Welcome to Jewish America

ADRIENNE TOOCH

The Jewish Americans – Three Centuries of Jewish Voices in America is a magnificently illustrated book by author Beth S. Wenger, associate professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania and director of the Jewish studies program. It features captivating tidbits of history, from an ancient photograph of the U.S. Constitution in Yiddish to a poem written by Emma Lazarus when she was 18 years old. Just paging through the chapters is like walking through a Jewish American history museum.

The Jewish Americans accompanies a six-hour PBS documentary of the same name, which will air in January 2008. Divided into four parts, it brings to life the arrival, obstacles and accomplishments of the early Jewish community in the United States, through photos, correspondence and interviews of several generations of American Jews. Actors, musicians, politicians, spiritual leaders and others provide intimate first-person accounts and images of more than 300 years of Jews' tireless efforts to fully participate in American life.

In Part 1, readers are introduced to the 23 Jews who, after fleeing the island of Recife when the Portugese seized it from the Dutch, arrived in New Amsterdam, now known as New York.

Many of these "early Jews," such as Levi Strauss, an immigrant from Bavaria, became peddlers, "an occupation that required little capital and filled an economic niche in a nation expanding westward and in need of commercial goods." Although often lonely and isolated, many of these peddlers persevered and created more stable careers for themselves, enabling them to marry and have families. Wenger has included in these pages the diary of a Jewish peddler.

In Part 2, the book covers the mass immigration of more than two million Eastern European Jews to America in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Fleeing oppression and tyranny, these Jews settled in the Lower East Side of Manhattan, where they acquired their own unique Yiddish cultures and traditions. "By 1920," writes Wenger, "almost a quarter of world Jewry resided in the United States."
Jews were constantly "Americanizing" themselves, according to this book. They outfitted themselves in American-style clothes, attended night classes to learn English and, by 1909, the Jewish Daily Forward, the Yiddish-language newspaper, ran a segment to explain the fundamentals of baseball.

"The Best of Times, the Worst of Times," Part 3, explores anti-Semitism in the 1920s. "Even as Jews became increasingly comfortable as middle-class Americans, they had never felt less secure in the United States," says Wenger, referring to the rise of Nazism. "The era culminated with the destruction of one-third of world Jewry, leaving America's Jews as the largest surviving community," she writes. Universities, businesses and professions began barring Jews from employment, hate groups expanded, the Ku Klux Klan grew and, by the mid-1920s, it had a membership of more than four million. Anti-Semitic material became regular features in newspapers and constantly warned against the "Jewish menace."

The Jewish community was constantly responding to these attacks, all the while engaging in American culture, particularly in the entertainment industry. Al Jolson, Sophie Tucker, Fanny Brice, Benny Goodman, Irving Berlin and George Gershwin were just some of the up-and-coming personalities at the time.

The Jewish Americans ends with the portrayal of a world transformed by the Holocaust, the establishment of Israel and various social movements. The decline in anti-Semitism after the war "enhanced the confidence and sense of well being among American Jews," however, American Jews remembered the devastation of European Jewry and their support for the state of Israel was the "natural corollary."

This book reminds us that, in carving out a life for themselves in the free and open society of the United States, Jews maintained their identity, while becoming an integral part of American culture. It's a fascinating read.

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