 4; Yidishe velt, July 4, 1902, 4. Tomashevsky, Mayn lebns-geshikhte, 68. On the Jewish distinction between the surrounding peasantry and those seen as carriers of higher culture, see Mendelsohn, On Modern Jewish Politics, 37–38. Slezkine, Jewish Century, 64.

chapter 4 — “The American Is Not Very Musical and Not So Sociable” 1. A. H. Fromenson published his address, “The Sociological Function of the Jew,” in Maccabaean, May 1906, 185–186. YT, Aug. 17, 1902, 8. See also YT, June 12, 1899, 8. On Fromenson, see Leo M. Glassman, ed., Biographical Encyclopaedia of American Jews (New York: Maurice Jacobs & Leo M. Glassman, 1935), 161. 2. YT, May 15, 1902, 1; May 16, 1902, 1, 4; May 23, 1902, 1; June 5, 1902, 1; Forverts, May 15, 1902, 1; May 19, 1902, 1. Paula E. Hyman, “Immigrant Women and Consumer Protest: The New York City Kosher Meat Boycott of 1902,” AJH 70 (1980): 91–105. Jenna Weissman Joselit, “The Landlord as Czar: Pre–World War I Tenant Activity,” in The Tenant Movement in New York City, 1904–1984, ed. Ronald Lawson and Mark Naison (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1986), 39–50. The reporter wrote for the Tribune, Apr. 7, 1904, 1; Apr. 9, 1904, 1. Susan A. Glenn, Daughters of the Shtetl: Life and Labor in the Immigrant Generation (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), 210–211.

238

Notes to Pages 77–79

3. The attack is detailed in two studies: Leonard Dinnerstein, “The Funeral of Rabbi Jacob Joseph,” in Anti-Semitism in American History, ed. David A. Gerber (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986), 275–301 (Dinnerstein, however, has not used Yiddishlanguage sources); Edward T. O’Donnell, “Hibernians versus Hebrews? A New Look at the 1902 Jacob Joseph Funeral Riot,” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 6 (2007): 209–225. On the rabbi’s career, see Abraham Cahan, “The Late Rabbi Joseph,” AH, Aug. 1, 1902, 311–314; Abraham J. Karp, “New York Chooses a Chief Rabbi,” PAJHS 44 (1955): 129–198; Jeffrey S. Gurock, Orthodox Jews in America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009), 113–118. 4. Sun, July 31, 1902, 1–2; Aug. 1, 1902, 1; Forverts, July 30, 1902, 1; YT, July 31, 1902, 1–2, 4; Yidishe gazetn, Aug. 1, 1902, 2. O’Donnell has argued that there were more German Americans than Irish Americans among the arrested, perhaps since Germans felt displaced by Jews more than the Irish, in “Hibernians versus Hebrews?” 216–217. Dinnerstein, “Funeral,” 282–286. 5. NYT, July 31, 1902, 1; Aug. 1, 1902, 4; Sun, July 31, 1902, 1–2; Aug. 1, 1902, 1; Tribune, July 31, 1902, 1; Aug. 1, 1902, 3; AH, Aug. 15, 1902, 355–356. Philip Cowen, Memories of an American Jew (New York: International Press, 1932), 289. 6. Yidishe gazetn, Aug. 8, 1902, 1–2. “Hard on the Jews,” Life 40, Sept. 25, 1902, 266. NYT, Aug. 1, 1902, 14; Aug. 2, 1902, 2; Yidisher zhurnal, Aug. 8, 1902, 2; Tribune, Aug. 1, 1902, 3. Zvi Hirsh Masliansky, Masliansky’s zikhroynes: Fiertsig yor lebn un kemfn (New York: Zrubavel, 1924), 201–202. Dinnerstein, “Funeral,” 287–288. 7. YT, Aug. 8, 1902, 2; Aug. 10, 1902, 4; Forverts, Aug. 18, 1902, 4. See the memoir of Isaac Asofsky, WWOHL-AJC, 3, 6. NYT, Aug. 2, 1902, 2. 8. Yidishe gazetn, Aug. 22, 1902, 12. YT, Aug. 8, 1902, 4. Aug. 5, 1902, 1. Avner Tanenboym argued that the few Jewish police officers in New York “were suppressed by their Irish comrades,” in Yidishe velt, Aug. 5, 1902, 4. Cf. O’Donnell’s assertion, “Nowhere are they [the assailants] referred to as Irish,” in “Hibernians versus Hebrews?” 215. An early account (1924) that identified the workers as Germans is Masliansky, Masliansky’s zikhroynes, 201–202. See also an undated Yiddish newspaper clipping in the Benjamin Koenigsberg Papers (Yeshiva University) Box 14, folder 9. 9. Forverts, July 30, 1902, 1; Aug. 4, 1902, 1 (“Christians”). Arbeter tsaytung, Aug. 9, 1902, 4; Yidishe gazetn, Aug. 1, 1902, 2 (“Wild shkotsim”). Yidishe velt, Aug. 3, 1902, 4. YT, Aug. 18, 1902, 4. Gerald Kurland, Seth Low: The Reformer in an Urban and Industrial Age (New York: Twayne, 1971), 118–119. 10. Barondess and the other (unnamed) speaker are cited in NYT, Aug. 2, 1902, 2; Yidishe velt, Aug. 3, 1902, 4. On that paper, see Lucy S. Dawidowicz, “Louis Marshall’s Yiddish Newspaper, The Jewish World: A Study in Contrasts,” JSS 25 (1963): 102–132. Howe, World of Our Fathers, 112–115. 11. On the society’s meeting, see the YT, Aug. 8, 1902, 2. Although he is mentioned by only his last name, it seems that the main speaker was the Lithuanian-born Dr. Zvi

Notes to Pages 79–81

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Hirsh Rabinowitz, who came to America four years beforehand—Reyzin, Leksikon, 4:41–42. Yidishe gazetn, Aug. 8, 1902, 1; YT, Aug. 21, 1902, 4; July 31, 1902, 4; Aug. 6, 1902, 4. 12. Forverts, Aug. 1, 1902, 4; Aug. 2, 1902, 4; Aug. 6, 1902, 4; Yidishe velt, July 30, 1902, 1. Beneqvit, Durkhgelebt, 2:184–185. Cf. Arbeter tsaytung, Aug. 2, 1902, 1; Aug. 9, 1902, 4; FAS, Aug. 8, 1902, 1, 9; Aug. 22, 1902, 8. 13. YT, Aug. 5, 1902, 1; Aug. 8, 1902, 4; Aug. 19, 1, 4; Aug. 21, 1902, 4; Aug. 25, 1902, 1; Aug 29, 1902, 1; Sept. 1, 1902, 1. Soyfer’s letter appeared YT, Aug. 27, 1902, 1. Forverts, Sept. 8, 1902, 1. A report about a rabbi who was assaulted on a Brooklyn trolley is in NYT, Aug. 25, 1902, 7. Dinnerstein, “Funeral,” 276–278, 287–290. 14. Forverts, Aug. 19, 1902, 4; Aug. 29, 1902, 1. YT, July 31, 1902, 4; Aug. 3, 1902, 4. Oct. 1, 1902, 5; Hebrew Standard, Aug. 8, 1902, 6. Tomashevsky, Mayn lebns-geshikhte, 68. See also Moss, American Metropolis, 3:160–161. The reaction to his book appeared in the YT, Jan. 21, 1898, 4. Kurland, Seth Low, 118–120, 140–192. Steven C. Swett, “The Test of a Reformer: A Study of Seth Low, New York City Mayor, 1902–1903,” New-York Historical Society Quarterly 44 (1960): 5–41. 15. Adler, Voice of America, 112–147. Blaustein, Memoirs, 195, 217. Wald, House on Henry Street, 229. Schoenberg, “American Reaction,” 262–283. Penkower, “Kishinev Pogrom,” 187–225. Edward H. Judge, Easter in Kishinev: Anatomy of a Pogrom (New York: New York University Press, 1992), 49–75. Shlomo Lambroza, “Jewish Responses to Pogroms in Late Imperial Russia,” in Living with Antisemitism: Modern Jewish Responses, ed. Jehuda Reinharz (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1987), 266–267. Frug’s poem appeared in the Fraynd (St. Petersburg), Apr. 28, 1903, 3. 16. See the Morgen zhurnal’s front page, Apr. 25 through Apr. 30, 1903. Peter Wiernik, “The Jew in Russia,” in Russian Jew, ed. Bernheimer, 20–21. 17. Barondess wrote in the Yidishe folk, Aug. 27, 1915, 1. See also his speech cited in NYT, May 16, 1903, 3. On Roosevelt, see Oscar S. Straus, Under Four Administrations: From Cleveland to Taft (Boston: Houghton Miffl in, 1922), 170–173. 18. In Adler, Voice of America, 112–147, there is a list of the New York meetings, speeches, and participants. Editorials of the New York press are in ibid., 330–426. Forverts, May 1, 1903, 1; May 13, 1903, 1. Cowen, Memories of an American Jew, 272. On Cleveland, see S. L. Blumenson, “The Politicians,” Commentary 21 (1956): 258–259. Simon Wolf, The Presidents I Have Known from 1860–1918 (Washington, DC: Byron S. Adams, 1918), 194–197. 19. See the laudatory letter from Joseph Barondess to Hearst (May 20, 1903), Joseph Barondess Papers (NYPL), letterbook 8. Hebrew Standard, Dec. 29, 1905, 1–2. The “Hoist” chant is in NYT, Nov. 3, 1905, 4. A collection of the New York American and Journal editorials is in Adler, Voice of America, 330–352. Schoenberg, “American Reaction,” 273. Rischin, Promised City, 229–233. Even in his 1909 mayoral bid, Hearst retained a considerable Jewish vote. W. A. Swanberg, Citizen Hearst: A Biography of William Randolph Hearst (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1961), 195–207, 230–238.

240

Notes to Pages 82–84

20. Sulzer’s speech appears in NYT, Nov. 1, 1912, 10. On Sulzer’s popularity among immigrant Jews, see the “Reminiscences of Jonah J. Goldstein” (Dec. 10, 1965), CUOHROC, 3:437–440. Der yudisher emigrant 10 (1910): 7, 10 described Sulzer as a Jew. George W. Blake, ed., Sulzer’s Short Speeches (New York: Ogilvie, 1912), 44–46, 184–201. Eisenstein, Stripe of Tammany’s Tiger, 21–22. Arthur W. Thompson and Robert A. Hart, The Uncertain Crusade: America and the Russian Revolution of 1905 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1970), 108–109. 21. Forverts, May 12, 1903, 4 (parenthesis for “only those two” in the original). A Jewish correspondent from New York argued that the commissioner was far from being antisemitic, Fraynd (St. Petersburg), Mar. 24, 1903, 2. On the Forverts in those years, see the sharp letter by Isaac A. Hourwich (Aug. 4, 1903) to the Forverts Association, Isaac A. Hourwich Papers (YIVO), reel 8. 22. Forverts, June 16, 1903, 4. See also Forverts, Nov. 24, 1906, 4. Cahan’s description of the Kishinev pogrom is in Rischin, Grandma Never Lived in America, 43–49. Higham, Strangers, 112–113, 162–165. See also Ehud Manor, ‘Iton le-ma’an ha-enoshut: Ha-forverts; Mehagrim, sotsyalism, u-politika yehudit be-nu-york, 1890–1917 (Tel Aviv and Haifa: Hakibbutz ha-meuchad u-mekhon Guteiner, 2008), 108–109, 116–120. 23. Glanz, Jew and Italian, 9–11, 38, 94. See the comments by Glanz and Lawrence Fuchs (“de-puritanize”) in Jean A. Scarpaci, ed., The Interaction of Italians and Jews in America: Proceedings of the Seventh Annual Conference of the American Italian Historical Association (Staten Island, NY: American Italian Historical Association, 1975), 101, 107–108. Cf. Richard Juliani and Mark Hutter, “Research Problems in the Study of Italian and Jewish Interaction in Community Setting,” Interaction of Italians and Jews in America, ed. Scarpaci, 43–52. “Harmoniously” is by Joseph Schlossberg, CUOHROC, 35–36. Vaynshteyn, Fertsik yor, 249. 24. Vagman wrote in the Di nu-yorker yudishe folkstsaytung, Feb. 17, 1888, 5. On the “pig market,” see Riis, How the Other Half Lives, 91–92. Kobrin, Mayne fuftsik yor, 31–32. Moshe Vaysman, A halber yorhundert in amerike (Tel Aviv: I. L. Peretz bibliotek, 1960), 43. See also Hyman Plumka AJAC, 19:5, 23. Teller, Strangers and Natives, 6. 25. George E. Pozzetta, “The Italians of New York City, 1890–1914” (PhD diss., University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill, 1971), 76, 94–96, 185–186. Donna R. Gabaccia, From Sicily to Elizabeth Street: Housing and Social Change among Italian Immigrants, 1880–1930 (Albany: New York State University Press, 1984), 63–64, 94–95, 109–111. Robert Anthony Orsi, The Madonna of 115th Street: Faith and Community in Italian Harlem, 1880– 1950 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), 14–21, 31–33. Federal Writers’ Project, The Italians of New York: A Survey (New York: Random House, 1938), 18–22. Kessner, Golden Door, 56, 155. Hermalin wrote in Ha-magid, Feb. 10, 1887, 44 (italics added). Yidishe gazetn, Aug. 15, 1902, 2; Aug. 22, 1902, 6; YT, Jan. 13, 1899, 1. On Italian violence, see also the Forverts, Sept. 3, 1900, 1; Oct. 2, 1905, 1, and the memoir of Kushner, Lebn, 144, 148. Sam Liptzin, Amol iz geven (New York: Amcho, 1951), 38–40, 101–102.

Notes to Pages 85–87

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26. William McAdoo, Guarding a Great City (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1906), 148–149. Borgenicht, Happiest Man, 221–222, 226. YT, Jan. 18, 1901, 1; Feb. 3, 1901, 1; Forverts, Oct. 2, 1905, 1; June 8, 1908, 1. Rosenfeld, Shriftn, 3:172. Max Davis, AJAC, 129:14–15, 20–21. 27. Jones, Sociology of a New York City Block, 24, 103. Shub, Fun di amolike yorn, 301–302. Forverts, Oct. 21, 1904, 4. Gilbert Osofsky, Harlem: The Making of a Ghetto (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1968), 88–89. Henderson, Tammany Hall, 147–150. Gurock, When Harlem Was Jewish, 18, 49–50. Glenn, Daughters of the Shtetl, 188–199. 28. Thomas Monroe Pitkin and Francesco Cordasco, The Black Hand: A Chapter in Ethnic Crime (Totowa, NJ: Littlefield, Adams, 1977), 3, 17, 52–63. Humbert S. Nelli, The Business of Crime: Italians and Syndicate Crime in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), 69–100. McAdoo, Guarding a Great City, 148. Tribune, Oct. 1, 1904, 1; Forverts, Oct. 2, 1904, 1; NYT, Oct. 8, 1904, 16. Pozzetta, “Italians of New York City,” 185–186, 202–203. 29. Forverts, Oct. 18, 1904, 4. Joseph, Jewish Immigration, 113–123. Shlomo Lambroza, “Pogroms of 1903–1906,” in Pogroms, ed. Klier and Lambroza, 191–247. Rebecca Kobrin, “The 1905 Revolution Abroad: Mass Migration, Russian Jewish Liberalism, and American Jewry, 1903–1914,” in The Revolution of 1905 and Russia’s Jews, ed. Stefani Hoffman and Ezra Mendelsohn (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 227–244. Zosa Szajkowski, “The Impact of the Russian Revolution of 1905 on American Jewish Life,” YAJSS 17 (1978): 54–118. 30. Forverts, Aug. 8, 1905, 4. Similar Jewish pride vis-à-vis the Americans but on the topic of alcohol consumption is in YT, Dec. 27, 1906, 4. Thompson and Hart, Uncertain Crusade, 36. 31. On the Bund’s autonomism and its rivals’ territorialism, see Milkh, “Natsionale programe,” Tsukunft, May 1904, 26–32. John (Yoysef ) Mill, Tsukunft, Feb. 1918, 117–120. See the letter (dated Apr. 19–24, 1903) from Lipsky to Rita Scherman, Louis Lipsky Papers (AJHS), box 18, folder 7. Burgin, Geshikhte, 615. Kopelov, Amol in amerike, 454–461. See the letter of Leib Hutnakh to Kalman Marmor, July 4, 1905, Kalman Marmor Papers (YIVO), reel 495.41. Shub, Fun di amolike yorn, 87–88. Frankel, Prophecy and Politics, 210–257, 321–328, 473–499. 32. Avner Tanenboym’s column appeared in the YT, July 9, 1901, 4. See also Getsil Zelikovitsh, YT, Oct. 25, 1909, 4. Cahan’s quote is in Forverts, May 12, 1903, 4. Litvin wrote in the Tsukunft, Oct. 1904, 28–34. Vintshevsky, Erinerungen, 128. Cf. Kranz, Vos heist, 32–36. On the idea of a common origin in Yiddish folklore, see Yosef Guri, Vos darft ir mer? 2000 bilderishe oysdruken in yidish ( Jerusalem: Hebrew University, Russian Studies Department, 2002), 126. Goldstein, Price of Whiteness, 95–98. On “Zera Yisrael,” see Shaye J. D. Cohen, The Beginnings of Jewishness: Boundaries, Varieties, Uncertainties (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 337–338, 343. John M. Efron, Defenders of the Race: Jewish Doctors and Race Science in Fin-De-Siècle Europe (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 131–133, 178–179.

242

Notes to Pages 88–91

33. Varhayt, Dec. 4, 1905, 1; YT, Dec. 5, 1905, 1, 4; Forverts, Dec. 5, 1905, 1, 4; NYT, Dec. 5, 1905, 6. Arthur A. Goren, The Politics and Public Culture of American Jews (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 30–82. Frankel, Prophecy and Politics, 487–492. Szajkowski, “Impact of the Russian Revolution,” 64–67. 34. Rosenfeld, Shriftn, 3:70–76. Marc Miller, Representing the Immigrant Experience: Morris Rosenfeld and the Emergence of Yiddish Literature in America (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2007), 146–151. 35. For an extended analysis of that episode, see my article “‘They Are Slitting the Throats of Jewish Children’: The 1906 New York School Riot and Contending Images of Gentiles,” AJH 94 (2008): 175–196. 36. Varhayt, June 28, 1906, 1, 4; YT, June 28, 1906, 1; June 29, 1906, 1; Forverts, June 29, 1906, 1; MZ, June 29, 1906, 1; NYT, June 28, 1906, 4; June 29, 1906, 9; Sun, June 28, 1906, 1–2. William H. Maxwell, “Stories of the Lives of Real Teachers,” The World’s Work 18 (Aug. 1909): 11879. Kelly, Wards of Liberty, 122–131. Alan M. Kraut, Silent Travelers: Germs, Genes, and the “Immigrant Menace” (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), 228–232. Kraut has not used any Yiddish sources in his short segment on the school panic. In her memoirs, physician and reformer Dr. S. Josephine Baker justified the parents who were not properly notified—Fighting for Life (New York: Macmillan, 1939), 140–141. I thank Kendra Smith-Howard who referred me to Baker’s book. 37. NYT, June 28, 1906, 4; Sun, June 28, 1906, 1–2. M. A. Lipkind, “Some East Side Physicians at the Close of the Nineteenth Century,” Medical Leaves 4 (1941): 103–109. A. J. Rongy, “Half a Century of Jewish Medical Activities,” ibid. 1 (1937): 151–163. Kelly, Wards of Liberty, 120–121. 38. The parents’ shouts are cited in Kelly, Wards of Liberty, 124; Evening Post, June 27, 1906, 3; Tribune, June 29, 1906, 8; NYT, June 28, 1906, 4. Sun, June 28, 1906, 1–2; June 29, 1906, 2. Kraut, Silent Travelers, 230–232. AJYB 5667 (1906/1907): 65, 70–85. 39. MZ, June 29, 1906, 4. Stern is quoted in the Forverts, June 28, 1906, 1; and the Sun, June 28, 1906, 2. YT, June 29, 1906, 1; Varhayt, June 28, 1906, 1; Tribune, June 28, 1906, 1; Sun, June 28, 1906, 1. Kelly, Wards of Liberty, 121–124. See also Myra Kelly’s article “Recent East Side Riots,” Collier’s, July 21, 1906, 15–16, for which the Tageblat, Aug. 6, 1906, 8, accused her of anti-Jewish prejudice. 40. The physician is cited in MZ, June 29, 1906, 1. The teacher is quoted in Evening Post, June 27, 1906, 3. The “bury” quote is in MZ, June 27, 1906. The “parents’ stupidity” is in the YT, June 29, 1906, 1. Kelly, “Recent East Side Riots,” 15–16. See also Varhayt, June 28, 1906, 4. The harshest Jewish critic of the parents’ behavior was Julia Richman, the district school superintendent (Sun, June 28, 1906, 2). Selma Berrol, Julia Richman: A Notable Woman (Philadelphia: Balch Institute, 1993), 61, 82–84, 91–92. 41. MZ, June 28, 1906, 1, 5; June 29, 1906, 1, 4; July 1, 1906, 4. 42. YT, June 28, 1906, 1. Forverts, June 29, 1906, 1. On the concepts of “civilization” and “barbarism” among Yiddish-speaking immigrants, see Goldstein, Price of Whiteness, 79–83. Jacobson, Special Sorrows, 181, 196–198. Cuddihy, Ordeal of Civility, 3–14.

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43. Varhayt, June 28, 1906, 4. There were few Jewish teachers in the New York school system before 1917—see Brumberg, Going to America, 137–138. Cf. Markowitz, My Daughter, 12. On Miller and the beginning of the Varhayt, see Khaykin, Yidishe bleter, 175–195; Danzis, Eygen likht, 32; Sanders, East Side Jews, 354–357, 372–374. 44. Fromenson wrote in YT, June 29, 1906, 1, 10 (italics added). “The same fools” is in YT, June 29, 1906, 1. Varhayt, June 29, 1906, 1. NYT, June 29, 1906, 9. Sun, June 29, 1906, 2. On the Jewish “obsession with public relations,” see Diner, In the Almost Promised Land, 64–65. 45. See the letter from Jacob H. Schiff to James B. Reynolds, Oct. 15, 1896, USSNY Papers (WSHS), series 2. See the letter from Bernard Richards to Benjamin Koenigsberg (Dec. 20, 1912) on the heightened missionary enticement during Christmas week, in Benjamin Koenigsberg Papers (Yeshiva University), box 17, folder 1. Benjamin Koenigsberg, WWOHL-AJC, 39–40. Yaakov Ariel, Evangelizing the Jewish People: Missions to the Jews in America, 1880–2000 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 55–68. Jonathan Sarna has argued that the missionary threat strengthened American Jews by prompting them to improve Jewish education, charity, and social work, in “The Impact of Nineteenth-Century Christian Missions on American Jews,” in Jewish Apostasy in the Modern World, ed. Todd M. Endelman (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1987), 232–254. Jeffrey Gurock has reached opposite conclusions—as any other communal politics, this issue was divisive—in Jewish Apostasy, ed. Endelman, 255–271. See also Horowitz, Reckless Rites, 149–185. 46. Ha-tsefirah, Mar. 14, 1889, 212–213; Evening Post, June 17, 1899, 2; Forverts, May 24, 1899, 1; Oct. 11, 1900, 4. YT, May 23, 1899, 1; May 25, 1899, 1; Yidishe gazetn, Feb. 2, 1900, 1. Benjamin Koenigsberg, WWOHL-AJC, 39–40. Vaynshteyn, Fertsik yor, 109–110. Robert  A. Woods and Albert J. Kennedy, eds., Handbook of Settlements (New York: Charities, 1911), 235–243. David Max Eichhorn, Evangelizing the American Jew (New York: Jonathan David, 1978), 156–157. Gurock, American Jewish Orthodoxy, 153–166. Jonathan Sarna, “The American Jewish Response to Nineteenth-Century Christian Mission,” in Essential Papers, ed. Cohen, 21–43. 47. Schiff is quoted in Dollinger, Quest for Inclusion, 19. See also Jewish Charities, Nov. 1910, 4; Mar. 1913, 15–16; and the letter from the “Young People’s Anti-Mission League” to Israel Friedlaender (Sept. 9, 1912) on how missionary activity was often disguised as charity or settlement work, Israel Friedlaender Papers ( JTS), box 3, folder “Sept. 1912.” Ha-Ivry, Dec. 27, 1895, 1. See the report (Dec. 1897) by the headworker of the University Settlement House, James B. Reynolds, USSNY Papers (WSHS), series 2. On “Stealing Jewish Children,” see AH, Oct. 16, 1903, 705–706; Dec. 27, 1912, 270. Hebrew Standard, Dec. 11, 1906, 8. Ariel, Evangelizing, 55–62. 48. Although there is a study of the 1906 school strike, its context and Yiddish sources were hardly examined (Leonard Bloom, “A Successful Jewish Boycott of the New York City Public Schools—Christmas 1906,” AJH 70 (1980): 180–188). Goren, New York Jews, 97–98. On similar debates, see Naomi W. Cohen, Jews in Christian America: The Pursuit of Religious Equality (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 81–87.

244

Notes to Pages 93–96

49. NYT, December 25, 1906, 8; Nov. 21, 1907, 1; Tribune, Dec. 25, 1906, 2; MZ, Dec. 10, 1906, 4; Dec. 24, 1906, 1; Dec. 25, 1906, 1, 4; YT, Dec. 12, 1906, 1; Dec. 24, 1906, 1, 4; Dec. 25, 1906, 1, 4. Bloom, “Successful Jewish Boycott,” 184–186. On the OU, see Gurock, American Jewish Orthodoxy, 10–17; Jonathan D. Sarna, American Judaism: A History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 185–187. On Christmas in New York’s public schools a decade later, see Isaac Rosengarten, “The Jewish Teacher in the New York Public Schools,” Jewish Forum 1 ( July 1918): 320. 50. Varhayt, Dec. 8, 1906, 4. MZ, Dec. 26, 1906, 4 (italics added). Hebrew Standard, Dec. 21, 1906, 8. In early December 1906 the Tageblat, Dec. 9, 1906, 1, was alarmed by a few hostile readers’ letters in the New York Herald, printing a headline, “New York’s Antisemites Raise Their Heads.” 51. Yidisher kemfer, Dec. 14, 1906, 1. On Jewish education in New York, see Alexander  M. Dushkin, Jewish Education in New York City (New York: Bureau of Jewish Education, 1918), 63–99. Mordecai M. Kaplan and Bernard Cronson, “First Community Survey of Jewish Education in New York City, 1909,” Jewish Education 20 (1949): 113–116. Chaim Zhitlovsky, “Yidish un hebreish,” in Gezamlte shriftn, 4:156. See an even blunter version in the Chaim Zhitlovsky Papers (YIVO), folder 1221. On the National Radical Schools, see Varhayt, Apr. 18, 1909, 4. Tsukerman, Zikhroynes, 1:337–343. L. Shpizman, “Etapn in der geshikhte fun der tsiyonistishe arbeter-bavegung in tsofn amerike,” in Geshikhte fun der tsienistishe bavegung in tsofen amerike (New York: Yidisher kemfer, 1955), 261–273. Mark A. Raider, The Emergence of American Zionism (New York: New York University Press, 1998), 30–35. 52. Zeidel, Immigrants, 26–50. Marion T. Bennett, American Immigration Policies: A History (Washington DC: Public Affairs Press, 1963), 26–28. On the Jewish protests and petition against the bill, see Forverts, June 4, 1906, 7. Hebrew Standard, June 8, 1906, 4. 53. On working with other immigrant groups, see the letter from the president of HIAS, Leon Sanders, to Jacob Schiff, Jan. 10, 1911, HIAS Papers (YIVO), reel 15.16. Amerikaner, Jan. 13, 1911, 1–3. Judith S. Goldstein, The Politics of Ethnic Pressure: The American Jewish Committee Fight Against Immigration Restriction, 1907–1917 (New York: Garland, 1990), 66–134. Sheldon Morris Neuringer, American Jewry and United States Immigration Policy, 1881–1953 (1969; repr., New York: Arno, 1980), 82–84. 54. Letter from Joseph Barondess to Irving Lipsitch, June 4, 1909, Joseph Barondess Papers (NYPL), letterbook 23. In 1909 Lipsitch replaced Harkavy as representative of HIAS in Ellis Island. See Williams’s decree in the William Williams Papers (NYPL), box 5. See the nativist letters of support, like the one by Edwin W. Cady ( July 10, 1909), box 2; or the one from Madison Grant ( July 16, 1909), box 2. YT, July 13, 1909, 1. The immigrant’s letter appeared in the Forverts, July 7, 1909, 1. Howe, World of Our Fathers, 55–56. 55. Yudisher emigrant 1 (1908): 13–14; 2 (1908): 18; 14 (1909): 6–12; 15 (1909): 2, 4–6; 22 (1909): 1–2 (on deported immigrants who had enough money). Already in 1907 Hirsh Masliansky warned an unnamed relative about the increasing strictness at Ellis Island— letter dated, Mar. 5, 1907, Hirsh Masliansky Papers ( JNUL), folder 225.

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56. YT, July 13, 1909, 4; Cf. May 30, 1899, 4, 7. The theme of “hyphenated Americans” would peak during World War I—Desmond King, Making Americans: Immigration, Race, and the Origins of the Diverse Democracy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 29–30, 90–91. Higham, Strangers, 198–199, 242. 57. The pupil’s letter ( July 18, 1909) is in the William Williams Papers (NYPL), box 2. Forverts, July 4, 1909, 1, 4; July 5, 1909, 4; July 7, 1909, 1; July 14, 1909, 1. See also Varhayt, July 8, 1909, 1, 4; July 10, 1909, 5; July 14, 1909, 4. 58. Tanenboym’s piece appeared in MZ, Oct. 31, 1909, 4. Varhayt, July 31, 1912, 4. YT, Aug. 1, 1912, 4. William Jay Gaynor, Some of Mayor Gaynor’s Letters and Speeches (New York: Greaves, 1913), 21, 91–92. On the accusation and the Kehillah, see Goren, New York Jews, 25–42, 134–185. Jenna Weissman Joselit, Our Gang: Jewish Crime and the New York Jewish Community (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983), 45–49, 54–84. 59. Glanz, Studies in Judaica Americana, 321–322. Neuringer, American Jewry, 22–23. 60. Varhayt, July 13, 1909, 4. 61. YT, July 29, 1909, 4. Jonah Goldstein, CUOHROC, 3:599–600. Goldstein quoted a memo of the Educational Alliance (Nov. 25, 1904); the name of the substitute instructor was Mr. Davis. Davis ridiculed the idea that Jews and Blacks were similar. Hermalin wrote in Varhayt, Apr. 10, 1911, 4. Cf. Philip Krantz, “Di khinesishe frage,” Tsukunft, Mar. 1902, 17–19. 62. YT, Dec. 9, 1906, 4 (quotes in the original). Gorin wrote YT, Dec. 5, 1906, 4. Cf. MZ, Dec. 13, 1906, 4. On the anti-Japanese movement in those years and the subsequent “Gentlemen’s Agreement,” see Roger Daniels, Guarding the Golden Door: American Immigration Policy and Immigrants Since 1882 (New York: Hill and Wang, 2004), 40–45. 63. Yidisher kemfer, Apr. 14, 1911, 1; Jan. 3, 1908, 5. The paper poked fun at the fear of uptown Jews to “awaken sleeping dogs”; those were Jacob Schiff ’s words in a letter to Leon Sanders, July 5, 1912, HIAS Papers (YIVO), reel 15.16. Higham, Strangers, 140–144, 160. Shmeruk, “Mayufes,” 273–286. Charles Thomas Johnson, Culture at Twilight: The National German-American Alliance, 1901–1918 (New York: Peter Lang, 1999). 64. Varhayt, June 3, 1906, 4. Amerikaner, Jan. 13, 1911, 3. Isaac A. Hourwich, Immigration and Labor: The Economic Aspects of European Immigration to the United States (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1912), 161–165, 353–361. See the testimonies (March 11, 1910) of Jewish representatives before the House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization, AJYB 5671 (1910/1911), 36, 43–45, 50. Morris D. Waldman, Nor by Power (New York: International Universities Press, 1953), 324 (he did not provide an exact date). See also “What the Irish Have to Teach Us,” American Monthly Jewish Review, Jan. 1911, 70–71.

chapter 5 — “You Could Almost Forget That He Is Not a Jew” 1. Life and Labor, Sept. 1911, 282 (italics added). Mary Van Kleeck, Working Girls in Evening Schools: A Statistical Study (New York: Survey Associates, 1914), 24 (italics added);

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Notes to Pages 102–104

the study was conducted in 1910–1911. On the WTUL in New York, see Nancy Schrom Dye, As Equals and as Sisters: Feminism, the Labor Movement, and the Women’s Trade Union League of New York (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1980), 34–60. 2. Vaynshteyn, Yidishe yunyons, 189–190. On that transformation, see Melvyn Dubofsky, When Workers Organize: New York City in the Progressive Era (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1968), 41–85. Joel Seidman, The Needle Trades (New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1942), 101–113. Charles Elbert Zaretz, The Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America (New York: Ancon, 1934), 95–104. 3. Steve Fraser, “Landslayt and Paesan: Ethnic Confl ict and Cooperation in the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America,” in Struggle a Hard Battle: Essays on WorkingClass Immigrants, ed. Dirk Hoerder (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1986), 280–303. Edwin Fenton, Immigrants and Unions, a Case Study: Italians and American Labor, 1870–1920 (1957; repr., New York: Arno, 1975), 483–542. Glenn, Daughters of the Shtetl, 186–242. Elizabeth Ewen, Immigrant Women in the Land of Dollars: Life and Culture on the Lower East Side, 1890–1925 (New York: Monthly Review, 1985). 4. The classic version of this argument is found in Will Herberg, “The Jewish Labor Movement in the United States,” AJYB 53 (1952): 3–74. For a more nuanced view, see Moses Rischin, “The Jewish Labor Movement in America: A Social Interpretation,” Labor History 4 (1963): 227–247. Gerald Sorin, “Tradition and Change: American Jewish Socialists as Agents of Acculturation,” AJH 79 (1989): 37–54. See a critique of that approach in Lederhendler, “America,” 129–132; Howe, World of Our Fathers, 321–324; Tony Michels, “Socialism and the Writing of American Jewish History: World of Our Fathers Revisited,” AJH 88 (2000): 521–546. 5. Frankel, Prophecy and Politics, 453–547. Sherman, Jew Within, 167–171. Terwilliger, “Jews and Italians,” 53–54. Joseph Rappaport, “Jewish Immigrants and World War I: A Study of American Yiddish Press Reactions,” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 1951), 381. 6. Glenn, Daughters of the Shtetl, 186–199. Fraser, “Landslayt and Paesan,” 280–303. Fenton, Immigrants, 484–485, 503–508. 7. On the older images, see chap. 1 above. On the concept of religious chosenness, see Eisen, Chosen People, 3–22. Tchernowitz, Toledoth ha-halakhah, 1:255–305. On Eastern European Jews’ mentality as intimately tied to the concept of chosenness, see Hundert, Jews in Poland-Lithuania, 4, 234–235. 8. Cahan’s quote is from “Tsu dem finften yor-gang ‘Tsukunft,’” Tsukunft, Jan. 1896, 2–3. See also Faygnboym’s similar view, Tsukunft, May 1894, 35. Raboy, Mayn lebn, 2:212. Shlomo Avineri, “Marxism and Nationalism,” Journal of Contemporary History 26 (1991): 637–657. Elie Kedourie, Nationalism, 4th ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), 141–142. Frankel, Prophecy and Politics, 184. 9. Cahan’s article was titled “Unzer inteligents,” Tsukunft, Jan. 1910, 41; Feb. 1910, 109. On Yiddish-speaking socialists’ concept of civilization, see Goldstein, Price of Whiteness, 79–83. On socialists and Jewish religious values, see Annie Polland, “‘May a Freethinker

Notes to Pages 105–107

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Help a Pious Man?’: The Shared World of the ‘Religious’ and the ‘Secular’ among Eastern European Jewish Immigrants to America,” AJH 93 (2007): 375–407. 10. Vaynshteyn, Yidishe yunyons, 371–372. Schlossberg, CUOHROC, 35–36. Schlossberg’s second quote is from an interview with David J. Saposs, Feb. 27, 1919, David J. Saposs Papers (WSHS), box 21, folder 16. Scholars include Glanz (who is quoted), Jew and Italian, 9–11, 38, 94; Lawrence Fuchs, in Interaction of Italians and Jews, ed. Scarpaci, 107–108. A similar view is in Ronald H. Bayor, “Italians, Jews, and Ethnic Confl ict,” International Migration Review 6 (1972): 377. Robert Rockaway has criticized the “harmony” thesis, in “Jews and Italians: Ambivalent Affinities,” Parcours Judaiques 4 (1996): 164–166. See also chap. 4 above. 11. U.S. Industrial Commission, Report of the Industrial Commission (1901), 14:83; 15:xxvi, 322–327, 345. Reports of the Immigration Commission, 11:369–370. Jesse Eliphalet Pope, The Clothing Industry in New York (1905; repr., New York: Burt Franklin, 1970), 48–53. Greenfeld, “Role of the Jews,” 180–204. Kessner, Golden Door, 61–63. Egal Feldman, “Jews in the Early Growth of New York City’s Men’s Clothing Trade,” AJAJ 12 (1960): 3–14. 12. I. Patent, AJAC, 148:22. Hoffman, Fuftzik yor, 24–25, 40. David Montgomery, The Fall of the House of Labor: The Workplace, the State, and American Labor Activism, 1865–1925 (1987; repr., New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 120–121. Irwin Yellowitz, “Jewish Immigrants and the American Labor Movement, 1900–1920,” AJH 71 (1981): 188–217. Robert Asher, “Union Nativism and the Immigrant Response,” Labor History 23 (1982): 330–339. 13. Rothenberg’s letter appeared in the Naye post, Nov. 27, 1914, 6. Melvyn Dubofsky, “Organized Labor and the Immigrant in New York City, 1900–1918,” Labor History 2 (1961): 182–201. Robert Asher, “Jewish Unions and the American Federation of Labor Power Structure, 1903–1953,” AJHQ 65 (1976): 218–219. Philip Taft, The A. F. of L. in the Time of Gompers (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1957), 305–308. 14. On the “Irish” rituals, see Abraham Rosenberg, Di kloukmakher un zeyere yunyons: erinerungen (New York: Cloak Operators Union, Local 1, 1920), 10–11. Vaynshteyn, Yidishe yunyons, 317, 505–507. Yellowitz, “Jewish Immigrants,” 202–213. Donald B. Robinson, Spotlight on a Union: The Story of the United Hatters, Cap, and Millinery Workers International Union (New York: Dial, 1948), 75–76. Max Gaft, “Yidishe arbeter in di boy-fakhen,” in Geverkshaftn: Zaml-bukh tsu fuftsik yor lebn fun di fareynikte yidishe geverkshaftn (New York: Fareynikte yidishe geverkshaftn, 1938), ed. Harry Lang and Morris Feinstone, 195–198. Zausner, Unvarnished, 40–55. 15. Interview with Sol Broad, Mar. 6, 1919, David J. Saposs Papers (WSHS), box 22, folder 2. The painters’ story appeared in the YT, Dec. 28, 1906, 1. Bronzvil, Oct. 16, 1914, 2. The quote is from Yellowitz, “Jewish Immigrants,” 213. 16. Forverts, Oct. 5, 1906, 4; Nov. 10, 1906, 4 (quotation marks in the original). On the campaign, see the letters from Hillquit to Aleksej M. Peskov, Dec. 10, 1906 and Jan. 30, 1907, Morris Hillquit Papers (WSHS), reel 5. Varhayt, Nov. 3, 1908, 4. YT, Oct. 26, 1908,

248

Notes to Pages 107–109

4; Nov. 1, 1908, 4 (italics added). Goren, Politics and Public Culture, 83–99. Arthur A. Gorenstein (Goren), “A Portrait of Ethnic Politics: The Socialists and the 1908 and 1910 Congressional Elections on the East Side,” PAJHS 50 (1961): 227–238. Melvyn Dubofsky, “Success and Failure of Socialism in New York City, 1900–1918: A Case Study,” Labor History 9 (1968): 361–375. Charles Leinenweber, “The Class and Ethnic Bases of New York City Socialism, 1904–1915,” Labor History 22 (1981): 31–56. 17. Hillquit’s speech is in the Forverts, Oct. 23, 1908, 4. Hillquit, Loose Leaves, 107–116. Lesin wrote in the Forverts, Aug. 11, 1910, 4. Ira Kipnis, The American Socialist Movement, 1897–1912 (1952; repr., New York: Greenwood, 1968), 206, 276–288. Irwin Yellowitz, “Morris Hillquit: American Socialism and Jewish Concerns,” AJH 68 (1978): 166–172. Henderson, Tammany Hall, 41, 132–133. 18. Forverts, Nov. 7, 1908, 4. London’s speech is in Meyer London Papers (Tamiment), box 2, folder “1910 speeches.” Tageblat tried to hold on to the old image of the tolerant American; see YT, Feb. 6, 1910, 4. 19. Harry Rogoff, An East Side Epic: The Life and Work of Meyer London (New York: Vanguard), 56–60. A comparison of London and Hillquit is in Goldovsky, Fun vayten, 120–121. A handbill by the Arbeter Ring (1916) for London’s reelection clearly shows his ethnic appeal—Meyer London Papers (Tamiment), box 1, folder BF. Harry Roskolenko mentioned Jewish ethnic voting in his memoir, The Time That Was Then: The Lower East Side, 1900–1914; An Intimate Chronicle (New York: Dial, 1971), 20, 29. 20. Socialist Party officials are quoted in Dubofsky, “Success and Failure,” 368, 372. Zaks is cited in J. S. Herts, Di yidishe sotsyalistishe bavegung in amerike (New York: Der veker, 1954), 148. Yidisher sotsyalist, Nov. 15, 1914, 5. Henderson, Tammany Hall, 176–179. Goren, Politics and Public Culture, 97–99. Melech Epstein, Jewish Labor in USA, 2 vols. (1950; repr., New York: Ktav, 1969), 1:357–361. Leinenweber, “Class and Ethnic Bases,” 38, 56. 21. Burgin, Geshikhte, 615–616. See Zametkin’s criticism of Jewish nationalism, in Tsukunft, Aug. 1909, 481. For a different internationalist view, see Emma Goldman, “National Atavism,” Mother Earth, Mar. 1906, 49–56. On a 1905 public debate between Zhitlovsky’s nationalism and Jacob Gordin’s internationalism, see the letter of a spectator, Leib Hutnakh, to Kalman Marmor ( July 4, 1905), Kalman Marmor Papers (YIVO), reel 495.41. Shub, Fun di amolike yorn, 87–88. Frumin, “Der ‘Bund’ un zayne kegner,” 9–17. Milkh, “Natsionale programe,” Tsukunft, May 1904, 26–32. Tobias, Jewish Bund, 160–175, 248–255. 22. Lesin wrote in the Forverts, May 20, 1903, 4 (italics added). See also Tsukerman, Zikhroynes, 1:109, 170–172, 177–178. On the struggle between Bundists and internationalists, see S. D. Levin, Kapitlen fun mayn lebn: zikhroynes (New York: Levin bukh komitet, 1971), 54–57. 23. AH, June 29, 1906, 808. Chaim Zhitlovsky, “A briv fun a yidishn sotsyalist,” in Gezamlte shriftn, 5:13–28. I. A. Beneqvit wrote about Zhitlovsky’s infl uence in

Notes to Pages 109–112

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Durkhgelebt, 2:245–246. See also Cowen, Memories of an American Jew, 155–156. Frankel, Prophecy and Politics, 258–287; Michels, Fire in Their Hearts, 125–154. 24. The internationalist quote is in Cahan, “Finften yor-gang ‘Tsukunft,’” 2–3. Fornberg wrote in the Yidisher sotsyalist, Apr. 1, 1914, 5–6 (italics in the original). A. S. Zaks, Yidisher sotsyalist, May 15, 1914, 5 (italics added). On Fornberg, see Moshe Shtarkman, “Di tsukunft 1892–1942,” Tsukunft, May–June 1942, 267–268. On Zaks, see Herman Frank, A. S. Zaks: Kemfer far folks-oyflebung (New York: A. S. Zaks Gezelshaft, 1945). 25. Jane Addams, “The Settlement as a Factor in the Labor Movement,” in The Jane Addams Reader, ed. Jean Bethke Elshtain (New York: Basic Books, 2002), 50–51. “Minutes of the First Meeting of the General Executive Board,” June 21, 1906, ILGWU Papers (Kheel), reel 2/1/16–1. Elizabeth Hasanovitz, One of Them: Chapters from a Passionate Autobiography (Boston: Houghton Miffl in, 1918), 49. L. Tsukerman, “Di vestn makher,” Fortshrit 1916 yor bukh, 15. Glenn, Daughters of the Shtetl, 191. Sanders, East Side Jews, 398. 26. Kessner, Golden Door, 56, 72–75. U.S. Industrial Commission, Report of the Industrial Commission (1901), 14:xxvi, 15:326. “Headworker Report” (Mar. 1900), USSNY Papers (WSHS), series 4. Reports of the Immigration Commission, 27:322–325. Dyche is quoted in Pope, Clothing Industry, 54n15 (italics added). “Report on Conditions of Woman and Child Wage-Earners in the United States,” Paul Abelson Papers (Kheel), box 47, folder 5. J. M. Budish and George Soule, The New Unionism in the Clothing Industry (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Howe, 1920), 109. Louise C. Odencrantz, Italian Women in Industry: A Study of Conditions in New York City (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1919), 13, 27, 38–44, 60. Gabaccia, From Sicily to Elizabeth Street, 63–64, 94–95. 27. Rosenberg, Kloukmakher, 103–104, 131. Marot wrote in the Weekly Bulletin of the Clothing Trades, Feb. 28, 1908, 6 (italics added). WTUL-NY, Annual Report, 1907/1908 (Tamiment), reel R 3099, 10–11. Fenton, Immigrants, 485–489. 28. Tenth Convention of the ILGWU, Report and Proceedings (New York: The Union, 1910), 20–21. See also John A. Dyche, “The Union is af tsores,” in Out of the Sweatshop: The Struggle for Industrial Democracy, ed. Leon Stein (New York: Quadrangle, 1977), 57–58. Maxine Schwartz Seller, “The Uprising of the Twenty Thousand: Sex, Class, and Ethnicity in the Shirtwaist Makers’ Strike of 1909,” in Struggle a Hard Battle, ed. Hoerder, 254–279. A fictionalized bildungsroman about the strike was written by the socialist organizer Theresa Serber Malkiel, The Diary of a Shirtwaist Striker (1910; new ed., Ithaca, NY: ILR Press, 1990). Rosenberg, Kloukmakher, 208–209. On the concept of “e’revrav” as Gentiles or converts in rabbinic literature, see Shaul Magid, From Metaphysics to Midrash: Myth, History, and the Interpretation of Scripture in Lurianic Kabbala (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008), 81–84. 29. Those are the estimates given in Helen Marot, “A Woman’s Strike: An Appreciation of the Shirtwaist Makers of New York,” Proceedings of the Academy of Political Science in the City of New York 1 (1910): 119–128. Meredith Tax, The Rising of the Women: Solidarity and Class Confl ict, 1880–1917 (New York: Monthly Review, 1980), 211. Cf.

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Notes to Pages 112–115

Epstein, Jewish Labor, 1:388. An account of the meeting at Cooper Union is in Forverts, Nov. 23, 1909, 1, 8. NYT, Nov. 23, 1909, 16. Dec. 4, 1909, 20. Louis Levine, The Women’s Garment Workers: A History of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union (New York: B. W. Huebsch, 1924), 154. Howe, World of Our Fathers, 297–300. 30. Forverts, Nov. 24, 1909, 1; Nov. 26, 1909, 1; Dec. 3, 1909, 1; Jan. 10, 1910, 1. The paper mentioned that a Jewish foreman incited the Italians. Call, Nov. 25, 1909, 2; Dec. 2, 1909, 1. Levine, Garment Workers, 156–157. Fenton, Immigrants, 489–492. 31. Constance D. Leupp, “The Shirtwaist Makers’ Strike,” Survey, Dec. 18, 1909, 384. The strikers are quoted in Call, Dec. 26, 1909, 14. The interview with Halpern is in the Irving Howe Collection (YIVO), 10–12. The interview with Painkin is in Irving Howe Collection (YIVO), 6 (italics added). See also the interview with Abraham Kazin, Irving Howe Collection (YIVO), 13. Ida Seltzer, tape I-132, NYC-ILHP. Berl Baum, AJAC, 85:58. B. Khazanov, Teg un yorn: Fun’m lebn fun a yidishn arbeter (New York: Khazanov yubilee komitet, 1956), 74. See also Rosenberg’s depiction of Italian untrustworthiness in Kloukmakher, 212–215. WTUL-NY, Annual Report, 1910/1911 (Tamiment), reel R 3099, 3–4, 6–7. Vaynshteyn, Yidishe yunyons, 371–372. 32. Faygnboym wrote in a publication for Arbeter Ring’s third annual convention (Workmen’s Circle Collection [AJHS], box 2, folder 18). Louis Hollander, “Di italyenishe arbeter in unzer organizatsyon,” Fortshrit, Dec. 1, 1916, 5. Menashe Tsinkin, In shap un oysern shap (New York: Aber, 1951), 83–85. 33. Abraham Rosenberg, “Arbitration Proceeding: The Cloak and Skirt Makers’ Unions of New York; The Cloak and Skirt Makers’ Protective Association,” August 3–6, 1913, 1:513–514, Isaac A. Hourwich Papers (YIVO), reel 4 (italics added). Schwartz spoke at a YWHA convention—Young Men’s Hebrew Association/Young Women’s Hebrew Association Collection (AJHS), box 2, folder “Second Triennial Convention.” See also Marc D. Angel, La America: The Sephardic Experience in the United States (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1982), 21–22. On YWHA, see David Kaufman, Shul with a Pool: The “Synagogue-Center” in American Jewish History (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1999), 76–82. 34. Seltzer, tape I-132, NYC-ILHP. Hollander, “Italyenishe arbeter,” 5. Naye post, Nov. 13, 1914, 3. See the the interviews with Ida Shapiro and Bella Cohen in Ewen, Immigrant Women, 250–251. Historians have seen 1913 as a turning point, when Italians became part and parcel of the union structure (Pozzetta, “Italians of New York City,” 357–359; Fenton, Immigrants, 518–520). 35. Forverts, Jan. 9, 1910, 1; Feb. 14, 1910, 4; Naye post, Feb. 1, 1911, 1. Lemlich’s story is quoted in 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), 58. Glenn, Daughters of the Shtetl, 188. 36. Report and Proceedings, Tenth Convention of the ILGWU 1910 (WSHS), 57, 83, 89. WTUL, Proceedings, Second Biennial Convention, 1909 (Tamiment), reel R 3092, 50. As

Notes to Pages 115–117

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late as 1916 Italian representatives of Local 48 demanded ( July 31, 1916) representation in future negotiations—Benjamin Schlesinger records, in ILGWU Papers (Kheel), box 4, folder 6. On the negative Jewish response to the Italians’ demands in local 9, see Kushner, Lebn, 110–111. Ewen, Immigrant Women, 190, 259. The ILGWU 1912 convention is cited in Nancy L. Green, Ready-to-Wear and Ready-to-Work: A Century of Industry and Immigrants in Paris and New York (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997), 225. Charles A. Zappia, “From Working-Class Radicalism to Cold War Anti-Communism: The Case of the Italian Locals of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union,” in The Lost World of Italian American Radicalism: Politics, Labor, and Culture, ed. Philip V. Cannistraro and Gerald Meyer (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003), 143–159. 37. Liptzin, Amol iz geven, 7. Harry Lang, in B. Vaynshteyn, Yidishe yunyons, 28–29. See also how Barondess described Jewish socialists as those who “propelled the socialist ship so far,” in a “Souvenir for the Fourth Convention of the Workman’s Circle” (1904), Workmen’s Circle Collection (AJHS), box 2, folder 19. David Dubinsky with A. H. Raskin, David Dubinsky: A Life with Labor (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1977), 48–49. 38. Charles Anthony Zappia, “Unionism and the Italian American Worker: A History of the New York City ‘Italian Locals’ in the International Ladies’ Garment Union” (PhD diss., University of California–Berkeley, 1994), 163–172, 197. Sorin, Time for Building, 123. John R. McKivigan and Thomas J. Robertson, “The Irish-American Worker in Transition, 1877–1914: New York as a Test Case,” in New York Irish, ed. Bayor and Meagher, 319–320. 39. See, for example, Glenn, Daughters of the Shtetl, 207–242. Orleck, Common Sense. Tax, Rising of the Women. Carolyn Daniel McCreesh, Women in the Campaign to Organize Garment Workers, 1880–1917 (New York: Garland, 1985). Nan Enstad, Ladies of Labor, Girls of Adventure (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 119–160. 40. Adjectives like slow or dumb appear in the Weekly Bulletin of the Clothing Trades, Feb. 28, 1908, 6. WTUL-NY, Annual Report, 1910/1911 (Tamiment), reel R 3099, 6. Life and Labor, Sept. 1911, 282. Van Kleeck, Working Girls, 24. Seltzer, tape I-132, NYC-ILHP. 41. Cahan, “Unzer inteligents,” 41, 109. 42. Mary Van Kleeck, Artificial Flower Makers (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1913), x, 30, 34–37, 67 (italics added). Charlotte Baum, Paula Hyman, and Sonya Michel, The Jewish Woman in America (New York: Plume, 1977), 137–139. 43. Letter from Pauline Newman to Rose Schneiderman, Feb. 9, 1912, in Rose Schneiderman Papers (Tamiment), box 5, folder “1912.” However, Newman admitted that it was difficult to retain Jewish workers in the union. Pauline Newman’s second quote is in her article, “The Girls of Worcester,” Ladies’ Garment Worker, Nov. 1914, 21–22. Marot, “Woman’s Strike,” 122–123. See also Mollie Hyman’s account in Kisseloff, You Must Remember This, 37. Alice Kessler-Harris has depicted how Jewish women believed they were “superior unionists” in “Organizing the Unorganizable: Three Jewish Women and Their Union,” Labor History 17 (1976): 12. Orleck, Common Sense, 63–68.

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Notes to Pages 117–120

44. Call, Dec. 26, 1909, 2. Van Kleeck, Flower Makers, 35–36. Glenn, Daughters of the Shtetl, 192, 200. The quote from Richter’s interview is in Kramer and Masur, Jewish Grandmothers, 131. See also Belle Lindner Israels, “The Way of the Girl,” Survey, July 3, 1909, 486–497. Kathy Peiss, Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-theCentury New York (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986), 68, 89. 45. Supportive editorials for the strikers were in the New York American, Dec. 3, 1909, 18; Jan. 15, 1910, 16; New York Post, Dec. 16, 1909, 8; Dec. 21, 1909, 8; World, Jan. 21, 1910, 8; Call, Jan. 3, 1910, 1. Leon Stein, ed., Out of the Sweatshop, 131–134. Dubofsky, When Workers Organize, 47–55, 83–84. Schneiderman, All for One, 8, 80. Dye, As Equals and as Sisters, 88–109. 46. Forverts, Dec. 22, 1909, 4; Call, Feb. 15, 1910, 1–2. Schneiderman, All for One, 77–78. Glenn, Daughters of the Shtetl, 177, 186–187, 236–237. Newman is quoted in Kessler-Harris, “Organizing the Unorganizable,” 15–16. 47. WTUL-NY, Annual Report, 1910/1911 (Tamiment), reel R 3099, 3–4. Marot, “Woman’s Strike,” 120, 123–124. Letter from Newman to Schneiderman, Sept. 13, 1910, Rose Schneiderman Papers (Tamiment), box 5, folder “1910” (italics in the original). Dye, As Equals and as Sisters, 54, 113–117 (Newman’s second quotation is in ibid.). Orleck, Common Sense, 43–45, 67–68. McCreesh, Women in the Campaign, 165. 48. Lesin wrote in the Forverts, July 27, 1910, 4. Fraynd, Nov.–Dec. 1911, 602–603. By 1911 it was no longer the case that every member in the Arbeter Ring was a socialist or even a wageworker—see Michels, Fire in Their Hearts, 187–189. Liebman, Jews and the Left, 260. 49. Letter from Julius Gerber (the Socialist Party’s executive secretary in New York) to Saul Friedman, organizer of the Jewish branch in Harlem, May 7, 1914, New York Socialist Party Records (Tamiment), reel R 292. Letter from Nathan Zughaft to Gerber, Apr. 29, 1914, and Gerber’s reply, May 7, 1914, New York Socialist Party Records (Tamiment), reel R 292. Letter from Gerber to Isidor Flanzer, May 23, 1912, New York Socialist Party Records (Tamiment), reel R 291. Kling is quoted in Herts, Yidishe sotsyalistishe, 148. The letters in the Message are quoted in Green, Ready-to-Wear, 222 (italics added). 50. J.B.S. Hardman (Yankev Salutsky), “Jewish Workers in the American Labor Movement,” YAJSS 7 (1952): 251–253. Kushner, Lebn, 110–111. Kushner mentioned that several Italians fought against that “fascist.” Rosenberg is quoted in Fenton, Immigrants, 542n222. Irving R. Stuart has shown how those attitudes continued into the 1940s: “A Study of Factors Associated with Inter-Group Confl ict in the Ladies’ Garment Industry in New York City” (PhD diss., New York University, 1951), 173–175. 51. “Reminiscences of Adolph Held” (April 2, 1965), CUOHROC, 1 (italics added). Bartholomew’s nickname is in Levine, Garment Workers, 223, 581. Roskolenko, Time That Was Then, 29, 83. Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, The Rebel Girl: An Autobiography, 2nd ed. (New York: International, 1973), 59. 52. The nickname for Dyche is in Benjamin Stolberg, Tailor’s Progress: The Story of a Famous Union and the Men Who Made It (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Doran, 1944), 51.

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The worker is Berl Baum (AJAC, 85:59). On Dyche’s pragmatism, see Julius Henry Cohen, They Builded Better Than They Knew (New York: Julian Messner, 1946), 223–224. Dubofsky, When Workers Organize, 30–31. 53. A letter from A. Zwirek to Kalman Marmor (May 3, 1905), Kalman Marmor Papers (YIVO), reel mk 495.41. See Schlossberg’s admiring words about Debs in undated notes (circa 1940), in Joseph Schlossberg Papers ( JNUL), folder 17. The Socialist Party member is quoted in Nick Salvatore, Eugene V. Debs: Citizen and Socialist (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982), 232. Vladeck is quoted in Devere Allen, ed., Adventurous Americans (New York: Farrar and Reinhart, 1932), 330. 54. Vladeck’s quote is in Liebman, Jews and the Left, 55 (italics added). Cahan, Bleter, 5:246 (quotes in the original). 55. Eisenstein, Otsar zikhronotay, 120. Richard A. Greenwald, The Triangle Fire, the Protocols of Peace, and Industrial Democracy in Progressive Era New York (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2005), 129–153. Leon Stein, The Triangle Fire (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1962). Rabbi Stephen S. Wise’s speech at a memorial is in Stein, Out of the Sweatshop, 195–196. Berl Baum depicted the working conditions at the Triangle factory—AJAC, 85:37–49, 61–62 and part B. See the feuilleton by Yiddish writer Julius Rak (pseudonym of Yehudah-Chaim Lipman), in Forverts, Apr. 5, 1911, 4–5. On the funeral, see Goren, Politics and Public Culture, 62–67. On the panic the Triangle fire caused in Eastern Europe, where some people thought that America was one big town, see Hasanovitz, One of Them, 214. 56. YT, Mar. 27, 1911, 1. Yet two days later the Tageblat nearly gloated at the scenes of bedlam at a meeting of the Italian American Congress in Philadelphia, noting that Jews should “consider ourselves a calm people, at least in comparison with the Italians” (YT, Mar. 29, 1911, 6). A list with the names of 140 victims is in David Von Drehle, Triangle: The Fire That Changed America (New York: Atlantic Monthly, 2003), 108, 271–283. Recently the six remaining victims have been identified; see http://www.forward. com/articles/136891/. 57. Forverts, Mar. 28, 1911, 1. Yidisher kemfer, Apr. 7, 1911, 1. See also Pauline Newman’s account, in AYGB, box 4, 12. On the emphasis on class rather than ethnicity, see Paula E. Hyman, “Beyond Place and Ethnicity: The Uses of the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire,” Remembering the Lower East Side, ed. Diner et al., 70–85. Eli Lederhendler, Jewish Immigrants and American Capitalism, 1880–1920: From Caste to Class (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 75. 58. Dyche wrote in Ladies’ Garment Worker, June 1913, 26–27, where he served as the editor. Cf. Leinenweber, “Class and Ethnic Bases,” 50, 56. 59. For the UHT’s attacks, see the Weekly Bulletin of the Clothing Trades, Aug. 2, 1907, 1. J.B.S. Hardman, ed., The Book of the Amalgamated in New York, 1914–1940 (New York: Amalgamated Joint Boards, 1940), 13–20. Documentary History of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America (New York: Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America, 1920),

254

Notes to Pages 123–126

53. NYT, Mar. 1, 1913, 1. Forverts, Mar. 11, 1913, 1; NYT, Mar. 2, 1913, 3; Mar. 6, 1913, 20. Zaretz, Amalgamated, 86–90. 60. See the correspondence between Hillman and Schlossberg (Dec. 1914–Jan. 1915) about the formation of ACWA, ACWA Papers (Kheel), box 5, folder 20. Documentary History, 4–11, 33–34, 43–44, 75–108. The names of the New York and Chicago delegates who seceded included many Italian names (Documentary History, 10–11). On the Nashville conference, see the recollection of a delegate, Morris Goldin, in AJAC, 93:64–66. Steven Fraser, Labor Will Rule: Sidney Hillman and the Rise of American Labor (New York: Free Press, 1991), 86–97. 61. Interview with Schweitzer and Kaufman, Mar. 31, 1919, David J. Saposs Papers (WSHS), box 21, folder 16. Schlossberg, CUOHROC, 35–36. Rickert was portrayed as an anti-Jewish “German battery”—GK, Oct. 2, 1914, 6. On Groyser kundes, see Lauren B. Strauss, “Images with Teeth: The Political Infl uence of Artwork in American Yiddish Periodicals, 1910s–1930s,” in Yiddish in America, ed. Shapiro, 24–46. Edward A. Portnoy, “The Creation of a Jewish Cartoon Space in the New York and Warsaw Yiddish Press, 1884–1939” (PhD diss., Jewish Theological Seminary, 2008), 93–111. 62. Letter from Feldman to Schlossberg, Feb. 9, 1915, ACWA Papers (Kheel), box 10, folder 21; Feldman to Hillman (May 8, 1915), ACWA Papers (Kheel), box 2, folder 29. See the concern about the Italians in the letter from Hillman to Schlossberg (Dec. 1, 1914), ACWA Papers (Kheel), box 5, folder 20. Abraham I. Shiplacoff, “Tsum yorsfest fun di ACWA,” Fortshrit 1916 yor bukh, 17. 63. Letters from Schlossberg to Hillman (both on Mar. 18, 1915), ACWA Papers (Kheel), box 5, folder 20. Interview with David Wolf, Mar. 1, 1919, David J. Saposs Papers (WSHS), box 21, folder 16. On the Italian American integration into the garment and other unions, see Pozzetta, “Italians of New York City,” 357–359. Fenton, Immigrants, 524–525. Rudolph J. Vecoli, “The Making and Un-making of the Italian American Working Class,” in Lost World, ed. Cannistraro and Meyer, 51–75. 64. Eli Lederhendler has claimed that Jewish unions featured “transcendence of ethnic division,” as they were ostensibly “discounting all ethnic distinctions,” in Jewish Immigrants, 72, 75. 65. The argument about “Judaism secularized” is in Rischin, Promised City, 166; Sorin, Prophetic Minority, ix, 163.

chapter 6 — “The ‘Green’ Italian Pays the Same Good Taxes as the 14-Karat Yankee” 1. Varhayt, Oct. 24, 1917, 4. On the conference, see NYT, Oct. 29, 1917, 9; Nov. 1, 1917, 5. The three delegates were Professor Israel Friedlaender, Dr. H. Pereira Mendes, and Bernard G. Richards. See the conference pamphlet in the Israel Friedlaender Papers ( JTS), box 6, folder “Oct. 1917.” Zosa Szajkowski, Jews, Wars, and Communism: The Attitude of American Jews in World War I, the Russian Revolutions of 1917, and Communism (1914–1945), 4 vols. (New York: Ktav, 1972), 1:218, 548–549.

Notes to Pages 126–129

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2. In treating the Great War and its effects, historians of American Jewry have mostly concentrated on Jewish relief efforts aimed at helping Jews overseas: Sorin, Time for Building, 200, 207–209. Soyer, Immigrant Associations, 161–189; McCune, Whole Wide World, 43–77; Diner, Jews of the United States, 179–182. Moore, At Home in America, 22. Szajkowski also focused on the war, but his “sole purpose” was to prove that “there was never a monolithic attitude of American Jews to radicalism”—Jews, Wars, and Communism, 1:xx–xxi. 3. YT, Aug. 16, 1900, 1, 4; FAS, Aug. 24, 1900, 6; Forverts, Aug. 17, 1900, 1. Robert G. Weisbord and Arthur Stein, Bittersweet Encounter: The Afro-American and the American Jew (Westport, CT: Negro Universities Press, 1970), xxiv. Seth M. Scheiner, Negro Mecca: A History of the Negro in New York City, 1865–1920 (New York: New York University Press, 1965), 121–125, 133. Osofsky, Harlem, 46–52. Diner, In the Almost Promised Land, 36–50, 74–76. Cf. Philip S. Foner “Black-Jewish Relations in the Opening Years of the Twentieth Century,” Phylon 36 (1975): 362n18. 4. YT, Nov. 29, 1906, 4; Aug. 6, 1906, 4; Aug. 23, 1908, 4. Isaac A. Hourwich’s letter (Sept. 14, 1912) to H. Moskowitz is in Paul Abelson Papers (AJA), box 2, folder 6. Tog, Oct. 11, 1916, 8; Forverts, July 11, 1910, 4. Historians have shown that southern Jews usually treated Blacks better than did most white southerners: Hertzberg, Strangers within the Gate City, 200–201. Arnold Shankman, Ambivalent Friends: Afro-Americans View the Immigrant (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1982), xiii–xiv, 114, 135–137, 163–164. 5. Forverts, Sept. 9, 1904, 1; Oct. 20, 1904, 4; YT, Oct. 18, 1904, 1, 8; Oct. 19, 1904, 8 (Fromenson wrote in ibid.); Oct. 20, 1904, 8; Oct. 21, 1904, 8; Yidishe velt, Oct. 18, 1904, 1; Oct. 19, 1904, 4; NYT, Oct. 24, 1904, 9. Berrol, Immigrants at School, 85–91. Diane Ravitch, The Great School Wars: New York City, 1805–1973 (1974; repr., New York: Basic, 1988), 176. 6. Parts of Minikes’s play appear in Slobin, Tenement Songs, 108–113. Zelikovitsh, “Di droshe af ’n fidl,” Geklibene shriftn, 247. Zelikovitsh wrote that piece probably between 1911 (when the song came out) and 1913 (when his collected works came out). On the ubiquity of the term “coon song” in popular culture, see Raymond Knapp, The American Musical and the Formation of National Identity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 73–76. YT, Oct. 29, 1909, 1 (italics added). There is a slightly different version in MZ, Oct. 29, 1909, 1. See also Pamela Brown Lavitt, “First of the Red Hot Mamas: ‘Coon Shouting’ and the Jewish Ziegfeld Girl,” AJH 87 (1999): 253–290. 7. Leonard Dinnerstein, “Leo M. Frank and the American Jewish Community,” AJAJ 20 (1968): 107–126. Leonard Dinnerstein, The Leo Frank Case (New York: Columbia University Press, 1968). Hertzberg, Strangers within the Gate City, 202–215. Jeffrey Melnick touched on Abraham Cahan’s coverage of the case in Black-Jewish Relations on Trial: Leo Frank and Jim Conley in the New South ( Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2000), 35–38, 84–85. Steve Oney, And the Dead Shall Rise: The Murder of Mary Phagan and the Lynching of Leo Frank (New York: Pantheon, 2003). On press reactions to the case (including Anglo-Jewish and Black publications), see Eugene Levy, “‘Is the Jew a White Man?’: Press Reactions to the Leo Frank Case, 1913–1915,” Phylon 35 (1974): 212–222.

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Notes to Pages 129–132

8. Barondess is quoted in the Tribune, Aug. 20, 1915, 4. Yidishe folk, Aug. 27, 1915, 1. Grossman’s short account in Hebrew is in Joseph Isaac Bluestone Papers (AJHS), box 3, folder 123. Forverts, Aug. 26, 1915, 2. See also Albert S. Lindemann, The Jew Accused: Three Anti-Semitic Affairs (Dreyfus, Beilis, Frank), 1894–1915 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 235–282. Y. Lifshits, “Hedey alilat ha-dam al beilis be-amerika,” Zion 28 (1963): 206–222. 9. Lewis, “Parallels and Divergences,” 547. Diner, In the Almost Promised Land, 3. 10. Forverts, Aug. 18, 1915, 4. Bronzvil, Aug. 20, 1915, 2. See also Naye velt, Aug. 20, 1915, 1. Avrom Lesin thought the lynching made Jews and Blacks “comrades in misfortune,” but only in “certain aspects”—Tsukunft, Sept. 1915, 792. 11. That is the argument of Eugene Levy, who also quotes the lawyer and the AngloJewish press, in “‘Is the Jew,’” 212, 214, 219–222. Forverts, Aug. 24, 1915, 4; Mar. 26, 1914, 6; Apr. 2, 1914, 6. Cahan, Bleter, 5:389. Cf. ibid., 5:385. Tog, Jan. 19, 1915, 4. Melnick, BlackJewish, 61–62, 111–112. Steven Bloom, “Interactions between Blacks and Jews in New York City, 1900–1930, as Reflected in the Black Press” (PhD diss., New York University, 1973), 55. 12. Forverts, Mar. 22, 1911, 5. Varhayt, Apr. 16, 1911, 8. Goldstein, Price of Whiteness, 77–78. 13. On Jewish customer peddlers who dealt mainly with Blacks, see Tsukerman, Zikhroynes, 1:283. On the Jewish merchant’s alleged contempt toward his Black customers, see Edwin Emerson Jr., “The New Ghetto,” Harper’s Weekly, Jan. 9, 1897, 44. Rosenwaike, Population History, 85. Gurock, When Harlem Was Jewish, 50, 146–149, 166–168. Mary White Ovington, Half a Man: The Status of the Negro in New York (1911; repr., New York: Schocken, 1969), 43–44, 163. 14. Sam Carasik AJAC, 173:64. Zvi Scharfstein, Arba’im shanah be-amerika (Tel Aviv: Masada, 1956), 50–51 (italics added). Scharfstein admitted that even after forty years, he still felt some fear of Blacks. Sholem Aleichem, Motl Peisy dem khazn’s, 2 vols. (New York: Sholem Aleichem Folksfond, 1925), 2:70–71. Elias Newman, WWOHL-AJC, 18. See also the account of Isaac Donin, AJAC, 100:25. See the caricature in GK, Oct. 8, 1909, 6. 15. Wiernik, “The Jew in Russia,” in Russian Jew, ed. Bernheimer, 21 (italics added). Rubinow, “Economic and Industrial Condition,” in Russian Jew, ed. Bernheimer, 105 (quotation marks in the original). Israel Goldstein, WWOHL-AJC, 37–38. Israel Goldstein, My World as a Jew, 2 vols. (Cranbury, NJ: Cornwall Books, 1984), 1:25. On Blacks as the New World incarnation of peasant folk, see Milton Himmelfarb, “Negroes, Jews, and Muzhiks,” in The Ghetto and Beyond: Essays on Jewish Life in America, ed. Peter I. Rose (New York: Random House, 1969), 409–418; and Harold David Brackman, “The Ebb and Flow of Confl ict: A History of Black-Jewish Relations Through 1900” (PhD diss., University of California–Los Angeles, 1977), 404–405. 16. Roskolenko, Time That Was Then, 13. Bercovici, “Black Blocks,” 618. WPA Federal Writers’ Project (New York Municipal Archives), reel 164, folder “Black Jews.” Howard

Notes to Pages 133–134

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Brotz, The Black Jews of Harlem (1964; repr., New York: Schocken, 1970), 11–12. On the attitude toward the Falashas, a Black Ethiopian tribe, see the American Jewish Committee, Ninth Annual Report (New York: American Jewish Committee, 1916): 17–18. Varhayt, Apr. 15, 1911, 6; May 13, 1911, 4–5. Goldstein, Price of Whiteness, 109. 17. Bloom, “Interactions between Blacks and Jews,” 165–170. Scheiner, Negro Mecca, 30. The researcher quoted is Thomas Jesse Jones ( Jones, Sociology of a New York City Block, 24, 103, 106). Cf. Jeffrey S. Gurock, “Harlem’s Jews and Blacks,” Jewish Digest 24 (1978): 42–47. Tsipin wrote in Varhayt, July 2, 1914, 4. On Tsipin’s career, see Reyzin, Leksikon, 3:317–320. Robert A. Rockaway, “The Detroit Jewish Ghetto before World War I,” Michigan History 52 (1968): 28–36. 18. Y. Opatoshu, Gezamlte verk, 14 vols. (Vilna: Kletzkin, 1927), 5:8, 35–41. Interestingly, Opatoshu still likened an old Black man to “an old Orangutan.” Hirshbein’s report appeared in the Tog, Apr. 12, 1917, 5. See also Tog, Jan. 19, 1915, 4. On the Yiddish press’s response to the East St. Louis race riots, see in the Forverts, July 6, 1917, 4; Varhayt, July 8, 1917, 4; Fortshrit, July 6, 1917, 4–5. On Blacks in the Yiddish literature, see I. E. Rontsh, Amerike in der yidisher literatur (New York: Rontsh bukh komitet, 1945), 203–255. 19. Call, Aug. 2, 1916, 6. Meltzer’s letter appeared in Varhayt, Oct. 29, 1918, 5. See Randolph’s magazine, Messenger, Nov. 1917, 19. Diner, In the Almost Promised Land, 203, 209–213. 20. Eugene Levy and Eric Goldstein have emphasized that the Frank case pitted Jews against Blacks, yet their focus is on established Jewry (Levy, “‘Is the Jew,’” 212; Goldstein, Price of Whiteness, 65–66). See also Foner, “Black-Jewish,” 366. 21. On the relief efforts and destruction in East Europe, see Morris Engelman, Four Years of Relief and War Work by the Jews of America, 1914–1918 (New York: Shoen, 1918); Bogen, Born a Jew, 84–94; AJYB 5676 (1915/1916): 225, 244–245, 269; Joseph C. Hyman, “Twenty-Five Years of American Aid to Jews Overseas,” AJYB 41 (1939/1940): 143–153; Zosa Szajkowski, “Private and Organized American Jewish Overseas Relief and Immigration (1914–1938)” AJHQ 57 (1967): 191–253; Frankel, Prophecy and Politics, 509–512. Examples of the activity of different landsmanshaftn and federations are in Forverts, Apr. 24, 1915, 12; YT, Sept. 8, 1915, 4. 22. On the mass rapes of Jewish women, see Forverts, Aug. 6, 1915, 4. Yiddish folklorist and playwright S. An-ski wrote an elaborate account on the expulsions and antiJewish violence in Russia, Poland, and Bukovina during the war (Gezamlte shriftn, vols. 4–6). The folkloristic dimension of Yiddish anti-Russian idioms is in S. An-ski, “Yudishe milkhome-glaykhverteln,” Gezamlte shriftn, 15:233–239. Eric Lohr, Nationalizing the Russian Empire: The Campaign against Enemy Aliens during World War I (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 137–150. 23. Rosenfeld is cited in Szajkowski, Jews, Wars, and Communism, 1:3. YT, Aug. 12, 1914, 4. MZ, Aug. 3, 1914, 4; Aug. 5, 1914, 4. Varhayt, July 30, 1914, 4. Globe and Commercial Advertiser, Apr. 26, 1915, 3. See also Joseph Rappaport, Hands across the Sea: Jewish Immigrants

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Notes to Pages 135–139

and World War I (Lanham, MD: Hamilton Books, 2005), 20–31. Joseph Rappaport, “The American Yiddish Press and the European Confl ict,” JSS 19 (1957): 113–128. 24. Helen Weinstein, tape I-65, NYC-ILHP. Gotesfeld, Vos ikh gedenk, 41. Varhayt, July 29, 1914, 4; Forverts, July 31, 1914, 4; MZ, Aug. 3, 1914, 4. On Jewish high regard for Franz Joseph, see also Borgenicht, Happiest Man, 33. 25. At first Miller lambasted Russian antisemitism—Varhayt, July 30, 1914, 4. Cf. Varhayt, Aug. 8, 1914, 4; Aug. 10, 1914, 4; Aug. 25, 1914, 4. The fear of being labeled as proRussian can be clearly seen in a letter by Zionist leader Richard Gottheil to the editor of the Tog, Dec. 1, 1914—Herman Bernstein Papers (YIVO), folder 166. Khaykin, Yidishe bleter, 218–231. Cf. Henderson, Tammany Hall, 41, 125. On Varhayt’s circulation, see N. W. Ayer and Son’s, American Newspaper Annual and Directory (1914), 1265. 26. YT, Aug. 3, 1914, 4; July 27, 1914, 4; July 30, 1914, 4. See also Varhayt, July 31, 1914, 4. 27. See Melamed’s article in Varhayt, Jan. 11, 1915, 4. See also his editorial in the American Jewish Chronicle, Oct. 20, 1916, 723. On Melamed’s connection with the German Information Bureau’s activities, see the Senate Sub-Committee of the Committee on Judiciary, Hearings on Brewing and Liquor Interests and German and Bolshevik Propaganda (Washington DC: Government Printing Office), 66th Congress, 1st Session, 3 vols. (1919), 2:1448–1449. 28. Hasanovitz, One of Them, 160. On the dissemination of information about the suffering of Russian Jews, see the letter from Ber Borokhov to S. Niger, Oct. 25, 1914, in Igrot ber borokhov, 1897–1914, ed. Matityahu Mintz (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1989), 613. On Russian soldiers’ cruelty, see An-ski, “Khurbm galitsye,” Gezamlte shriftn, 4:10–14. Cahan (and H. Burgin, who expressed a similar view) wrote in Forverts, July 31, 1914, 4; Aug. 7, 1914, 4; Aug. 20, 1914, 4. The cartoon of the murderous bear is Forverts Apr. 28, 1915, 2. See a similar opinion by A. Veslof in FAS, Nov. 21, 1914, 5. 29. The opinions of those Jewish radicals are quoted in Rappaport, Hands across the Sea, 28–30. Louis B. Boudin, Socialism and War (New York: New Review, 1916), 198–212. See also FAS, Dec. 26, 1914, 4; Mother Earth, Aug. 1914, 178; Nov. 1914, 281. Cherikover wrote in Tog, Jan. 20, 1916, 4; July 27, 1916, 4. Litvak wrote in the JSF’s organ, Naye velt, Jan. 7, 1916, 5. See Borokhov’s view in Varhayt, Jan. 8, 1915, 4. Rachel Rojanski, Zehuyot nifgashot: Poalei zion bi-tsfon amerika (Be’er Sheva: Ben Gurion University Press, 2004), 240–241. 30. Zhitlovsky, Gezamlte shriftn, 8:37–38, 51. 31. On the German press and German patriotism in New York City, see Peter Conolly-Smith, Translating America: An Immigrant Press Visualizes American Popular Culture, 1895–1918 (Washington DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2004), 95–96, 219–221. Juergen Matthaeus, “German Judenpolitik in Lithuania during the First World War,” Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 43 (1998): 155–174. Hirsh Abramovitsh, Farshvundene geshtaltn: Zikhroynes un siluetn (Buenos Aires: Tsentral farband fun poylishe yidn in argentine, 1958), 295–298. On relations between the German army and Eastern European Jews, see Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius, War Land on the Eastern Front: Culture, National Identity,

Notes to Pages 139–142

259

and the German Occupation in World War I (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 32, 68, 119–120, 126. 32. The Yiddish tune is quoted in Slobin, Tenement Songs, 100–102. Cahan is quoted in NYT, May 2, 1915, 5 (italics added). Forverts, Aug. 11, 1915, 4–5. MZ congratulated Galician Jews for their liberation from “Asiatic barbarism”—June 24, 1915, 4. The ad appeared in YT, Dec. 15, 1916, 8. Tog, Apr. 14, 1916, 4. Hirsh Abramovitsh recounted how “almost” all the Jews in Vilna were happy when the Germans came: Farshvundene geshtaltn, 262–264. Liulevicius, War Land, 17–21. 33. Tog, Apr. 4, 1915, 8; Apr. 16, 1915, 1; Varhayt, Apr. 18, 1915, 1; Forverts, Aug. 16, 1916, 4; Tog, Oct. 17, 1916, 4. See also Hillel Rogoff, “Di daytsh-amerikaner in hayntigen kempayn,” Tsukunft, Nov. 1916, 903. Szajkowski, Jews, Wars, and Communism, 1:66–67. Rappaport, Hands across the Sea, 48–49. Fredrick C. Luebke, Bonds of Loyalty: GermanAmericans and World War I (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1974). 34. Varhayt, Jan. 14, 1915, 8. Clifton James Child, The German-Americans in Politics, 1914–1917 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1939), 15, 23. 35. Forverts, June 10, 1908, 4; June 11, 1908, 4. See also Herbert Tobin, “New York’s Jews and the Catskill Mountains,” in Jewish Civilization: Essays and Studies, ed. Ronald A. Brauner, 2 vols. (Philadelphia: Reconstructionist Rabbinical College, 1979), 1:163–164. Stefan Kanfer, A Summer World (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1989), 49–113. 36. Varhayt, Feb. 23, 1911, 8. Teller, Strangers and Natives, 6. Roskolenko, Time That Was Then, 83. Russian and Polish members of ILGWU claimed they were discriminated against—Shub, Fun di amolike yorn, 441. The wedding story is in Bronzvil, Nov. 10, 1916, 1. Similar images appeared in YT, May 14, 1906, 4; MZ, Nov. 2, 1909, 2; Forverts, Aug. 24, 1916, 4. Wirth, Ghetto, 229. Ewa Morawska, “Polish-Jewish Relations in America, 1880–1940: Old Elements, New Configurations,” Polin 19 (2007): 71–86. Victor Greene, For God and Country: The Rise of Polish and Lithuanian Consciousness in America, 1860–1910 (Madison: Wisconsin State Historical Society, 1975). 37. The “refuse” is in the poem “Romanian Burden” published by William Kayzer, YT, Sept. 22, 1902, 5. The Amalek quote is in Sol Rosman, “Di geshikhte fun branch 66,” Workmen’s Circle Collection (AJHS), box 4, folder 38. Tog, Aug. 29, 1916, 4. Forverts, Sept. 2, 1916, 4. AJYB 5663 (1902/1903): 38–41. Cherikover wrote in the Tsukunft, Feb. 1917, 87–91. 38. An-ski, “Khurbm galitsye,” 6–9, 24–29. Israel Gutman, “Yehudim—polanim— antishemiyut,” in Kiyum va-shever: yehudei polin le-doroteihem, ed. Israel Bartal and Israel Gutman ( Jerusalem: Zalman Shazar, 1997), 612–617. See also Ezra Mendelsohn, The Jews of East Central Europe between the World Wars (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983), 21. Cf. Danusha V. Goska, who has concentrated on what she calls “antiPolonism” among Jews—Bieganski: The Brute Polak Stereotype, Its Role in Polish-Jewish Relations and American Popular Culture (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2010), 83–84. 39. NYT, Jan. 8, 1915, 3; Nov. 12, 1916, 2. Zetser wrote in Tsukunft, Nov. 1916, 943. Ha-toren, July 28, 1916, 1–2. Varhayt, Apr. 19, 1915, 4; Apr. 30, 1915, 1; YT, Apr. 30, 1915, 1. On Hausner’s

260

Notes to Pages 142–145

visit, see Herman Bernstein’s respective letters (Mar. 16, 1915 and May 6, 1915) to Josef Hoffman and to Dr. Kaplansky, Herman Bernstein Papers (YIVO), folders 168, 176. Tog, Nov. 16, 1914, 4. Mieczyslaw B. Biskupski, “Poles and Jews in America and the Polish Question,” Polin 19 (2007): 87–95. Andrzej Kapiszewski, “Polish-Jewish Confl icts in the United States at the Beginning of World War I,” Polish American Studies 48 (1991): 63–78. 40. NYT, Oct. 12, 1916, 1; Oct. 13, 1916, 1; Oct. 20, 1916, 7. On the background to the Bayonne strike, see John J. Bukowczyk, “The Transformation of Working-Class Ethnicity: Corporate Control, Americanization, and the Polish Immigrant Middle Class in Bayonne, New Jersey, 1915–1925,” in Americanization, Social Control, and Philanthropy, ed. George E. Pozzetta (New York: Garland, 1991), 13–42; George Sweet Gibb and Evelyn H. Knowlton, History of Standard Oil Company (New Jersey): The Resurgent Years, 1911–1927 (1956; repr., New York: Arno, 1976), 141–152. 41. Yidishe folk, Oct. 16, 1916, 4 (italics added). Tog, Oct. 15, 1916, 1; Oct. 16, 1916, 4. Goldberg’s contemporary is Weisgal, So Far, 37. 42. The resident’s letter and the “ignorant peasants” are in FAS, Oct. 21, 1916, 2; Nov. 4, 1916, 2. YT, Oct. 18, 1916, 8. 43. See Roosevelt’s letter (Oct. 29, 1915) to the Tageblat’s editors, Kasriel and Ezekiel Sarasohn Papers (AJA), scrapbook 2. American Jewish Committee, Eighth Annual Report (1915): 19. NYT, Jan. 23, 1915, 10; Feb. 5, 1915, 1. On the three American presidents who vetoed the literacy test four times, see Bennett, American Immigration Policies, 26–28. Bernstein argued that Jewish opposition to the Burnett Bill had weakened because of an exemption clause based on religious persecution—letter to Congressman Isaac Siegel, Apr. 5, 1916, Herman Bernstein Papers (YIVO), folder 296. See the memo (1913) about the literacy test in the National Jewish Immigration Council Papers (AJHS), box 1, folder “Problem of literacy, 1913.” 44. Edward Alsworth Ross, The Old World in the New (New York: Century, 1914), 143– 167, 289–290. Madison Grant, The Passing of the Great Race (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1916), 16. Charles C. Alexander, “Prophet of American Racism: Madison Grant and the Nordic Myth,” Phylon 23 (1962): 73–90. Higham, Strangers, 131–157, 202–204. 45. Shmuel-Zvi Zetser was the editor of Ha-techiyah, where Nathanzon’s letter appeared in June 1913, 3 (quotation marks in the original). Voliner wrote in the Tog, Nov. 1, 1915, 5. Yidisher kongres, Aug. 19, 1915, 5 (italics added). The writer signed as X; hence he might have been Avrom Lesin, who signed at times as “Dr. X”—Berl Kagan, Leksikon fun yidish-shraybers (New York: Ra’aya Ilman-Cohen, 1986), 644. See the offensive reference to Americans in a letter from Yiddish writer S. B. Komaiko to Morris Rosenfeld, Mar. 10, 1916, Morris Rosenfeld Papers (YIVO), folder 10. 46. Jacobson is quoted in Marianne R. Sanua, Going Greek: Jewish College Fraternities in the United States, 1895–1945 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2003), 92–93. Lyons is quoted in the Forverts, Mar. 1, 1914, 1. Vaysman, Halber yorhundert, 73–74. Tog, Oct. 2, 1916, 4. See a similar experience in Sam Gordon, AJAC, 167:18. S. Willis Rudy, The

Notes to Pages 145–148

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College of the City of New York: A History, 1847–1947 (New York: City College Press, 1949), 294–295. Norman Hapgood wrote about anti-Jewish animosity at leading northeastern universities: Harper’s Weekly, Jan. 15, 1916, 53–55; Jan. 22, 1916, 77–79. Stephen Steinberg, “How Jewish Quotas Began,” Commentary 52 (1971): 67–76. 47. American Jewish Committee, Ninth Annual Report (1916): 13–16. Charles Reznikoff, ed., Louis Marshall: Champion of Liberty (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1957), 1:118–119, 127–131. Letter from Leon Sanders of HIAS to Jacob Schiff, Jan. 10, 1911, HIAS Papers (YIVO), reel MKM 15.16. Wolf, Presidents I Have Known, 379–382. On the League of Foreign-Born Citizens, see Jewish Charities, Apr. 1915, 216–217. Hearings before the House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization, 62nd Congress, 2nd Session, 8 vols. (Washington DC: Government Printing Office, 1912), 8:36–214. Neuringer, American Jewry, 90. 48. Varhayt, Nov. 19, 1914, 4 (italics added; quotation marks in the original). In 1913 about three hundred Jewish bricklayers in New York left the union and organized a separate Jewish union “because of insult to Jews in picnic journal,” AJYB 5675 (1914/1915): 140. Melamed also wrote in Varhayt, Jan. 27, 1915, 4 (quotes in the original). 49. NYT, Oct. 20, 1916, 7. Transcript of the hearing (including London’s call to the Polish delegate) on Feb. 24, 1916, is in Meyer London Papers (Tamiment), box 1, folder “1916.” Ha-toren, Mar. 10, 1916, 3. 50. Yidishe folk, Jan. 8, 1915, 4. An English translation of the Tog’s unsigned article clipping is in the Meyer London Papers (Tamiment), box 1, folder “1916” (quotation marks in the original). Hershkovitch wrote in Fortshrit, Jan. 12, 1917, 4. 51. Letter from Louis Feldman to Sidney Hillman, May 8, 1915, ACWA Papers (Kheel), box 2, folder 29. Joseph Schlossberg to Sidney Hillman, Mar. 18, 1915, ACWA Papers (Kheel), box 5, folder 20. Aldo Cursi to Schlossberg, Aug. 23, 1917, ACWA Papers (Kheel), box 9, folder 46. See the resolutions of the first Italian local in the ILGWU, July 31, 1916, ILGWU Papers (Kheel), box 4, folder 6. 52. Documentary History, 134–138. Fenton, Immigrants, 533–534. On Jewish-Italian cooperation in the ACWA, see also Liptzin, Amol iz geven, 138. 53. NYT, Jan. 28, 1916, 1, 4. Zappia, “Unionism,” 182–188. Zappia has argued that ILGWU officials thought that by transferring all Italians to their own local they would limit their power. Ladies’ Garment Worker, Yiddish section, Apr. 1916, 31–36. 54. Forverts, Sept. 8, 1916, 1; Sept. 26, 1916, 1. NYT, Oct. 1, 1916, 1. Call, Sept. 11, 1916, 2; Sept. 12, 1916, 1; Sept. 13, 1916, 2; Sept. 14, 1916, 2. Dubofsky, When Workers Organize, 126–156. See also Leinenweber, “Class and Ethnic Bases,” 50. 55. Forverts, Oct. 5, 1916, 4. Elbe wrote in the Tog, May 3, 1916, 4. On Elbe’s career, see Reyzin, Leksikon, 1:207–210. Dyche wrote in Ladies’ Garment Worker, June 1913, 26–27. See also chap. 5. 56. Forverts, Feb. 21, 1917, 1; Feb. 22, 1917, 1; Feb. 24, 1917, 8. See the reports in the Morgen zhurnal, Tog and Varhayt between Feb. 21 and Mar. 15, 1917. NYT, Feb. 21, 1917, 1; Mar.

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Notes to Pages 148–150

1, 1917, 6. Ganz, Rebels, 246–260. Bruno Lasker, “The Food Riots,” Survey, Mar. 3, 1917, 638–641. Ewen, Immigrant Women, 176–183. The 1917 food riots are discussed in Dana Frank, “Housewives, Socialists, and the Politics of Food: The 1917 New York Cost-ofLiving Protests,” Feminist Studies 11 (1985): 255–286. William Freiburger, “War Prosperity and Hunger: The New York Food Riots of 1917,” Labor History 25 (1984): 217–239. Both articles have not used Yiddish-language sources. 57. Litvin’s report is in the Forverts, Mar. 2, 1917, 4 (quotation marks in the original; italics added). “Food Riots in the United States,” Literary Digest, Mar. 3, 1917, 533–535. See also Maxine S. Seller, “Defining Socialist Womanhood: The Women’s Page of the Jewish Daily Forward in 1919,” AJH 76 (1987): 416–438. 58. Syrkin’s column is in the Tog, Mar. 17, 1917, 6. Voliner wrote in Yidisher kemfer, Mar. 2, 1917, 4. 59. Jacob De Haas’s letter (Mar. 15, 1904) to the Zionist office in Vienna is in Greater Actions Committee Papers (Central Zionist Archives [Jerusalem]), Z1/407. Richards is cited in Melvin I. Urofsky, American Zionism from Herzl to the Holocaust (New York: Anchor, 1975), 117. Evyatar Friesel, Ha-tnua’ ha-tsyonit be-artsot ha-brit (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz ha-meuchad, 1970), 113–114, 160–170. Yonathan Shapiro, Leadership of the American Zionist Organization, 1897–1930 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1971), 24–52. 60. See Brandeis’s formulation in Menorah Journal, Jan. 1915, 4. See also Brandeis’s note (Feb. 18, 1917) to Morris Rothenberg, reprinted in American Zionism: A Documentary History, ed. Aaron S. Klieman and Adrian L. Klieman, 15 vols. (New York: Garland, 1990), 2:146. Shapiro, Leadership, 53–76, 128–129. Urofsky, American Zionism, 242, 294. Allon Gal, Brandeis of Boston (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980). Ben Halpern, “Brandeis Becomes a Zionist,” Modern Judaism 6 (1986): 227–243. 61. Horace M. Kallen, “Democracy Versus the Melting-Pot,” Nation, Feb. 18, 1915, 190–194; Feb. 25, 1915, 217–220. His second quote is in Higham, Send These to Me, 204. Already in 1909 rabbi Judah L. Magnes argued, “The symphony of America must be written by the various nationalities which keep their individual and characteristic note,” quoted in Goren, New York Jews, 4. Noam F. Pianko, “Diaspora Jewish Nationalism and Identity in America, 1914–1967” (PhD diss., Yale University, 2004), 45–78. Sarah Schmidt, “Horace M. Kallen—the Zionist Chapter,” in The Legacy of Horace M. Kallen, ed. Milton R. Konvitz (Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1987), 76–89. 62. Attacks on “slaves” and praise of German Americans are in Yidisher kemfer, Jan. 3, 1908, 5; Apr. 14, 1911, 1. Rosenfeld wrote in the Forverts, July 6, 1910, 4. On Jewish prizefighters, see the Tog, Oct. 2, 1916, 4. Glanz, Jew and Irish, 102–103. Hermalin, Zhurnalistishe shriftn, 165–168. See also Masliansky, Masliansky’s droshes, 2:173–174. Mitchell Bryan Hart, The Healthy Jew: The Symbiosis of Judaism and Modern Medicine (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 124–125. Some Jewish social workers chided rabbis for not partaking in social work, as opposed to Christian clergy: Julius M. Mayer, “The Problem of the Delinquent Child,” Jewish Charity, Jan. 1904, 89–90. See also the critique

Notes to Pages 150–152

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of social worker Abraham Caplan, “Specific Jewish Social Service,” Jewish Charities, Mar. 1913, 15–16. 63. Jonathan Frankel, “The Jewish Socialists and the American Jewish Congress Movement,” YAJSS 16 (1976): 202–341. Frankel, Prophecy, 509–547. Shapiro, Leadership, 80–98, 110–113. Matityahu Mintz, Zmanim khadashim zmirot khadashot: Ber Borokhov, 1914–1917 (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1988), 145–157, 186–198, 253–268. Goren, New York Jews, 218–228. Morris Frommer, “The American Jewish Congress: A History, 1914–1950” (PhD diss., Ohio State University, 1978). 64. The congress’s goals are in Nachman Syrkin, Yidisher kongres in amerike (New York: Yidish-natsyonalen arbeter farband, 1915), 10–16. See the attack by Isaac A. Hourwich on the timidity of the AJC, Tsukunft, May 1916, 368–371; July 1916, 565–571. Friedlaender’s quip was at a meeting of the Zionist leadership, May 9, 1915, Israel Friedlaender Papers ( JTS), box 4, folder “May 1915.” Frankel, “Jewish Socialists,” 324–325. Tsukerman, Zikhroynes, 2:49–76. Rojanski, Zehuyot nifgashot, 127–164. Raider, Emergence of American Zionism, 2–3, 27–28, 35–36. 65. Zhitlovsky, Gezamlte shriftn, 8:113, 118–122. See also a different handwritten version (in Yiddish as well), Chaim Zhitlovsky Papers (YIVO), folder 1224. Bronzvil, Nov. 6, 1914, 1. On the Germans, see Tog, Mar. 30, 1916, 4. The Poles are mentioned in Yidisher kongres, Nov. 12, 1915, 2. On the aspiration for normalcy, see Shapira, Yehudim chadashim, 155–174. Biale, Power and Powerlessness, 130–133. 66. Schiff is cited in Goren, New York Jews, 221. See Moyshe Olgin’s opposition to the congress, Forverts, Apr. 9, 1915, 4. For a humorous take on how central the congress issue was on the Jewish street, see GK, July 20, 1917, 4. On Rutenberg, see Matityahu Mintz, “Pinkhas Rutenberg—ha-chida: ’Od al Rutenberg u-misaviv lo,” Ha-tsiyonut 16 (1991): 283–306. Frankel, “Jewish Socialists,” 231–232. 67. Borokhov and Rutenberg wrote in the Yidisher kongres, quoted in Frankel, Prophecy and Politics, 517 (italics added). Magnes is quoted in Frankel, Prophecy and Politics, 523. See also the letter from Brandeis to Cyrus Adler (Aug. 10, 1915) on how to secure non-Jewish support for the congress—Israel Friedlaender Papers ( JTS), box 4, folder “August 1915.” 68. Entin wrote in Varhayt, Jan. 18, 1915, 4. Tog, Oct. 17, 1916, 4. Isaac A. Hourwich argued the same about the Irish—American Jewish Chronicle, May 26, 1916, 71. See how Zionist essayist Abraham Koralnik described the “Celts”—Tog, May 3, 1916, 4. 69. Yidishe folk, Feb. 18, 1916, 4. Yidisher kongres, Feb. 18, 1916, 3–4 (italics in the original). Cherikover’s latter article is in the Tog, Mar. 29, 1916, 4. See also his article in the Tsukunft, Aug. 1916, 659–660. On the Federation of Ukrainians in America, see Myron B. Kuropas, The Ukrainian Americans: Roots and Aspirations (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991), 131–137. On the Irish convention in New York and its results, see Kevin Kenny, “American-Irish Nationalism,” in Making the Irish American: History and Heritage of the Irish in the United States, ed. J. J. Lee and Marion R. Case (New York:

264

Notes to Pages 153–156

New York University Press, 2006), 294–295. Mary C. Kelly, The Shamrock and the Lily: The New York Irish and the Creation of a Transatlantic Identity, 1845–1921 (New York: Peter Lang, 2005), 175. On the Polish American effort to organize, see Donald E. Pienkos, For Your Freedom Through Ours: Polish American Efforts on Poland’s Behalf, 1863–1991 (New York: Distributed by Columbia University Press, 1991), 56–72. 70. See the contempt for the alliance between the patrician AJC and downtown socialists in Yidisher kongres, Aug. 19, 1915, 5. In a 1917 address before the “Judaeans” club in Manhattan, Bernard G. Richards maintained that an American Jewish Congress was needed to win the sympathy of “all other liberty-loving Americans”—A Congress for Jewish Rights, Mar. 4, 1917, *ZP-*PBM, p.v. 89, 13 (Dorot). Manor, ‘Iton, 178–186. Frankel, Prophecy and Politics, 516, 526–528. 71. Henderson, Tammany Hall, 41, 125. Fuchs, Political Behavior, 51, 56. Sorin, Time for Building, 192–197. On the relations between political machines and reform, see J. Joseph Huthmacher, “Urban Liberalism and the Age of Reform,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 49 (1962): 231–241. 72. Marshall’s words are in Minutes of the Executive Committee for an American Jewish Congress, Oct. 14, 1917, William Edlin Papers (YIVO), folder 68. For more on the postponement issue, see the article by H. Zolotarov, Varhayt, Oct. 14, 1917, 6. Karl Fornberg, Tog, Oct. 20, 1917, 6. 73. On Jewish War Relief Day, see NYT, Jan. 13, 1916, 5; Jan. 28, 1916, 1. Shub, Fun di amolike yorn, 386–387, 415, 457. Forverts, Aug. 22, 1916, 4; Jan. 25, 1917, 3 (Tsivyen); Feb. 2, 1917, 4. See also Tsukerman, Zikhroynes, 2:124–125. Cyrus Adler, I Have Considered the Days (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1941), 305. Cf. M. Baranov’s earlier opinion of Wilson, Tsukunft, Apr. 1913, 400. Rappaport, Hands across the Sea, 59–60, 90. Fuchs, Political Behavior, 57–60. Arthur S. Link, Woodrow Wilson and the Progressive Era, 1910–1917 (1954; repr., New York: Harper & Row, 1963), 60–61, 244–245. Howe, World of Our Fathers, 384. 74. The expediency argument has been made numerous times: Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 119–122, 186–187. Jeffrey Melnick, A Right to Sing the Blues (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 12–13. Harold Cruse, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual (New York: William Morrow, 1967). Charles Anthony Zappia has made a similar argument about the Jewish self-interest in relation to the Italians in the ILGWU, in “Unionism,” 182–183, 197. 75. Diner, “Drawn Together,” 27.

chapter 7 — “What the American Can Do in His Anger” 1. Fredrick Lewis Allen, Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the Nineteen-Twenties (1931; repr., New York: Harper & Row, 1964), 54. Elbe wrote in the Tog, Jan. 21, 1920, 6. Rogoff wrote in the Tsukunft, Feb. 1920, 75.

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2. See, for example, Weiss, “Ethnicity and Reform,” 566–585. Cohen, Making a New Deal, 47–48. 3. See the front pages in the Forverts, Morgen zhurnal, and Yidishes tageblat between Mar. 16 and Mar. 23, 1917. See also Avrom Lesin’s joy in Tsukunft, Apr. 1917, 189. The happiness among New York Jews is described in NYT, Mar. 17, 1917, 1, 8; Szajkowski, Jews, Wars, and Communism, 1:119–130; and Rappaport, Hands across the Sea, 96–98 (MZ is cited in ibid.). 4. Forverts, July 10, 1917, 4–5. American Jewish Chronicle, July 13, 1917, 273. Varhayt, Mar. 19, 1917, 4. The statistic about migration to Russia is cited in Szajkowski, Jews, Wars, and Communism, 1:284. 5. See the undated appeal of the JLAP in the Joseph Barondess Papers (NYPL), box 4, folder “1916–1918 Jewish Affairs.” See the league’s letter (May 16, 1917) to Edlin, William Edlin Papers (YIVO), folder 83. On the AALD, see the “Reminiscences of John Spargo,” CUOHROC, 266–278. Frank L. Grubbs, Jr., The Struggle for Labor Loyalty: Gompers, the AF of L, and the Pacifists, 1917–1920 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1968), 39–46. Baranov is quoted in Rappaport, Hands across the Sea, 109. Miller wrote in Miller’s vokhenshrift, July 6, 1917, whose English translation is in AFL Papers (WSHS), series 11A (hereafter 11A), box 61, folder 2. The manifesto of the JSL (Sept. 14, 1917) is in ibid. 6. Call, Apr. 10, 1917, 1–2. Yidisher kemfer, Apr. 20, 1917, 4. Burgin (and also Max Goldfarb, who expressed a similar stance) wrote in the Forverts, May 4, 1917, 4; May 10, 1917, 3. Hourwich wrote in the Tog, Apr. 11, 1917, 4 (italics added). On the resistance to war in the Arbeter Ring convention, see Fraynd, June 1917, 41; FAS, May 26, 1917, 2. Nina E. Hillquit, an unpublished biography of her father, Morris Hillquit Papers (WSHS), reel 7, 44–50. H. C. Peterson and Gilbert C. Fite, Opponents of War, 1917–1918 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1957), 8–9, 74–76. Cf. Beth Wenger’s argument that as America entered the war, “even most of the strident opponents conceded the issue,” in “War Stories: Jewish Patriotism on Parade,” in Imagining the American Jewish Community, ed. Jack Wertheimer (Hanover: University Press of New England in association with Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 2007), 101. 7. Slonim’s recollection was published in the Tog, Oct. 26, 1943, 5; Oct. 27, 1943, 7. Varhayt, Aug. 26, 1917, 1; Aug. 29 1917, 1; World, Aug. 29, 1917, 5; NYT, Aug. 29, 1917, 8. Michael N. Dobkowski, The Tarnished Dream: The Basis of American Anti-Semitism (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1979), 221–222. 8. On the situation in South Brooklyn, see Varhayt, Sept. 2, 1917, 1; Sept. 23, 1917, 1; Nov. 10, 1917, 4. NYT falsely called Dunne a “socialist soapbox orator”—Nov. 2, 1917, 10. John D. Moore, national secretary of the Friends of Irish Freedom, also wrote to Mayor Mitchel, “The Jews are our friends”: World, Aug. 29, 1917, 5. Christopher M. Sterba, Good Americans: Italian and Jewish Immigrants during the First World War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 28–29. The organ of JSF complained that Tammany (through Varhayt) was inflating Dunne’s agitation to appear as rescuer of New York Jews in the 1917 election—Naye velt, Sept. 7, 1917, 1.

266

Notes to Pages 160–163

9. David M. Kennedy, Over Here: The First World War and American Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 59–69. Conolly-Smith, Translating America, 245–270. Higham, Strangers, 204–219, 278–279. O’Leary, To Die For, 220–245. 10. Rosenfeld is quoted in Rappaport, Hands across the Sea, 102. Tog, Mar. 31, 1917, 8. Tashrak wrote in Yidishe gazetn, Mar. 30, 1917, 11. On worsening conditions under German occupation in Eastern Europe in 1917, see the recollections of Pauline Notkoff, Voices from Ellis Island (Library of Congress), 27:2; and fellow Bialystoker Gertrude Yellin, Voices from Ellis Island (Library of Congress), 144:4. Liulevicius, War Land, 182. 11. The friend is Shub, Fun di amolike yorn, 450. Tsivyen wrote in the Fraynd, Aug. 1917, 9 (italics added). Forverts is cited in Naye velt, Apr. 13, 1917, 6. See also the depiction of Germans as “savages” with a superiority complex in GK, July 20, 1917, 6. Ha-toren, Nov. 21, 1919, 1–2. 12. Entin wrote in Varhayt, Aug. 4, 1917, 4–5. The second quote is in Varhayt, Aug. 3, 1917, 4 (quotes in the original). On the physical “underdevelopment” of Jews, see also the Tog, Apr. 13, 1917, 10; Jewish Charities, Dec. 1914, 111. The most complete account of New York Jews and the draft is in Sterba, Good Americans, 53–81. On conceptions regarding Jews and physical weakness, see Stephen J. Whitfield, “Unathletic Department,” Jews, Sports, and the Rites of Citizenship, ed. Jack Kugelmass (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007), 51–71. See also Fishberg, Jews, Race, 178. 13. Brandeis’s words were said at a meeting of the Provisional Executive Committee for General Zionist Affairs, cited in an appendix to a letter by Jacob De Haas to Israel Friedlaender, Sept. 11, 1917, Israel Friedlaender Papers ( JTS), box 6, folder “Sept. 1917” (italics added). London is quoted in Rogoff, East Side Epic, 104–105. The account on London’s meeting in New York was given in an ad by a group that set out to defeat Hillquit’s mayoral candidacy, in Varhayt, Nov. 4, 1917, 3. The group’s depiction seems to be fairly accurate: London indeed believed antiwar agitation to be dangerous. 14. Those impressions also appeared in the city’s mayoralty campaign in the fall of 1917: see, for example, the arguments of Samuel Untermyer and Abraham Cahan (respectively) in World, Nov. 6, 1917, 9; Forverts, Nov. 4, 1917, 1. 15. Yidisher kemfer, Nov. 23, 1917, 4. On the joy in New York following the declaration, see Katsovitch, Zekhtsik yor lebn, 371–372. Ash wrote in the Tsukunft, Dec. 1917, 673–674. The declaration and some of the responses are in Urofsky, American Zionism, 202, 212– 220. Other responses are quoted in Charles Israel Goldblatt, “The Impact of the Balfour Declaration in America,” AJHQ 57 (1968): 480–492. On the responses to the declaration, see also American Zionism, ed. Klieman and Klieman, 2:233–236. Ben Halpern, “Brandeis and the Origins of the Balfour Declaration,” Studies in Zionism 7 (1983): 71–100. On Agudas ha-Rabonim, see Jenna Weissman Joselit, New York’s Jewish Jews: The Orthodox Community in the Interwar Years (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 30, 60–61. 16. American Jewish Chronicle, Dec. 7, 1917, 110–111; Dec. 14, 1917, 161–162; Yidishe folk, Jan. 11, 1918, 10. See also Rappaport, Hands across the Sea, 134–135.

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17. New York Exporters Review is quoted in Dobkowski, Tarnished Dream, 222 (parentheses in the original). The speeches of Bernstein and Greenbaum are in NYT, Nov. 19, 1917, 2; Mar. 24, 1918, 22. The Yidishe folk made the same argument, Nov. 23, 1917, 2. Peter G. Filene, Americans and the Soviet Experiment, 1917–1933 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967), 46–47. Robert K. Murray, Red Scare: A Study of National Hysteria, 1919–1920 (1955; repr., New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964), 34. 18. Brainin, diary entry for Nov. 11, 1917, Kol kitvey Re’uven Ben Mordekhai Brainin, 3 vols. (New York: By a committee, 1940), 3:321–322. Magidov, Shpigl, 42–44. The antiBolshevik stance of Yiddish papers is quoted in Rappaport, Hands across the Sea, 122–123. See also Howe, World of Our Fathers, 326. Epstein, Jewish Labor, 2:63. 19. On the early doubts, see M. Gurevitsh’s article, Tsukunft, Dec. 1917, 681, and Baranov’s opinion in the Tsukunft, June 1918, 364–365. Herts, Yidishe sotsyalistishe, 180–183. Murray, Red Scare, 33–36. 20. Interview with Sol Broad (Mar. 6, 1919), David J. Saposs Papers (WSHS), box 22, folder 2. Edlin wrote to George Creel on Feb. 28, 1918, William Edlin Papers (YIVO), folder 76. Letter from Germer to Hillquit, Mar. 4, 1918, Morris Hillquit papers (WSHS), reel 2. 21. Isaac Babel, “The Killers Must Be Finished Off,” in 1920 Diary, ed. Carol J. Evins, trans. H. T. Willetts (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 106. Oscar Kleinman from Bialystok recalled how the Red Army treated the Jews better than the Poles, but it was no “panacea” either—Voices From Ellis Island (Library of Congress), 1:2. See M. Sadikov’s contemporary accounts of the pogroms, In yene teg (New York: N.p., 1926), 32–43. AJYB 5681 (1920/1921): 247–283. N. Gergel, “The Pogroms in the Ukraine in 1918–1921,” YAJSS 6 (1951): 237–252. Peter Kenez, “Pogroms and White Ideology in the Russian Civil War,” in Pogroms, ed. Klier and Lambroza, 293–313. Norman Davies, God’s Playground: A History of Poland, 2 vols. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 2:393–401. 22. Examples of Jewish anti-Bolshevik warnings are in MZ, June 13, 1919, 4; Oct. 27, 1919, 4; YT, Nov. 3, 1918, 4; Yidishe folk, Nov. 23, 1917, 2. Wise, Rosenfeld, and Yanovsky (among others) are cited in Szajkowski, Jews, Wars, and Communism, 2:189–194, 204. Zosa Szajkowski, Kolchack, Jews, and the American Intervention in Northern Russia and Siberia (New York: By the author, 1977), 27–36. On the American intervention, see Thomas J. Knock, To End All Wars: Woodrow Wilson and the Quest for a New World Order (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 155–158. Filene, Americans and the Soviet Experiment, 39–63, 164. 23. Sinclair is quoted in Zosa Szajkowski, “Double Jeopardy—The Abrams Case of 1919,” AJAJ 23 (1971): 22. On the Jewish opposition to American intervention in Russia, see Szajkowski, Kolchack, Jews, 35, 142. See also Lesin’s article, Tsukunft, Sept. 1918, 503–504. 24. Richard Polenberg, Fighting Faiths: The Abrams Case, the Supreme Court, and Free Speech (New York: Viking, 1987), 23–27, 43–81, 88–95, 118–153, 197–242. Szajkowski, “Double Jeopardy,” 6–32. Kahan, Di Yidish-anarkhistishe bavegung, 367–368.

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Notes to Pages 166–169

25. Tsukunft, Sept. 1919, 530–532 (italics added). On the tension in the Socialist Party branch, see Central Committee minutes, Jan. 11, 1919, New York Socialist Party Records (Tamiment), reel R2638, 5–7. Isaac Babel described in his diary how Red Army Cossacks also committed atrocities against Jews—1920 Diary, 3–5, 84–85. On pogroms by Red Army units, see Elias Cherikover, Di ukrayner pogromen in yor 1919 (New York: YIVO, 1965), chap. 12. 26. YT, Oct. 22, 1917, 4 (italics added). See also Varhayt, Apr. 19, 1915, 4; Tog, Mar. 11, 1919, 4; Ha-toren, Dec. 6, 1918, 1; NYT, Nov. 15, 1918, 2; Nov. 30, 1918, 3. H. H. Fisher, America and the New Poland (New York: Macmillan, 1928), 155–159. See the essay by Max J. Kohler in AH, Nov. 22, 1918, 50, 68. The Polish Committee’s circular, June 9, 1919, is in Peter Wiernik Papers (Yeshiva University), box 11, folder 20. The Cleveland committee is quoted in Andrzej Kapiszewski, Confl icts across the Atlantic: Essays on PolishJewish Relation in the United States during World War I and in the Interwar Period (Kraków: Ksiegarnia Akademicka, 2004), 176. See also chap. 6. 27. Marshall and Mack are cited in NYT, Nov. 30, 1918, 3. Ash is quoted in MZ, Dec. 12, 1918, 1. Glanz (who was among the founders of the In zikh literary group and known by his pen name Leyeles) wrote in Tog, May 30, 1919, 6 (italics added). A heartrending portrayal of the situation in Pinsk after the pogrom is in a letter by Borekh Tsukerman to his wife (May 1919), quoted in his Zikhroynes, 2:160–167. See the reports and memos sent (1919–1920) by Jewish relief workers in Poland (like Boris Bogen), Judah L. Magnes Papers (CAHJP), folder 1148. Azriel Shochat, “Pinsk beyn ukrainim, bolshevikim u-polanim,” Gal-ed 2 (1975): 209–236. Fink, Defending the Rights of Others, 173–186. 28. The report on Haller’s soldiers appeared in Tsayt, Nov. 24, 1920, 5. Rosen’s story appeared in ibid., Nov. 16, 1920, 3. GK, Apr. 25, 1919, 3. Tog, Apr. 17, 1919, 4. On Haller’s army, see James S. Pula, Polish Americans: An Ethnic Community (New York: Twayne, 1995), 58–60. 29. MZ, Nov. 13, 1918, 4 (but on Apr. 7, 1919, 4, the paper complained about anti-Jewish violence in Czechoslovakia). Tog, July 12, 1919, 8. A. S. Zaks identified with the Czech in an undated article, “Natsyonalitet un shovinism,” Abraham S. Zaks Papers (CAHJP), folder 10. See also the comparisons between various Slavic nations by A. Litvin in the Forverts, May 3, 1919, 4–5. 30. Lesin wrote in the Forverts, May 21, 1919, 1; May 22, 1919, 1, 3, 6. See also his comments about Poles in Tsukunft, Mar. 1919, 131–132; Ha-toren, May 23, 1919, 2; Yidishe folk, May 30, 1919, 4–5; Tog, Nov. 25, 1919, 1. NYT, May 22, 1919, 1, 5; Nov. 25, 1919, 6. In April 1921 Re’uven Brainin visited Ellis Island, where newly arrived children from Ukraine told him how Semyon Petlyura’s men “chopped off ” many Jewish heads—diary entry dated April 23, 1921, Re’uven Brainin Papers (CAHJP), P8/25, 69. 31. NYT, June 5, 1919, 7; June 8, 1919, 20. Tog, Apr. 2, 1919, 6; June 1, 1919, 8; June 14, 1919, 1; July 12, 1919, 8; MZ, June 3, 1919, 5; June 10, 1919, 2. Egoz’s piece appeared in MZ, June 18, 1919, 4. Bundist John Mill also wrote about antisemitism as a “national phenomenon” in Poland—Tsukunft, Oct. 1919, 604.

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32. The Polish paper is cited in Kapiszewski, Confl icts, 176. AH, Aug. 1, 1919, 282. Hermalin’s column was published in the Tog, May 17, 1920, 8. See also Forverts, May 6, 1919, 1. On Poles as workers who did not want to unionize, see Flora Weiss’s account, AYGB, box 3, 5. 33. Tog, May 15, 1920, 16; May 26, 1920, 10 (the words “noble” and “progressive” are originally in quotes; italics added). See also Hermalin’s earlier (1912) praise of the American people in Zhurnalistishe shriftn, 60–63, 147. When Prohibition was enacted, several Jewish commentators (including Hermalin) referred to Catholics, especially the Irish, as those who would suffer the most: Tog, Aug. 29, 1920, 16. MZ, March 16, 1919, 4 (“The last ‘wet’ Purim”). The latter paper saw Prohibition as mainly an anti-German measure, MZ, Aug. 7, 1919, 4. Morris Rosenfeld wrote a humorous column about the difference between Gentiles and Jews that could explain Prohibition, in MZ, Feb. 16, 1919, 6. 34. Literary Digest, Dec. 14, 1918, 32. The Anti-Bolshevist is cited in Szajkowski, Jews, Wars, and Communism, 2:159. Hornaday’s book, titled Awake! America! Object Lessons and Warnings, is quoted in Dobkowski, Tarnished Dream, 223–224. 35. Murray, Red Scare, 67–81, 94–104, 190–209, 251. Pfannestiel, Rethinking the Red Scare, 19–35, 75–96. Julian F. Jaffe, Crusade against Radicalism: New York during the Red Scare, 1914–1924 (Port Washington, NY: Kennikat, 1972), 77–103, 119–142. Higham, Strangers, 229–233, 277–279. William Preston Jr., Aliens and Dissenters: The Federal Suppression of Radicals, 1903–1933 (1963; repr., New York: Harper & Row, 1966), 182–183, 208–237. Peterson and Fite, Opponents of War, 285–294. 36. On Pine and discrimination in army camps, see in the Call, Nov. 9, 1917, 1–2. The letter of Kornbleit and Goldenberg (Aug. 27, 1918) and other complaints are in the Louis Marshall Papers (AJA), box 155, folder “War Department,” which also contains many examples of anti-Jewish abuses in the armed forces. See also Marshall’s letter to Richard Derby (chair of the Soldiers’ Re-Employment Committee), Jan. 5, 1920, Louis Marshall Papers (AJA), box 1590, folder “Jan. 1920.” The situation had worsened a decade later— Broun and Britt, Christians Only, 188–245. 37. The letters from Edlin, Dec. 30, 1918 (which cites the Tog), and Fromberg, Jan. 5, 1919, are in the Louis Marshall Papers (AJA), box 155, folder “War Department.” See Marshall’s letter to M. J. Greene of Brooklyn, June 14, 1920, Louis Marshall Papers (AJA), box 1590, folder “June 1920.” AH, Nov. 23, 1917, 69; Nov. 22, 1918, 51, 67. Eisenstein, Stripe of Tammany’s Tiger, 28. See also YT, Oct. 31, 1918, 8; MZ, Jan. 15, 1920, 4. 38. Elbe wrote in the Tog, Jan. 16, 1920, 6. Friedlaender’s words are in Minutes of a Meeting of the Board of Trustees, Feb. 3, 1919, Educational Alliance Papers (YIVO), reel MK 266.4. For an extreme example of Jewish proponents of Americanization, see Jewish Charities, Feb. 1919, 207–209. Yoel Entin accused those Americanizing agencies of being subservient—Yidisher kemfer, Mar. 7, 1919, 1–2. On the “Russification” of America, see Bronzvil, Mar. 23, 1917, 7. See also the Joint Distribution Committee, Memorial Meeting, Israel Friedlaender, Bernard Cantor (New York: American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, 1920).

270

Notes to Pages 172–177

39. Tsukunft, Aug. 1919, 477–478. A similar view is expressed in the recollection of Sam Gordon, AJAC, 167:18. Cf. the comparison made by the Zionist Abe Goldberg between Europe and America in MZ, Dec. 17, 1918, 4. 40. The HIAS official is quoted in Neuringer, American Jewry, 133–134. GK, May 9, 1919, 3. Entin wrote in the Tog, Nov. 29, 1919, 9 (italics added). Hourwich wrote in the Tsukunft, Mar. 1919, 150. His 1913 article appeared in AH, Oct. 17, 1913, 683–684. 41. Goldberg wrote in MZ, Dec. 17, 1918, 4; Sept. 24, 1919, 4. The longer quote is in Yidishe folk, Nov. 21, 1919, 3 (italics added). Entin wrote under the pen name L. Iserovitsh in the Yidisher kemfer, June 13, 1919, 4. 42. The warning was published in (among other dailies) MZ, Oct. 31, 1919, 7; Nov. 7, 1918, 4 (quotes in the original). See another warning in YT, Nov. 3, 1918, 4. Cf. Forverts, Sept. 4, 1918, 1. See also the letter of a pro-Bolshevik, Dr. N. Alpert, to Isaac A. Hourwich (undated, circa Apr. 1919), complaining about “Russian Jews who disseminate wrong ideas about Bolsheviks among the American Gentiles”—Isaac A. Hourwich Papers (YIVO), reel 8. 43. Fornberg wrote in the Tog, Feb. 23, 1919, 6. Fraynd, Nov.–Dec. 1919, 13 (italics added). Voliner wrote in the Tog, Jan. 19, 1920, 4; Nov. 6, 1919, 4. See also his article in Yidisher kemfer, July 4, 1919, 1. GK, Jan. 30, 1920, 4. Forverts, Jan. 14, 1920, 7. Responses to the unseating of New York Socialist assembly members are in GK, Jan. 30, 1920, 4; Forverts, Jan. 14, 1920, 7; Waldman, Labor Lawyer, 90–114; Hillquit, Loose Leaves, 246–273; NYT, Jan. 8, 1920, 1; World, Jan. 8, 1920, 12. 44. Siegel, Untermyer, Adler, and Marshall are cited in Szajkowski, Jews, Wars, and Communism, 2:100–102, 117, 136, 139, 193, 315–316n9. Tog, Jan. 28, 1919, 5; July 5, 1919, 6; Jan. 15, 1920, 4; May 24, 1920, 4. See the critique by Magidov in MZ, Jan. 12, 1920, 4. On Marshall’s public objection to the kind of Americanization that demanded that Jews relinquish their distinctiveness, see Tsukerman, Zikhroynes, 2:138–139. 45. Fink wrote in the Tog, July 11, 1919, 4–5. The movie was directed by George Irving, and the screenwriter was Augustus E. Thomas—see http://www.imdb.com/title/ tt0010851/fullcredits#cast. Six days later the Tog notified its readers that Smith and Roosevelt did not endorse the film, and the distributor promised to change it—July 17, 1919, 4. Patricia Erens, The Jew in American Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 63. 46. Caplan wrote in MZ, June 13, 1919, 4; June 20, 1919, 4 (italics added). Niger wrote in Tog, July 24, 1920, 7. See also Tog, Oct. 3, 1919, 8. Iser Ginzburg made a similar point in the socialist Naye velt, May 23, 1919, 3. On the dissemination of the Protocols in America, see Robert Singerman, “The American Career of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” AJH 71 (1981): 48–78. 47. The letter quoted above (Nov. 21, 1920) is in Benjamin Koenigsberg Papers (Yeshiva University), box 14, folder 3; a slightly different version (Nov. 22, 1920) is in William Edlin Papers (YIVO), folder 68. Schomer’s handwritten proposal (in Yiddish,

Notes to Pages 177–180

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1907) to establish a Jewish World Congress is in the Abraham S. Schomer Papers (YIVO), folder 24. The official Yiddish circular (1920) for the congress is in Abraham S. Schomer Papers (YIVO), folder 23. The letter of Nathan Straus to Schomer, Nov. 3, 1920, is in Abraham S. Schomer Papers (YIVO), folder 17. The letter from Benjamin Koenigsberg to Schomer, Dec. 17, 1920, depicted the opposition of American Zionists to the initiative—Abraham S. Schomer Papers (YIVO), folder 11. See Cyrus Adler’s letter to Schomer, Nov. 24, 1920, Abraham S. Schomer Papers (YIVO), folder 1. 48. On the opposition of rabbis and various lodges to the Gary Plan, see AJYB 5677 (1916/1917): 85–86. Forverts, Oct. 20, 1917, 1, 8. Samson Benderly, “The Gary Plan and Jewish Education,” Jewish Teacher 1 (1916): 41–47. See also Sarah Kristol-Breslau’s article in the Tsukunft, Nov. 1917, 622–624. Tribune, Oct. 17, 1917, 9; Evening Post, Oct. 22, 1917, 1, 8; World, Oct. 20, 1917, 1, 3; Oct. 22, 1917, 10. The most comprehensive treatment of the controversy in New York over the Gary Plan is in Ravitch, Great School Wars, 195–230. See also Brumberg, Going to America, 145–146. Cohen, Jews in Christian America, 115–116. 49. Entin wrote in Varhayt, Nov. 2, 1917, 4. Tsivyen wrote in Forverts, Oct. 18, 1917, 4. Ravitch, Great School Wars, 224–226. The constant obsession with public image led Varhayt to complain that the demonstrations “bring shame on Jews” and “brutalize the children,” Oct. 20, 1917, 4. 50. Kristol-Breslau wrote in the Tsukunft, Aug. 1917, 459–461, where much of her attack was directed at Irish principals and supervisors. Blum wrote in Forverts, Oct. 19, 1917, 4. Markowitz, My Daughter, 5, 12. 51. NYT, Nov. 14, 1917, 11; Nov. 16, 1917, 5; Dec. 16, 1917, 5; Dec. 20, 1917, 1, 11. Literary Digest, Jan. 5, 1918, 26. Sherry Gorelick, City College and the Jewish Poor: Education in New York, 1880–1924 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1981), 97, 215–216n36. Jaffe, Crusade against Radicalism, 106–108. 52. Forverts, Nov. 15, 1917, 4. Rosengarten, “Jewish Teacher,” 323–326. The second teacher wrote in Tsukunft, Jan. 1918, 18–19. 53. Tog, June 19, 1919, 6—since Edlin wrote most of the editorials, he probably wrote that one as well. See the anti-Lusk caricature in the Tsayt, Apr. 26, 1921, 8. Literary Digest, July 5, 1919, 40. Call, May 29, 1919, 1. Herman is cited in Szajkowski, Jews, Wars, and Communism, 2:33. Jaffe, Crusade against Radicalism, 109–117. Pfannestiel, Rethinking the Red Scare, ix-x, 123–133. 54. Diner, In the Almost Promised Land, 15. 55. Varhayt, Nov. 20, 1917, 3. Steinberg, “How Jewish Quotas Began,” 67–76. The statistics about Jewish students at CCNY (and the ensuing joke) are in Sanua, Going Greek, 41–42. The letter is cited in Richard P. McCormick, Rutgers: A Bicentennial History (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1966), 160–161. On intra-Jewish tensions, see the Tsukunft, Sept. 1917, 528–529; Jonathan Z. Pollack, “Jewish Problems: Eastern and Western Jewish Identities in Confl ict at the University of Wisconsin, 1919–1941,” AJH 89 (2001): 161–180.

272

Notes to Pages 180–182

56. The sergeant incident is in AJYB 5680 (1919/1920): 177. Slonim wrote in the Tog, June 14, 1919, 7. He described the president of the student body as an “Irishman.” Felix Morrow, “Higher Learning on Washington Square: Some Notes on N.Y.U.,” Menorah Journal 18 (1940): 346–357. Horace Coon, Columbia: Colossus on the Hudson (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1947), 16. The Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute dropped (December 1918) sixty-eight students because of the need to reduce classes—sixty-six of them were Jewish—AH, Dec. 27, 1918, 203. For a depiction of campus attitudes and enrollment figures, see Marcia G. Synnott, The Half-Opened Door: Discrimination and Admissions at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, 1900–1970 (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1979), 15–19, 130. Harold S. Wechsler, The Qualified Student: A History of Selective College Admission in America (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1977), 150–153, 162–166. 57. An example of a site where there were amicable relations between Italians and Jews was Yale University—Dan Oren, Joining the Club: A History of Jews and Yale, 2nd ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 35, 75. 58. Glanz, Jew and Italian, 7–8. The Irish still “enjoyed” an image of street hoodlums and Jew-baiters, characteristics that were less associated with Italians and Blacks: see the account of Max Feigan, AJAC, 4:23. A. Berlow (Vorleb), AJAC, 70:43–44. Sam Shershevsky, AJAC, 131:29. Gorelik, WWOHL-AJC, 22. Newman, WWOHL-AJC, 36. On the Irish humor of April Fool’s Day, see Tog, Apr. 3, 1919, 6. Jewish observers also blamed “the Irish” for the death in October 1918 of a girl from Harlem, thirteen-yearold Sadie Dellon, an incident that I intend to explore in a separate study—see Varhayt, Oct. 28, 1918, 1. 59. Sibert’s report was in the American Jewish Chronicle, Aug. 18, 1916, 456–457. On Irish-Jewish intermarriage, see Philip Krantz’s essay in the Fraynd, Nov. 1917, 11–13. Bercovici, It’s the Gypsy in Me, 94. See also the feuilleton by humorist Chaim Gutman in which Jewish women reproach a female pushcart vendor for running off with an Italian—Tsayt, Nov. 25, 1920, 3. Drachsler, Democracy, 124–128. 60. Benjamin Gitlow, I Confess: The Truth about American Communism (New York: E.  P. Dutton, 1940), 25–39. On the split of Jewish left-wingers and communists from the Socialist Party, see Howe, World of Our Fathers, 325–338. Herts, Yidishe sotsyalistishe, 188–198. Michels, Fire in Their Hearts, 219–228. 61. Lang, Tomorrow Is Beautiful, 115. The writer of the report from the AFL convention is identified only as “observer,” Tsukunft, July 1918, 395. On the convention, see Grubbs, Struggle, 110–112. See also Harry Lang’s report in the Fraynd, Jan. 1919, 21. David J. Saposs, “Report,” in the David J. Saposs Papers (WSHS), box 21, folder 5. A fierce attack on the AFL’s immigration policy is in the Tog, Jan. 29, 1919, 4. On the frame-up of Tom Mooney as involved in a Preparedness Day bombing (1916), see Richard H. Frost, The Mooney Case (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1968). The Forverts called for the release of Mooney and characterized him as a “martyr”—Oct. 5, 1917, 4; Oct. 23, 1917, 5. 62. “Digest of Interviews with Trade Union Officials” (1919), David J. Saposs Papers (WSHS), box 21, folder 5. Interview with J. H. Conway ( Jan. 20, 1919), David J. Saposs

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Papers (WSHS), box 22, folder 2: Conway complained that Jews were “chasing rainbows and dreams chiefly in the form of Socialism.” Interview with J. C. Skemp, Chas A. Cullen, and Jos F. Clarke ( Jan. 1919), David J. Saposs Papers (WSHS), box 21, folder 16. David T. Davis from the Bookbinders Union attacked Jews as “a wild bunch” ( Jan. 1919)—David J. Saposs Papers (WSHS), box 22, folder 2. 63. “Hostile attitude” is in the interview with Phil Zanser ([sic]—it was Zausner), secretary of the New York Painters, Paper Hangers, and Plasterers District Council (Dec. 13, 1919), David J. Saposs Papers (WSHS), box 22, folder 2. The interview with Schoolman (Dec. 24, 1918) is in David J. Saposs Papers (WSHS), box 21, folder 16. Interview with Michael B. Newman, Bookbinder Union (Mar. 7, 1919), David J. Saposs Papers (WSHS), box 21, folder 5. Interviews with Joseph Schlossberg, General Secretary of ACWA (Feb. 27, 1919), David J. Saposs Papers (WSHS), box 21, folder 16. Interview with David Wolf of ACWA (Feb. 27, 1919; Mar. 1, 1919), David J. Saposs Papers (WSHS), box 21, folder 16. Baranov wrote in the Tsukunft, Dec. 1919, 701. 64. On clashes with Italians, see Roskolenko, Time That Was Then, 101–102; and Ray Arcell’s account in Kisseloff, You Must Remember This, 344–345. Interview with Fannie Cohn (Aug. 1919), David J. Saposs Papers (WSHS), box 21, folder 16. In 1916 Cohn became the first woman to be elected as vice president of a major union—ILGWU: see Orleck, Common Sense, 169–173. See the letter from Italian organizer Aldo Cursi to Schlossberg, Aug. 23, 1917, about Jewish workers in Philadelphia who were unwilling to nominate an Italian business agent, ACWA Papers (Kheel), box 9, folder 46. Rockaway, “Jews and Italians,” 164–165. Fraser, Labor Will Rule, 33. 65. Those exaggerations appear in Schlossberg, CUOHROC, 35–36. Vaynshteyn, Yidishe yunyons, 371–372. Glanz, Jew and Italian, 9–11, 38, 94. 66. Interview with David Wolf, (Mar. 1, 1919), David J. Saposs Papers (WSHS), box 21, folder 16. On the forty-four-hour-week strike, see Documentary History of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America (1918–1920), 4–30. Interview with B. Schweitzer and Ephraim Kaufman (Mar. 31, 1919), organizers of the UGWA, David J. Saposs Papers (WSHS), box 21, folder 16. Interview with Sol Broad (Mar. 6, 1919), David J. Saposs Papers (WSHS), box 22, folder 2. Liptzin, Amol iz geven, 138. On the Italian locals, see Liebman, Jews and the Left, 275–276. Zappia, “Unionism,” 191–192, 220. 67. Erdberg wrote in Yidishe folk, May 30, 1919, 4–5. In a 1918 memo for HIAS, Rabbi I. L. Bril regarded Italian Americans as a role model, HIAS Papers (YIVO), reel MKM 15.1. See Moyshe Olgin’s ambivalent description of an unemployed Italian, Fun mayn tog-bukh (New York: Frayhayt, 1926), 7–11. 68. See, for example, Voliner’s articles in the Tog, Jan. 19, 1920, 4; Nov. 6, 1919, 4; Vladeck’s article in Tsukunft, Aug. 1919, 477–478. Interview with Hyman Schneid (Dec. 1918), David J. Saposs Papers (WSHS), box 21, folder 16. The data is in Saposs’s report, David J. Saposs Papers (WSHS), box 21, folder 5. See the lament by Harry Lang about the ethnic change in the needle trades—Forverts, May 23, 1924, 5. Epstein, Jewish Labor, 2:420–425.

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Notes to Pages 183–186

69. Tog, June 4, 1920, 7. Gurock, When Harlem Was Jewish, 146–150, 166–168. Osofsky, Harlem, 70–127. Goldstein, Price of Whiteness, 151–152. 70. YT, May 18, 1921, 1. See also ibid., Oct. 15, 1917, 8. Raisin, Dapim, 151–155 (Raisin believed that Jews and other whites did leave Harlem because of Black migration). For other examples, see the portrayal of a Black elevator man in the Forverts, Oct. 2, 1917, 4; or its description of a Black man charged of murder as looking “more like a gorilla (a monkey) than a man,” Forverts, Mar. 15, 1921, 1. Cf. Cornel West, “On Black-Jewish Relations,” in Blacks and Jews: Alliances and Arguments, ed. Paul Berman (New York: Delacorte, 1994), 146. Harry Golden argued that “shvartze” was not necessarily an offensive term—Right Time, 23. 71. Forverts, Oct. 1, 1919, 4; May 9, 1919, 5; Tog, July 22, 1919, 4; Oct. 8, 1919, 6. Z. Sher analyzed the “Pogroms against the Negroes,” in Tsukunft, Sept. 1919, 543–546. Rontsh, Amerike, 203–255. Diner, In the Almost Promised Land, 66–81. On the race riots in Washington, DC, and Chicago (respectively), see Arthur I. Waskow, From Race Riot to Sit-In (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1966), 21–37; William M. Tuttle, Jr., Race Riot: Chicago in the Red Summer of 1919 (New York: Atheneum, 1970). 72. Zaks wrote in the Tog, Oct. 7, 1919, 8; July 14, 1919, 4. 73. Kremer’s story was published in the Forverts, May 22, 1919, 3. He noted that there were also Irish workers who joined the Jews and “even Polish workers.” On Kremer’s career, see Reyzin, Leksikon, 3:787. 74. Drobkin wrote in Fortshrit, Dec. 7, 1917, 8. Blum and Lesin wrote in Tsukunft, Oct. 1920, 576–579. Yiddish journalist and playwright Berl Botvinik portrayed the dignified character of a Black porter in a sketch in the Forverts, May 22, 1920, 3. See the poems “Lynching” by Yehoash, and “Little Negro Boy” by Lesin, in America in Yiddish Poetry: An Anthology, ed. and trans. Jehiel B. Cooperman and Sarah H. Cooperman (New York: Exposition, 1967), 23–24, 39. 75. E. J. Dillon, The Inside Story of the Peace Conference (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1920), 496–497. See also MZ, Apr. 2, 1919, 4 which extolled the benevolence of the English-speaking nations. The second writer is H.W.V. Temperley, ed., A History of the Peace Conference of Paris, 6 vols. (London: Henry Frowde and Hodder & Stoughton, 1921), 5:122–123. Edward Mandell House and Charles Seymour, eds., What Really Happened At Paris: The Story of the Peace Conference, 1918–1919 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1921), 210, 218. Kristofer Allerfeldt, Beyond the Huddled Masses: American Immigration and The Treaty of Versailles (London: I. B. Tauris, 2006), 29–35. 76. Minutes of the executive committee for an American Jewish Congress (Oct. 14, 1917), in the William Edlin Papers (YIVO), folder 68. On the Jewish delegates’ activity in Paris and their inner divisions, see the memoir of a participant—Yoysef Tenenboym, Tsvishn milkhome un sholem: Yidn af der sholem-konferents nokh der ershter velt-milkhome (Buenos Aires: Tsentral farband fun poylishe yidn in argentine, 1956), 33–36, 60–80, 115–145. Wise, Challenging Years, 206–208. Straus, Under Four Administrations, 396–430. Fink, Defending the Rights of Others, 193–235, 362–363. Mark Levene, “Nationalism and Its

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Alternatives in the International Arena: The Jewish Question at Paris, 1919,” Journal of Contemporary History 28 (1993): 511–531. Wisse, “Jewish Writers,” 69–70. Janowsky, Jews and Minority Rights, 321–344. 77. On the New York delegation and Edlin’s article, see the Tog, May 25, 1920, 4. May 26, 1920, 1. Dalidansky wrote in YT, May 2, 1924, 4. Shapiro, Leadership, 94–98. Frankel, Prophecy and Politics, 546. Pianko, “Diaspora Jewish Nationalism,” 45–78.

Epilogue 1. Bruno Lasker, ed., Jewish Experiences in America: Suggestions for the Study of Jewish Relations with Non-Jews (New York: The Inquiry, 1930), 285–287. Wayne Clark, “Portrait of a Mythical Gentile,” Commentary 7 (1949): 547. See also Joshua Halberstam, Schmoozing: The Private Conversations of American Jews (New York: Perigee, 1997), 207. 2. One can mention only a few references on this topic: Zeitz, White Ethnic, 40–41. Walzer, “Liberalism and the Jews,” 3–10. Forman, “Politics of Minority Consciousness,” 141–160. Irving Kristol, “The Liberal Tradition of American Jews,” in American Pluralism and the Jewish Community, ed. Seymour Martin Lipset (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1990), 109–116. Spinrad, “Explaining American-Jewish Liberalism,” 107–119. 3.The claim is from Alexander, Jazz Age Jews, 8, 181–182. 4. Mendelsohn, On Modern Jewish Politics, 38–39. I. L. Peretz expressed a similar idea in 1910: “Far kumendike nokh an eytse,” Ale verk, 11 vols. (New York: Cyco, 1947) 9:132. On Jewish relationships with Gentile authorities, see Yerushalmi, “Lisbon Massacre,” xi–xii. Schorsch, From Text to Context, 118–132. Biale, Power and Powerlessness, 64–67. Jacob Katz, Tradition and Crisis: Jewish Society at the End of the Middle Ages (1958; repr., Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2000), 44–51. Charles S. Liebman, “A Perspective on My Studies of American Jews,” AJH 80 (1991): 520–523. “Common bond” is in Rischin, Promised City, 263–264. See also Barrett and Roediger, “Irish and the ‘Americanization,’” 4–33. 5. Shulamit Volkov has discussed the comparable phenomenon of dissimilation among German Jews, yet her focus is on the second or third generation after emancipation—“The Dynamics of Dissimilation: Ostjuden and German Jews,” in The Jewish Response to German Culture, ed. Jehuda Reinharz and Walter Schatzberg (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1985), 195–211. 6. The quote is by Werner Cohn, “The Politics of American Jews,” in The Jews: Social Patterns of an American Group, ed. Marshall Sklare (New York: Free Press, 1958), 626. A similar picture is in Lucy S. Dawidowicz, “The Jewishness of the Jewish Labor Movement,” in Bicentennial Festschrift, ed. Korn, 130. 7. As Mordecai M. Kaplan noted, the fact that a 1930 book about American Jews devoted an entire segment to the topic “how to correct anti-Semitism among Jewish children” showed many American-born Jews’ obsession “to be taken for Gentiles”—Judaism as a Civilization: Toward a Reconstruction of American-Jewish Life (1934; enlarged ed., New York: Thomas Yoseloff, 1957), 4. He referred to Lasker, Jewish Experiences, 107–120.

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Notes to Pages 190–193

8. Stuart Svonkin has attributed that development to a later period, while focusing on American Jewish organizations—Jews against Prejudice, 11–40. Jonathan Frankel, “The Paradoxical Politics of Marginality: Thoughts on the Jewish Situation during the Years 1914–1921,” Studies in Contemporary Jewry 4 (1988): 3–21. Cohen, Making a New Deal, 47–48. Janowsky, Jews and Minority Rights, 388. 9. Marshall Sklare, ed., The Jewish Community in America (New York: Behrman, 1974), 285. Nathan Glazer and Daniel P. Moynihan, Beyond the Melting Pot, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1970), 166–171. 10. Gleason, Speaking of Diversity, 91–122. Fink, Defending the Rights of Others, 362–363. Lasker, ed., Jewish Experiences, xi. Feingold, Time for Searching, 206–207. See also Goren, Politics and Public Culture, 13–29. Randolph Bourne, “The Jew and Trans-National America” (1916), reprinted in War and the Intellectuals: Essays by Randolph Bourne, 1915–1919, ed. Carl Resek (New York: Harper & Row, 1964), 127–128, 132. 11. The quote is in Wenger, New York Jews, 128. McNickle, To Be Mayor, 35–40. Donald Young, Progressive Education, and other examples are cited in Gleason, Speaking of Diversity, 93–95. The pamphlet is quoted in Weiss, “Ethnicity and Reform,” 568. Higham, Send These to Me, 191, 212. When historians have examined the theme of Jewish overtures to other groups, they have usually looked at a later period (mostly from the 1930s on) at the level of organizations: Dollinger, Quest For Inclusion, 4–5, 41. Svonkin, Jews against Prejudice, 25–26. Glazer and Moynihan, Beyond the Melting Pot, 167–169. 12. Harrison’s message to Congress is cited in Wolf, Presidents I Have Known, 156–157. Hoover is quoted in AJYB 41 (1939/1940): 179. Bordering on conspiracy is the recent study by John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2008). For more balanced assessments, see Jerome A. Chanes, “Who Does What? Jewish Advocacy and Jewish ‘Interest,’” in Jews in American Politics, ed. Maisel, 99–119. Steven L. Spiegel, “Israel and Beyond: American Jews and U.S. Foreign Policy,” in Jews in American Politics, ed. Maisel, 251–269. McNickle, To Be Mayor, 188, 323. Eli Lederhendler, “New York City, the Jews, and the ‘Urban Experience,’” Studies in Contemporary Jewry 15 (1999): 49–67. 13. Neil Baldwin, Henry Ford and the Jews: The Mass Production of Hate (New York: Public Affairs, 2001). Leo P. Ribufo, “Henry Ford and the International Jew,” AJH 69 (1980): 437–477. David Levering Lewis, “Henry Ford’s Anti-Semitism and Its Repercussions,” Michigan Jewish History 24 (1984): 3–10. Higham, Strangers, 264–299. Ruth Gay, Unfinished People: Eastern European Jews Encounter America (New York: W. W. Norton, 1996), 57. Broun and Britt, Christians Only, 72–124, 203–245. Sanua, Going Greek, 117–141. See also Maurice Samuel, You Gentiles (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1924), 95, 129. 14. Diner, In the Almost Promised Land, 28–88, 118–163, 199–235. Nancy Joan Weiss, The National Urban League, 1910–1940 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974), 53–54, 155. Goldstein, Price of Whiteness, 153–154. On the compassionate portrayal of Blacks by Yiddish poets in the 1920s, see the poems by Yehoash, Lesin, and Chaim Rosenblat in America in Yiddish Poetry, ed. Cooperman and Cooperman, 23–24, 39, 54–55.

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15. The quote about the shoemaker is from anonymous, undated speech notes in Yiddish, Michael Cohn Papers (YIVO), box 1, untitled folder. Forverts, June 7, 1921, 4. Poems about Sacco and Vanzetti are by Yankev Glatshteyn, “Sako un vanzetis montik,” Kredos (New York: Yidish lebn, 1929), 52–63. Moyshe Leyb Halpern, “Sacco-Vanzetti,” in American Yiddish Poetry: A Bilingual Anthology, ed. Benjamin Harshav and Barbara Harshav (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 437–439. Tamara K. Hareven, “Un-American America and the Jewish Daily Forward,” in East European Jews in Two Worlds: Studies From the YIVO Annual, ed. Deborah Dash Moore (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1990), 321–327. Avrich, Anarchist Portraits, 195–196. Bayor, Neighbors in Confl ict, 82–86. 16. Kate Simon, Bronx Primitive: Portraits in a Childhood (1982; repr., New York: Penguin, 1997), 8, 52, 94. Marie Syrkin, “Anti-Semitic Drive in Harlem,” in Strangers and Neighbors, ed. Adams and Bracey, 380–383. Ella Baker and Marvel Cooke, “The Bronx Slave Market,” in Strangers and Neighbors, ed. Adams and Bracey, 369–374. Louis Harap, “Anti-Negroism among Jews,” in Strangers and Neighbors, ed. Adams and Bracey, 444– 448. Bloom, “Interactions between Blacks and Jews,” 224. Diner, “Between Words and Deeds,” 88–91. Cheryl Lynn Greenberg, “Or Does It Explode?”: Black Harlem in the Great Depression (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 126–127. 17. Lang wrote in the Forverts, May 23, 1924, 5. Stuart, “Study of Factors,” 162, 173–175, 189–194. Joshua B. Freeman, “The Persistence and Demise of Ethnic Union Locals in New York City after World War II,” Journal of American Ethnic History 26 (2007): 10. Zappia, “Unionism,” 197. 18. Bayor, Neighbors in Confl ict, 83–84. A recent study by Stefano Luconi has revealed the impact of Fascism on America’s Little Italys and the tensions and rivalry between Italians and Jews, La faglia dell’antisemitismo: Italiani ed Ebrei negli Stati Uniti, 1920–1941 (Viterbo: Setta Città, 2007), 31–67. 19. McCune, Whole Wide World, 4–5, 187–95. Rebecca Kobrin, “Rewriting the Diaspora: Images of Eastern Europe in the Bialystok Landsmanshaft Press, 1921–45,” JSS 12 (2006): 1–38. Kapiszewski, Confl icts. Stephen H. Norwood, “Marauding Youth and the Christian Front: Antisemitic Violence in Boston and New York during World War II,” AJH 91 (2003): 233–267. Stack, International Confl ict, 87–107, 128–139. Bayor, Neighbors in Confl ict, 57–125. 20. The quote is from Sterba, Good Americans, 210. Moore, “At Home in America?,” 165. On economic mobility, see Moore, At Home in America, 22–24. Wenger, New York Jews, 15–32. Cf. Gartner, ”Metropolis and Periphery,” 342. Alfred Kazin, A Walker in the City (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1951), 99. Gay, Unfinished People, 57–58. “Jewish turf ” is in the memoir of Phil Silvers, in I Remember Brooklyn: Memories from Famous Sons and Daughters, ed. Ralph Monti (New York: Carol, 1991), 194. 21. Only a fraction can be mentioned here: Henry L. Feingold, “Was There Communal Failure? Some Thoughts on the American Jewish Response to the Holocaust,” in FDR and the Holocaust, ed. Verne W. Newton (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1996), 89–108. David Wyman, Paper Walls: America and the Refugees Crisis, 1938–1941 (Amherst:

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University of Massachusetts Press, 1971). Haskel Lookstein, Were We Our Brothers’ Keepers? The Public Response of American Jews to the Holocaust, 1938–1944 (New York: Vintage, 1988). Arthur D. Morse, While Six Million Died: A Chronicle of American Apathy (New York: Random House, 1967). Cf. Peter Novick, The Holocaust in American Life (Boston: Houghton Miffl in, 1999). 22. Katz, Exclusiveness and Tolerance, xiv. Norwood, “Marauding Youth,” 233–267. Leo P. Ribuffo, The Old Christian Right: The Protestant Far Right from the Great Depression to the Cold War (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1983). 23. For the recent historiographical opposing poles on Roosevelt’s role during the Holocaust, see Robert N. Rosen, Saving the Jews: Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Holocaust (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2006). Robert L. Beir, with Brian Josepher, Roosevelt and the Holocaust: A Rooseveltian Examines the Policies and Remembers the Times (New York: Barricade Books, 2006). 24. Ed Koch with William Rauch, Politics (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1985), 171. More than eighty years before Koch, Max Raisin made a similar observation about immigrant Jews—Ha-shiloach 5 ( Jan.–June 1899): 266. Liebman, Ambivalent American Jew, 150. “Embattled” is in Lucy S. Dawidowicz and Leon S. Goldstein, “The American Jewish Liberal Tradition,” Jewish Community, ed. Sklare, 295–296. On Jewish support for Smith (and the role of Belle Moskowitz) and Roosevelt, see Howe, World of Our Fathers, 385–393. Moore, At Home in America, 219–221, 226–227. Henry Moskowitz, Alfred E. Smith: An American Career (New York: T. Seltzer, 1924). 25. Scholars who have suggested that direction are Cuddihy, Ordeal of Civility, 4–8, 148–149. Isaac Deutscher, The Non-Jewish Jew and Other Essays (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968), 40–41. Isaiah Berlin, “Jewish Slavery and Emancipation,” in The Power of Ideas, ed. Henry Hardy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 171–175. Slezkine, Jewish Century, 2, 62–64, 79–102. The complaints of African Americans about Jewish paternalism are cited in Kitty O. Cohen, “Black-Jewish Relations in 1984: A Survey of Black U.S. Congressmen,” in Strangers and Neighbors, ed. Adams and Bracey, 689; and Joel Dreyfuss, “Such Good Friends: Blacks and Jews in Confl ict,” Strangers and Neighbors, ed. Adams and Bracey, 714. 26. See, for example, Melnick, Right to Sing the Blues, 12–14, 201–203; Jacobson, Whiteness, 63–65, 119–122, 186–187. A more moderate version is in Dollinger, Quest for Inclusion, 226–227. See the critique by Rosman, How Jewish Is Jewish History?, 82–110.

A Note on Methodology and Sources 1. Katz, Tradition and Crisis, 20–37. See also Brumberg, Going to America, 17, 54. 2. Arthur O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea (1936; new ed., New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2009). My approach is closer to that of George M. Fredrickson, The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817–1914 (New York: Harper & Row, 1971). Several historians have

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dealt with images and imagery but have not defined it: Mia Bay, The White Image in the Black Mind: African-American Ideas about White People, 1830–1925 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000). Shankman, Ambivalent Friends. See also an otherwise insightful article by Noble, “Image of the American Jew,” 83–108. 3. Roland Barthes, “Rhetoric of the Image,” in Image-Music-Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill &Wang, 1977), 32–51. Michael Berkowitz, The Jewish Self-Image: American and British Perspectives, 1881–1939 (London: Reaktion, 2000), 11–52. Sander L. Gilman, Inscribing the Other (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1991), 9–13. 4. The historian is Morris U. Schappes, ed., A Documentary History of Jews in the United States, 1654–1875 (New York: Citadel, 1950), xi–xii. On the history of images and perceptions, see Jonathan Schorsch, Jews and Blacks in the Early Modern World (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 116–134. Sidney M. Bolkosky, The Distorted Image: German Jewish Perceptions of Germans and Germany, 1918–1935 (New York: Elsevier, 1975). Wolfgang Helbich, “Different, But Not Out of This World: German Images of the United States between Two Wars, 1871–1914,” in Transatlantic Images and Perceptions: Germany and America Since 1776, ed. David E. Barclay and Elizabeth Glaser-Schmidt (Washington, DC: German Historical Institute; Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 109–129. Seth Forman, Blacks in the Jewish Mind: A Crisis of Liberalism (New York: New York University Press, 1998). Joshua A. Fishman, “An Examination of the Process and Function of Social Stereotyping,” Journal of Social Psychology 43 (1956): 27–64. Several studies that challenge the popular meaning of stereotypes are in Yueh-Ting Lee, Lee J. Jussim, and Clark R. McCauley, eds., Stereotype Accuracy: Toward Appreciating Group Differences (Washington DC: American Psychological Association, 1995). 5. Aschheim, Brothers and Strangers, 11. See also James S. Pula, “Image, Status, Mobility, and Integration in American Society: The Polish Experience,” Journal of American Ethnic History 16 (1996): 77. The school of “invention” owes much to Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983). Jacobson, Special Sorrows, 7, 220–221. Werner Sollors, ed., The Invention of Ethnicity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), ix–xx. A more moderate position is that of Kathleen Neils Conzen, David A. Gerber, Ewa Morawska, George E. Pozzetta, and Rudolph J. Vecoli, “The Invention of Ethnicity: A Perspective from the U.S.A.,” Journal of American Ethnic History 12 (1992): 3–41. A critique of that school of thought is in Stanislawski, Zionism and the Fin de Siècle, xvii–xviii. 6. The quote is by Orsi, Madonna of 115th Street, 150–162. Arthur Hertzberg has argued that Jewish socialists and anarchists left behind more writings than others, and that mass of documents “have seduced some historians of the immigrant past into believing that new ideologies dominated the ghetto,” in The Jews in America—Four Centuries of an Uneasy Encounter: A History (1989; repr., New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 204. 7. Undoubtedly, some aspects of immigrant Jewish life receive here only brief attention, like intermarriage; that phenomenon had remained fairly marginal among Jewish

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immigrants in New York City prior to 1930. Julius Drachsler calculated that less than 1 percent of Eastern European Jewish immigrants in New York intermarried between 1908 and 1912, in Democracy, 121–128, 250. Those numbers remained stable through at least the 1920s. Keren R. McGinity, Still Jewish: A History of Women and Intermarriage in America (New York: New York University Press, 2009), 20. 8. See, for example, YIVO’s American Jewish Autobiographies Collection, which includes only “common” people. On this collection, see Cohen and Soyer, My Future, 11–14. 9. Jill Ker Conway, When Memory Speaks: Reflections on Autobiography (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998), 3–18, 60–86. Melissa R. Klapper, Jewish Girls Coming of Age in America, 1860–1920 (New York: New York University Press, 2005), 9–10. On the infl uence of later events, see the depiction of Germans in Bercovici, It’s the Gypsy in Me, 30–31, 41. See also the memoir of labor leader Philip Zausner, Unvarnished, 3–4. On a particularly problematic autobiography, see E. G. Stern, My Mother and I (New York: Macmillan, 1917); and Ellen M. Umansky, “Representations of Jewish Women in the Works and Life of Elizabeth Stern,” Modern Judaism 13 (1993): 165–176. On the autobiography as a genre in the Haskalah literature in Eastern Europe, see Marcus Moseley, Being For Myself Alone: Origins of Jewish Autobiography (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006), 50–66. 10. An excellent discussion of this topic and of the congruence between oral histories and the conditions they describe is in Virginia Yans-McLaughlin, “Metaphors of the Self in History: Subjectivity, Oral Narrative, and Immigration Studies,” in Immigration Reconsidered: History, Sociology, and Politics, ed. Virginia Yans-McLaughlin (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 254–290. See also Kobrin, “1905 Revolution Abroad,” 230–233. Michael Stanislawsky, Autobiographical Jews: Essays in Jewish Self-Fashioning (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2004), 3–17. 11. Probably the most comprehensive study of the Yiddish press in America is Khaykin, Yidishe bleter. See also Arthur A. Goren, “The Jewish Press,” in The Ethnic Press in the United States: A Historical Analysis and Handbook, ed. Sally M. Miller (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1987), 205, 216. Moshe Shtarkman, “Vikhstikste momenten in der geshikhte fun der yidisher prese in amerike,” in 75 yor yidishe prese in amerike, ed. Yankev Glatshtein, Shmuel Niger, and Hillel Rogoff (New York: Y. L. Peretz Writers Association, 1945), 18–26. Mordecai Soltes, The Yiddish Press: An Americanizing Agency (1925; repr., New York: Arno Press and the New York Times, 1969), 19–29. Tony Michels, “‘Speaking to Moyshe’: The Early Socialist Press and Its Readers,” Jewish History 14 (2000): 51, 71n4. 12. Hapgood, Spirit of the Ghetto, 176–177. Robert E. Park, The Immigrant Press and Its Control (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1922), 79–89, 104. The Yiddish press’s circulation per capita surpassed any other foreign-language press already by 1910: see Goldberg, “Yidishe prese,” 138–139. YT, Dec. 28, 1906, 1 (assault of Gentile coworkers); Aug. 27, 1902, 1 (Brooklyn Jew). Getsil Zelikovitsh, “Yidishe tsaytungen in amerike,” Minikes’ yor bukh (1905): 125–127. Kobrin, Mayne fuftsik yor, 96, 191–200. S. Margoshes, “Di role fun

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der yidisher prese,” in Der pinkes, ed. Bikl, 199. Frankel, Prophecy and Politics, 467–469. Michels, Fire in Their Hearts, 109–114. Soltes, Yiddish Press, 21, 38–39, 60–62. 13. Kobrin, Mayne fuftsik yor, 263–277. Howe, World of Our Fathers, 417–551. Rischin, Promised City, 115–143. Soltes, Yiddish Press, 13, 173–181. Michels, Fire in Their Hearts, 69–124. On the dire state of Hebraists, see Hapgood, Spirit of the Ghetto, 53–66. Michael Gary Brown, “All, All Alone: The Hebrew Press in America from 1914 to 1924,” AJHQ 59 (1969): 139–178. See also the Hebrew poem “What Shall the Gentiles Say” by Moshe Ha-Cohen Reicherson, Ha-techiya, Jan. 26, 1900, 5. 14. Baron, Russian Jew, 130. Slutsky, ‘Itonut, 43–44. Cohen and Soyer, My Future, 13–14. 15. Schechter, Obstinate Hebrews, 237–238. Funkenstein, “Dialectics of Assimilation,” 11–12. Cf. Laurence J. Silberstein, “Others within and Others Without: Rethinking Jewish Identity and Culture,” in The Other, ed. Silberstein and Cohn, 11–16. Jonathan Boyarin, “The Other within and the Other Without,” in The Other, ed. Silberstein and Cohn, 434–435. Zygmunt Bauman, “Postmodernity, or Living with Ambivalence,” in A Postmodern Reader, ed. Joseph Natoli and Linda Hutcheson (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 13–14. Tamise Van Pelt, “Otherness,” Postmodern Culture 10 (2000): 1–47.

Index Abbott, Lyman, 81 Abelson, Paul, 54 Abend-blat, Dos (Evening paper), 62, 64 Abramovitsh, Hirsh, 16, 138 Abrams, Jacob, 166 Addams, Jane, 110 Adler, Cyrus, 175, 186 Adler, Felix, 54 African Americans, see Blacks Agudas ha-Rabonim (Union of Orthodox Rabbis of the United States and Canada), 163 Ahearn, John F., 70 Ahlwardt, Hermann, 94, 237n54 Aksenfeld, Yisroel, 25 Albany (New York), 175 Alexander II (czar), 20, 28 Alexandrov, C. (Chaim Miller), 46–47 Allen, Fredrick Lewis, 156 Allgemeine Zeitung des Judenthums (General newspaper of Judaism), 39 Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America (ACWA), 110, 115, 122–124, 146, 147, 159, 182–183, 185 American Alliance for Labor and Democracy (AALD), 159 American Association of Foreign Language Newspaper Editors, 145 American Federation of Labor (AFL), 102, 105, 110, 118, 120, 123, 124, 139, 159, 181 American Hebrew, 93, 109, 170, 171–172 American Hebrew League of Brooklyn, 65, 66, 73 American Indians, 36–37, 64, 90, 100, 128 Americanization, 4, 8, 52, 53–54, 62, 69, 74, 80, 100, 102, 172, 269n38 American Jewish Chronicle, 158, 163 American Jewish Committee (AJC), 92, 145, 150, 158, 167, 171, 175, 176, 186, 194 American Jewish Congress, Movement for, 126, 144, 148–155, 176, 186, 192 American, Sadie, 176 Am oylem (Eternal People), 30–31, 43 Amsterdam, 22 An-ski, S. (Shloyme Zaynvl Rapoport), 141

Antin, Mary, 23 Antwerp, 22 Arbeter Ring, see Workmen’s Circle Armenians, 108, 126, 152 Ash, Sholem, 163, 167 asif, Ha- (the Harvest), 41 Atlanta, 129–130 Babel, Isaac, 165 Balfour, Arthur J., 162 Balfour Declaration, 162–163, 165 Baltimore, 72, 131 Baranov, M. (Moyshe Gormidor), 63–64, 107, 136, 159, 182 Barondess, Joseph, 78, 81, 109, 129, 159, 173, 178, 252n37 Bartholomew, Walter H., 120 Baum, Berl, 112 Bayonne (New Jersey), 142–143 Beecher, Henry Ward, 41 Beilis, Mendel, 129 Belkind, Israel, 31 Ben-Chananja (Son of Chanania), 38 Beneqvit, Yisroel, 14, 73 Ben-Gurion, David, 151 Benjamin of Tudela, 36 Benjamin, Israel Joseph (Benjamin II), 36, 37 Ben-Zvi, Yitzchak, 151 Berdichev, 21 Berger, Israel, 29 Berkovitch, Y. D., 142 Berlin, 23, 27 Berlin, Irving, 128 Berlin, Meyer, 176 Bernheimer, Charles, 54, 62–63 Bernstein, Herman, 163 Bernstein, Zvi Hirsh, 38 Bialystok, 43, 89, 90, 139, 267n21 Bijur, Nathan, 99 Billikopf, Jacob, 193 Blacks, 7, 36, 64, 90, 98, 127–133, 154, 156–157, 173, 180–185, 187, 190, 202, 206n8, 274n70; as dangerous, 128–129, 184, 194; cooperation with Jews, 3, 11, 133, 184–185, 192–193;

283

284

Index

Blacks (continued) in the interwar period, 193–194; in the labor movement, 133, 185, 193 Blaine, James G., 39 Blaustein, David, 54, 57–58, 80 Blaustein, Esther, 90 Bluestone, Joseph Isaac, 72, 176 Blum, Shmuel, 185 Blum, Yitskhok, 178 Blumenfeld, Moshe, 60 Board of Education (New York City), 76, 89, 93, 178–179 Bobroysk, 23, 55, 72, 131 Boer War, 57 Bogen, Boris, 28, 54 Bohemians (Czechs), 126, 145, 168, 268n29 Bolshevik Revolution (1917), 163–164, 165 Borgenicht, Louis, 70, 84 Borokhov, Ber, 136, 151 Boston, 123 Boudin, Louis, 136 Bourne, Randolph, 191 Braf, Morris, 92 Brafman, Jacob, 6 Brainin, Re’uven, 164, 176, 186 Brandeis, Louis D., 149, 153, 162, 186 Bremen, 22, 24, 72, 95 Brenner, Yosef Chaim, 30 Brest-Litovsk, treaty of, 164–165 Broad, Sol, 106, 164–165, 182 Bronx, 64, 120, 147, 164, 169, 173, 177, 192, 193, 194 Bronzvil un east nu york progres (Brownsville and East New York progress), 129–130 Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute, 180 Brotherhood of Tailors, 122–123 Brownsville (Brooklyn), 9, 59, 64, 89, 140, 141, 148, 169, 173, 177 Bublik, Gedaliah, 98, 135, 237n57 Buchalter, Yehuda, 38 Bucharest, 29, 60 Bukansky, Max, 67 Bund (the General Jewish Labor Union in Lithuania, Poland, and Russia), 16, 25, 30, 31–32, 108, 121, 146, 164, 166, 248n22 Burgin, Herts, 87, 159 Cahan, Abraham, 23, 31, 54, 55, 60, 62, 66–67, 82–83, 87, 104, 116, 121, 130, 136, 139, 147, 157–158, 164, 237n57 Campe, Joachim Heinrich, 35 Caplan, Ephraim, 176, 200 Carasik, Sam, 72, 131 Castle Garden (New York City), 48

Catskills, 140 Cavello, Antonio, 112 Chaimsohn, Yehuda, 69 Chait, Irving, 48 Cherikover, Elias, 136, 141, 152 Chernikhov (town), 12 Chicago, 9, 39, 47, 110, 123, 184 Chinese, 37, 41, 44, 79–80, 81, 87, 97–98, 100, 131 chosenness, secularized, 11, 101–125, 181, 194 Chotzinoff, Samuel, 53 City College of New York (CCNY), 179–180 Civil War (U.S.), 36, 38 Clark, Wayne, 188 Cleveland, Grover, 76, 81 Cleveland (Ohio), 167 Cohen, Morris Raphael, 1, 54 Cohen, Rose, 56, 69 Cohn, Fannie, 182, 273n64 Columbia University, 180 Coney Island, 42, 133 Conley, Jim, 129–130 Conway, J. H., 182 Corbin, Austin, 42 Coughlin, Charles E., 196 Creel, George, 160 Czechs, see Bohemians Dalidansky, Y. L., 186–187 Danzig, see Gdansk Debs, Eugene V., 120–121, 196 De Haas, Jacob, 149 Detroit, 133 Dewey, John, 178 Dik, I. M., 38 Dillingham, William P., 95, 145 Dillingham Commission, 95, 99 Dillon, E. J., 185–186 Diner, Hasia R., 7–8 Domnitz, Aaron, 48 Donen, Isaac, 23 Dorshey tsiyon (Seekers of Zion), 58 Dreier, Margaret, 117 Dreier, Mary, 117 Dreyfus, Alfred, 57, 59, 129, 230n15 Drobkin, S., 185 Drokhovitsh (Galicia), 30 Dubnov, Simon, 45 Dunlop, Wilson W., 92, Dunne, Russell, 159–160, 161 Dyche, John A., 110, 120, 122, 147 East Side Vigilance League, 77 Edelshtat, Dovid, 50

Index Edlin, William, 57, 159, 165, 171, 175, 179, 183, 186 Educational Alliance, 80, 97, 163, 172 Egoz, Aren D., 169 Eisenmenger, Johann Andreas, 6 Eisenstein, Louis, 68, 172 Eisenstein, Yehuda David, 37, 41, 42, 73, 224n13 Elbe, Leon (Leyb Baseyn), 147, 156, 172 Elizovitsh, Shlomo, 61 Ellis Island, 46, 47, 48–49, 80, 86, 95–96, 192 enlightenment and enlighteners, see Haskalah; maskilim Entin, Yoel, 152, 161, 173, 177, 186 Epshteyn, Alter, 146–147 Erdberg, Shimshen, 183, 200 Evansville (Indiana), 37 Eydtkuhnen (East Prussia), 95 Faygnboym, Benyomen, 60–62, 113 Federation of American Zionists (FAZ), 58, 149 Feignberg-Imri, Rachel, 43 Feldman, Louis, 123 Feldstein, S., 97 Filipinos, 64, 90 Fink, Reuben, 175 Finkelstein, Shimon Yitskhak Halevy, 59 Fischel, Harry, 176 Fleischmann, Akiva, 60 Flohr, Cipora, 90 Flynn, Elizabeth Gurley, 120 folks-advokat, Der (the People’s advocate), 67 folkshul (folk school), 94 Ford, Henry, 164, 175, 192 Fornberg, Karl (Yisha’aya Rosenberg), 95–96, 109, 174, 183 Fortshrit (Progress), 110 Forverts ( Jewish daily forward), 48, 49, 63, 79, 85, 86, 96, 106–107, 112, 114, 117, 120, 121, 128, 129, 136, 139, 140, 147, 150, 153, 159, 161, 163, 164, 169, 178, 184 Frank, Leo, 129–130, 133, 200 Franz Joseph (emperor), 134–135 Fraye arbeter shtime, Di (Free voice of labor), 128, 143 fraynd, Der (Russia) (the Friend), 45–47 fraynd, Der (U.S.) (the Friend), 71, 118–119 Friedlaender, Israel, 150, 172 Friedman, Louis, 134 Fromberg, Harry G., 171 Fromenson, Abraham H., 8, 63, 73, 76, 91–92, 128, 173

285

Frug, Shimen, 80 Frumusica (Romania), 29 Fuenn, S. Y., 38 Galician Jews, 8–9, 20–21, 30, 49–50, 95, 134–135 Gary (Indiana), 177 Gary Plan, see under public schools Gay, Ruth, 192 Gaynor, William, 97 Gdansk (Danzig), 30 Gentiles: as a benchmark of normalcy, 4–5, 17–18, 29–30, 33, 126–127, 148–155, 192; in Jewish law, 1, 13, 204n2, 212n3; womanhood of, 16, 101, 111, 115–118, 119, 148; in Yiddish folklore, 14, 17 Gerber, Julius, 108 Germans: and antisemitism, 21–24, 26, 29, 39–40, 54, 94, 160–161, 201; as carriers of an advanced culture, 4, 12, 20–22, 30, 32, 70, 75, 135–136, 138–139; change of attitudes toward during World War I, 160– 161, 164–165; as cleaner than other Gentiles, 22, 23, 67, 70, 72, 73 German Americans, 49, 96, 97, 105, 106, 110, 112, 121, 124, 145, 147, 151, 160, 171, 173, 177, 188; and antisemitism, 39–40, 47, 64, 67–68, 72–73, 161, 164–165, 182, 193, 195, 196; cooperation with Jews during World War I, 138–140; as role models, 4–5, 36, 70–72, 98, 115, 150, 152, 192; rowdyism of, 66, 73, 78, 79 German Jews, 8–9, 20–21, 44–45, 49, 70, 102, 122, 160, 161, 188 Germer, Adolph, 165 Gersoni, Henry (Zvi), 38 Glanz, Aren (Glanz-Leyeles), 167 Gleason, Philip, 191 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 22 Goldberg, Avrom (Abe), 142, 152, 173, 182 Goldberger, Ludwig Max, 57 Golden, Harry, 69, 70 Goldenberg, Jacob, 171 Goldfaden, Avrum, 60 Goldfogle, Henry, 153 Goldman, Emma, 61, 136 Goldstein, Israel, 132 Goldstein, Jonah J., 82, 97 Goldstein, Minnie, 23, 24 Gompers, Samuel, 71, 120 Gordin, Jacob, 55 Gordon, David, 27 Gordon, Yehuda Leib, 27 Gorelik, Mordecai, 18, 66

286

Index

Gorin, B. (Yitskhok Goydo), 46, 50, 98 Gotesfeld, Khone, 135 Gotlober, Avrom Ber, 12, 36 Gottheil, Richard, 58 Gottlieb, Otto, 90 Grant, Madison, 144 Greek Americans, 49, 112, 113 Greenbaum, Samuel, 163 Grodzinsky, Israel Pinchas, 37 Grossman, Re’uven, 129 Groyser kundes, Der (the Big stick), 167–168, 172–174, 175, 176 Haller, Józef, 167 Halpern, Pearl, 112 Hamid, Sufi Abdul, 194 Hamburg, 22 Hapgood, Hutchins, 55, 74, 201 Hapgood, Norman, 55 Harkavy, Alexander, 57, 95 Harlem (New York City), 64, 66, 85, 97, 117, 119, 128, 131, 132–133, 147, 177, 183–184, 194, 274n70 Harrison, Benjamin, 38, 192 Harvard University, 180 Hasanovitz, Elizabeth, 110, 136 Ha-shilony, Ben, 39 Hasidim, 21, 60, 139, 216n22 Haskalah, 6, 12, 15, 20, 57 Hausner, Arthur, 142 Hearst, William Randolph, 81, 196 Hebraists, 9–10, 22, 27, 38, 39–40, 41, 43, 54, 58, 70, 131, 144, 164, 224n17, 281n13 Hebrew Emigrant Aid Society (HEAS), 49 Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS), 95, 172 Hebrew press, 10, 15, 22, 27, 41, 144, 281n13. See also names of specific newspapers Held, Adolph, 120 Herder, Johann G., 6 Hermalin, Dovid M., 54, 84, 91, 97–98, 150, 159, 170 Herman, Hyman, 179 Hershkovitch, Avrom, 146 Herzl, Theodor, 58 Higham, John, 192 Hillquit, Morris, 61, 73, 106–107, 133, 157, 165 Hilton, Henry, 41 Hindus, Maurice, 55 Hirshbein, Peretz, 133 Hoboken (New Jersey), 84 Hollander, Louis, 113–114 Holocaust, 5, 23, 78 Homel, 91

Hoover, Herbert, 192 Hornaday, William T., 171 Hourwich, Isaac A., 99, 128, 153, 159, 173, 186 Howells, William Dean, 55, 81 Hungarian Jews, 9, 22, 38, 49–50, 134–135, 211n33 Hungarians, 22, 47, 59, 147 Hunter College, 180 Hurvitz, Morris, 59, 80 images, definition of, 199–200 immigration: Jewish, as prone to criminality, 97; Jewish, to the U.S., 42, 45, 48–49, 86, 95–96; restrictions, 76, 82, 95–96, 107, 144–146, 172–174, 181; U.S. immigration officials, 47, 48–49, 82, 95–96, 192, 227n32 immigrant groups, 65; as bringing antisemitism to America (see under specific ethnic groups); Jewish defense of, 97–99, 145–146, 172, 191; as potential allies, 76–77, 96–99, 145–146, 154, 183–185 Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), 111, 120 intermarriage, 68, 69, 180–181, 234n43, 279–280n7 International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU), 105, 110–112, 114, 115, 116, 119–120, 124, 139, 146, 147, 159, 182–183, 194 Irish Americans, 49, 64–70, 81, 82–83, 96, 105, 106, 108, 110, 115, 120, 124, 131, 147, 149, 151, 159–160, 173, 177, 189, 190, 193, 195, 196, 202, 238n8, 265n8, 269n33; as carriers of an ultimate Gentile essence, 66–67, 104, 130; as incarnations of peasantry, 44, 54, 63, 66; as role models, 4–5, 69–70, 152, 192; rowdyism of, 40, 53, 64–67, 73, 78, 79, 84, 128, 199–200; schoolteachers/principals, 68–69, 91, 100, 178 Italian Americans, 49, 63, 83–86, 88, 99, 105, 119–120, 121–122, 145, 151, 154, 156–157, 180– 185, 187, 190, 194, 202, 253n56, 273n64, 273n67; cooperation with Jews, 3, 11, 104, 114, 123–125, 146–147, 181–183, 192–193; as paralleling Jewish characteristics, 82, 83, 131, 181; as strikebreakers, 11, 101, 110–115, 116, 123, 199–200; and violence, 65, 67, 84–85, 91, 100, 112 Jacobs, Fannie, 133 Jacobson, Hyman Isaac, 144 Japanese, 98 Jassy (Romania), 18 Jastrow, Marcus, 68 Jerusalem, 162

Index Jewish labor movement, 101–125, 146–148, 181–183, 185, 194; Jewish strikebreakers, 117; views of Gentile coworkers as apathetic/egoistic, 11, 101–103, 108, 109–117 Jewish League of American Patriots ( JLAP), 158–159 Jewish Socialist Federation (Socialist Party), 102, 137, 139–140, 150, 159 Jewish Socialist League, 159 Jewish Socialists, 13, 26–27, 43–44, 52, 53, 54, 55, 60–64, 71–72, 79, 87, 92, 94, 101–125, 136–138, 139, 146–148, 150, 151, 153, 162, 164– 165, 166, 174–175, 177–178–179, 182–183, 251n37; pro-war, 158–159, 164–165 Jewish Theological Seminary, 131, 150 Jews: admiration for Gentile leaders, 25, 38, 81–82, 120–121, 153–154, 196; in American universities and colleges, 43, 76, 144–145, 179–180, 185, 192–193; as anarchists, 14, 42, 50, 53, 55, 61, 63, 71, 128, 136, 143, 159, 165, 166, 171, 181; attitudes toward military conscription, 24, 161–162, 218n29; racial conceptions expressed by, 36, 44, 51, 63–64, 87, 100, 129–132, 134–135, 137, 158, 161, 163, 189; self-image, 17, 46, 51, 62, 74, 87, 97–98, 102–103, 155, 188, 192, 196–197, 271n49; Southern, 128, 129, 130, 255n4 Jews, Orthodox, 1, 15, 21, 37, 38, 59, 69, 70, 72, 81, 93–94, 98, 121, 134, 163, 176, 177, 192, 200. See also Reform Judaism Joint Distribution Committee, 134 Jonas, Alexander, 71 Jones, Thomas Jesse, 66 Joseph, Jacob, 77–79, 83 Kallen, Horace M., 149, 186 Kamenets (town), 19 Kaplan, Mordecai, 228n3 karmel, Ha- (the Carmel), 38 Kats, Moyshe, 109 Katz, Jacob, 195 Kaufman, Ephraim, 123 Kazin, Alfred, 195 Kehillah (New York City), 97, 149, 151, 158 Kemp, Ira, 194 Khisin, Chaim, 28 Kiev, 30 Kishinev, 45, 47, 80–81, 86, 89, 91, 108 Kissin, Isidor (Yekotiel Garnitsky), 30 Kling, Lazar, 119 Knights of Labor, 106 Kobrin, Leon, 83 Koch, Ed, 196 Koenigsberg, Benjamin, 134, 176

287

Kohn, Abraham, 20–21 Kol mevaser (Heralding voice), 15, 21, 25, 26, 27, 36 Kopelov, Yisroel, 23, 55–56, 67, 72 Kopishok (town), 31 Kornbleit, Jacob, 171 Kornblit, Zisl, 68 Kosovsky, Vladimir (Nokhem-Mendel Levinson), 31, 166 Kotik, Yekhezkel, 19 Kotlyor, Abraham, 54 Kovno, 26, 30, 42, 139 Kraków, 134 Kramer, Zvi Hirsh, 37, 42 Kranz, Philip, 87, 233n33 Kremenchug (Ukraine), 16 Kremer, Shmuel, 184–185 Kristol-Breslau, Sarah, 178 Kushner, Meyer, 16, 119 Lachovsky, Hyman, 166 La Guardia, Fiorello H., 122 landsmanshaftn (hometown associations), 71, 95, 134, 135, 166 Lang, Harry, 115, 194 Lang, Lucy Robins, 42, 181 Lasker, Bruno, 188 Latayner, Joseph, 59 League for Small and Subject Nationalities, 126 League of Foreign-Born Citizens, 145 League of Nations, 191 Lee, Algernon, 121 Lemberg, see L’viv Lemlich, Clara, 114 Lesin, Avrom (Valt), 12, 62, 63, 107, 108, 118, 163, 166, 169, 185 Leslie, Robert, 48 Levanda, Lev, 27 Levey, Augustus A., 49 Levin, Emanuel, 25 Levin, H., 128 Levin, Shmaryahu, 22, 141 Levy, Aaron J., 153, 158, 186 Libau, see Liepāja Liberman, Aren, 26, 27 Liepāja (Libau), 21 Lilienblum, Moshe Leib, 29, 40 Lincoln, Abraham, 38 Lipman, Samuel, 166 Lipsky, Louis, 87 Liptzin, Sam, 115, 182–183 Lissitsky, Ephraim, 38 Lithuanians, 31, 123, 140, 152, 214n11

288

Index

Litvak, A. (Chaim-Yankl Helfand), 136–137 Litvakes (Lithuanian Jews), 49–50 Litvin, A. (Shmuel Hurvitz), 87, 148 Lodz, 139, 169 Loeher, Franz, 40 Lola (Leon Israel), 167–168, 172–174 London, Meyer, 78, 107, 108, 139, 146, 162 Low, Seth, 78, 80, 81 Lublin, 17 Lusk, Clayton R., 175 Lusk Committee, 171, 179 L’viv (Lemberg), 17, 20–21 Lyons, Alexander, 144 Lyuban (Byelorussia), 43 Maccabaean, 68 Mack, Julian W., 167 magid, Ha- (the Herald), 15, 22, 27, 37, 39, 41 Magidov, Yankev, 53, 70, 164 Magnes, Judah L., 97, 151–152, 158, 262n61 Maisel, Robert, 159 Malachovsky, Hillel, 224–225n17 Margoshes, Shmuel, 176 Margoshes, Yoysef, 21 Marinoff, Yankev, 176 Marmor, Kalman, 94 Marot, Helen, 111, 116–118 Marr, Wilhelm, 22 Marshall, Louis, 151, 159, 167, 171, 172, 175, 186 Masaryk, Thomas G., 168 maskilim (followers of Haskalah), 6, 12, 15, 20–21, 25, 26, 28, 36, 37–38, 40, 56–57, 74, 83, 139 Masliansky, Hirsh, 66, 169, 176 May Laws (1882), 28 “mayufes,” 19–20, 98, 107, 109, 150 Mazella, Publio, 112 McAdoo, William, 84 McKinley, William, 60 Melamed, Shmuel M., 136, 145, 158 melits, Ha- (the Advocate), 15, 36, 60 Meltzer, Y., 133 Mendelssohn, Moses, 6 Milkh, Yankev, 136 Miller, Louis E. (Bandes), 52, 61–62, 78, 79, 91, 97, 107, 135, 153, 159, 176 Milwaukee, 78, 173 Minikes, Khonen-Yankev, 128 Minneapolis, 24 minorities, concept and recognition of, 3–4, 11, 98, 145, 149, 154, 156, 175, 183, 185–187, 191–192, 206n9 Minority Rights Congress, 191

Minsk, 12, 16, 18, 91 missionaries, 55, 92–93, 100, 177–178 Mitchel, John P., 177 Monroe Doctrine, 46 Montenegrins, 151 Mooney, Tom, 181 Morawska, Ewa, 7–8 Morgan, Anne, 117 Morgan, J. P., 117 Morgen zhurnal, Der (Morning journal), 81, 90–91, 93, 128, 132, 134, 157, 168, 173 Moscow, 28 Moskowitz, Bessie, 18 Moskowitz, Henry, 54, 193 Moss, Frank, 65 Most, Johann, 71 Mothers’ League against High Price, 148 Mount Vernon (New York), 114 Mussolini, Benito, 193 muzhik, see peasantry narodniki (populists), 26 Nashville, 123 Nathan, Paul, 23 Nathanzon, M., 144 National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), 131, 193 National Liberal Immigration League, 145 Naye post, Di (the New post), 114 Naymanovitz, Hertz Ha-cohen, 17–18 Neustettin, 22 Newark, 112, 169 New Deal, 157, 190–191 Newman, Michael B., 182 Newman, Pauline M., 116–118 New York University, 43, 144, 180, 192–193 Nicholas II (czar), 134, 139, 158, 160–161 Niger, Shmuel (Charney), 176 Nomberg, Hersh Dovid, 48 Odessa, 15, 21, 30, 43, 45, 83, 91, 184 Opatoshu, Yoysef, 133 Orthodox Jewish Congregational Union of America, see Orthodox Union Orthodox Union (OU), 93 Ovington, Mary, 131 Painkin, Louis, 112 Paley, John (Yoyne), 56–57, 60, 67 Palmer, A. Mitchell, 171 Panken, Jacob, 157 Paperna, Avraham Ya’akov, 22 Paris Peace Conference (post–World War I), 156, 167, 185–186, 191

Index Parkhurst, Charles H., 63 peasantry, 8, 10, 12–18, 30–31, 45, 55, 59, 74, 125, 135, 142–143, 152, 154–155, 165, 189, 214n11 Pelley, W. Dudley, 196 Peoples of America Society, 145 Perkins, Frances, 54 Peskin, Shmuel, 79 Petlyura, Semyon, 165 Pfefer, Yankev, 57 Pfefferkorn, Johannes, 6 Phagan, Mary, 129 Phelps-Stokes, James G., 159 Philadelphia, 9, 39, 110, 186 Pine, Max, 171, 181 Pinsk, 167 Pinsker, Leo, 25, 29 Pinsky, Dovid, 94, 226n26 Poalei Zion Party, 94, 150, 152, 158–159 pogroms: 1871 (Odessa), 27; of 1881–1884, 27–29, 30, 32, 40; of 1903–1906, 45, 47, 76, 80, 86–88, 95, 108, 140; post–World War I, 3, 4, 12, 156, 201; responses to in the U.S., 41, 47, 80–81, 87–88, 89–91, 108, 140, 165– 170, 183, 184–185 Poles, 165; as antisemitic, 25, 26, 135, 141–143, 157, 166–170, 172–174, 183, 185, 214n11 police, 77–78, 80, 84, 142–143, 238n8; immigrants’ fear of, 48, 117 Polish Americans, 44, 47, 119, 120, 123, 140– 143, 145, 146, 147, 151, 152, 154, 167, 169, 177, 180, 190, 195; as bringing antisemitism to America, 142–143, 167, 169–170, 182 porets (Polish lord), 1, 14, 18–20, 107, 125, 202 Potter, Henry C., 81 Poznan´ (Posen), 9 Price, George M., 43–44 Progressive Era, 10, 54, 99, 128, 149, 153, 177 Prohibition, 269n33 Protocols of the Elders of Zion, The, 176 public schools, 7, 47, 61, 68–69, 74, 76, 85–86, 88–94, 99, 128, 178–179; and the Gary Plan, 177–178; scares, 85, 88–92; strike (1906), 92–94 Puck, 63 Queens, 64, 110, 170 Rabinovitsh, Shaul Pinchas, 40 Rabinowitz, Rosa, 117 Raboy, Isaac, 67, 104 Ragoler, I. I., 47 Raisin, Max, 9–10, 66, 184, 274n70 Randolph, A. Philip, 133, 193

289

Ravage, Marcus, 50 Red Scare, 3, 10–11, 157, 170–176, 178–179, 185, 190 Reform Judaism, 6–7. See also Jews, Orthodox Reid, Arthur, 194 Reynolds, James B., 54–55 Reyzin, Avrom, 45 Richards, Bernard G., 149 Richman, Julia, 242n40 Richter, Ida, 48, 117 Rickert, Thomas A., 123 Rochester (New York), 123 Rockefeller, John D., 143 Rogoff, Hillel, 156 Rolnik, Yoysef, 16, 21 Romanian Jews, 8–9, 18, 29, 36, 49–50, 82, 134, 141, 186 Romanians, 140, 167; as antisemites, 29, 141, 172–174 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 175, 196 Roosevelt, Theodore, 81, 128, 144 Rosen, Saul, 167 Rosenberg, Abraham, 110–111, 113, 120 Rosenfeld, Morris, 50, 83, 84–85, 88, 134, 150, 160, 165 Rosengarten, Isaac, 179 Rosenzweig, Gershon, 58–59 Roskolenko, Harry, 120, 132, 141 Ross, Edward A., 144 Rothenberg, Abraham, 105 Rotterdam, 22 Rubin, Harris, 55 Rubinow, Isaac Max, 44–45, 132 Russell, Charles Edward, 121 Russian Civil War, 165–166, 183 Russian Revolution (1905), 3, 45, 76, 108 Russian Revolution (March 1917), 157–158 Russians: as carriers of an advanced culture, 4, 12, 27, 32; as antisemites/pogromists, 22, 29, 34, 43, 44, 59, 81, 94, 99, 132, 134, 136–137, 139, 140–141, 164, 166, 170; officials, 14, 24–25, 29, 202; positive images of, 25–26, 30 Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905), 45, 98 Russo-Turkish War (1877–1878), 27 Rutenberg, Pinkhes, 151 Rutgers College, 179–180 Sacco, Nicola, 193 St. Louis, 159 St. Paul (Minnesota), 42, 181 St. Petersburg (Petrograd), 25, 28, 45, 164 Salutsky, Yankev, 119

290

Index

Sanders, Leon, 153 San Francisco, 37, 57 Saposs, David J., 181 Sarasohn, Kasriel, 56–57, 80 Saratoga Springs (New York), 41 Saroka, Israel ben Joseph, 42 Scharfstein, Zvi, 131 Schechter, Ronald, 202 Schewitsch, Sergius, 71 Schiff, Jacob H., 8, 92, 140, 151–152, 245n63 Schiller, Friedrich, 22 Schlossberg, Joseph, 104, 123, 182 Schneid, Hyman, 183 Schneiderman, Rose, 117–118, 230n15 Schomer, Abraham S., 176, 186 Schoolman, Hyman, 182 Schur, Wolf (Ze’ev), 70 Schurz, Carl, 81 Schwartz, B., 139 Schwartz, Jacob, 166 Schweitzer, B., 123 Scott, Melinda, 118 Sejni (Poland), 39 Seligman, Joseph, 41 Seltzer, Ida, 112, 114, 200 settlement houses, 54–56, 62, 92, 110, 158, 188 shabes goy, 18, 141 shachar, Ha- (the Dawn), 27 Shapira, Eliezer Yitschak, 15 Shapira, Tuvyah Pesach, 39–40 Shaykevitsh, Nokhem Meyer (Shomer), 34, 176 shiloach, Ha- (the Shiloach), 10 Shiplacoff, Abraham I., 123, 139 Shmuelevitsh, Shlomo, 48 Sholem Aleichem (Sholem Yankev Rabinovitsh), 21, 43, 131 Shomer, see Shaykevitsh, Nokhem Meyer Shtern (Star—Zionist women’s society), 78–79 Shub, Dovid, 85, 153 Shur, Shmuel, 54 Siegel, Isaac, 175 Sigma Alpha Mu, 144 Silbert, Celia, 180–181 Simon, Kate, 193 Sinclair, Upton, 166 Singer, I. J., 16 Sion (Zion), 25–26 Sklare, Marshall, 190 Slaton, John, 129 Slavic peoples, 25, 63, 96, 127, 135–137, 140– 141, 142, 151, 154–155, 157, 164, 165–170,

217n24; in the U.S., 142–143, 167, 177. See also peasantry Slobodin, Henry L., 159, 186 Slonim, Yoel, 159–160, 180 Slutsk (town), 38 Smith, Al, 175, 196 Smith, Gerald L. K., 196 Smolenskin, Perets, 27, 29, 30 Snitkin, Leonard A., 160 Socialist Labor Party, 44, 53 Socialist Party, 73, 106–108, 119, 140, 153, 159, 162, 165, 166 Sokolov, Nachum, 217n24, 231n22 Soloveichik, Emanuel, 25 Soloveitchik, Chaim, 42 Sorge, Friedrich, 71 Soyfer, Shabtai, 79 Spaniards, 59–60 Spanish-American War, 59–60 Spargo, John, 159 Spektor, Yitschak E., 42 Standard Oil, 142–143 Steffens, Lincoln, 55 Steimer, Mollie, 166 Steiner, Edward A., 67, 234n40 Stern, David, 90 Stoecker, Adolf, 22, 94 Stover, Charles B., 54 Straus, Nathan, 176–177 strikes (garment industry): of 1886, 105; of 1909/1910 (shirtwaist makers), 111–112, 117, 118; of 1910 (cloak makers), 111, 118; of 1913 (white goods, wrapper, and kimono workers), 117; of 1913 (men’s clothing), 122–123; of 1915 (men’s clothing), 146 Strykov (town), 16 Stuart, Irving R., 194 Sullivan, “Big” Tim, 70 Sulzer, William, 82, 196 Syrkin, Nachman, 121–122, 136, 148, 159 Taft, Helen, 117 Tammany Hall, 46, 69–70, 82, 91, 115, 140, 153, 158, 160, 172, 175, 177, 186, 265n8 Tanenboym, Avner, 63, 87, 96–97, 200, 238n8 Tashrak (Yisroel Zevin), 161 Teller, Judd L., 141, 227n35 Tenderloin (district in New York City), 127–128 Tildsley, John L., 178 Tiszaeszlár blood libel (Hungary), 22 Tog, Der (the Day), 128, 142, 146, 152, 161, 167, 168, 169, 171, 175, 183 Tomashevsky, Boris, 49, 60, 73

Index toren, Ha- (the Mast), 142 Treitschke, Heinrich von, 6, 22 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, 112; fire at, 121– 122, 253n55 Trotsky, Leon, 163–164 Tsederboym, Alexander, 15, 25, 26, 28, 36 tsefirah, Ha- (the Dawn), 22, 24, 37, 38, 39 Tsinkin, Menashe, 113, 200 Tsipin, Menakhem-Mendel, 133 Tsivyen (B. Hoffman), 119, 153, 161, 177–178 Tsiyon (Zion), 30 Tsiyony, Yisroel, 67 Tsukerman, Borekh, 176, 186 tsukunft, Di (the Future), 52, 87, 104, 109, 163, 166 Tsunzer, Elikum, 50, 67–68, 234n41 Ukrainians (Ruthenians), 14, 21, 24, 99, 140, 141, 145, 152, 166, 167, 192, 202; as antisemites/pogromists, 25–26, 80, 157, 165, 169– 170, 172–174 Unger, Avrom Pinkhes, 16 United Garment Workers of America (UGWA), 122–123, 146 United Hebrew Charities (UHC), 99 United Hebrew Trades (UHT), 71–72, 102, 109, 136, 139, 147, 159, 171, 181, 183 Untermyer, Samuel, 140, 158, 175 Vagman, Yehoshua, 83 Van Kleeck, Mary, 101, 116 Van Wyck, Robert, 60, 65 Vanzetti, Bartolomeo, 193 Varhayt, Di (the Truth), 91, 93, 94, 97, 98–99, 126, 130, 134, 135, 136, 140, 141, 145, 153, 158, 161 Vaslui (Romania), 84 Vaynshteyn, Bernard, 24, 43, 72, 102, 104, 106 Vaysman, Moyshe, 83, 145 Veker, Der (the Awakener), 31 Vidaver, Henry, 39 Vidaver, Zvi Falk, 37, 39 Vienna, 29 Vilna, 27, 30, 38, 40, 81, 167 Vintshevsky, Morris (Bentsiyen Novakhovitsh), 26 Vitebsk, 18, 24–25 Vladeck, Borekh Charney, 30, 121, 130, 157, 172, 183 Voliner, A. (Eliezer Landoy), 144, 148, 175, 183 Voskhod (Ascent), 43–44, 45 Wald, Lillian, 54, 80

291

Waldman, Morris, 99 Walling, William English, 159 Warsaw, 15, 19, 21, 22, 23, 37, 41, 60, 139, 169, 193 Washington, D.C., 98, 145, 184 Waterbury (Connecticut), 145 Weinstein, Helen, 134 Weinzweig, Irving, 160 Weisgal, Meyer, 23 Wiernik, Peter (Perets), 81, 132, 164 Williams, William, 47, 82, 95–96, 98, 192 Williamsburg (Brooklyn), 64, 89, 173, 177 Wilson, Woodrow, 144, 145, 149, 153–154, 155, 164, 165, 186, 196 Winrod, Gerald, 196 Wintner, Leopold, 65 Wise, Stephen S., 159, 165, 186 Wolf, David, 123–124, 182 Wolf, Simon, 234n41 Wolfson, Leo, 176 Women’s Trade Union League (WTUL), 101, 111, 113, 116–118 Workmen’s Circle (Arbeter Ring), 71, 94, 102, 113, 118–119, 159, 166, 174–175; Independent Order, 163 World War I, 3, 10–11, 12, 126–127, 133–155, 156–166, 175, 183, 190 Yafe, Shneyer, 25, 31 Yakobson, M., 99 Yale University, 76 “Yankees”/“real” Americans, 2–3, 10–11, 101, 112, 116–118, 159, 188, 202; disillusionment with, 3, 48, 56, 79–80, 82–83, 86, 96–97, 98, 117–118, 124, 126–127, 142, 144–145, 147–148, 157, 161, 170–176, 178, 179, 182, 184, 187, 189–190, 195–196; idealization of, 34–51, 52–64, 73–75, 76, 78, 93–94, 100, 121; as paralleling Jewish characteristics, 40–41, 46, 51, 62–63 Yanovsky, Shoel, 53, 136, 165 Yarmulovsky, Meyer, 132–133 Yehalel (Yehuda Leib Levin), 27 Yehoash (Shlomo Blumgarten), 19 Yellin, Gertrude, 43 Yiddish: folklore, 14, 16–17, 19–20, 24, 155, 213n5–6, 218n29, 257n22; germanized, 59, 70–71, 161; in the labor movement, 102, 108, 109, 119, 124 Yiddish press, 7, 10, 38, 49, 52, 53, 54, 56–57, 60, 79, 80, 84, 90–91, 102, 127–128, 134, 135, 140, 141, 153, 158, 160, 163, 171, 173, 184, 193, 201. See also names of specific newspapers Yiddish Sunday Schools, 94, 177

292

Index

Yiddish theater, 44, 49, 59, 60, 80, 128, 139, 201 Yidishe folk, Dos (the Jewish people), 142, 146, 163 Yidishe gazetn, Di (the Jewish gazette), 56, 57, 69, 79 Yidisher kemfer, Der (the Jewish fighter), 94, 98, 121–122 Yidisher kongres, Der (the Jewish Congress), 144, 151 Yidishes tageblat ( Jewish daily news), 8, 56, 60, 76, 79, 80, 84, 91, 93, 96, 97, 107, 127– 128, 134, 135, 142–143, 167, 184 Yidishe velt, Di (the Jewish world), 78, 128 Yoffeh, Zalmen, 53, 69 Young, Donald, 191 Young Israel, synagogue, 171 Young Men’s Hebrew Association (YMHA), 145 Young Women’s Hebrew Association (YWHA), 113 yudisher emigrant, Der (the Jewish immigrant), 95

Yudishes folks-blat, Dos (the Jewish people’s newspaper), 28, 42 Zaks, A. S., 108, 109, 184 Zamoshtsh, 14 Zausner, Philip, 17, 48 Zeff, Joseph, 58 Zelikovitsh, Getsil, 128, 176 Zemel, Bernard, 95 Zetser, Shmuel-Zvi, 142 Zhitlovsky, Chaim, 18, 22, 24, 31, 94, 109, 137–138, 151, 186 Zhitomir, 91 Zionism, 8, 22, 23, 28, 29, 30, 31, 40, 45, 58, 67–68, 76, 78–79, 87, 94, 108, 109, 121–122, 136, 142, 158, 162–163, 173, 176, 186; growth during World War I, 149 Zionist Organization of America, 149, 167 Zolotarov, Hillel, 109 Zolotkof, Leon, 56, 57, 135 Zundelevich, Aren, 26 Zupnik, Aren Hirsh, 30 Zurich, 191

About the Author gil ribak is the Schusterman Postdoctoral Fellow at the Arizona Center for Judaic Studies, University of Arizona. His articles have appeared in American Jewish History, Israel Studies Forum, War and Peace in Jewish Tradition, and Midstream, among other publications.