Immigration of the Jews to America is one of the great stories in our nation's history. The uniqueness of these amazing people receives proper recognition in the fascinating new book, Tradition Transformed: The Jewish Experience in America (Johns Hopkins University Press, $40 hardcover, $14.95 paperback). Author Gerald Sorin, who is Distinguished Teaching Professor in the History Department at the State University of New York, New Paltz, has recorded an astounding story, assembling in bright but serious prose the facts about the Jews in the U.S. "From the beginning, despite initial rebuff," he writes, "Jews were anxious to participate in American society, and they were ready, even delighted, to accept America's ideals, norms, and obligations (many of which paralleled Jewish values and aspirations) while at the same time they wished to keep, and succeeded in keeping, important albeit reshaped elements of their Jewish culture. In this way Jews and American society changed and enriched each other, and in this way, Jews and many other groups contributed, and continue to contribute, to a process of fusion in which some dimensions of ethnic culture and identity were incorporated into changing definitions of what was American and what it meant to be American."
Because Jews, on the average, demonstrated more intelligence, more savvy, than other ethnic populations, they quickly achieved success in the U.S., despite the continuing presence of resentment and sometimes hatred of who they were. "In numerous quantitative accounts by urban historians of Jews in nineteenth-century Atlanta, Boston, Columbus, Omaha, Poughkeepsie, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, similar conclusions were reached: Jews outpaced non-Jews in occupational and social mobility," Sorin observes.
Sorin says that no other group had the Jews' degree of historical consciousness as a nation. Sorin writes, "Only Jews, after all, left the ghettos of Europe for the ghettos of America." The book notes that 33 percent of the Jewish population fled Eastern Europe between 1880 and 1920, and after 1905 only small numbers returned.
What pulled Jews to America was "the powerful combination of physical wretchedness and spiritual hope (that) pushed the Jews out of Eastern Europe; (and) the lure of openness and tolerance, economic opportunity, and the possibilities for new modes of living" that attracted them to the U.S.
The trip wasn't easy. The transatlantic voyage ran from 13 to 20 days in the primitive conditions of steerage class. Travelers found iron bunks with straw mattresses and no pillows. Both sexes had to share the two available bathrooms. "As the voyage progressed," Sorin writes, "conditions became filthy and unbearable."
At the height of the influx, up to 5,000 immigrants were processed daily at Ellis Island. The total reached an astounding 11,745 on one day in April of 1907. "The overworked and often insensitive immigration officials checked the new arrivals for tuberculosis (considered 'the Jewish disease'), 'dull-wittedness,' eye and scalp problems, contagious and 'loathsome' diseases, and other 'defects'."
Sorin contends that anti-Semitism was actually lessened in the U.S. by the lack of a national church and by competition with other forms of discrimination, particularly anti-Black and anti-Indian racism and anti-Catholicism. Americans always could find plenty to hate.
Describing the grand tradition of the Yiddish theater, particularly popular in large metropolitan areas, Sorin notes that the theater directly encouraged its audience to "feel connected to both the American and the Jewish worlds. Patrons felt pride in their Jewishness as the Jewish playwrights and actors consistently expressed the immigrants' own exuberant vitality."
In Eastern Europe, Jews had been forced into the entrepreneurial experience, which made it likely that they would pursue similar occupations in their new surroundings. In cities such as Columbus, Portland, and Milwaukee, Jews newly arrived to this country borrowed from friends, relatives, and cooperative loan societies to open their own small businesses.
In Cleveland, Sorin writes, "one young scavenger protest(ed) when the uncle who was 'training' him picked unattractive, seemingly worthless junk out of backyards. The older man retorted, 'That's business! . . . Everything goes into the wagon. If you're too finicky, you'll never make a living."
A few decades later, Jews were no longer particularly welcome immigrants. During the Depression limits on immigration for economic reasons were deliberately used to cut down on the entrance of Jewish refugees. When reports of the "Final Solution" came out of Nazi Germany, the U.S. State Department suppressed the information for months that the Nazis were systematically exterminating the Jews of Europe.
President Roosevelt disclosed to a delegation of Jewish agencies that he was aware of the "resettlement" of Jews for the express purpose of genocide. But Sorin writes that Roosevelt did nothing about it until a year later. "Many of the thousands of Hungarian Jews who survived the Holocaust owe their lives to the War Refugee Board, but U.S. initiative, six years in coming, was too late to save the millions."
American action, or rather inaction, was a response, Sorin believes, to the fact that the Jews were an unpopular minority, their plight an "incident" in the war. "The administration persisted in the argument that winning the war against the Nazis was the way to save the Jews, and all other rescue efforts, including the proposed bombing of Auschwitz or the rail lines leading to that factory of death, were dismissed as diversions that would delay victory over the Germans."
Jews have a claim to uniqueness in America, Sorin says, in that they declined to throw their pasts on the scrap heap. With creative transformation of their ancient and more recent past, Sorin writes, they constructed a religiously authenticated Jewish American ethnic identity "around philanthropy, Israelism, political liberalism, and the search for social justice, as well as around anti-anti-Semitism. The choices Jews made -- to be educated, civic-minded secular humanists, to be universalists, even as they defended their particular culture and values, to be metropolitan and egalitarian -- were far more important as the source of Jewish American cultural distinctiveness than the facts of birth and inheritance. Yet Jews stayed true to Leon Wieseltier's aphorism 'What is made should be celebrated as much as what is given, not least because it is made out of what is given."
Tradition Transformed is worthwhile reading.
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