JEWS

The half-century between 1870 and 1920 was the most dynamic period in history for the growth and development of American Jewry. By that time Sephardic and Ashkenazic Jews had already established a solid population base in the United States, the Sephardim originally from Spain and Portugal, the Ashkenazim, or "German Jews" as popularly designated, then mostly from central Europe.

In 1880, as the promise of America was being fulfilled for many Jewish entrepreneurs and professionals already in the United States, the period of mass Jewish immigration from eastern Europe was soon to commence. Since 1791 a vast number of Jews from much of this region between the Baltic Sea and the Black Sea had been confined to the Pale of Jewish Settlement under Russian control. From 1880 on for most of nearly forty-five years, almost unbearable poverty sustained by burdensome Russian restrictions and anti-Semitic pogroms drove these East European Jews from their homelands and across the Atlantic by the tens of thousands annually, seeking a better life. Not all of them found one, but many did, and of them all, few returned.

Many of these Ashkenazic East European immigrants tried to follow the scriptural laws, Talmudic rules, and ancient traditions familiar to them from birth. But adverse circumstances usually made such steadfastness difficult, and families were soon divided by generation regarding their adherence to the Hebraic laws and rituals. Generally the older immigrants were more faithful, the younger more interested in "making it" and becoming Americanized.

Similarly the older generation found it difficult to learn and use English, whereas the younger, especially children in the public schools, shifted to English from their native Yiddish much more quickly and easily, often becoming teachers of their parents, an anomalous and discomfiting reversal for the elders. Abraham Cahan's (1860–1951) most famous novel, The Rise of David Levinsky (1917), describes an emotional conflict between mother and daughter that develops in their home over this issue and helps drive them apart. From wherever in eastern Europe the Jews emigrated, they spoke Yiddish, a form of High German printed in Hebrew letters; it is a colloquial tongue rich in imagery and heavily mixed with Hebrew words and variants from the diverse countries and areas these Jews originally had called home. The culture they brought with them from eastern Europe, called yidishkayt, is based heavily on the language itself, and it evolved with the Jewish way of life in the shtetlach of the homeland, combining the religious and the secular, although with the passing of years in America it was increasingly secularized. Most Jewish men had as boys learned Hebrew to read scripture and Yiddish for daily usage; most women who could read—and many could not—understood Yiddish only. Instead of Yiddish, Jews from the Near East spoke Ladino, a Judaeo-Spanish tongue, or some form of Arabic.

Because life was so different in America, means were devised relatively early in the nineteenth century to liberalize Judaism from European rabbinical dictates yet allow Jews to remain faithful in the New World if they wished, as most did at least to some degree. Within Reform Judaism, established in the United States in the 1840s, the extent of liberalization varied. Among the prominent theorists behind Reform were Isaac Mayer Wise, Samuel Adler (whose son, Felix, founded the Ethical Culture movement in the 1870s), David Einhorn, and the more restrained Isaac Leeser. Late in the century, Conservative Judaism was instituted to provide a middle ground between the rigorous practice of Orthodoxy and the decidedly assimilative policies of Reform, but it did not take root until early in the twentieth century under the leadership of Solomon Schechter.

IMMIGRATION

Before 1880 relatively few Jews entered the United States annually, so the difficulties they faced were usually limited; by then about 280,000 Jews lived in the country. The next year, however, would witness the beginning of a dramatic increase in numbers at the reception area in New York City's Castle Garden. Between the end of the Civil War and the outbreak of World War I, over two million Jews entered the United States. Moses Rischin has estimated that during this period a third of East European Jewry left home; some 90 percent of them sailed to the United States, and the vast majority of those settled at least temporarily in New York. By 1915 approximately 3.5 million Jews lived in the United States.

Part of the reason for this new influx may be found in Cahan's historical novel of 1905, The White Terror and the Red, in which he graphically describes a dreadful anti-Semitic pogrom in Russia. The novel is set in the early 1880s, around the time that Tsar Alexander II was assassinated, but Cahan had been motivated to begin writing it immediately on learning of the massacre that occurred in Kishinev during Easter Week 1903, leaving forty-nine Jews dead and hundreds more wounded.

Although such violent pogroms as this helped influence the Russian and Polish Jews to flee, escape from their hopeless poverty provided an even stronger motive. Aboard ships from Germany and England they sailed in steerage and after a harrowing voyage of ten days to two weeks arrived at Castle Garden through 1892 and Ellis Island afterward. Although immigrants were treated decently at the crowded processing stations, their experiences nevertheless were often distressing, even frightening because, knowing little or no English, most could not understand what was happening to them. Moreover, names were often changed in processing because they were incomprehensible as pronounced to the officials.

Most of the incoming Jews who remained in New York settled in one of the city's ghettos, mainly in the tenement district of the Lower East Side, not far from Castle Garden. In 1900 the population density of that area's tenth ward was approximately seven hundred per acre—one of the highest in the world—yet the death rate was the lowest in the city. By 1910 the population of the Lower East Side was over half a million, but by then inhabitants were moving either to ghettos elsewhere in the city or to other parts of the country.

The heavy influx of immigrants caused a dramatic increase in urban populations across the United States. In 1878 New York had a population of sixty thousand Jews, and in 1907 it was ten times that number. According to Lee Shai Weissbach, the Jewish population of other cities in the United States underwent similar or greater dynamic growth.

Not all Americans were happy with these changing Jewish demographics, including the Jews already established in the United States. Those whose businesses and professions had thrived after the Civil War eagerly sought respectability in their new homeland, that is, favorable recognition from Gentile society; not wishing to appear different as Jews, they yearned to be true Americans themselves. If these "uptown Jews" were uncomfortable with all the devout "greenhorns" (newcomers) pressing into "downtown" tenements, however, they did not turn away from their landsleit (landsman) in need but contributed heavily toward assisting them. From the time the first Jews arrived in the United States, they insisted that they would provide for their own and not leave their poor to be cared for by public charities.

On the other hand, most of the resentment toward the immigrants was attributable not to Jews but to Gentiles willing to accommodate the Sephardic and German Jews who sought to assimilate but not the hordes of destitute East Europeans living in squalor in Lower East Side tenements.

LIVING CONDITIONS

The tenement buildings were newly designed in 1879 to replace earlier types. The more recent structures of six or seven stories were called dumbbell tenements, with every floor holding four apartments of three or four rooms each. Shaped like dumbbells, the contiguous buildings narrowed at the center to provide for wholly inadequate airshafts between them, allowing no other space for light and ventilation. Moses Rischin describes these buildings in which every room often housed several people and served as both living and working quarters. Couples or families renting an apartment for $10 to $20 per month typically let one room to a boarder; under the worst economic circumstances, two boarders alternately used the same bed at different hours of the day and night. The excruciating summer heat drove the occupants outside to sleep on fire escapes and roofs; in winter the air inside was fetid and heavy with fumes emanating from heating units.

Outside the tenements, pushcarts and horse wagons maneuvered amid crowds of peddlers, while shoppers, hagglers, and children ferrying large bundles of piece-work, among others going about their business, jammed such noisy, bustling East Side thoroughfares as Hester and Delancey Streets. Rischin's The Promised City, Irving Howe's World of Our Fathers (1976), Howe and Kenneth Libo's How We Lived (1979), and Stanley Feldstein's The Land That I Show You (1978) as well as Jacob Riis's early groundbreaking exposé How the Other Half Lives (1890) exhibit eye-opening photographs of the overcrowded, noisome conditions under which immigrants struggled for life in the tenement districts during these decades. Moreover, as bad as the New York tenements were, those in Chicago were allegedly worse.

Not all immigrant husbands could cope with either the constant pressure or the burdensome responsibility of keeping their families alive under such circumstances. Consequently the number of husbands deserting wives and children was high, especially in the cities. According to Arthur Hertzberg, as many as 25 percent of Jewish fathers deserted their wives during the years of mass immigration, some never sending them money in Europe for tickets to America and others abandoning them in the United States after fruitlessly attempting to earn enough to stay together. In 1911 a National Desertion Bureau was established when urban Jewish charities that could not cover the cost independently joined forces to assist deserted families.

EARNING A LIVING: THE GARMENT TRADE AND OTHERS

Not all the immigrant Jews settled in the cities. Others—although many fewer—traveled into rural New England, the South, the Midwest, and the far Northwest. Am Olam (Eternal People) groups that developed in major Russian cities promoted agricultural colonies among the emigrating Jews that led them to attempt to establish farm communities in the Dakotas, Oregon, and elsewhere in rural and wilderness areas of the United States (as well as Palestine). Few of these communities endured because not many Jews in Europe had acquired farming experience; those in the Pale could not own land at all.

Because Jews who settled in the United States after 1880 had emigrated largely from shtetlach and other restrictive communities in eastern Europe, the ways they knew of earning a living were extremely limited. Like earlier Jewish immigrants who had "made it" in business and finance by beginning as peddlers and small shop owners in different parts of the country, many East Europeans also began with backpacks and pushcarts. Countless others knew how to sew, and those who did not quickly learned. This endeavor eased when Singer sewing machines were brought into Russia in the 1870s; prospective immigrants who became accomplished on them found work soon after entering the United States.

Sewing was fundamental to the East Side Jews, who generally worked under the sweatshop system, a method already in effect when they arrived. As Ronald Sanders and Irving Howe describe the system, typically a contractor agreed to provide a set number of suits or cloaks to a merchant at a certain price. By then the merchant had purchased the requisite amount of cloth and cut it into sections for the contractor to distribute among workers he or she had hired, each of whom had a specific task to perform. Manufacturing ready-made clothes was seasonal work, and workers had little chance to earn sufficient money during the off-seasons, so when jobs were available, six-day work weeks often required seventy-two to eighty-four hours of labor.

On the Lower East Side during these years thousands of sweatshops were in existence simultaneously, but most were small operations employing but a handful of people. By 1880, even before their heyday, about half the Jewish businesses in the United States were in some aspect of the garment trade, and Arthur Hertzberg estimates that Jews already controlled as much as three-fourths of the American clothing industry. Extending this point, Irving Howe states that altogether the production of the sweatshops was so great that by 1900 some 90 percent of the garment industry was under Jewish control, and by then the east Europeans were squeezing out the Germans, who had previously dominated the industry.

In addition to businesses, the professions attracted a disproportionate number of Jewish immigrants. Among the most distinguished American jurists during this period, for example, were Louis Brandeis, Benjamin Cardozo, and Louis Marshall, all three of whom contributed significantly to the nation's legal as well as Jewish history; both Brandeis and Cardozo became Supreme Court justices. Moreover, as Hertzberg indicates, by 1910 about a quarter of the students in American medical schools were Jewish (p. 200).

With the good came the bad. Arnold Rothstein (1882–1928), born of East European parents in New York, became the notorious gambler who masterminded the infamous Black Sox scandal and gained a fortune by bribing leading players on the Chicago White Sox to throw the World Series in 1919. A stylish, well-groomed wheeler-dealer among the politicians of Tammany Hall, he allegedly bribed his way to success through police stations and courtrooms alike. Although F. Scott Fitzgerald based Meyer Wolfsheim in The Great Gatsby (1925) on Rothstein, he transformed the dapper gambler from a brilliant gangster into a repulsive anti-Semitic Jewish stereotype.

On the Lower East Side many less-conspicuous Jewish figures were loose with the law as well, typically thwarting it by chicanery and manipulation rather than violence. Prostitution too was difficult to control in that section partly because it was on the edge of the red-light district and partly because it was supported by dance halls that abounded in the area to provide entertainment for men and women alike. In Yekl, A Tale of the New York Ghetto (1896), Cahan describes a dance hall but implies nothing about prostitution. Juvenile delinquency was also commonplace; parents tried to control their offspring, but peer pressure often overcame their influence. Children were no longer under the religious restrictions of the shtetlach, traditional discipline in the home had deteriorated, youngsters spoke better English than their parents, and much of their time was spent on the streets. If their fathers had deserted them, they had no place else to go.

AIMS AND ASPIRATIONS

In the miasmic atmosphere of the ghettos, advocates of socialist theory and practice—which by no means always corresponded—were prominent, especially from the 1880s until after the Bolshevik revolution in 1917. The east European Jews brought socialism from the old country, where those who expressed radical ideas toward reform were either harassed or subject to arrest and imprisonment, depending on their assumed degree of implication with the revolutionaries. Abraham Cahan, who arrived in America from Russia in 1882, became one of the strongest and most effective spokespersons for socialism on the East Side, partly by speaking to the workers in Yiddish rather than one of their native European languages but mostly through his strong voice in the Yiddish press. After editing and writing for the Socialist Labor Party's weekly, Arbeter tsaytung, through the mid-1890s, Cahan in 1897 founded the Jewish daily Forverts, popularly known as the Forward, which ultimately became the most widely read, distributed, and influential Yiddish newspaper in the world. One cannot overstate the importance of the Forward to Jewish economic and social progress during that crucial period in American Jewish history.

But the Forward was only one of many Yiddish newspapers published on the East Side; each of the leftist dailies and weeklies propagated its own brand of socialism, often more theoretical than practical, and each had its own coterie of adherents. The more theoretical socialists attempted to promote economic as well as social equality by ending all forms of labor exploitation, an impossibility in democratic America, where workers could vote freely and reap the benefits of their labor. In contrast, the more liberal papers recommended adapting socialist theories to suit the needs of Jews living in a different world from the tsarist autocracy.

With socialists of every stripe came others—Jewish anarchists, communists, Am Olam adherents, and Zionists among them—all with various commitments and degrees of loyalty. The Chicago Haymarket riot in 1886 began with an authorized protest by angered workers and anarchists and ended when someone unknown threw a bomb amidst a group of police, who then opened fire on the crowd. Several people were killed or wounded; eight of those at the protest were arrested and tried by a heavily biased court; four were executed and, according to Hertzberg, regarded as martyrs by Jewish socialists and radical workers.

Zionists showed little strength in the United States until the unanticipated support they gained from Louis Brandeis in 1914 rapidly increased their influence among American Jews, particularly those from eastern Europe. Hadassah, the Women's Zionist Movement, was organized two years earlier by Henrietta Szold, and it has since played a major role in American Zionism. Each group of advocates and theorists attempted to propagate its own social philosophy and practice through lectures, rallies, protests, and the Yiddish press.

Attempts to establish unions in the ghettos focused particularly on the clothing trade. In 1909 and 1910 large strikes in the clothing industry occurred in Chicago as well as New York. Of course Jews were not the only workers in that industry, which drew heavily for labor from other immigrant groups and neighborhoods in Lower Manhattan. Many young Italian and Jewish women died together, for example, in the horrifying Triangle Shirtwaist Company fire of 1911 that shocked the nation. Those on the upper floors were trapped in their workrooms behind locked doors and were among the 146 workers who burned or jumped to their deaths within only a few minutes. Such catastrophes as this exacerbated the misery of the working people and their families on the East Side in particular, and strikes became both larger and more effective. Among the most prominent labor leaders of the period were Cahan; Samuel Gompers, longtime president of the American Federation of Labor; Joseph Barondess, dubbed "King of the Cloak-Makers"; David Dubinsky, the enduring leader of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union; Morris Hillquit (né Hilkowitz), who helped establish the United Hebrew Trades with Cahan in 1888; and Meyer London, a Jewish labor lawyer elected to Congress in 1914. Their political leanings were always to the left.

Reducing anti-Semitism in the United States, always a major issue for Jewish leaders, was particularly evident during the years of mass immigration. Antipathy toward Jews gained strength with the increasing numbers of immigrants. In 1913 Leo Frank, a young Jewish plant manager in Atlanta, was framed and convicted for killing a woman in the factory; without proof that he had committed the crime, a lynch mob hanged him in 1915 as he awaited the result of his appeal in jail. Moreover, that infamous treatise The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a forgery by the Russian police early in the century, was translated and published in the United States in 1919. Purporting to be a secret plan by international Jewry to take over the world, this ludicrous document, promoted by Henry Ford, gained tremendous influence soon after its publication in English. Among the organizations founded early in the twentieth century in support of Jewish civil rights are the American Jewish Committee (1906) and B'nai B'rith's Anti-Defamation League (1913).

EDUCATION AND JOURNALISM

In The Promised City, Moses Rischin reviews in some detail the surprising success rate of Jewish immigrant children in the East Side public schools. The average absentee rate of 8 percent was attributable almost entirely to illness, he says, and the pupils, eager to learn, were responsive and quickly Americanized. Rischin also points out that by the end of the century most children in the public schools of New York City were those of east European immigrants. Myra Kelly (1876–1910), an Irish teacher on the East Side at the end of the century, was so enthusiastic over her experiences with her Jewish pupils that she published numerous stories based on those she knew; her most popular collection was Little Citizens: The Humours of School Life (1904).

Several Jewish organizations assisted in the support of vocational schools, including technical training and English instruction for both girls and boys. As the numbers of incoming children increased toward the end of the century and beyond, the "uptown" Jews of the older, more established German-Jewish community contributed more heavily to the education and welfare of East Europeans in the tenement districts "downtown." The Hebrew Free School Association, the Young Men's Hebrew Association, the Baron de Hirsch Fund, and various other agencies were instrumental in helping to provide education for the immigrants, children and adults alike. In 1895 Lillian Wald established the Nurses (Henry Street) Settlement on the Lower East Side to offer nursing services and educate the immigrants about good health and hygiene. Other, more comprehensive charities such as the B'nai B'rith also helped to make education for these children possible among their broader commitments. Hebrew Union College was first established in Cincinnati in 1875 under the leadership of Isaac Mayer Wise; Gratz College, the first specifically for Jewish teachers, dates to 1897, and Dropsie College, the first postgraduate school for Jewish studies, was founded ten years later.

Education went two ways on the Lower East Side: not only were most immigrant Jews eager to learn about American manners and practices, but many Americans were equally interested in the ghetto, that "exotic" district to which the foreign Jews had immigrated. Because American journalists other than Jews did not know Yiddish, those who wished to write about the East Side sought someone there to guide them. Abraham Cahan had been hired by Lincoln Steffens, a philo-Semite (one who admires, praises, and often makes it a point to associate with Jews) (see Howe, p. 398) recently appointed city editor for the New York Commercial Advertiser, to report on the East Side. One outstanding result of Cahan's warm association with Hutchins Hapgood (1869–1944), also on the staff, was The Spirit of the Ghetto (1902), a collection of articles on East Side life by Hapgood with superb charcoal drawings by Jacob Epstein. Jacob Riis (1849–1914), widely known as the author and photographer of How the Other Half Lives (1890) and Children of the Poor (1892), was then reporting for the New York Sun.

As the Gentile journalists publicized immigrant life for outsiders, the Yiddish press brought omnifarious information as well as fiction and poetry to American Jews wherever copies were available. Although the Forward was the most enduring of the Yiddish papers, other Yiddish dailies, weeklies, and monthlies were chiefly political, but some emphasized Jewish achievements, and still others appealed to conservative Jewish readers from a religious perspective. Apart from news and commentaries in the Jewish press, a variety of other features appeared, including tawdry, sentimental, melodramatic, and sensational fiction written quickly and strictly for commercial purposes.

THE ARTS

An outstanding novel of the period is Cahan's The Rise of David Levinsky, which details the life of a hypocritical Russian immigrant from his childhood in a shtetl studying to become a Hebrew scholar through his middle age in New York as a multimillionaire industrialist. As Cahan presents immigrant life in fiction from a male perspective, Anzia Yezierska (1885?–1970) reveals it from the viewpoint of a woman. Her first story, "The Fat of the Land," appeared in 1915 and her first collection, Hungry Hearts, in 1920; her work was so well received that it brought her to Hollywood, a dramatic change from her childhood and adolescence amid poverty as a Polish immigrant from the Pale. On arriving in America she lived on the East Side under the Old World exploitative behavior of her father, who expected women to work and serve him without question as he studied Talmud at home. So Yezierska fled and gained self-fulfillment trying to create a bridge of mutual understanding between the American people and the immigrants. Because much of Yezierska's fiction is autobiographical, it is comparable with Mary Antin's (1881–1949) popular autobiography The Promised Land (1912), in which she reveals the changes that occurred in her life as a Russian Jew who becomes secularized on leaving her family in Boston to gain what she believes is a new nationalistic religion as an American. Another noted female author early in the century was Fanny Hurst (1889–1968), who brought out two collections of stories before 1920, Just around the Corner (1914) and Humoresque (1919), that show the Jewish immigrants becoming assimilated into American life.

Two other Jewish fiction writers of New York from the period are Herman Bernstein (1876–1935) and James Oppenheim (1882–1932). Bernstein's stories collected in In the Gates of Israel (1902) are somewhat contrived and sentimental, but they expose the alienation felt by immigrants amid conflicting values of the Old World and the New; Bernstein was also founding editor of the Yiddish daily Tog in 1914. Oppenheim first wrote a series of realistic stories about a character named Dr. Rast, a physician on the East Side (1909), that reveals his profound sympathy with the destitute immigrants. Two years later he brought out a novel, The Nine-Tenths, that strongly supports the labor movement and draws on two recent historical incidents, the massive strike among garment workers in 1909 and the Triangle Shirtwaist Company fire of 1911. Sholem Aleichem (1856–1916) came to New York from Russia in 1906 but never overcame his misery over what he considered the coarseness of the eastern European immigrants.

Relatively few notable Jewish fictionists existed outside of New York. In the 1890s Emma Wolf (1865–1932) in San Francisco brought out several novels on middle-class Jewish life on the West Coast, among them Other Things Being Equal (1892) and Heirs of Yesterday (1900). After 1900 Elias Tobenkin (1882–1963) published Witte Arrives (1916), which portrays an enterprising, educated youth reared by Russian immigrant parents in rural Wisconsin; unhappy there with no possibility of finding a meaningful life, he leaves and gains fulfillment first in Chicago, then New York. A year after Witte Arrives appeared, Sidney L. Nyburg (1880–1957) brought out The Chosen People, set in contemporary Baltimore. This realistic fiction places many of the serious problems confronting Jewish communities in New York into a smaller arena. Liberal versus conservative, uptown Jews versus downtown Jews, owners versus workers are the crucial conflicts that confront a young rabbi trying to become a moral leader amidst a wealthy community unprepared to make essential changes.

Undoubtedly the best-known poem by a Jewish poet of the period is "The New Colossus," by Emma Lazarus (1849–1887), a Sephardic Jew living in New York. Asked to provide a manuscript to help pay for the base of the Statue of Liberty, she wrote her famed sonnet in November 1883; it is now implanted in the pedestal of the statue. Until the early 1880s Lazarus wrote traditional poetry on classical subjects, but when awakened to her Jewish commitment, she devoted herself to it.

Many other Jewish poets also were active, publishing their own collections as well as individual poems in the Yiddish press. Because nearly all their important work was in Yiddish, however, until it was translated they were virtually unknown to non-Yiddish-speaking readers. In the 1880s and 1890s a group called Sweatshop Poets devoted their poetry to the cause of labor on the East Side; perhaps the best known are Morris Winchevsky, David Edelstadt, and especially Morris Rosenfeld. Later more individualistic poets emerged, including such popular writers as Mani Leib, Moshe Leib Halpern, Reuben Iceland, and Zisha Landau. In A Little Love in Big Manhattan (1988), Ruth R. Wisse portrays Leib and Halpern, immigrants from eastern Europe, and discusses their work in the context of trends and patterns in Yiddish poetry of the period. As young poets they became part of a group called Di Yunge (Youth), which formed under the leadership of David Ignatow. Di Yunge separated art from the wretchedness they knew of East Side life by seeking to write as individuals and to emphasize internal truths over external actualities.

Written by Emma Lazarus, a Sephardic Jew from New York, "The New Colossus" is probably the most universally recognized poem by an American poet. She drafted it in November 1883 when asked to submit a manuscript for auction to help acquire funds to provide a base for the Statue of Liberty, a recent gift to the United States from France. The poem received immediate acclaim and was eventually engraved on a plaque mounted within the pedestal.

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame, With conquering limbs astride from land to land; Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame. "Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

Lazarus, The Poems of Emma Lazarus, 2:202–203.

The Yiddish theater and the song, dance, and comic routines of early vaudeville also became popular during these years. The Yiddish theater was an art form all its own. Its first performance in New York was Abraham Goldfaden's (1840–1908) operetta The Sorceress, staged in August 1882 on the Lower East Side. Originally a Yiddish songwriter in Russia and Romania, Goldfaden demanded little from his audience in order to generate popular appeal. In contrast, Jacob Gordin (1853–1909) tried to educate his audience. He was the first to attempt to bring realism and serious drama to the Yiddish stage. Two of the principal early actors were Boris Thomashevsky, who achieved great popularity as a star of melodrama, and Jacob Adler, reputedly among the best actors on stage. Late in the 1910s and early 1920s, as David S. Lifson ably traces in The Yiddish Theatre in America (1965), a successful effort was finally made to bring art—serious drama treated seriously—into the Yiddish theater under the influence of the actor Maurice Schwartz, who founded the Yiddish Art Theater in 1918.

Stories abound of the uproarious liberties Yiddish dramatists and actors alike took with Shakespeare's plays—notably Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, and King Lear—in the early years. Much of the pleasure, laughter, and weeping over these productions was attributable to ad-libbing by the performers and to changes made in situation and setting to accommodate the interests and limitations of Jewish audiences at the time. People familiar with a play before it began still never knew what to expect from one performance to the next, and sometimes audience members became so engaged that they shouted at the performers to encourage or instruct them. In World of Our Fathers, Irving Howe mentions theatergoers so overjoyed with a performance of Hamlet that they called for the author.

Another form of entertainment reigned over the Catskills as Jewish immigrants in New York saved enough to vacation in the mountains for a few days or a week during the summer. By 1890 East European workers began to escape temporarily from the stifling ghettos and enjoy short stays in the cooler mountain air. Aging farmhouses were purchased by entrepreneurs and converted into boardinghouses; after 1900 more lavish hotels and resorts were created. As Cahan illustrates when David Levinsky spends a weekend at the luxurious Rigi Kulm House, overeating and overdressing were the rule for evenings of dining and dancing. Although the Catskills were at their peak for Jewish summer vacationers after 1920, Cahan shows that entertainers were already appearing in the hotels earlier.

A list of names alone of the singers, dancers, and comedians with roots in Jewish neighborhoods of New York early in the last century, especially the East Side, conveys an idea of their importance in the development of American popular culture in the decades that followed. Eddie Cantor, Al Jolson, the Ritz Brothers, Fanny Brice, Sophie Tucker ("Last of the Red-Hot Mamas"), Jack Benny, Milton Berle, the Marx Brothers, and George Burns are only a few of those named by Irving Howe who went on to become American stars in the media during the first half of the century and after. The fathers of George Gershwin, Eddie Cantor, and Harold Arlen were cantors in the synagogue, and Irving Berlin was already writing popular songs before 1910.

Prominent Jews in the visual arts also emerged from immigrant backgrounds in urban America. For example, Jacob Epstein, William Gropper, Ben Shahn, and Leonard Baskin all excelled in the graphic arts, while Moses and Raphael Soyer, Adolf Gottlieb, and later Mark Rothko achieved reputations as outstanding painters. Several of these artists either taught or studied at the Jewish Educational Alliance, which evolved when three Jewish charities of New York combined in 1893, and it continued to serve for decades after.

All told, American Jewry in the early twenty-first century cannot be understood without considering the five decades between 1870 and 1920. As well as a period of literary realism and naturalism in America, this was a dynamic age of maturation for the millions of Jewish immigrants caught between two worlds before winning the struggle to achieve their own identity as both Jews and Americans.

See alsoAnarchism; Assimilation; Immigration; Labor; Poverty; The Rise of David Levinsky; Socialism

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Works

Bernheimer, Charles S., ed. The Russian Jew in the United States: Studies of Social Conditions in New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago, with a Description of Rural Communities. Philadelphia: John C. Winston, 1905.

Hapgood, Hutchins. The Spirit of the Ghetto. 1902. Edited by Moses Rischin. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1967.

Lazarus, Emma. The Poems of Emma Lazarus. 2 vols. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1888.

Riis, Jacob. How the Other Half Lives. New York: Scribners, 1890.

Secondary Works

Birmingham, Stephen. The Grandees: America's Sephardic Elite. New York: Harper and Row, 1971.

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Howe, Irving, and Kenneth Libo. How We Lived: A Documentary History of Immigrant Jews in America, 1880–1930. New York: Richard Marek, 1979.

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Taub, Michael. "Yiddish Newspapers in America: A Selective Overview (on the Occasion of the 105 Anniversary of the Yiddish Forwerts)." Yiddish 13, nos. 2–3 (2003): 111–119.

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Wisse, Ruth R. A Little Love in Big Manhattan. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988.

Sanford E. Marovitz