New York

Introduction
Cities, port cities in particular, have played a crucial role in the reconstitution of traditional Jewish culture since the 17th century. New York City has been the setting for the largest Jewish community in North America throughout most of US history, indeed the largest single urban Jewry in the history of the world. As such, it has been a premier focus of research on the American Jewish experience. New York is generally seen as a very heterogeneous city, even by American standards, and its Jewish population has, since the early 20th century, ranged from 10 to 30 percent of the city’s inhabitants. New York Jewry’s unique size—more than 2 million at its height in the mid-20th century—makes it an especially rich context for Jewish and general social and historical study.
General Overviews
Perhaps surprisingly, there is not a single, monographic overview that captures the entire range of New York Jewish history from colonial times to the early 21st century. The available literature deals with shorter chronological periods. Moreover, these works have been written over the course of several distinct generations and reflect different styles, agendas, and cultural assumptions. In view of the numerical centrality of New York Jewry in the wider American Jewish narrative, however, general histories of US Jewry are often very informative about New York, and, in lieu of single-volume treatments of New York as such, they may serve as partial alternatives. Among the more recent general survey treatments, Diner 2004 stresses social history and the formation of a hybrid American-Jewish identity. Sarna 2004 portrays the American Jewish experience through the prism of religion: voluntarism, congregationalism, denominationalism, and cycles of apathy and enthusiastic “awakenings.” Earlier works include Feingold 1974, which not only may be consulted for its reliable narrative, but also may be read as a cultural document of a time when ethnic identity critically informed scholarly discussion of social subgroups and their interactions within American society.
Diner, Hasia R. The Jews of the United States, 1654 to 2000. Jewish Communities in the Modern World. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004.
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Combines paradigms regnant among scholars in the late 20th century (feminism and the claims for self-expression wielded by nonhegemonic groups) and argues that American democracy fostered among Jews of both genders a sense of self-assurance, enabling them to construct their own blend of Jewish otherness and American integration.
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Feingold, Henry L. Zion in America: The Jewish Experience from Colonial Times to the Present. New York: Twayne, 1974.
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Traces the interconnections between the economic, social, political, and religious adaptations of Jews to American life, while raising the question of Jewish long-term survival in a secular ethnic mode. Notable for its treatment of Jews’ involvement in American domestic and foreign politics.
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Sarna, Jonathan D. American Judaism: A History. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004.
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Asserts that American Judaism must be understood as indigenously American and that the consistencies between earlier and later forms of Jewish congregational life transcend doctrinal debates. The book incorporates earlier scholars’ view of Jewish ethnic secularism but sees it within the rubric of the Jews’ encounter with religion in America.
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Reference Works
Parallel to the lack of an integrated monographic survey, there are also no reference books solely devoted to New York Jewry. Coverage may be found in various formats in more general works, some standard and generally accessible, others a bit more esoteric. Berenbaum and Skolnik 2007,Norwood and Pollack 2008, and, to a lesser extent, Jackson 2010 may be relied upon for basic information. More particularized but very informative works include Rontch 1938, a 1930s-vintage directory of Jewish immigrant hometown associations, and Hyman and Moore 1997. Rock and Moore 2001 offers a pictorial history and Rosenwaike 1972 includes historical population data for New York City as a whole.
Berenbaum, Michael, and Fred Skolnik, eds. Encyclopedia Judaica. 2d ed. Detroit: Macmillan, 2007.
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“New York City” (Volume 15) covers New York Jewry from the colonial period, emphasizing 1870 to the early 21st century. There are sections on neighborhoods and discussion of developments. The bibliography does not highlight the most important sources and unjustifiably devotes as much space to Soviet-era immigration as to all other topics combined. “United States of America” (Volume 20) provides a concise background on American Jewry, with frequent mention of New York.
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Hyman, Paula E., and Deborah Dash Moore, eds. Jewish Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia. 2 vols. New York: Routledge, 1997.
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Pioneering work in canvassing feminist history in the Jewish American sphere. Many biographical articles are germane to New York City. Much can also be gleaned about New York from topical entries, some on unexpected subjects, such as “Agudath ha-Rabbanim,” “American Museum of Natural History,” “Art Students League,” “Brooklyn College,” “Vaudeville,” “Vocational Training Schools,” and “Yiddish Film.”
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Jackson, Kenneth T., ed. The Encyclopedia of New York City. 2d ed. New Haven. CT: Yale University Press, 2010.
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The entry “Jews” is serviceable; others of particular relevance are “Crown Heights,” “Lower East Side,” “Brownsville,” “92nd Street Y,” and “Yiddish Writing and Publishing.” Others lack indication of Jewish relevance (“Communism,” “Henry Street Settlement”). “Newspapers” includes the Yiddish dailies in its coverage of the foreign-language press but does not discuss the phenomenon. Under “Slang” there are no references to idioms derived from Yiddish.
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Norwood, Stephen H., and Eunice G. Pollack, eds. Encyclopedia of American Jewish History. 2 vols. American Ethnic Experience. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2008.
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“Sephardic Jews in America,” “American Jews in the Colonial Period,” “German Jews in America,” and “East European Jewish Immigration” present themes that include much New York material. Other articles are more specific to New York, such as “Lower East Side,” “Brownsville,” “Antisemitic Violence in Boston and New York during World War II,” “The Workmen’s Circle,” “Meyer London,” and “Yiddish Theater in America.”
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Rock, Howard B., and Deborah Dash Moore. Cityscapes: A History of New York in Images. Columbia History of Urban Life. New York: Columbia University Press, 2001.
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An annotated pictorial archive of New York City history, providing essential visual perspective on the physical environment of city life—streets, buildings, neighborhoods, commercial and industrial settings, public squares, transportation, and the like. The presence of Jews in these venues is showcased in the context of the city’s heterogeneous population, depicted across time and space.
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Rontch, Isaac E., ed. Di idishe landsmanshaftn fun nyu york. New York: I. L. Peretz Yiddish Writers’ Union, 1938.
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A directory of several thousand benevolent and fraternal societies formed by Jewish immigrants, still active in the late 1930s, along with a collection of valuable articles detailing the activities of immigrant fraternal societies. An English translation of much of the material is provided in Jewish Hometown Associations and Family Circles in New York: The WPA Yiddish Writers’ Group Study, edited by Hannah Kliger (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992).
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Rosenwaike, Ira. Population History of New York City. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1972.
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A good summary of demographic data, arranged chronologically, from “The Colonial City” to “The Metropolitan Giant (1940–1970).” Data relevant to Jews in the New York population are duly noted and indexed. In addition, numerous tables refer to other relevant categories, such as foreign birth (Russia as a country of origin), religious groups, and Yiddish as mother tongue.
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Mid-17th to Mid-19th Century
The presence of Jewish households in colonial New Amsterdam and British New York owed much to the trading routes linking the Caribbean islands, North America, London, and Amsterdam. New York was one of several towns with Jewish households and could rightly claim to have been the first among them, but New York only emerged as the premier American Jewish community in the 1820s. Because of the dominance of Sephardim (Jews of Hispanic origin) in the earliest stages of the community’s growth, as outlined in Angel 2004 (cited under Colonization, Community, and Integration), it became customary to dub the entire colonial and early national periods the Sephardic era; but, this is a misnomer, as northern European (Ashkenazic) Jews outstripped the Sephardim by the mid-18th century. Numerical growth of the Jewish population took place as New York itself grew to become the nation’s leading commercial and manufacturing city. The sole general treatment of New York Jewry from its colonial origins to the American Civil War is Grinstein 1945 (cited underColonization, Community, and Integration). Most of the general histories of American Jewry in this era provide a great deal of New York–based information (Marcus 1970, cited under Colonization, Community, and Integration), as do documentary collections (Marcus 1959, Blau and Baron 1963, cited under Documentary Anthologies, Biographical Studies, Letters, Papers, and Diaries). Most works in the field make the case for viewing New York Jewish history as a successful ethnic paradigm, including both individual integration in social and economic life and the emergence of group-based religious and social institutions. Although narrative works predominate, there are several important collections of primary source documents as well as many more recent examinations of individual Jews and their productivity in writing and other media.
Colonization, Community, and Integration
The common American historical inner periodization of the colonial, Revolutionary War, early national, Jacksonian, and antebellum periods is generally not adhered to in Jewish scholarship, which tends to emphasize longer eras of immigration waves, with the Sephardic era giving way to the German immigration period (1820s to 1880s). Here, this conventional periodization is nevertheless compressed so as to conform with American historiographical canons. Scholarship has dealt with questions of the place of New York in the Atlantic economy (Faber 1992, Snyder 2009) and the Jews’ civic status and their relationships with other Euro-Americans and African Americans (Marcus 1970, Faber 1992, Jaher 2002, Pencak 2005). Ernst 1994 features Jews in the context of the other immigrant populations in New York City. Angel 2004 provides an account of the history of New York’s first synagogue, still functioning in the early 21st century. The first standard history of early New York Jewry was Grinstein 1945, which surveys the viability of colonial and early national New York Jewry as a religious community.
Angel, Marc D. Remnant of Israel: A Portrait of America’s First Jewish Congregation, Shearith Israel. New York: Riverside, 2004.
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An accessible account of the chronology and evolution of North America’s first Jewish congregation. Lavish illustrations accompany the description of the pattern of establishment, from settlement to institution, while including descriptions of prominent members.
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Ernst, Robert. Immigrant Life in New York City, 1825–1863. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1994.
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Originally published in 1949. Rich in detail, providing data on the social, economic, religious, and civic lives of immigrants. Jews are featured as part of the polyglot migrant population, alongside Germans, Irish, and others.
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Faber, Eli. A Time for Planting: The First Migration, 1654–1820. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992.
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Faber places early American Jewry in the context of trans-Atlantic trade settlement, chronicles the development of Jewish congregations, and discusses Jews’ interrelations with other Euro-Americans as well as African Americans. Jews in early America are said to have been “among the first Jews . . . to experiment with acculturation and to contend with one of its most extreme forms, assimilation through intermarriage” (p. 142).
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Grinstein, Hyman B. The Rise of the Jewish Community of New York, 1654–1860. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1945.
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The author stresses religious change, arguing that although Jews tended to cluster in certain neighborhoods and maintained a coherent identity, their Jewish lifestyles were highly plastic. Jews lived in close proximity to Christians, with whom they intermingled freely in business, social activities, and cultural life. Polish Jews were about a third of the Jewish population in mid-19th-century New York, second only to the German-origin group.
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Jaher, Frederic Cople. The Jews and the Nation: Revolution, Emancipation, State Formation, and the Liberal Paradigm in America and France. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002.
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Sets the discussion of liberal democracy and the Jews’ place within it in a comparison of the French and American revolutionary and liberal traditions from 1775 to 1815. Brief attention is devoted to New York City’s Jews and their religious and civic lives, especially in chapter 5.
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Marcus, Jacob R. The Colonial American Jew, 1492–1776. 3 vols. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1970.
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A synthetic reconstruction of the colonial-era Jewish experience in North America (with an initial survey of Brazil and the West Indies). New Netherland and New York are covered in Volume 1. Volumes 2 and 3 are devoted, respectively, to economic activity among Jews and their religious life and to the place of Jews in the wider colonial American social order.
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Pencak, William. Jews and Gentiles in Early America: 1640–1800. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005.
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A provocative study of Jewish otherness in the context of early America, with separate chapters devoted to each of the main cities (New York, Newport, Charleston, Savannah, Philadelphia). The section on New York traces Jewish–gentile relations “from ostracism to acceptance.”
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Snyder, Holly. “English Markets, Jewish Merchants, and Atlantic Endeavors: Jews and the Making of British Transatlantic Commercial Culture, 1650–1800.” In Atlantic Diasporas: Jews, Conversos, and Crypto-Jews in the Age of Mercantilism, 1500–1800. Edited by Richard L. Kagan and Philip D. Morgan, 50–74. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009.
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An analysis of the complex roles of colonial Jewish merchants in their historical milieu, with a sketch of the life and career of Asser Levy (the only colonial New York Jew to have a street in Manhattan named for him).
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Documentary Anthologies, Biographical Studies, Letters, Papers, and Diaries
The relatively small size of the Jewish population in New York up to the Civil War prompts the social historian to seek out microhistorical and biographical methodologies. There are abundant public records that have been mined for information about Jewish individuals, but fewer private sources documenting the earlier history of New York Jews and their community. Hershkowitz 1967 provides primary documents attesting to colonial New York Jews’ family and business relations. The integration of certain prominent Jews in the civil and political discourse of their day is the subject ofSarna 1981, a biography of Mordecai Noah. The overlapping categories of religious, class, and gender identities are explored in Gelles 2004. Marcus 1959) and Blau and Baron 1963 are well-constructed anthologies of documents culled from various archives.
Blau, Joseph L., and Salo W. Baron, eds. The Jews of the United States, 1790–1840: A Documentary History. 3 vols. Jacob R. Schiff Library of Jewish Contributions to American Democracy. New York: Columbia University Press, 1963.
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Primary source materials on Jewish life and social relations with other Americans during the first half-century of the republic, many relating to New York, including discourses on America delivered by Jewish leaders of the time, business papers, and correspondence. The index (Volume 3) provides handy reference to New York City, Shearith Israel congregation, and prominent families (Franks, Lazarus, Myers, Noah, and Seixas).
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Gelles, Edith B., ed. The Letters of Abigaill Levy Franks, 1733–1748. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004.
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A literate and socially involved woman, a leading figure in her day in New York society and its small Jewish community, Abigaill Levy Franks’s voluminous correspondence with her family members at home and abroad is a significant source of information on domestic, social, and religious life in colonial New York.
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Hershkowitz, Leo. Wills of Early New York Jews, 1704–1799. Studies in American Jewish History. New York: American Jewish Historical Society, 1967.
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An invaluable source of information on social history and particularly the commercial and family ties linking Jews in colonial New York with other merchants in the colonies, the Caribbean, and Europe.
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Marcus, Jacob Rader, ed. American Jewry: Documents, Eighteenth Century: Primarily Hitherto Unpublished Manuscripts. Publications of the American Jewish Archives. Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press, 1959.
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Incorporates a valuable trove of colonial-era source material, including a good deal from New York, organized according to a thematic rubric (personal life, religious life, general community, commerce and trade).
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Sarna, Jonathan D. Jacksonian Jew: The Two Worlds of Mordecai Noah. New York: Holmes and Meier, 1981.
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Noah is often remembered for his abortive, utopian plan to establish a Jewish international refuge and commonwealth on Grand Island, on the Niagara River, near Buffalo, New York; however, his literary, diplomatic, political, and journalistic careers are of far wider import. Noah exemplifies the limits and achievements of secularized Jews in early-19th-century America and New York City in particular.
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Arts and Visual Culture
Visual culture in modern Jewish communities remained largely unexplored terrain for scholars until fairly recently but is enjoying a fresh examination in the early 21st century. Although more evident in the scholarship about New York Jewry in later eras, this trend is also evident in the few works that deal with colonial New York Jews, best exemplified in Barquist and Butler 2001.
Barquist, David L., and Jon Butler. Myer Myers: Jewish Silversmith in Colonial New York. New Haven, Yale University Art Gallery. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001.
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A handsome exhibition catalogue with some 150 plates and dozens of other illustrative figures, this book documents the career of New York’s 18th-century master silversmith, Myer Myers (b. 1723–d. 1795). The fine introduction by Jonathan Sarna offers the historical context for understanding Myers’s role in the New York Jewish community.
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Mid-19th Century to World War I
From the 1850s to 1919, New York grew rapidly as a manufacturing city. This period saw the absorption of many thousands of European, working-class immigrants; the definitive establishment of New York as the nation’s financial capital; and the incorporation of the previously separate city of Brooklyn. Generally adhering to the patterns of non-Jewish migration from central and eastern Europe, more than a million Jewish immigrants from those regions made New York their home. They and their children integrated into consumer industries (food and clothing in particular) as well as building trades, peddling, and other small businesses. A small, elite group, mainly mid-19th-century immigrant stock and their children, penetrated into high finance and large-scale marketing. Older narratives subdivide the period into “German” and “Russian” eras, according to the geographic origins of the two largest segments of New York Jewry. In fact, the community also comprised subgroups of Hungarian, Romanian, Levantine, Moravian (Czech), Galician (Austro-Polish), Balkan, and Yemenite origin. In addition, the Jewish social fabric was institutionally complex, as it was served by several thousand fraternal societies, hundreds of synagogues, numerous press organs, philanthropic and health institutions, and—for a while—an attempt at formal self-government, at the municipal level (see Goren 1970, cited under Community, Ethnicity, and Americanization Studies).
Migration, Living Conditions, Demographics, Public Health
The mass movement of poor immigrants across borders and continents was not just about individual successes, and the history of the period involves an examination of squalid housing and health conditions. For these, as related to the case of East European Jewish migration, see Dwork 1981and Markel 1997. The impact of tenement life on American public discourse at the time is reflected inRiis 2010. The demographics of the especially large Russian-origin influx are best documented inKuznets 1975. Many of these aspects as well as initial social work initiatives to ameliorate slum conditions are discussed in Bernheimer 1905 and James 1906. Rosenwaike 1972 analyzes comprehensive population data for New York City, with frequent mention of the Jewish population, tabulated according to foreign birth, mother tongue, and other indices.
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 Settlements. Philadelphia: Winston, 1905.
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A set of studies of Russian Jewish immigrant life in American cities, including images, mostly from the perspective of settlement house workers and the philanthropic elite of the period.
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Dwork, Deborah. “Health Conditions of Jews on the Lower East Side of New York, 1880–1914.” Medical History 25.1 (1981): 1–40.
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A seminal treatment of health issues as related to Jewish immigrants’ housing conditions in the city’s tenements, work conditions, sanitation, and the spread and treatment of diseases (especially tuberculosis).
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James, Edmund J., ed. The Immigrant Jew in America. New York: Buck, 1906.
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Although a composite portrait of Jewish immigrant life, chapters are subdivided according to city, with ample New York coverage. Issued by the Liberal Immigration League, the book is a historical document of the public campaign waged against American nativism and immigration restriction.
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Kuznets, Simon. “Immigration of Russian Jews to the United States: Background and Structure.” Perspectives in American History 9 (1975): 35–124.
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More than half of the Russian Jews who migrated to the United States remained in New York. This analysis by a Nobel economist is still the standard discussion of the demographic and occupational characteristics of those migrants, noting the similarities and differences between Jewish and non-Jewish migrants in this period. Findings may be compared with Kessner 1977 and Godley 2001(cited under Mid-19th Century to World War I: Intergroup and Transnational Studies) andLederhendler 2009 (cited under Economic History).
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Markel, Howard. Quarantine! East European Jewish Immigrants and the New York City Epidemics of 1892. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997.
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Written by a historian with medical training, this is a compelling study of the typhus and cholera epidemics in New York and the stigma associating disease with immigration—especially Jewish immigration.
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Riis, Jacob A. How the Other Half Lives: Studies among the Tenements of New York. Edited by Sam Bass Warner Jr. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010.
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Originally published in 1901. The classic exposé of tenement life, written by New York’s great muckraking journalist.
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Rosenwaike, Ira. Population History of New York City. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1972.
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Basic demographic data on New York City’s population, including its various religious and ethnic subgroups, provide essential methodological tools for understanding the urban social landscape in which the Jewish population developed. See also Reference Works.
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Community, Ethnicity, and Americanization Studies
Ethnicity and the plasticity of its contours have been explored according to several models: a transplantation model (Barkai 1994, Angel 1982), a reconstruction model (Rischin 1962, Brumberg 1986, Nadel 1990, Soyer 1997, Ben-Ur 2009), and a conflictual model (Kosak 2000, cited underLabor History). Both Angel 1982 and Ben-Ur 2009 reemphasize the diversity of New York’s Jewish population in modern times by focusing on Jews originating in the eastern Mediterranean. Barkai 1994 asserts that Jews from German lands retained Jewish cultural patterns closely resembling those of Jews in their home country, whereas Nadel 1990 argues, rather, for an overhauling of the “German” ethnic category as applied to a diverse population of immigrants in America. Goren 1970focuses on the encounter between the recently arrived masses of East European Jewish immigrants at the turn of the 20th century and the efforts made by Jewish communal leaders to restructure Jewish public life. Gorenstein 1961 and Goren 1999 (cited under Political Culture) also discuss the political culture of New York Jews and the public face of Jewish presence in the city.
Angel, Marc D. La America: The Sephardic Experience in the United States. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1982.
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A study of the Judeo-Spanish-speaking Sephardim of New York, 1910–1925 as seen through the weekly newspaper La America. Some 30,000 Jewish immigrants came from Levantine countries to the United States, and many of them settled in New York City. To be read together with Ben-Ur 2009and Sutton 1979 (cited under 1920s to 1960s: Neighborhoods).
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Barkai, Avraham. Branching Out: German-Jewish Immigration to the United States, 1820–1914. Ellis Island. New York: Holmes and Meier, 1994.
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The author asserts that the special circumstances underlying the Jews’ emigration and their particular identity explain why, once resettled in America, they adhered to their own group and long remained an extension of German Jewry, even as they maintained sometimes cordial relations with other German-speakers in America. Although national in scope, this book directly debates the theses on immigrant ethnic formation formulated in Nadel 1990 regarding New York’s German-origin population.
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Ben-Ur, Aviva. Sephardic Jews in America: A Diasporic History. New York: New York University Press, 2009.
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Ben-Ur’s ethnographic study is largely based on oral documentation among informants but also makes extensive use of published historical sources.
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Brumberg, Stephen F. Going to America, Going to School: The Jewish Immigrant Public School Encounter in Turn-of-the-Century New York City. New York: Praeger, 1986.
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Using statistics and oral history, the author contends that the New York City public schools functioned as a key factor in the East European Jewish immigrant’s encounter with American society and were “vehicles to transmit the dominant culture” (pp. 224–225).
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Goren, Arthur A. New York Jews and the Quest for Community: The Kehillah Experiment, 1908–1922. New York: Columbia University Press, 1970.
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Still the best study of intracommunal Jewish politics in the years preceding World War I. The Jews were the only migrant population to merge native and immigrant institutions under one agency for city-wide civic, religious, and philanthropic self-governance. This experiment in ethnic democracy and its eventual demise are traced against the background of Progressive-era reform and the diversity that characterized New York’s Jews.
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Nadel, Stanley. Little Germany: Ethnicity, Religion, and Class in New York City, 1845–1880. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990.
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Argues for a wider, complex, American-ethnic-studies approach to the German migration to America, and New York in particular, and places Jews from German lands alongside and intermingled among their peers belonging to Protestant, Catholic, and other subgroups.
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Rischin, Moses. The Promised City: New York’s Jews, 1870–1914. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962.
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Stresses the intimate involvement in Progressive-era politics by the immigrant community’s leadership, press, and social institutions. What appeared to be an ethnic “ghetto” was actually a springboard to a new, urban, multiethnic democracy at odds with older, agrarian, visions of the American republic.
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Soyer, Daniel. Jewish Immigrant Associations and American Identity in New York, 1880–1939. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997.
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Analyzes the socializing roles performed by hometown associations and fraternal societies, arguing that their dual function was to preserve a narrative of hometown loyalty, while leveraging the immigrants’ facility with American voluntarism and social mobility. To be read together with Rontch 1938 (cited under Reference Works) and Kobrin 2010 (cited under 1920s to 1960s: Intergroup and Transnational Studies).
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Criminality
Social pathologies are commonly associated with poverty, cultural instability, loosened intergenerational bonds, and migration. In this context the East European Jewish migration to the West generally fit into universal patterns. What appeared somewhat distinct, however, in the Jewish case was that a native-born Jewish community mobilized quickly to organize vocational training, family services, and other forms of social control. These patterns are borne out in Bristow 1982, on human trafficking problems; Gastwirt 1974, on racketeering in the kosher food industry; and Joselit 1983, on organized crime and Prohibition-era illicit trade in alcohol.
Bristow, Edward J. Prostitution and Prejudice: The Jewish Fight against White Slavery, 1870–1939. Oxford and New York: Clarendon, 1982.
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A description of the origins, impact, and responses regarding Jewish participation in and rejection of human trafficking at the turn of the 20th century. Using archival sources in English, German, Spanish, Yiddish, French, and Polish, this study surveys the major migration routes between Europe and the Americas (including New York) during the peak era of Jewish migration. This is an early example of transnational scholarship.
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Gastwirt, Harold P. Fraud, Corruption, and Holiness: The Controversy over the Supervision of Jewish Dietary Practice in New York City, 1881–1940. National University Publications. Port Washington, NY: Kennikat, 1974.
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Gastwirt deals with the corruption and racketeering, including violent enforcement practices, that surfaced in the kosher food industry in the era before consumer protection legislation, which was exacerbated by the chaotic state of religious sanctions in the destabilized society formed by recent immigrants.
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Joselit, Jenna Weissman. Our Gang: Jewish Crime and the New York Jewish Community, 1900–1940. Modern Jewish Experience. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983.
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Examines Jewish criminality in the context of immigrant life and social pathologies, from before World War I to the Prohibition years. The author scrutinizes Jewish communal responses and details the techniques applied by social welfare agencies to develop preventive approaches to delinquency and criminality.
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Intergroup and Transnational Studies
Much has been done over the years to integrate the historical analysis of Jewish migration within transnational social and economic studies and intergroup comparative studies, such as Ewen 1985,Berrol 1994, Green 1997, and Godley 2001. Scholars have sometimes pointed toward larger conceptual frameworks, such as globalization, that reposition the narrative of Jewish immigrant labor within long-term trends affecting many immigrant minorities, up to the early 21st century, as demonstrated in Soyer 2005, and in cross-cultural comparative works, such as Green 1997 andEwen 1985. In Sterba 2003 we see a fruitful comparison between Jews and another immigrant minority (Italians) in terms of their civic and political integration in America in times of war. The Jewish–Italian comparison is particularly relevant to New York, and in the field of socioeconomic research, the main contribution is Kessner 1977.
Berrol, Selma. East Side/East End: Eastern European Jews in London and New York, 1870–1920. Westport, CT: Praeger, 1994.
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Compares the New York and London immigrant quarters, with insights on the relative success of New York’s Jewish immigrants in managing their own acculturation, with an assist from the local native Jewish community. One of a handful of studies to undertake a transnational portrait of Jewish migration.
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Ewen, Elizabeth. Immigrant Women in the Land of Dollars: Life and Culture on the Lower East Side, 1890–1925. New Feminist Library. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1985.
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Places women at the center of the social processes of migration and resettlement during the early half of the 20th century, demonstrated via a retrospective analysis of class-based and other relationships between Jewish and non-Jewish immigrants in Manhattan as well as between the generations of mothers and daughters.
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Godley, Andrew. Jewish Immigrant Entrepreneurship in New York and London, 1880–1914: Enterprise and Culture. Studies in Modern History. New York: Palgrave, 2001.
DOI: 10.1057/9780333993866Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Jewish migrants in New York and London displayed different economic and class-status outcomes. In New York City, Jews showed a far greater propensity to open their own business or manufacturing plant, despite the lower return in profits. The premium on self-employment in New York is contrasted with the skilled journeyman status that was an attractive and socially accepted alternative in London.
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Green, Nancy L. Ready-to-Wear and Ready-to-Work: A Century of Industry and Immigrants in Paris and New York. Comparative and International Working-Class History. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997.
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Analyzes urban industry in the two cities, emphasizing the key role played by successive waves of low-status immigrant groups in staffing the labor needs of garment manufacturing and noting the typicality of small workshops as well as the ubiquitous employment of many women. To be read together with Waldinger 1986 (cited under Economic History) and Soyer 2005.
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Kessner, Thomas. The Golden Door: Italian and Jewish Immigrant Mobility in New York City, 1880–1915. Urban Life in America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1977.
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Pioneering work in the cross-cultural study of Jewish and Italian immigrants in New York. Mostly dealing with employment and income data, the book also advances an argument that bases New World social outcomes on Old World cultural patterns and the different types of immigrant households.
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Soyer, Daniel, ed. A Coat of Many Colors: Immigration, Globalism, and Reform in the New York City Garment Industry. New York: Fordham University Press, 2005.
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Covering the long 20th century, this collection of essays crosses ethnic and gender lines to examine labor relations, trade, and politics in and around the clothing industry. Leading scholars write on Jews, Italians, Chinese, and Dominicans; men and women; the impact of economic change in the city; labor militancy; and fair labor and globalization. To be read in conjunction with Waldinger 1986(cited under Economic History) and Green 1997.
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Sterba, Christopher M. Good Americans: Italian and Jewish Immigrants during the First World War. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.
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Compares the experiences of Jews in New York City and Italians in New Haven, both as civilians and as recruits at the time of America’s entry into World War I. The role of the federal government and the US army as agencies of integration is discussed. Although patriotic American rhetoric abounded in both communities, the New York Jewish case provides ample evidence of antiwar dissent.
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Economic History
Economic history forms a significant portion of the historiography, with specific attention to class, class mobility, occupational distribution, and entrepreneurship (Kessner 1977 and Godley 2001, cited under Mid-19th Century to World War I: Intergroup and Transnational Studies; Lederhendler 2009). Supple 1957 undertakes a brief exploration of the mercantile and financial elite in late-19th-century New York. Kahan 1986 provides essential data on occupational distribution and mobility in the immigrant generation. Heinze 1990 pioneered a historical analysis of Jewish consumer culture, pointing out the relevance of material culture in a culture of plenty, even among lower-class and small-trades sections of the Jewish immigrant population. Waldinger 1986 is a comparative and theoretical analysis of ethnic entrepreneurship. Joselit 1992 straddles economic and social history, demonstrating the critical importance of access to credit for small personal and business loans for Jewish immigrant families.
Heinze, Andrew R. Adapting to Abundance: Jewish Immigrants, Mass Consumption, and the Search for American Identity. Columbia History of Urban Life. New York: Columbia University Press, 1990.
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A groundbreaking study of consumption patterns. Raises issues related to the gendered experience of domesticity, status aspirations in the furnishing of apartments, and the development of street vending in the immigrant quarter. Also covers targeted advertising, the reshaping of shopping habits and foodways around Jewish holidays, and the advent of the nickelodeon in New York.
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Joselit, Jenna Weissman. Lending Dignity: The First One Hundred Years of the Hebrew Free Loan Society of New York. New York: Hebrew Free Loan Society of New York, 1992.
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Although a commissioned court history, in the hands of a veteran social historian this book delves into archival holdings to produce a sensitive portrait of a social institution that had deeper economic ramifications in terms of Jewish adjustment to New York life, the ability of immigrant families to weather crises, and the interplay between philanthropy and self-help ideologies.
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Kahan, Arcadius. Essays in Jewish Social and Economic History. Edited by Roger Weiss. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986.
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Written by an economic historian of Russia, the essays deal with labor conditions in Jewish society both in eastern Europe and also among Jewish immigrants in the United States. Data detail the circumstances of Jewish migrants in New York (see especially chapters 1, 4, and 5). Findings may be compared with Kuznets 1975 (cited under Migration, Living Conditions, Demographics, Public Health), Godley 2001 (cited under Mid-19th Century to World War I: Intergroup and Transnational Studies), and Lederhendler 2009.
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Kessner, Thomas. The Golden Door: Italian and Jewish Immigrant Mobility in New York City, 1880–1915. Urban Life in America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1977.
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The pioneering study of differential mobility patterns among Jewish and Italian immigrant men and their sons, arguing that Jewish immigrants typically entered the workforce at a higher skill level, entered petty trade and white-collar jobs more quickly, and enabled the second generation to capitalize sooner on social mobility gains.
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Lederhendler, Eli. Jewish Immigrants and American Capitalism, 1880–1920: From Caste to Class. Cambridge, UK, and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009.
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Jewish economic life in Russia in the 19th century is compared with the immigrant milieu in America. References to the experience of Jews in New York abound. The author contends that immigrants were rarely able to apply their premigration skills directly. Rather, they purchased their new social and economic status in America via adaptation to the American labor market.
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Supple, Barry E. “A Business Elite: German-Jewish Financiers in Nineteenth-Century New York.” Business History Review 31.2 (1957): 143–178.
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The German-Jewish business elite is indicative of some Jews’ stellar success in integrating themselves in the upper reaches of American trade and finance, while exemplifying the ties they retained through extensive social networking among themselves. Available online by subscription.
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Waldinger, Roger D. Through the Eye of the Needle: Immigrants and Enterprise in New York’s Garment Trades. New York: New York University Press, 1986.
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Theoretical analysis of minority groups’ involvement in manufacturing, trade, and entrepreneurship. Encompasses the local garment trade and its global connections and the various ethnic groups, which have, over time, “colonized” the industry as labor and as management.
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Labor History
The history of Jewish workers and the class conflict between “German” employees and “Russian” workers has been featured in some studies, and socialist radicalism among the East Europeans has a strong historiographical tradition (Kosak 2000; Rischin 1962, cited under Community, Ethnicity, and Americanization Studies; Howe 2005, Michels 2005, cited under Mid-19th Century to World War I: Literary Studies and Yiddish Culture; Green 1997, cited under Mid-19th Century to World War I: Intergroup and Transnational Studies). Gender as a conceptual category has also been integrated into the field of economic and labor history, as discussed in Glenn 1990. Herberg 1952 provides a synopsis of the history of Jewish trade unionism. The longer Hertz 1954 offers an insider’s history of Jewish socialism.
Glenn, Susan A. Daughters of the Shtetl: Life and Labor in the Immigrant Generation. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990.
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Glenn’s work pioneered the scholarly reexamination of Jewish labor history in America from the point of view of women’s studies. Although it has a great deal to say on questions of gender roles and family life (see Mid-19th Century to World War I: Women and Gender Studies), the book also makes a major contribution to the understanding of the immigrant family household economy, especially the importance of women’s employment.
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Herberg, Will. “The Jewish Labor Movement in the United States.” American Jewish Year Book 53 (1952): 3–74.
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An excellent survey by a former radical leftist, later chiefly known as a conservative theologian. Provides essential social and historical background for the rise of the Jewish unions in New York and their subsequent history, into the interwar period.
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Hertz, J. S. Di Yidishe sotsyalistishe bavegung in Amerike: Zibetsik yor sotsyalistishe tetikayt: Draysik yor Yidisher Sotsyalistisher Farband. New York: Der Ṿeḳer, 1954.
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A standard survey, with politically engaged, detailed reflections on the rise of the Yiddish Left in America, with its main hub in New York.
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Kosak, Hadassa. Cultures of Opposition: Jewish Immigrant Workers, New York City, 1881–1905. State University of New York Series in American Labor History. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000.
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The author highlights the transmission of ethnoreligious assumptions from the Old World to the New and asserts that immigrant labor functioned as a moral community, imposing its norms on labor relations. At the same time, she also shows that the modern industrial experience forced immigrant labor to face new choices and new opportunities, including women’s activism and communal democratization.
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Literary Studies and Yiddish Culture
Although most Jews conformed with the general American pattern of first-generation bilingualism and second-generation adoption of English as mother tongue, the transitional phase between those generations provided options of cultural expression that, in their day, were an important case of linguistic diversity within American life. Documenting the press, theater, literary production, and other aspects of Yiddish in America emerged in the late 20th century as a central feature of scholarship on New York Jewry. Howe 2005 is the readable, nearly canonical text that set out to enshrine the proletarian culture of Yiddish-speaking immigrants and the intellectuals whose work spanned the critical decades of Jewish immigrant settlement and integration. Sandrow 1996 and Wisse 1988treat, respectively, Yiddish theater and Yiddish poetic modernism. Cassedy 1999 showcases the early Jewish Left and its role in promoting literary and political criticism. Michels 2005 argues that the ethnic and Yiddish-language component of Jewish leftist activity is best understood as an adaptive strategy, but one that strongly supported dissent. To complement this dimension, the production of literary and journalistic work in English by Jewish immigrant authors is showcased in Rischin 1985.
Cassedy, Steven, ed. and trans. Building the Future: Jewish Immigrant Intellectuals and the Making of Tsukunft. New York: Holmes and Meier, 1999.
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The Tsukunft was a highbrow political and literary journal, sponsored by socialist intellectuals. Cassedy presents a selection of articles in translation, spanning cultural modernism, radical thought, and literary criticism, and stresses the links between progressive Jewish intellectuals and the radical Russian intelligentsia.
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Howe, Irving. World of Our Fathers. New York: New York University Press, 2005.
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The well-known literary critic’s elegiac tribute to East European immigrant life in New York, covering the 1880s to the 1950s, has become a standard, if partisan, guide. Looks at Howe’s parents’ era as a “world” animated by a social utopia embedded in the proletarian culture of immigrant Yiddish. Published in Great Britain as The Immigrant Jews of New York, 1881 to the Present (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1976).
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Michels, Tony. A Fire in Their Hearts: Yiddish Socialists in New York. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005.
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Primarily an intellectual and political history, though it also bears upon the history of Jewish labor. The author undertakes to show why Yiddish language and cultural production became so thoroughly entwined with socialist politics during the pre-1920 heyday of Jewish radicalism in New York. To be read together with Rischin 1962 (cited under Community, Ethnicity, and Americanization Studies),Howe 2005, and Kosak 2000 (cited under Labor History).
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Rischin, Moses, ed. Grandma Never Lived in America: The New Journalism of Abraham Cahan. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985.
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Rischin collected and introduced more than a hundred feature articles by Cahan, published from 1897 to 1902, mainly in Lincoln Steffens’s New-York Commercial Advertiser, that experimented with a new urban journalism. The articles offer a glimpse of Cahan in the world of English-language reportage (he is normally remembered as a kingpin of Yiddish journalism and socialist politics).
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Sandrow, Nahma. Vagabond Stars: A World History of Yiddish Theater. Judaic Traditions in Literature, Music, and Art. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1996.
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Still a standard work on the Yiddish theater in its New York milieu and its trans-Atlantic dimensions.
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Wisse, Ruth R. A Little Love in Big Manhattan. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988.
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Wisse devotes her study mainly to two New York Yiddish poets, Mani Leib and Moishe Leib Halpern, but this erudite and passionate work is just as much about the literary milieu of New York in the first three decades of the 20th century and the ways in which Yiddish became a vehicle for modernist expression.
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Political Culture
A great deal of attention was paid by historians of the Left to the political culture of the Jewish immigrant community in New York (see Labor History), but relatively few works have been devoted to other aspects of Jewish political culture. One of the leading scholars in the field is Arthur Goren (see Goren 1970, cited under Community, Ethnicity, and Americanization Studies, for his work on the Kehillah movement). His works Gorenstein 1961 and Goren 1999 include several critical essays that widened the scope of Jewish political history.
Goren, Arthur A. “The Conservative Politics of the Orthodox Press.” In The Politics and Public Culture of American Jews. By Arthur A. Goren, 100–109. Modern Jewish Experience. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999.
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Goren focuses here on Jacob Saphirstein and his Yiddish newspaper, the Morgen Zhurnal, which was a socially conservative, pro-Republican organ.
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Gorenstein, Arthur “A Portrait of Ethnic Politics: The Socialists and the 1908 and 1910 Congressional Elections on the East Side.” Publications of the American Jewish Historical Society (1893–1961) 50.3 (1961): 202–238.
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Gorenstein closely analyzes the interplay among ethnicity, class, and party loyalty in two elections, pointing out why certain candidates succeeded in their campaigns and how changing political conditions altered the map of ethnic bloc voting. The article is available via the American Jewish Historical Society through an authenticating link to and title search via ProQuest.
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Biographical Studies, Letters, Papers, Memoirs, and Diaries
The following are only a few of the many extant memoirs and biographical studies that illuminate Jewish life in New York in this period. Many such works were spawned during and after the era of mass Jewish migration, and the self-awareness that this illustrates is considered to be an essential attribute of modern migration in general and is characteristic of Jewish migrants in particular. Adler 1999 recalls the era of the Yiddish stage from an insider’s vantage point. Cahan 1926–1931 reflects the personal and collective histories of Russian Jewish immigrant radicals. Cohen 1995 is a rare, introspective memoir written in English by a young female immigrant. Masliansky 2009 complementsCahan 1926–1931 by engaging the wider religious and cultural worlds of East European Jews before and after their migration. Scult 2001, a publication of Mordecai Kaplan’s diaries titled Communings of the Spirit, provides a window on the inner life of a central figure in New York Jewish religious life.Metzker 1971–1981 is an often-used compilation of readers’ letters from the Yiddish press. Biographical studies by historians have been less common than first-person narratives and general histories, but two good examples featured here are Cohen 1999 and Schor 2006.
Adler, Jacob. A Life on the Stage. Translated and edited by Lulla Rosenfeld. New York: Knopf, 1999.
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An engaging memoir by one of the leading lights of the New York Yiddish stage. To be read together with Sandrow 1996 (cited under Mid-19th Century to World War I: Literary Studies and Yiddish Culture).
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Cahan, Abraham. Bleter fun mayn lebn. 5 vols. New York: Forward Association, 1926–1931.
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These memoirs by the author and publisher of New York’s largest circulation Yiddish daily, theForverts, are essential reading for the political and cultural history of the East European immigrant socialists in New York. An excerpted and edited translation of the first two volumes is available inThe Education of Abraham Cahan, translated by Leon Stein, Abraham P. Conan, and Lynn Davison (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1969).
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Cohen, Naomi W. Jacob H. Schiff: A Study in American Jewish Leadership. Brandeis Series in American Jewish History, Culture, and Life. Hanover, NH: Brandeis University Press, 1999.
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Schiff was a leader of American Jewry during his lifetime—a fixture on Wall Street and a political activist. An immigrant from Germany, he rose rapidly in New York and international finance. He had a direct impact on New York’s Jewish community, including his support of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS), the Jewish Theological Seminary, and Lillian Wald’s Henry Street Settlement.
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Cohen, Rose. Out of the Shadow: A Russian Jewish Girlhood on the Lower East Side. Documents in American Social History. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995.
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Originally published in 1918. One of the better-known of the immigrant memoirs, but told by a young woman fairly close to the time of her family’s resettlement in America. The text describes a troubled youth, the human costs of readjustment, and the work regimen of young women in the garment workshops of New York.
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Masliansky, Zvi Hirsch. Memoirs: An Account of My Life and Travel. Translated by Isaac Schwartz and Zviah Nardi. Jerusalem: Ariel, 2009.
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Masliansky (b. 1856–d. 1943) was an important public figure and a perennially popular speaker and folk preacher in the Russian immigrant community. His memoirs, previously available in Yiddish and Hebrew (of 1920s vintage), reflect the entire migration experience as well as the times he lived through, with enlightening perspectives on Jewish religious life, Zionism, and acculturation.
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Metzker, Isaac, ed. A Bintel Brief. 2 vols. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1971–1981.
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The famous advice column published in the New York Yiddish daily the Forverts is excerpted here in a popular collection. Although indicative of the range of personal concerns expressed by immigrant men and women, caution should be exercised in seeking to extrapolate directly from readers’ letters to construct a social history of “ordinary” Yiddish readers’ lives.
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Schor, Esther. Emma Lazarus. Jewish Encounters. New York: Schocken, 2006.
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This is the first sophisticated biography of a seminal figure in American letters and New York Jewish life. Schor explores Lazarus’s cultural and social milieu, her literary ambitions, her Jewish concerns, and her personal life. To be read together with Bette Roth Young’s Emma Lazarus in Her World: Life and Letters (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1995).
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Scult, Mel, ed. Communings of the Spirit: The Journals of Mordecai M. Kaplan. Vol. 1, 1913–1934. American Jewish Civilization. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2001.
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Kaplan was a central figure in the religious and intellectual life of New York Jewry and American Jewry in general. His life spanned the century from the late 1800s to the late 1900s. He was active in Jewish education and religious innovation and was the driving force behind the founding of the Jewish Reconstructionist movement.
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Neighborhoods
Because the social texture of city life in New York is diverse, attention to the various neighborhoods in which Jewish populations have clustered began to engage the attention of scholars. Seeing neighborhood development and change as a key to the processes of group boundary and identity formation, as well as a manageable framework for analyzing interaction between Jews and others, social historians have taken up questions of self-segregation, dispersal, and the construction of neighborhood-based institutions. Two preeminent communities in the period in question were the Lower East Side and Harlem. Rischin 1962 (cited under Community, Ethnicity, and Americanization Studies), Howe 2005 (cited under Mid-19th Century to World War I: Literary Studies and Yiddish Culture), and many other studies have dwelled on the Lower East Side as a Jewish landscape. Maffi 1995 places that era into a cross-cultural perspective by reviewing the neighborhood’s changing demographic composition over time. Gurock 1979 was one of the first works to look beyond the Lower East Side to examine a different neighborhood context for Jewish immigrant life and acculturation.
Gurock, Jeffrey S. When Harlem Was Jewish, 1870–1930. New York: Columbia University Press, 1979.
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Documents the central role this neighborhood played as a launching pad for Jewish settlement and Americanization, its rise and decline. The account alludes to the stages of ethnic succession in Harlem, when African Americans came to dominate the area.
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Maffi, Mario. Gateway to the Promised Land: Ethnic Cultures on New York’s Lower East Side. New York: New York University Press, 1995.
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Ranging far beyond the old Jewish and Italian immigrant period, this is a cross-cultural and long-term view of cultural, social, and literary developments related to the Lower East Side.
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Religious Studies
New York Jewry is a polyglot, amorphous combination of religious and secular subgroups, more so than is true of some smaller urban Jewish communities in America. At the same time, New York Jews offer a distinct religious profile in that more of them than is true on average throughout the rest of the nation tend toward Jewish Orthodoxy. A focus on religious orthodoxy in the New York milieu is highlighted in Karp 1955, Weinberger 1981, Joselit 1990 (cited under 1920s to 1960s: Religious Studies), and Polland 2009. The exigencies of religious change and adaptation are reflected inGoldstein 1930 and Gurock and Schachter 1997.
Goldstein, Israel. A Century of Judaism in New York: B’nai Jeshurun, 1825–1925, New York’s Oldest Ashkenazic Congregation. New York: Congregation B’nai Jeshurun, 1930.
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Goldstein was a high-profile rabbi in the New York community. The book brings together a personal view of religious and cultural development among New York’s traditional Jews.
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Gurock, Jeffrey S., and Jacob J. Schachter. A Modern Heretic and a Traditional Community: Mordecai M. Kaplan, Orthodoxy, and American Judaism. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997.
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A study of the rabbi who broke with Orthodoxy to become the founder of Reconstructionism, based on his New York rabbinical career. To be read together with Scult 2001 (cited under Biographical Studies, Letters, Papers, Memoirs, and Diaries).
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Karp, Abraham J. “New York Chooses a Chief Rabbi.” Publications of the American Jewish Historical Society (1893–1961) 44.3 (1955): 128B–198.
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A comprehensive account of the invitation extended by New York Orthodox Jewish congregations to Rabbi Jacob Joseph (of Lithuania) to take up the post of “chief” rabbi in New York City. The episode is instructive as to the difficulties of transferring Old World institutions to the New World, where religious pluralism reigned. The article is available via the American Jewish Historical Societythrough an authenticating link to and title search via ProQuest.
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Polland, Annie. Landmark of the Spirit: The Eldridge Street Synagogue. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009.
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Contains photographs as well as literary and historical reflections of a New York landmark, a key congregation in the New York Jewish sphere that illustrates the deliberate adaptation of immigrant Jews to the city’s modern environment.
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Weinberger, Moses. People Walk on Their Heads: Moses Weinberger’s Jews and Judaism in New York. Translated and edited by Jonathan D. Sarna. New York: Holmes and Meier, 1981.
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Weinberger’s report on religious life among the immigrant Jews was published in Hebrew in 1887. Sarna places this text in its historical context, drawing on letters by Weinberger, which differ in tone and substance from his published reports, to help the reader separate polemic from ethnography.
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Women and Gender Studies
Feminist historiography has been a trend in works written since the 1970s, profoundly shaping the intellectual and scholarly endeavor of Jewish historians. Exemplars included here are Baum, et al. 1976; Weinberg 1988; Glenn 1990; and Feld 2008).
Baum, Charlotte, Paula Hyman, and Sonya Michel. The Jewish Woman in America. New York: Dial, 1976.
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Pioneering essays on women and their roles vis-à-vis the Jewish community, their careers in the public sphere, the class relations between native and immigrant women, and the construction of gender. This book may be read as a social document of the early volleys in the feminization of American and Jewish historiography.
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Feld, Marjorie N. Lillian Wald: A Biography. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008.
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Feld compares Wald to her gentile peers in the Settlement House movement, showing how she trod a fine line between her gendered and political solidarity with other progressive women and her reliance on her ethnic ties with the German-Jewish elite (chiefly, Jacob H. Schiff). Wald resolved the tensions between ethnicity, class, and gender, Feld suggests, via her notion of internationalism.
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Glenn, Susan A. Daughters of the Shtetl: Life and Labor in the Immigrant Generation. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990.
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Combining the lenses of gender and class, the author probes the social history of Jewish immigrant households. Glenn argues that migration altered the structure of gender roles within Jewish families, in part by recreating the female role of homemaker and imposing breadwinning tasks on single daughters.
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Weinberg, Sydney Stahl. The World of Our Mothers: The Lives of Jewish Immigrant Women. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988.
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This text offers oral memories culled from Jewish immigrant women, illuminating domestic life and social change. A complementary work to Howe 2005 (cited under Mid-19th Century to World War I: Literary Studies and Yiddish Culture).
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Arts and Popular Culture
Whereas many cultural studies of New York Jewry have tended to emphasize literary productivity, religious life, or the deep influence of the radical Left on the arts and journalism, relatively few works have delved into the small c popular culture consumed by working-class men and women. Peiss 1986 opened up for examination this newer field.
Peiss, Kathy. Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986.
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A cross-cultural examination of gender, sexuality, entertainment, and changing social mores in working-class culture.
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1920s to 1960s
The period often associated with New York Jews’ “second-generation” experience—counting from the mass East European influx—was also the time of initial economic boom, followed by the Great Depression, World War II, the Cold War, and the incipient urban crisis. Some authors emphasize social and cultural affairs; others focus on political tensions, conflicts, and social instability. The scholarly terrain is fairly loaded with polemical arguments, as proponents of divergent agendas have emerged over the span of several decades to engage each others’ main points. Thus, the successful merging of the Jewish population into one overall cultural homogeneity, it has been variously asserted, was one of the main outcomes of the interwar and early postwar periods; whereas in others’ views, inner diversity has persisted, and tension with others in the city environment fueled undercurrents of discontent.
Civic Affairs and Communal Studies
The mapping of Jewish responses to city politics and economic life, and their expression in community discourse, has emerged as a contested historiographical zone. One of the only studies to adopt a city-wide method, situating Jews alongside other groups, is Bayor 1978. Ronald Bayor is concerned with intergroup tensions as they related to economic and municipal political issues in the 1930s and 1940s, highlighting Jewish–Irish occupational and political friction. Both Moore 1981 andWenger 1996 undertake a focused study of the Jewish population during the 1930s, portraying Jews as residents of city neighborhoods and as clients and supporters of philanthropic associations. Compared with Moore 1981, Wenger 1996 suggests a more critical reading of the psychological comfort level experienced by second-generation New York Jews and emphasizes the impact of the Depression. Lederhendler 2001 undertakes to track intergroup conflict, intellectual trends, and demographic change in the 1950s and 1960s. Ben-Ur 2009 surveys the inner life of a relatively neglected Jewish subgroup, Sephardic immigrants, challenging the hegemonic view of New York Jewish culture. Lazerwitz 1961 looks at national and New York data in the late 1950s and offers a sociological profile of the New York Jewish population at that time, as compared with their neighbors and with the US population at large. During the period in question, New York Jews, on average, were still relatively less affluent than other American Jews, and fewer were native born.
Bayor, Ronald H. Neighbors in Conflict: The Irish, Germans, Jews, and Italians of New York City, 1929–1941. Johns Hopkins University Studies in Historical and Political Science. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978.
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Focusing on the La Guardia era, Bayor maps the social, economic, and political tensions that characterized relations among the city’s white ethnics, pointing out where they competed directly over jobs, control over the civil service, neighborhood turf, and political influence. The author also relates to the overseas issues (the rise of fascism in Spain and Italy and Nazism in Germany) that influenced intergroup relations in New York.
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Ben-Ur, Aviva. Sephardic Jews in America: A Diasporic History. New York: New York University Press, 2009.
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Ethnographic and social-historical study of Jews from the Levant who settled in New York during the 20th century. The text’s chronological framework extends up to the 1990s. Drawing on the ethnic press and oral histories, the book engages the relations among the various subcommunities of Sephardic heritage as well as their place in the wider New York Jewish scene. See also Angel 1982(cited under Community, Ethnicity, and Americanization Studies) and Sutton 1979 (cited under1920s to 1960s: Neighborhoods).
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Lazerwitz, Bernard. “Jews In and Out of New York City.” Jewish Journal of Sociology 3.2 (1961): 254–260.
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A summary of findings from three national surveys done in 1957 and 1958, comparing New York City with the nation at large on various scales of population data, religious behavior and organization, and social characteristics. Hypothesizes that New York Jews have, on average, lower incomes, less education, and more blue-collar workers than the rest of US Jewry.
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Lederhendler, Eli. New York Jews and the Decline of Urban Ethnicity, 1950–1970. Modern Jewish History. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2001.
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Looks at the looming urban crisis of the 1960s, as seen through the eyes of Jewish intellectuals, communal and religious leaders, and dissenting groups in the Jewish community. The book argues that neighborhood instability, interethnic political conflict, suburbanization, and fraught intergenerational relations critically altered the texture of Jews’ approach to their city.
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Moore, Deborah Dash. At Home in America: Second Generation New York Jews. Columbia History of Urban Life. New York: Columbia University Press, 1981.
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Characterizes the period between the two World Wars as seminal for creation of a second-generational lifestyle. Jewish New Yorkers were heavily concentrated in ethnically homogeneous city neighborhoods, allowing them to develop a native-born consciousness, exemplified by their functioning within public schools, community centers, Democratic Party clubs, and philanthropic associations.
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Wenger, Beth S. New York Jews and the Great Depression: Uncertain Promise. Yale Historical Publications. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996.
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Rhetorically references Rischin 1962 (cited under Community, Ethnicity, and Americanization Studies) in showing that the “promise” became more contingent during the Depression. Wenger examines the nature of the Jewish community’s response to Depression-era concerns, from unemployment and welfare to discrimination and popular anti-Semitism.
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Intergroup and Transnational Studies
At least four different fault lines are available for research on group relations in this period: religion, class, ethnicity, and race. Zeitz 2007 updates the Jewish–Catholic interface to the 1950s and 1960s, after the work done on the Depression era in Bayor 1978 (cited under Civic Affairs and Communal Studies) and the earlier survey by Glazer and Moynihan 1963. Katznelson 1981 asks why intergroup friction and neighborhood “trenches” defied social solidarity in terms of class theory. Hollinger 1996affords a close look at the role of the academy in processing political and ethnic tensions in the 1930s. After 1960, racial relations took on a new urgency; this is discussed in Glazer and Moynihan 1963, Brotz 1970, and Weisbord and Stein 1970. After the 1990s, a trend toward transnational studies, already evident in some of the economic and migration studies, came into play in social histories of New York Jews, as in Kobrin 2010, in which Jewish migrants in different destination countries are compared.
Brotz, Howard. The Black Jews of Harlem: Negro Nationalism and the Dilemmas of Negro Leadership. Sourcebooks in Negro History. New York: Schocken, 1970.
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Originally published in 1964. Attempts to evaluate the socio-political atmosphere in ethnoracial relations in the early 1960s, beyond the civil rights movement, including an analysis of specific interethnic relationships in New York, yet simultaneously introduces a new perspective via the unique history and status of the “Black Jews of Harlem.”
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Glazer, Nathan, and Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Beyond the Melting Pot: The Negroes, Puerto Ricans, Jews, Italians, and Irish of New York City. Publications of the Joint Center for Urban Studies of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1963.
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This book became an instant “must read” and reformulated the discourse of the 1960s on ethnic pluralism and racial tensions. Although dated, the book may be read for the perceptions of group-based sensibilities and their impact on urban politics. To be read together with Bayor 1978 (cited under 1920s to 1960s: Civic Affairs and Communal Studies) and Katznelson 1981.
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Hollinger, David A. “Two NYUs and ‘The Obligation of Universities to the Social Order’ in the Great Depression.” In Science, Jews, and Secular Culture: Studies in Mid-Twentieth-Century American Intellectual History. By David A. Hollinger, 60–79. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996.
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Hollinger examines the 1932 blue ribbon conference sponsored by New York University to celebrate its centennial year and reveals how this Depression-era attempt at social-elitist, conservative-minded, religiously inflected escape from social responsibility for the city was eventually undermined. He notes the ways in which Jews on campus became an essential part of the debate.
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Katznelson, Ira. City Trenches: Urban Politics and the Patterning of Class in the United States. New York: Pantheon, 1981.
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A sophisticated theoretical foray into the analysis of class relations, this book asks why the divisions between ethnic and racial groups—concretized in segregated and contested city neighborhoods—have taken political precedence over class-based interests rooted in the occupational structure. Delving into these issues prompts examination ranging in time from the Civil War to the 1970s, but the main concern is New York from the 1930s to the 1960s.
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Kobrin, Rebecca. Jewish Bialystok and Its Diaspora. Modern Jewish Experience. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010.
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Jewish migrants from Bialystok (Poland) resettled in New York, Buenos Aires, Tel Aviv, Canada, and Australia. Kobrin demonstrates that overlapping the narrative of migration and resettlement in a particular city lay an ongoing international network of former fellow townspeople. She examines the means they used to formulate a common diasporic identity, comparable to globalized and transnational ties among migrating populations in the early 21st century. To be read together withSoyer 1997 (cited under Community, Ethnicity, and Americanization Studies).
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Weisbord, Robert G., and Arthur Stein. Bittersweet Encounter: The Afro-American and the American Jew. New York: Schocken, 1970.
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One of the earliest and best analyses of the waning of the myth of Jewish–black cooperation. Political and intellectual currents from the 19th century to the late 1960s are examined, but the focus is primarily on the mid-20th century. Two chapters (7 and 8) are devoted specifically to New York City.
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Zeitz, Joshua M. White Ethnic New York: Jews, Catholics, and the Shaping of Postwar Politics. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007.
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Picking up where Glazer and Moynihan 1963 left off, Zeitz complicates writing on race and ethnicity, arguing not only that “white” ethnicity persisted in post–World War II New York, but also that historians should examine the different kinds of diversity in the city.
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Literary Studies and Yiddish Culture
Although the heyday of Yiddish cultural activity in New York is considered to have passed after the mid-1920s, recent scholarship redresses that view, as discussed in Harshav and Harshav 1986,Norich 2007, and Bachman 2008. The field of literary studies dealing with Jewish authors in English and the role of Jewish intellectuals in American literary and cultural criticism is very large. Here, it is represented by Bloom 1986 and Wald 1987. Weingrad 2011 returns to the theme of Jewish linguistic diversity by reexamining the corpus of modern Hebrew writing in New York.
Bachman, Merle L. Recovering “Yiddishland”: Threshold Moments in American Literature. Judaic Traditions in Literature, Music, and Art. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2008.
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Contributes to the understanding of Jewish immigrant literature in New York in Yiddish and English as part of a multilingual American literature. East European Jewish letters in New York are showcased, focusing on a few noted Yiddish writers and on those, like Anzia Yezierska and Abraham Cahan, whose English prose is mined for its bicultural sensibilities. A striking feature of the book is the attention paid to a less-well-known poet, Mikhl Likht.
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Bloom, Alexander. Prodigal Sons: The New York Intellectuals and Their World. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986.
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Bloom stresses the common ethnosocial affinities of the hungry (and angry) young Jewish men around Partisan Review and Commentary, bred in the interwar and Depression years to anticipate a constant struggle for cultural poise, ego gratification, and a political voice.
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Harshav, Benjamin, and Barbara Harshav, eds. American Yiddish Poetry: A Bilingual Anthology. Translated by Kathryn Hellerstein, Brian McHale, and Anita Norich. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986.
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An ambitious anthology, methodically annotated and preceded by one of the best essays in English on the Yiddish modernist poets. Most if not all the poets lived in New York City, and the modernist sensibilities exhibited in the anthology contribute enormously to our understanding of the city’s impact on the highbrow culture of literary New York. To be read together with Wisse 1988 (cited under Mid-19th Century to World War I: Literary Studies and Yiddish Culture).
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Norich, Anita. Discovering Exile: Yiddish and Jewish American Culture during the Holocaust. Stanford Studies in Jewish History and Culture. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007.
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Norich’s book is notable primarily for its informed, nuanced account of the writings of Yankev Glatshteyn and Sholem Asch during the 1930s and 1940s.
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Wald, Alan M. The New York Intellectuals: The Rise and Decline of the Anti-Stalinist Left from the 1930s to the 1980s. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987.
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Wald argues that their Trotskyist convictions of the 1930s explain the meandering path of these intellectuals from an anti-Stalinism of the Left to a position well within the hegemonic American culture of the 1950s and seeks to minimize the ethnic-origins theory as being too apolitical.
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Weingrad, Michael. American Hebrew Literature: Writing Jewish National Identity in the United States. Judaic Traditions in Music, Literature, and Art. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2011.
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Although less popular than its counterparts in Yiddish and English, immigrant literary output in modern Hebrew was part of the polyphonic artistic voice of New York Jews. Parts of this book are particularly relevant to the impact of the urban environment on aesthetic sensibilities and literary taste in poetry and prose.
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Women and Gender Studies
As the feminist trend in historiography gave rise to new readings of the era of mass Jewish migration, it also prompted scholars to probe more recent decades, leading up to the rise of second-wave feminism in the 1960s. Themes that have been included in these discussions, among others, are the professionalization of women’s employment, as discussed in Markowitz 1993, and the popularization of gender roles, their contested nature, and their cultural impact on everyday discourse, as discussed in Prell 1999.
Markowitz, Ruth Jacknow. My Daughter, the Teacher: Jewish Teachers in the New York City Schools. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1993.
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A rare study of Jewish women as professionals and as social agents during the interwar and post–World War II period. The politically fraught narrative of teachers’ unionization forms a key aspect of the study.
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Prell, Riv-Ellen. Fighting to Become Americans: Jews, Gender, and the Anxiety of Assimilation. Boston: Beacon, 1999.
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Prell contends that men and women in the Jewish population displaced onto each other those unwanted traits (e.g., acquisitive materialism) with which, they believed, Americans stigmatized Jews at large. The study reaches back to the late 19th century and forward to the later decades of the 20th century and relies heavily on the New York Yiddish press and on the social-historical context of immigrant Jewish life in New York.
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Religious Studies
In the early 21st century most scholarship on Jewish religious life in New York continues to concentrate on the Orthodox communities. Different aspects of these communities’ institutionalization are addressed: Gurock 1988 deals with the entrance of Orthodox Jews into the American academy via the establishment of a university under Orthodox religious auspices. Joselit 1990 illuminates the everyday social life of a typical modern Orthodox congregation in the 1920s and 1930s. Lowenstein 1988 (cited under 1920s to 1960s: Neighborhoods) focuses on one particular community of Orthodox immigrants of 1930s vintage.
Gurock, Jeffrey S. The Men and Women of Yeshiva: Higher Education, Orthodoxy, and American Judaism. New York: Columbia University Press, 1988.
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Covering the early origins and the interwar years, as well as the post–World War II decades, this is the standard history of New York’s denominationally sponsored Jewish university. The text contributes toward an understanding of traditionally minded religious Jews who were also eager for their children to achieve a quality level of higher education and occupational mobility.
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Joselit, Jenna Weissman. New York’s Jewish Jews: The Orthodox Community in the Interwar Years. Modern Jewish Experience. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990.
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Focusing on one congregation in particular, this is a work of social history that documents the emergence of a middle-class, modern-oriented, Americanized Orthodoxy among second-generation New York Jews. The book rounds out other accounts of interwar New York Jewry, such as Moore 1981 and Wenger 1996 (cited under 1920s to 1960s: Civic Affairs and Communal Studies), and may serve as background for later survey data compiled in Heilman and Cohen 1989 (cited under Post-1960s: Religious Studies).
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Autobiography, Memoirs, Letters, and Papers
Memoirs and autobiographies generated by the New York Jewish milieu from the 1920s to the 1960s are an especially rich vein of first-person narrative and historical study. Only a small selection is offered here. The cadre known as the New York intellectuals is showcased by the memoirs Kazin 1951, Podhoretz 1980, and Howe 1982. Miller 1987 derives from the life of one of America’s best-known dramatists. Judah L. Magnes’s life and career spanned an American career (from San Francisco to New York) and a second career as an intellectual and political figure in pre-1948 Palestine, as outlined in his collected papers (Goren 1982).
Goren, Arthur A., ed. Dissenter in Zion: From the Writings of Judah L. Magnes. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982.
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Following a valuable introductory essay by Goren, 140 letters, speeches, and other documents penned by Magnes illustrate his leadership role in political, religious, and intellectual life in New York and Palestine.
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Howe, Irving. A Margin of Hope: An Intellectual Autobiography. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982.
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Howe’s Pilgrim’s Progress is an engaging self-portrait describing the currents that made the mid-20th-century New York Jewish intellectuals a vital force for several decades. To be read together with Kazin 1951, Podhoretz 1980, and Bloom 1986 and Wald 1987 (cited under 1920s to 1960s: Literary Studies and Yiddish Culture).
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Kazin, Alfred. A Walker in the City. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1951.
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Kazin, one of the foremost literary critics of his time, penned one of the most memorable portraits of Jewish Brownsville and the second-generational spatial and cultural odyssey out of the “ghetto” and into the “big city” (Manhattan). He followed with a sequel volume: New York Jew (New York: Knopf, 1978).
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Miller, Arthur. Timebends: A Life. New York: Grove, 1987.
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Miller’s wide-ranging and pugnacious autobiography contains fascinating reflections on his boyhood in heavily Jewish areas of New York and sheds light on the political culture that nurtured this preeminent and controversial midcentury American playwright.
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Podhoretz, Norman. Making It. New York: HarperCollins, 1980.
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A memoir of a second-generational odyssey from Brownsville, and its Jewish streets, to Manhattan, and cosmopolitan culture, written by the one-time editor of Commentary and one of the key members of the group that came to be known as neo-conservative.
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Biography
Biographical treatments of Jewish figures, such as Herbert H. Lehman (Nevins 1963), Mordecai M. Kaplan (Scult 1993), Belle Moskowitz (Perry 2000), Marie Syrkin (Kessner 2008), and a cast of “other Jewish intellectuals” (Kessner 1994), represent only some of the work by historians of New York and its Jews. The selection here emphasizes public affairs and intellectual history. The gender balance in the selection of historical figures for biographical treatment reflects the turn to women’s history after the 1970s. Kessner 1994 presents essay-length biographies on representative figures not often discussed as part of the canonical New York intellectuals on the political Left.
Kessner, Carole S. Marie Syrkin: Values beyond the Self. Brandeis Series in American Jewish History, Culture, and Life. Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2008.
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Syrkin emerges as a significant and colorful female intellectual in this sensitive biography, which delves into her ideological and literary concerns as well as her unconventional personal life and her relationship with the New York Jewish writer Charles Reznikoff.
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Kessner, Carole S., ed. The “Other” New York Jewish Intellectuals. Reappraisals in Jewish Social and Intellectual History. New York: New York University Press, 1994.
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New York Jewry spawned a large crop of intellectuals whose priorities in adapting Jewish engagement to modern sensibilities were far more eclectic than can be subsumed under the well-known “New York intellectual” rubric. Contains essays on Will Herberg, Hayim Greenberg, Ben Halpern, Trude Weiss-Rosmarin, Maurice Samuel, and others.
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Nevins, Allan. Herbert H. Lehman and His Era. New York: Scribner, 1963.
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Lehman was a key political figure and New York state governor. The biography traces his relations with Franklin D. Roosevelt and leadership of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA)—the agency responsible for war refugees and Holocaust survivors. The style is sometimes antiquated (e.g., Lehman’s “loyalty to his race”). Lehman was deeply involved with the New York Jewish power elite of his day, a subject of which we receive only a small taste.
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Perry, Elisabeth Israels. Belle Moskowitz: Feminine Politics and the Exercise of Power in the Age of Alfred E. Smith. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2000.
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A fine biographical study of a prodigious political talent, who emerged from the Jewish immigrant labor public to become a key facilitator of Al Smith’s political career and of progressive legislation in New York.
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Scult, Mel. Judaism Faces the Twentieth Century: A Biography of Mordecai M. Kaplan. American Jewish Civilization. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1993.
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Scult’s biography of Kaplan (b. 1881–d. 1983) surveys his career from his birth in Lithuania up to the decisive publication of his magnum opus, Judaism as a Civilization (1934) and beyond, through the 1940s. See also Scult 2001 (cited under Biographical Studies, Letters, Papers, Memoirs, and Diaries).
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Neighborhoods
The dispersal of the Jewish population to the outer boroughs forms the basis for new scholarship about neighborhood transformation (Sorin 1990), ethnic succession and racial tension (Pritchett 2002), and reconstructed memories of place (Wenger 1997, Diner 2000, Abramovich and Galvin 2002). Continued Jewish migration through the mid-20th century has also inspired new research on small-community-formation at the neighborhood level (Sutton 1979, Lowenstein 1988).
Abramovitch, Ilana, and Seán Galvin, eds. The Jews of Brooklyn. Brandeis Series in American Jewish History, Culture, and Life. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2002.
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A mixed bag of brief scholarly articles along with nostalgia pieces of less distinction, presented in album format. The first sections—“Coming to Brooklyn” and “Living in Brooklyn”—have more to offer the social historian than the section “Leaving Brooklyn,” at the end. Some articles relate to the 19th century and pre–World War I era, and others cover the late 20th century.
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Diner, Hasia R. Lower East Side Memories: A Jewish Place in America. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000.
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This book examines the cult of immigrant memory that enshrined the Lower East Side as a Jewish “Plymouth Rock,” even among Jews who never lived there. Other examples of the embedding of Lower East Side mythology in Jewish American culture are detailed in Remembering the Lower East Side: American Jewish Reflections, edited by Hasia R. Diner, Jeffrey Shandler, and Beth S. Wenger (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000).
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Lowenstein, Steven M. Frankfurt on the Hudson: The German-Jewish Community of Washington Heights, 1933–1983, Its Structure and Culture. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1988.
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An account of the lives of Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany and their transplantation to upper Manhattan’s Washington Heights, and the subsequent development of a particular religious lifestyle inflected by the neo-Orthodox tradition of Frankfurt. The study comments, as well, on neighborhood demographic change and social conflict in the 1960s.
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Pritchett, Wendell. Brownsville, Brooklyn: Blacks, Jews, and the Changing Face of the Ghetto. Historical Studies of Urban America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002.
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Whereas other treatments of formerly Jewish neighborhoods end their narrative with the changeover of residential population, Pritchett seeks to embrace the entire history of Brownsville from the 1880s to the 1990s. This book is about racial change, poverty, community politics, and the differences between an “immigrant mecca” and a “ghetto”; it is also a chronicle of watershed events, such as the Beth-El Hospital strike of 1962 and the Ocean Hill–Brownsville school crisis of 1968.
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Sorin, Gerald. The Nurturing Neighborhood: The Brownsville Boys Club and Jewish Community in Urban America, 1940–1990. American Social Experience. New York: New York University Press, 1990.
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Sorin uses the Boys Club as a prism through which to describe the social vicissitudes of this working-class neighborhood where Jews once constituted a very large proportion of the community, before the area became an African American ghetto. To be read together with Kazin 1951 andPodhoretz 1980 (cited under Autobiography, Memoirs, Letters, and Papers) and Pritchett 2002.
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Sutton, Joseph A. D. Magic Carpet: Aleppo-in-Flatbush: The Story of a Unique Ethnic Jewish Community. New York: Thayer-Jacoby, 1979.
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An ethnographic account of the Jewish immigrants from Aleppo, Syria, and their adaptation to life in Brooklyn, written by an insider.
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Wenger, Beth S. “Memory as Identity: The Invention of the Lower East Side.” American Jewish History 85.1 (1997): 3–27.
DOI: 10.1353/ajh.1997.0008Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Wenger explores how during the interwar period the Lower East Side emerged as a site for after-hours and weekend visits, shopping, nostalgia, and food culture.
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Arts and Popular Culture
Upon the emergence of newer fields of research in the visual arts and the centrality of New York in American music and dance, scholars’ attention has been drawn to the roles of Jewish artists and popularizers as well as the nascent popular media and art forms of the mid-20th century. Buhle 2007offers a wide survey of Jews’ activities in American popular culture, with ample New York coverage. In monographic form, erudite but accessible, much of this territory is also explored in Whitfield 1999.Jackson 2000 examines a key sponsoring institution in the performing arts, the 92nd Street Y.Baigell 2002 and Kleeblatt and Chevlowe 1991 present an art-historical appreciation of New York–based artists from the Jewish milieu. Merwin 2006 spotlights popular music and jazz in particular.Moore and Lobenstine 2000 and Moore 2008 look at the development of New York–based photographers and their work.
Baigell, Matthew. Jewish Artists in New York: The Holocaust Years. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002.
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A leading art historian analyzes the New York art scene during the critical war years, showing how Jewish painters and sculptors engaged historical and aesthetic dilemmas.
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Buhle, Paul, ed. Jews and American Popular Culture. 3 vols. Praeger Perspectives. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2007.
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In these collective volumes, media across the spectrum of the arts—their production, consumption, and popularity—are treated in topically arranged individual chapters. The geographic focus shifts between New York and Hollywood, for the most part.
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Jackson, Naomi M. Converging Movements: Modern Dance and Jewish Culture at the 92nd Street Y. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2000.
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The Y on the Upper East Side was a critical meeting ground for modern dance artists and educators, a performance space, and a venue for cultural diversity. It was also a nexus for “Jewish dance”—a synthesis of particular folk-ethnic motifs with universal aesthetics.
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Kleeblatt, Norman L., and Susan Chevlowe. Painting a Place in America: Jewish Artists in New York, 1900–1945: A Tribute to the Educational Alliance School. New York, Jewish Museum. New York: Jewish Museum, 1991.
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This exhibition catalogue from New York’s Jewish Museum showcases artists who emerged from the Art School of the Educational Alliance—one of New York Jewry’s cultural centers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Featured artists include Abraham Walkowitz, Raphael Soyer, William Gropper, Jacob Epstein, Louis Lozowick, Ben Shahn, Max Weber, and Mark Rothko.
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Merwin, Ted. In Their Own Image: New York Jews in Jazz Age Popular Culture. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2006.
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Merwin covers vaudeville, Broadway theater, and the era of silent film as well as the popular music produced on Tin Pan Alley. Emphasis is laid on the ethnic influence of Jewish sensibilities in cultural production, with a brief discussion of audience response.
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Moore, Deborah Dash. “On City Streets.” Contemporary Jewry 28.1 (2008): 84–108.
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Moore details the history of the New York Photo League, active between the wars and closed during the 1950s under antileftist pressure. Moore characterizes the group, composed largely of left-wing, secular, native New Yorkers, as a “second generation Jewish organization,” noting that it was not sectarian or consciously Jewish but that it drew overwhelmingly on youth from working-class Jewish families, who produced a documentary style that was socially and politically conscious. Availableonline for purchase or by subscription.
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Moore, Deborah Dash, and David Lobenstine. “Photographing the Lower East Side: A Century’s Work.” In Remembering the Lower East Side: American Jewish Reflections. Edited by Hasia R. Diner, Jeffrey Shandler, and Beth S. Wenger, 28–69. Modern Jewish Experience. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000.
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The authors comment on the way in which the passage of time has lent the sites of former synagogues a prominence in the preservation of the physical and visual Jewish heritage that, compared with real-time visual records, they did not necessarily enjoy in the heyday of the Jewish-immigrant-era Lower East Side.
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Whitfield, Stephen J. In Search of American Jewish Culture. Brandeis Series in American Jewish History, Culture, and Life. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1999.
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Divided by genre and medium as well as by theme, this study does not focus entirely on New York but is nevertheless a key introduction to the Jewish side of New York–based popular culture.
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Post-1960s
The era since the late 1960s has produced more social and cultural studies than historical surveys. Yet, many of the works dealing with the interwar years and the 1950s to 1960s can also provide much relevant background to the years after 1968. As became clear for scholars dealing with the 1950s and 1960s, intergroup relations and their contested nature form a persistent theme in urban studies. Although the Jewish population in the wider metropolitan area remained fairly stable, the Jewish population of the five boroughs declined by half after the 1960s. This is firmly linked to questions of urban economics, class and racial divides, and the changing political leadership in New York City. National migration trends also drew some Jewish population to the West Coast and to the South. At the same time, however, New York became a magnet for newly settling immigrants from abroad, including Holocaust survivors, Soviet and post-Soviet immigrants, and Israelis, and it has remained a mecca for younger professionals and students. These trends have helped foster a new wave of research, dwelling on smaller trends and new, less familiar patterns of community life.
Civic Affairs, Community Studies, and Immigration
Works that introduce the newest immigrant additions to the Jewish population, Russian and Israeli Jews—sometimes in comparative frameworks dealing with the post-1965 migration wave composed of mainly Asian and Latin American populations—include Bogen 1987, Shokeid 1988, Markowitz 1993, and Lee 2006. Attuned to new social realities, some of the literature delves into the impact of Holocaust survivors and the politics of Holocaust memory on the cultural life of the city, as discussed in Saidel 1996.
Bogen, Elizabeth. Immigration in New York. New York: Praeger, 1987.
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Covers the immigration scene since the passage of the 1965 immigration laws. Contains a useful chronology of US immigration law, statistics on New York’s foreign-born population, and data on the migration of Soviet Jews and Israelis since the 1970s.
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Lee, Jennifer. Civility in the City: Blacks, Jews, and Koreans in Urban America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006.
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The author examines intergroup conflict and cooperation in five predominantly African American neighborhoods in New York and Philadelphia, focusing on Jewish, Korean, and African American storekeepers and their customers. Prevailing images of violence and conflict, she argues, are inconsistent with daily merchant–customer interaction. She stresses the importance of small business ownership in the construction of urban civility.
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Markowitz, Fran. A Community in Spite of Itself: Soviet Jewish Emigrés in New York. Smithsonian Series in Ethnographic Inquiry. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 1993.
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Based largely on oral interviews, this is a social and ethnographic study of language-based interpersonal networks within an informal community that, at the time, made few if any efforts to institutionalize itself (in marked contrast to Russian Jewish immigrants of earlier eras).
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Saidel, Rochelle G. Never Too Late to Remember: The Politics behind New York City’s Holocaust Museum. New York and London: Holmes and Meier, 1996.
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The decades-long political saga that lay behind the repeatedly postponed plan to erect a Holocaust memorial in New York City, extending from the 1950s to the 1990s.
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Shokeid, Moshe. Children of Circumstances: Israeli Emigrants in New York. Anthropology of Contemporary Issues. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988.
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A relatively early ethnographic and social inquiry into the lives of a new subcommunity in Jewish New York. The author contends that the emergence of “new ethnics” in America is compatible with the importance of affective ties in the lives of individuals and groups. He compares Israelis in New York with other new ethnics, such as Asian Indians, Koreans, and Dominicans.
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Neighborhood Studies and Intergroup Relations
Neighborhoods furnish scholars on the post-1960s period of New York history with a great deal of their material for examining community identity and intergroup relations. City-wide studies are less in evidence. Thus, Kaufman 2000 returns to the “mother” neighborhood of East European Jewish immigrants to interrogate how a single institution—the synagogue—has attained a privileged position in communal memory. Rieder 1985 pursues the themes in a particular setting, focusing on Jews and Italians in Canarsie, a lower-middle-class neighborhood in Brooklyn, in order to compare negative attitudes toward other minorities and toward the liberal “project” in general. The changing texture of life at the grassroots level in particular neighborhoods of the city has attracted the attention of journalists, sociologists, and social historians: see Sleeper 1990, Kugelmass 1996, Shapiro 2006.
Kaufman, David. “Constructions of Memory: The Synagogues of the Lower East Side.” InRemembering the Lower East Side: American Jewish Reflections. Edited by Hasia R. Diner, Jeffrey Shandler, and Beth S. Wenger, 113–136. Modern Jewish Experience. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000.
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An illuminating discussion of the virtual anonymity of synagogue visuals in real historical time and the advent of heritage visuals, focused on old synagogue buildings, in more recent times.
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Kugelmass, Jack. The Miracle of Intervale Avenue: The Story of a Jewish Congregation in the South Bronx. Rev. ed. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996.
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A poignant and brilliant rendering of the interpersonal relations among elderly Jews in and around their synagogue in a run-down Bronx neighborhood, as recorded by the author, acting as participant-observer in the life of this intimate, beleaguered community.
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Rieder, Jonathan. Canarsie: The Jews and Italians of Brooklyn against Liberalism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985.
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Rieder compares Jews and Italians of working-class and lower-middle-class background in relation to the changing demography of this Brooklyn neighborhood, particularly the proximity of new minority groups. Makes a strong case that “antiliberal” tendencies animated friction and tension between older and newer residents. A contrast with the more dominant narratives of Jewish liberalism, especially in race relations.
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Shapiro, Edward S. Crown Heights: Blacks, Jews, and the 1991 Brooklyn Riot. Brandeis Series in American Jewish History, Culture, and Life. Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2006.
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A sharply polemical critique of political correctness and what the author sees as the exaggerated use of the racial prism in the mass media, resulting in a false moral equivalency between actors in a violent confrontation.
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Sleeper, Jim. The Closest of Strangers: Liberalism and the Politics of Race in New York. New York: Norton, 1990.
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One journalist’s account of racial and ethnic polarization in New York City from the 1960s to the 1980s, with particular focus on Jews and African Americans.
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Religious Studies
Observers of post-1960s religious life among New York Jews highlight the complexities that divide overlapping and contentious forms of Jewish religious life. Modern Orthodoxy; ultra-Orthodoxy (Hasidic and “Lithuanian” Haredi); religious renewal communities (hazarah biteshuvah); and lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) lifestyles jostle each other in close proximity: Mayer 1979deals with the development of sectarian, or ultra-Orthodox, society in one Brooklyn community, and parallel ethnographic studies are developed in Belcove-Shalin 1995. Fader 2009 introduces the element of early education for ultra-Orthodox girls. Heilman and Cohen 1989 maps the sociology of religious observance among modern Orthodox Jews. Davidman 1991 undertakes a study of women who have turned away from secular, modern lifestyles to embrace traditionalist religion. Shokeid 2003 examines the synagogue life of New York’s LGBT community. Kugelmass 1988 is a collected volume of detailed studies of microgroups and their lifestyles from an anthropological point of view. Spanning ethnography, gender studies, and other new approaches, this is the richest vein of research on the lives of Jews in New York in this period, with an emphasis on overlooked or marginal groups.
Belcove-Shalin, Janet S. New World Hasidim: Ethnographic Studies of Hasidic Jews in America. State University of New York Series in Anthropology and Judaic Studies. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995.
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Close ethnographic studies of the various Hasidic groups in Brooklyn, their folkways and religious concerns.
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Davidman, Lynn. Tradition in a Rootless World: Women Turn to Orthodox Judaism. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991.
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An ethnographic reportage engaged with the phenomenon of religious renewal and in particular informed by the experiences of modern, New York Jewish women who, in the wake of feminism and postmodernity, have been attracted to traditionalist religion.
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Fader, Ayala. Mitzvah Girls: Bringing Up the Next Generation of Hasidic Jews in Brooklyn. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009.
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An insightful ethnographic study that combines the lenses of gender, religion, and urban adaptation.
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Heilman, Samuel C., and Steven M. Cohen. Cosmopolitans and Parochials: Modern Orthodox Jews in America. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1989.
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A sociology of modern Orthodox life and practice in New York, based on extensive survey data and interviews, demonstrating the fine distinctions in ethos and practice among a religious population which is far from monolithic.
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Kugelmass, Jack, ed. Between Two Worlds: Ethnographic Essays on American Jewry. Anthropology of Contemporary Issues. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988.
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Leading anthropologists examine synagogue life, secular Passover seders, Soviet Jewish immigrant life, and Jewish family ethnography, much of it based in the New York environment.
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Mayer, Egon. From Suburb to Shtetl: The Jews of Boro Park. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1979.
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A major sociological study of Orthodoxy in its more sectarian form, written at a time when it was still widely asserted that Orthodoxy in general was on the decline. Mayer argued that a renaissance of Orthodoxy was already taking place in some parts of New York and, by extension, in certain niches of American society. The study predates a later growth of scholarly interest in religious traditionalism.
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Shokeid, Moshe. A Gay Synagogue in New York. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003.
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Originally published in 1995. A close observation of personal and community interaction at Congregation Beth Simchat Torah, founded in 1973, dealing with marginality, religion, group dynamics, special concerns, and the lay-driven features of the synagogue.
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Arts, Visual, and Vocal Culture
Synagogues continue to provide material for the investigation of visual and material culture, as inRoma 2008. A new approach to visual aspects of material culture, with an emphasis on its inroads on religious life, is discussed in Stolow 2010 and Katz 2010. The Jews who were active in the creation and production of popular music in this period are featured in Rotundo 1982. Kligman 2009focuses on the distinctive musical traditions of Syrian Jews, in reemphasizing that New York Jewry is still a patchwork of subgroups and enclaves.
Katz, Maya Balakirsky. The Visual Culture of Chabad. Cambridge, UK, and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010.
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An innovative integration of material and visual culture into a sociology of religion, in the context of a New York–based religious movement committed to large-scale public and media outreach.
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Kligman, Mark L. Maqām and Liturgy: Ritual, Music, and Aesthetics of Syrian Jews in Brooklyn. Raphael Patai Series in Jewish Folklore and Anthropology. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2009.
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This ethnomusicological study interweaves a keen appreciation for musical traditions and their place in liturgical life and a social analysis of subgroup ethnicity.
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Roma, Thomas. On Three Pillars: Torah, Worship, and the Practice of Loving Kindness: The Synagogues of Brooklyn. New York: Powerhouse, 2008.
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Photographic guide to many mainly abandoned synagogues in Brooklyn.
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Rotundo, E. Anthony. “Jews and Rock and Roll.” American Jewish History 72.1 (1982): 82–107.
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Takes the view, not universally shared, that rock music was, by and large, dominated by non-Jews, particularly performers, though acknowledging the major role played by Jews in producing and marketing the new cultural form. The author provides sketches of those Jewish artists who were important to rock music, with emphasis on New York.
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Stolow, Jeremy. Orthodox by Design: Judaism, Print Politics, and the ArtScroll Revolution. S. Mark Taper Foundation Book in Jewish Studies. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010.
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More than just a publishing house for devotional books, ArtScroll has become part of a manifold popular culture of religious consumerism: a hybrid between commercialization of a new aesthetic “look” and a consumer-driven technique for facilitating an Orthodox lifestyle for Americanized adults and children. Media, marketing, religion, and the public are analyzed in their interaction.
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